Preserving the Harvest: Okra

The first time I remember eating okra was when we stayed with the Clayton family. Mrs. Julie pan-fried breaded okra and it was really good! On Sunday, Momma and Daddy went to see our neighbors down the road (who have a beautiful garden!). While Momma and Daddy were there, the Dominy's gave them a grocery bag of okra. I wasn't sure at first how I wanted to freeze it. In the end, I just sliced it, blanched it and froze it on a tray in the freezer. I kinda regretted slicing the okra before I blanched it because it was, in the words of a friend, 'mucous-y'! But it broke up okay in the gallon bag. Now we have a gallon of okra to use this winter and I'm looking forward to using the okra in soups and casseroles.

Hannah

Preserving the Harvest: Poblano Peppers

Momma planted poblano peppers this year and we were looking for recipes to use our abundunt crop of peppers. When I googled recipes for chile rellanos, I found this website. There is a whole bunch of recipes that we'll probably try out. With our first peppers, I made a version of chile rellanos. They were pretty good, but the onions were rather crunchy. Then a couple of weeks ago, we needed a quick dinner and Momma suggested I make chile rellanos again. So I ran out to the garden and picked about 2 1/2 dozen peppers and thought 'I won't bother finding gloves, after all, 'a certain someone' said that I wouldn't need gloves for poblanos!' By the time I blanched the peppers, my fingers were killing me! Dinner was good though and I tried sauteing the onions and added some other things to the recipe. Later I did learn many different things to try for peppers burns. Although in the end, ice water was the only thing that cut the burn.

The other day, I picked all the poblano peppers and seeded them (believe me, I wore gloves). Blanched and put them on cookie sheets and put them in the freezer. The next morning I pulled the cookie sheets out and filled gallon bags with the peppers. We ended up with a total of 4 1/2 gallons of peppers. So I'm hoping that all these peppers will about 9 meals worth of chile rellanos.

Hannah

Preserving the Harvest: Green Beans

Our Kentucky Wonder Beans have done really well this year, considering the late start they had. About two weeks ago, Katie frenched a whole bunch of green beans and blanched and froze them. She got 10 quart bags full and for our family we sometimes use as many as 2 quarts of beans each meal. So Katie put up enough for at least five meals. Yummm. I asked Momma this last time if I could can some more beans, because we were using the green beans, that we canned earlier this summer, more quickly than we originally thought.
Owen, Becca, Carrie and I picked the beans this time (Usually Momma and the little girls would pick the beans) and got a laundry basket full. All our big pots weren't big enough! The little girls, Owen and I spent the afternoon snapping the green beans. In the evening, Momma and I started to snap them into 2" pieces and James who was sitting with Daddy, signed that he wanted to help and came over to help and so did Becca. James helped snapping beans, and did an excellent job of breaking them into the right size. He developed some funny techniques for snapping beans. Once after James had finished a bean, he looked at us and said 'meen' and did the sign for bean. The Signing Time dvd that has the bean sign, we get from the library up at Egleston's and it had been awhile since James had watched it. So we were pretty excited that James was using signs that he doesn't use on a daily basis.

We washed the beans and since they need to be pressure canned, saved them till morning. In the morning, I started water to boil and filled the jars with the green beans. After I screwed the lids on, we had a total of 14 quarts and 2 meals worth of little beans. Now we're just waiting to take off the canner lid and see if all the jars sealed.

Hannah

Preserving the Harvest: Cucumbers

Hooray for cukes! We have made pickles with our cucumbers in the past, using the usual method of vinegar, et all. This time we thought we'd try lacto-fermented pickles. A blog we read had two recipes and we had the ingredients. So we made them. So far, we've only tried one of the two kinds of pickles. The garlic dill spears. They're actually pretty good. There is a different flavor and I need to get some grape leaves to make the pickles crunchy. But we'll make them again.
We have to wait for 1 1/2 more weeks till we can try the bread and butter pickles. But I think that we'll like those as well.

Now to try lacto-fermented baby dills!

Hannah

Preserving the Harvest: Eggplant

Our garden is doing really well and our eggplants have started producing. This is our second batch of eggplant. The first few eggplant we made ratatouille with, it was delicious!
Earlier this week, Momma brought in all the eggplant on the plants. I weighed it, 14 1/2 pounds of eggplant. We decided to make Baba Ghanoush. It was relatively simple. It was a little time-consuming though. We got a total of 9 cups of baba ghanoush and froze it for later.

I used the recipe from the 75th anniversary edition of the Joy of Cooking. Now I need to make soaked whole wheat pitas to eat with the baba ghanoush.

Hannah