Summer CSA Week 1-Lost Corner Farm

We started a new CSA this week. Lost Corner Farm located in Leesburg, Virginia.  We originally had thought to just stick with Farmers Markets this summer as there are so many changes coming in our household but when we heard Lost Corner had made arrangements to deliver direct to our apartment office and had a chance to meet and talk with the wonderful farmers and taste their fresh asparagus...well, it was too good to pass up.

We are signed up for a weekly half share of veggies and fruit for 22 weeks and added the delivery of a monthly whole chicken for 5 months. Their prices seemed competitive and reasonable, if like many other CSAs, rather high on the initial output but taking a look at the first week, we are certainly getting our moneys worth. 

In the week 1 box there were some of the best stuff of spring including substantial bundles of several types of kale, rainbow chard, a giant head of Chinese cabbage and an even bigger head of butter leaf lettuce. There was another type of lettuce, a nice sized head of red pok choy and a brown bag full of asparagus. You cant tell by the picture but that's more stalks than I can fit both my hands around. There was also one basket of the sweetest smelling strawberries.

I'm not sure if we are going to be able to make it through all this so I have plans to make refrigerator pickle with some of the asparagus and some kale chips. In addition I'm looking to make several soups, salads and sautes to try to use up ingredients. My menu is looking rather Asian inspired with fresh ingredients like these so I picked up some noodles and sauce components from the store.

2015-Week 8

In week 8 of 2015 I refocus on my February must finish projects and hide from all my WIPS as I get ready for the last push towards the end of the month and the start of Sock Madness.

Packing My Bags

In preparation for several projects I hope to start in late March/April I placed an order with Abstract Fiber for a kids sweater's worth of Calder in the Hydrangea colorway (which K picked out herself via text) and some super sock in the Solid Clover colorway for Aprils solid sock challenge. I also ordered my cotton bamboo fingering for the Knit Eco Chic Solar Flare MKAL from The Unique Sheep in the beautiful gradient Sunset Road colorway. While I was there I decided to try out their Sip 'n Stitch yarn club for 6 months and I couldnt resist getting 772 yds of Sushi Sock in Doctor Blue for a certain someone (and maybe me too).

I received my package from Unplanned Peacock with the lovely Peacock Sock yarn dyed special tonal blue and variegated purple hydrangea colorways just for Sock Madness 9. I got one of each and might be placing another order to get my hands on the newly added tonal purple soon.

First Steps

Last week I had just finished the first sock of my Purless Monkeys on Fire sock and cast on sock 2. I didn't get any time to put into it this week but I'm planning to focus in as soon as my His Golden Lair is complete.

Morning Stroll/Uphill Path

My His Golden Lair continues to be an extremely intuitive knit. I've made a few mistakes by not counting my initial set of pattern repeat carefully on one row and ended up noticing on the next right side row and having dropping down two rows to tink about half the width of the pattern row to move it back one stitch and re-knit it up. It went surprisingly well and even though it's a pain I felt really good knowing that I have the skills to do that without thoroughly buggering the rest of the project.
I'm knitting it in my Blue Moon Fiber Arts Targhee Worsted in the Hadia colorway so at that weight it moves quickly but you add stitches every row and now that I'm in the scales charts each row requires a different count of the increasing/decreasing pattern repeats so I have to re-count each row before I start to make sure I don't make the same mistake again. All that to say that, while easy and fun to knit, each row feels like it takes longer than the last and even with long stretches of knit repeats it seems to take a long time to get to the end of the row. At times it feels like slogging along but I cant wait to finish the last 10 rows and see the finished shawl. I'll bet it looks awesome.

Final Destination

No FOs this week but hopefully I'll have two or three next week.

Back Porch

My three jars of canned locally grown white beans came out great. I'm looking forward to doing other beans throughout the year. The leftover beans that didn't fit in the jars were just perfect to add to a massive batch of crockpot Minestrone Soup that I found through Pinterest and let cook during one of our snow days. It was just the thing to warm and nourish my family on that cold day and the leftovers were even better for several days more.

