Preserving

I spent some time earlier this year researching festivals and noting their dates.  If they fit in with what else we are doing then we observe them.  It was the Autumn Equinox last month and as I was reading about it I was struck by the similarity of what the author suggests to do at this time of year and what we are already doing in our own lives which I do through my own experiences with my mother and grandmother.

While the summer speaks to me of being outside as much as possible enjoying its warm envelope and long days, the autumn is about readiness and preparation.  Preparing for the cold times ahead when the home is the heart of our lives and where we are wrapped in warmth. Preparation of food for consumption in the wanter and early spring by preserving it so that it keeps.  In the part of the world we live the growing season has a beginning and end, defined by the seasons, we are not able to grow enough food to live on all year round.  Often at the end of our growing season we have a glut of produce most of which would not keep unless it is eaten straight away or preserving it, allowing us to eat our produce for longer.  There are many ways that good can be preserved, using tried and tested recipes or, with much trepidation, new ones often you have to leave whatever you have made for a few months before eating it is a long time to wait to see if a recipe has worked!

Freezing

We are lucky enough to have the space for a chest freezer.  It is in our garage and is model that is designed to be located in an unheated space.  It is usually quite full at this time of year and I am getting better at organising it, although you wouldn't think it when you open the lid.  One item we have in abundance in there is frozen fruit.  We are not big jam eaters so if we have a lot of fruit either from the garden, foraged for or given to us I usually freeze it in the first instance and use it up over the following months.  Last year I froze over 20lbs of fruit, this year I suspect it is the same I have yet to add it all up.  I use this fruit to make puddings and cakes mostly but I am going to make more fruit leathers with it this winter, experimenting with different flavours!

I have also been making and freezing soup.  We eat a lot of soup in the winter and they make a great addition to a picnic.  It is always handy to have some on standby..............I have been using courgettes and cucumbers from the garden.  The courgettes have been made into this recipe frozen before the cheese is added.  The cucumbers using this recipe given to me by a friend:

Cucumber Soup
1 cucumber
1 bulb fennel
1 onion or 6 shallots or several spring onions
1 pint vegetable stock
Pinch cayenne
1 tbsp parsley chopped

Chop onion and slice fennel, fry in butter.  Slice cucumber and add with stock and cayenne to pan.  Simmer until fennel is soft.  Blend and add parsley.  I omit the parsley if I am freezing and add when I have reheated.

Pickles

I grew gherkins for the first time this year.  They were moderately successful and I would grow them again.  They didn't fruit as much as the cucumbers but I think that may be down to neglect on my part, they weren't getting as much water for a start.  The gherkins that did grow were large, I expect that if you want to have a mass of smaller fruits, like the sort you buy, you need to tend to the plant more and pick the fruits more.  The few I did pick at a smaller size had gone mouldy by the time I had enough to fill a jar.  I think I need to learn more about growing gherkins before trying again.  Undaunted I decided to pickle the large ones I had by chopping them into pieces and using a recipe I adapted from Festivals, Family and Food:

Dill Pickles
Gherkins
Dill
Pickling Spices
2 Tablespoons Salt
1 fluid oz White Wine Vinegar
2 pints water bought to the boil
Jar - clean and sterilised

Wash and scrub the gherkins, slice into pieces.  I chopped mine into bite size pieces, some slices are whole, some halved, some quartered.  In the bottom of the jar sprinkle some dill and about 1/2 teaspoon of the pickling spices.  Add the gherkin pieces until jar is almost full.  Place a bit more dill on top.  Mix together the salt, vinegar and water to make a brine and pour into jar whilst it is still hot. Store for three months before eating, I hope they taste good!

I have pickled onions for years, I remember doing this each year with my mother making a huge batch as my family loved these.  I have grown pickling onions in the past but I don't find the sets for sale that often round my way, I often end up buying the onions to pickle.  I grew onions this year and about half of them were very small, I know that you are supposed to use pickling onions for pickling (they have a slightly milder flavour) but I thought I would pickle my tiny ones.  Although I have been pickling for years I have yet to share my recipe:

Pickled Onions
Onions
Salt
Water
Pickling Spices
White Wine or Malt Vinegar
Jars - clean and sterilised

Peel onions and put in a big bowl.  Make a wet brine with 50g salt to each pint of cold water.  Pour the brine over the onions placing a plate and a weight on top to ensure that all the onions remain in the brine.  Leave for the desired amount of time, 24 hours will give you crisp onions (my preference) you can leave for up to 48 hours depending on how crisp you like them.  Meanwhile prepare the vinegar with a teaspoon to a tablespoon (we prefer the latter) of pickling spices to each pint of vinegar.  You can place the spices in a muslin bag or strain them out at the end, either way put them in pan with the vinegar and boil steadily for 15 minutes, leave to cool.  I usually find that 3lbs of onions needs 1 pint of vinegar.  Drain and rinse very thoroughly.  Put the onions into your jar(s) and pour the cool vinegar over, seal down and leave for three months.

I have made one jar with my own onions and will buy some more pickling onions to make some more, we eat a lot of pickled onions in our house!

I have also pickled cucumbers using this recipe.

Syrup

We have once again made rosehip syrup this year, using rosehips picked in a friends garden.  They are supposed to taste better after a frost, sweeter apparently.  I made mine before the frost, just, I should have waited as we had a very heavy one this week!  I froze my berries before I made the syrup  which has the same effect as a frost, apparently............I have been enjoying this on my porridge each morning.

Fruit Leather

I first made fruit leather last year it took me a while to get the temperature and times right for my oven.  So do persevere if they don't work at first they are well worth it!  I had only made them using apples so I tried blackcurrants this time, cooking them with a little honey into a puree.  I strained them through a sieve to get rid of the pips, spread them out onto the baking tray and cooked/dried in oven.  They were really good although a little sharp I might use a touch more honey next time.  I have a freezer full of fruit so am going to experiment with a few other fruits and combinations..........

I still have a few more cucumbers that need attention, probably into pickles.  Sadly the apples orchard that we usually go and pick apples in yielded a poor crop this year only enough for a weeks worth of eating apples.  This means I was not able to freeze apples as I usually do or make apple chutney and apple butter.  I will just have to find another source of apples for this year!

Do you do any preserving?  Do you have any recipes to share.............

Preserving

Welcome to the October 2013 Natural Living Blog Carnival: Meals that Keep.
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Natural Living Blog Carnival hosted by Happy Mothering and The Pistachio Project through the Green Moms Network. This month, our members are talking about how they preserve food to reduce waste and stock their kitchens! Check out all of the posts to get recipes ideas and learn more about putting up food for your family.

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We eat seasonally and as locally as possible, we love the changes of vegetables and fruit this gives us that as we come towards the end of a season we can look forward to the vegetables from the next one.  Our local food comes from a variety of sources and this autumn we have been using many, we have some we have grown, some from a local veg bag scheme, some we have been given and some we have foraged from hedgerows and trees.  What we also have is a glut, an abundance of produce that we could not eat before it perished so we have turned our hand to preserving some of it to last us through the coming year.  We have tried old and tested methods and new ones.

Freezing

We are lucky to have the space to own a chest freezer, it sits in our garage and at this time of year is often quite full.  I am not very good at methodical storing in there so it is often in a mess, I know what is in there just can't always find it easily!  This year we have frozen fruit, we do so by spreading it out on a tray and placing in the freezer before bagging up and labelling, we do this in one pound quantities.  The exception to this is apples which I core, peel and slice thinly place in a bag and freeze.  This fruit usually ends up in puddings over the course of the year our favourite being crumble, I can empty the bag straight into the dish for defrosting cover with the topping (4oz flour, 2oz of butter rubbed in and 2oz of Demerara sugar for crunch).  I sometimes use the fruit in flapjacks, stirring it in to the mix from frozen.  This year we have frozen, black and white currants, rhubarb, raspberries, blackberries and apple in total over 20lbs of fruit.