Canning Beans

Its been a while since I've done much preserving and even longer since I've blogged about it. I've started to get back into cooking and deriving pleasure from creating healthful meals for me and mine and even did a massive kitchen, and kitchen gadgets, clean up this week. It was so nice to see my kitchen space neat and tidy. So of course the first thing I wanted to do was mess it up. :-)

I dug out the pressure cooker and inspired by this recent canning beans post from Food in Jars , a long time muse in my blog feed, which reminded me that even in the darkest days of winter there are things that can be preserved, I set out to can some beans. I had some dried white beans left over from a local Mennonite farmers market vendor that I had picked up last year. I also had some of their mixed beans and commercial black beans but for this experiment I decided to stick with the smaller quantity. Now I just needed a few jars.

This summer, after finally admitting that I wasn't in a good place to deal with canning and preserving I had loaded up all my extra jars, finally empty and the contents used or tossed from my preserving high water mark in 2010-2012, into their boxes and moved those out to the storage closet on my porch. Of course, its 10 degrees out there and snowed 8 inches so I wasn't interested in bundling up and dealing with the cold just for a few jars. So I dove into my pantry/junk storage are in my laundry room and was able to scrounge up 3 wide mouth Ball pint jars in addition to the one I've been using as my coffee cup for the last month, which I would have sacrificed if I had too but luckily that wasn't necessary. In a winning moment for my sporadically obsessive organizational binges my jar lids, rings, and accessories were right where they were supposed to be, right next to the pressure weight for my pressure cooker!

So following Food in Jars helpful tutorial and dusting off my own knowledge gained from years of canning experience I preped my equipment, heated my jars, pre-cooked the beans (which I had soaked overnight), jarred them up in 3 pint glasses (had about 1 cup of beans left over which will go towards dinner) and proceeded to can.

I'll let you know how they turn out.

Dark Days Challenge 2011-2012

Nothing like the Dark Days Challenge to remind me to do what is best for me, my family, my health, the earth and the local economy. Yes it’s that time again. Time to face the cold and dark with delicious sustainable, local, organic and ethical (SOLE) food. As in past years I will again be joining with other local food enthusiasts to prepare at least one meal a week entirely prepared with foods grown, raised or created from ingredients available in my local food-shed. For me that is about 150 miles up and down the Potomac River, into the Lancaster region of PA and a little down the Blue Ridge Mountains except for salt, pepper, minimal amounts of oil, chocolate and mom’s home canned raspberry jam and tuna from CA (it is unthinkable to come home without a few jars of home preserved goodness in our family).

Got a quick look at my stored ingredients when I cleaned out the pantry before thanksgiving and even though I didn’t get much canning/preserving done this summer I think with a few trips to the farmers market I will have a good run at it. Still have canned potatoes, chicken stock, vegie stock, a salsa or two, peach butter, grape juice, and some other sauces. I’ll have to check the freezer but I know I have some oven-dried tomatoes, and some farmers market sausage. Also have some local wheat flour left Managed to get in a small crop of carrots, turnips, beets, celery, kale, cabbage, oriental greens and lettuces into the community garden plot at the end of July. The root vegies are all looking good and the greens are thriving under the row covers so I may even get to have some salads

Since I had originally planned to eat out for Thanksgiving until my daughter begged me to cook it, I didn’t end up with an entirely local meal like previous years but I made the best of it. I went to the Wednesday Reston Smart Market and stood out in the freezing cold (not quite but with the wind it was bitter) to purchase an 11 pound heritage breed turkey from Heritage Farm and Kitchen. It cooked up beautifully and went great with my 1/2 local mashed potatoes (the last of my self-harvested spuds from the Great Country Farms Potato Dig plus a Trader Joes assortment), pan gravy (pan drippings, local flour, my stock and a bottle of gifted non-local red wine) and cranberry mold (cranberries from whole foods that may have been right at the 150 mark, local honey, non-local orange/cranberry juice). Haven’t gone too fancy with the leftovers, mostly repeats and sandwiches. Local Saturday Farmers Markets were closed so hopefully I can get some more local food stuff or this weeks entry will be barebones (guess its time to make the turkey soup).

1st canning of 2010

On a rainy Saturday I realized that with the garlic and sweet red peppers I had picked up at the farmers market and the tomatoes, peppers and onions I got in my CSA share I had the makings for some salsa. I had recently purchased the Ball Home Canning Discovery Kit, a pretty neon green plastic basket with handles meant to can small batches (3 jars) in regular old pots, so I set out to make the basic salsa recipes. I swapped out sweet red, red bell and a banana pepper for the spicier options in the recipes and used one roma that I had leftover from the store.  It went quite quick with the help of my electric hot water kettle to boil water to remove the skins of the tomatoes  and before I had imagined it I had 3 jars of salsa cooling on the counter. The measurements were precise, fitting in the three jars that came with the kit. I had forgotten to even taste how the salsa came out on canning day but I opened the first jar to serve with taco salad and it was perfect, sweet and mild like I like it.

While I was at it I diced up some of the over ripe peaches and mixed up 2 quarts of peach freezer jam that I intend to use as pie/tart filling in the fall.

LiveJournal Tags: canning,salsa,preserving,food,cooking,peach,tomato,freezer,Ball

Canning Citrus

I've challenged myself to take my canning to the next level by participating in the Tigress' can jam run by Tigress in a Jam (more info the challenge here). The theme for January was Citrus.

The obvious choice would be either a citrus marmalade or canning sections of citrus but since I don't really like either of those I was at a lose. After spending may rainy, drizzly, sleety weekend afternoons browsing my canning books I came across a couple of recipes in the Ball Complete book of Home Preserving that seemed worth a try: Cranberry-Oragne Vinegar (p277) and Honey-Orange Slices (p163). With the vinegar recipes was also a recipe for using the vinegar as a poultry marinade. I could use up the cranberries that I froze at thanksgiving and the last of my large jar of local honey that was starting to crystallize.

When I checked my supplies I found that I had used up most of my jars on a pantry full of stocks, jams and canned single ingredients but I had several dozen 4oz half jelly jars empty. Since I was likely going to be using the vinegar for dressings and marinades it was the perfect combo to make a bunch of single serving jars. I luckily also had just enough regular lids to match my needs.

The recipes calls for reducing 3.5 cups of cranberries to make 1 cup of juice and then simmering the juice with white wine vinegar, sugar and a cinnamon/clove spice bag. Once the sugar is dissolved you add in a reserved .5 cup of whole berries.

I found that I needed far more water than called for to make sufficient juice but that was at least partially due to the dehydration caused by freezing the berries. I also ran out of white wine vinegar so had to substitute about 1 cup of apple cider vineger which I actually rather like.

At the end, to jar up, you place an orange slice and a few of the whole berries in the jar with the vinegar and process in the water bath for 10 minutes.

For the honey orange slices you start with 2+ lbs of oranges and slice them thinly. This goes a lot faster if you get a seedless variety.

Cover them with water and boil for 10 minutes, or until the peel is soft, and then drain and set aside. Meanwhile, bring 1.25 cups of honey and the same of sugar to boil with 3 tbsp lemon juice and an allspice/cinnamon/clove spice bag until the sugar is dissolved and it makes a nice glaze.

Add the drained oranges back and simmer until the oranges are nice and glazed.  The smell is wonderful.

My only complaint is that the softened oranges started to fall apart if you stirred too strongly. I almost think the end product would be better without the pre-boiling but I don't know.

Anyway, you pack them up and if I had the time I might have actually arranged them nicely but as it is i just shoved them in, covered them with the syrup and processed them for 10 minutes.

Challenge months completed: 1 -- 2 recipes I would have never tried -- 14 jars (11 jars of vinegar and 3 jars of orange slices) on the shelf

Stocking-up, Dark Days Style

My feet are killing me and my knees ache but it was well worth it for I am now fully “stock”-ed up with local, home-canned stock. I spent the better part of the last 2 days boiling, reducing, straining, de-fatting, and  pressure canning 4 batches of liquid gold totaling 13 quarts of chicken stock, 6 quarts of vegetable stock, and 5 quarts of pumpkin chunks.

I made the chicken stock from 5 local, responsibly raised, raw chicken backs I picked up from the Purcellville Smart Markets and a some bones I froze after roasting whole birds from the farmers market.  I also added 1 local yellow onion, a handful of yellow onion skins to add color, and a bunch of local, organic celery (the really dark green, pungent kind, not the pale, blanched, scent-less kind). I boiled it down in my large water bath canner, my biggest stock pot, to get it all cooked in one batch. It simmered and reduced over 5 hours  before I strained out the bones and meat and did a little fat skimming on the first half. The second half went into the fridge overnight before canning to make the de-fatting easier. I put it in my pressure cooker at 10lbs for 25 minutes but I could only fit in up to 7 jars at a time. As it canned I pulled the little bits of meat from the remaining carcasses.

I needed more room in my freezer so in addition to pulling out most of the chicken bones I also pulled out the veggies. The vegetable stock was initially made last month and frozen, until today when I it was re-boiled and canned. I have been saving up what I call vegetable remnants, the bits of veggies that don’t get used for their original purpose but are otherwise perfectly good. Woody broccoli stocks that I didn’t use in stir-fry, onions ends chopped off to get a flat edge for slicing, the large white end at the base of a celery stock, mushroom stems leftover from a mushroom cap appetizer, and other bits and pieces all got tossed into several Ziploc bags in the freezer over the summer. I started building the base by sautéing local carrots, celery and onion and then dumped the frozen veggies along with any extra local veggies that were languishing in the fridge at the end of the CSA season (cabbage is the only one i can remember) and covered with water. I boiled it most of the day, reducing it by about half to concentrate the flavor. The smell of if it reheating was heaven.

While I had the pressure canner out and while the broth was cooking I skinned and chopped 3 small pie pumpkins. I have already made 10 quarts of pumpkin puree but that went into the freezer because, according to every respected food preservation reference, winter squash (pumpkin included) is too dense when pureed to allow for the necessary heat distribution for food safety and shelf storage. The chunks were covered with water and brought to a boil for 2 minutes before being hot packed into quart jars and pressure cooked at 10 lbs for 90 minutes.

Summer Preservation Activities

One of the most rewarding parts of working so hard to pick what the summer has to offer is then getting to preserve it for use later. Nothing can beat the taste of fresh strawberries in January or peach pie in February. I also like the idea of replacing store bought condiments with ones of my own creation. Why buy franken-Heinz katsup when you can make your own so easily. So here is a review of what I've put by so far.


Peach Butter: I have canned peach slices and halves in the past and not only was the skinning part a huge pain but we also didn't eat many of them. I'm not a big fan of the syrup I used and K had trouble eating them when they were so slippery. Maybe now that I am baking more I would have more use for them but I was looking for something else. In an attempt to try to use up as many of those peaches as possible I decided to try butter.

I still had to contend with removing the skins and without a good food mill I resorted to a stick blender, which did the job but took a lot of time and wrist strength. I don't think I got it down to the right consistency for butter, it was still a little runny. Otherwise, it smelled and tasted great and I look forward to the possibilities; jam thumbprint cookies and layered cakes come to mind.

Freezer Cole Slaw: I was searching for a way to use up and preserve cabbage that didn't call for fermentation when I saw a recipe in my Preservation For Busy People book that calls for freezing.


It called for shredding up everything, boiling a brine, pouring it over the vegetables and then freezing. I used cabbage from my share, carrots from the market, peppers from my garden and vinegar and celery seeds from the conventional supermarket.


I'm not sure what to expect when I defrost it but I'm waiting for my folks to come and visit so that I'll have some other opinions of its character and some additional mouths to use it up if it is good.

Condiments: In addition to peach butter, I also experimented with a few other canning recipes from my Ball Complete book of Home Preserving this summer. First was a fruit katsup that was equal parts peach and tomatoes with some apple too. It turned out a little zesty thanks to the addition of cayenne pepper. It was very, very good and felt extremely gourmet with my fancy fries and primo burger. Then there was a peach BBQ sauce. It didn't yield as much as I wanted but I attribute that to having very thick peach skins and no food mill. It was also very good. Then I made both a tomatillo and a fruit based salsa. I haven't tried them yet so I don't know if I will make them again or try something else.

Grape Juice: Finally, I tried making grape juice from the handful of too tart for just eating concord-type grapes that I got from my farm share. I washed and picked each grape and then, using my new mini-masher, crushed the heck out of them. Next I boiled them over med heat and continued to periodically re-mash anything that looked the least bit solid. Once, it was done cooking I strained the resulting mash through a strainer and ended up with about 1 cup of concentrated grape liquid. It was still a little tart, though much better than eating them whole so I stirred in some local honey. I filled the rest of the glass with ice and a dash of water, mixed it up and enjoyed my first glass of real grape juice in almost 20 years.