Chutney

These are made using a combination of ingredients usually fruit, vinegar and sugar with added flavour from spices which are all cooked to thicken them and intensify the flavour.  I usually make apple chutney each year but we still have several jars in the pantry from previous years so with the weather turning cool and my tomatoes still being green I made some green tomato chutney using this recipe, which is an amalgam from those I found in my recipe books:




Green Tomato Chutney
750g green tomatoes chopped
500g shallots or onions peeled chopped
200g cooking apples peeled, cored and chopped
300ml vinegar
small piece of ginger peeled
1 tsp yellow mustard seeds
100g raisins
1 dried chilli
1 tsp salt
200g brown sugar

Put tomatoes, onions and apples in a pan with half the vinegar, bring to the boil and cook for 30 minutes until tender.
Put chilli, ginger and mustards seeds in a muslin bag and tie, bruise with a rolling pin and add to pan with raisins.
Cook on a low heat stirring from time to time until mixture thickens.
Add salt, sugar and remaining vinegar stirring until sugar dissolves.
Cook until thickened again.
Remove muslin bag.
Pour into sterilised containers and seal.

Pickles

Towards the end of the summer when the temperatures start to cool we always have a glut of cucumbers. There are only so many cucumbers a family of four can eat in a week. Sadly these fruit do not store well for long periods, neither do they freeze. A few years ago we tried making picked cucumber and found they were delicious and make a good present as I have never seen thesefor sale. We use this recipe, my mother gave this to me and I am not sure where it came from:




Pickled Cucumber
3 large cucumbers
1 large onion
salt
570ml white wine vinegar
200g soft brown sugar
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 tbs mustard seeds

Slice cucumber thinly with the skins on, slice onion thinly.
Lay in layers in a colander sprinkling each layer with salt.
Put a plate with heavy weight on top and another underneath and leave to drain for 3 hours.
Put vinegar, sugar and spices in a pan and stir over a medium heat to dissolve sugar.
Add cucumber and onion slices bring to the boil and simmer uncovered for 1 minute.
Remove from heat and lift slices with a draining spoon into sterile jars.
Return vinegar to hear and boil for fifteen minutes, uncovered.
Pour over cucumber and onion slices and seal jars.
Leave for a month before using.

Ketchup

The chutney didn't really make a dent in my supply of green tomatoes I still had lots left. I cannot eat tomatoes so did not want to make any more chutney as we had plenty for my husband to eat. I searched for other recipes for preserving green tomatoes and found one for ketchup. This was tested a few days after making it at a barbecue, I am told it is delicious!  The bottle I made is in the middle of the Chutney picture above.

Green Tomato Ketchup
3lbs green tomatoes roughly chopped
1lb apples roughly chopped
1 medium onion roughly chopped
1/2lb sugar
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp salt
Pinch each of coriander, mustard, allspice, clove and ginger powders
1 dried chilli
1/2 pint cider vinegar

All the recipes I found (this is an amalgam of several) suggested finely chopping the tomatoes, apples and onions. Three pounds is a fair amount of tomatoes and after finely chopping a couple I went for the rough method and threw the whole lot (toms, apples and onions) in a food processor to let the machine do the work for me.
I put this and all the other ingredients in a large pan, bought it to the boil and simmered gently for a hour stirring occasionally.
Then you sieve the mix and return to the pan.
Reboil and simmer until mixture is desired thickness.
Bottle into sterilised containers.

Syrup

I tried making Rosehip Syrup a few years ago and it was so revolting that we threw it away. I think it probably didn't have enough sugar in it. Inspired by a friend who had made some this year I thought I would give it a go. Rosehips are high in Vitamin C and during WWII the government encouraged people to make the syrup due to the lack of citrus fruits. We have a Rosehip hedge growing down one side of our garden it does a good job of keeping some of the wind at bay, we live in a very windy place! So I picked some hips, trimmed them, weighed them, chucked them in a pan covered them with water and bought them to the boil. I left them of about twenty minutes boiling gently, then sieved the mix and returned to the pan with a little more water and the same weight of sugar as the weight of the rosehips at the start, heated gently to dissolve the sugar and poured into sterilised containers.
I have been enjoying this on my porridge for the last few weeks!

Jam

I have made a few jars of jam during the year, we don't eat much of it, a couple each of strawberry and raspberry. We picked a huge amount of apples from a local orchard and I wanted to find different ways to preserve them other than freezing and making chutney which is what I usually do. A search through my cookbooks found a recipe for apple butter from this book which is no longer in print.  My copy is falling apart it was the first vegetarian cookbook I bought, as a student, back in the 90s. Despite the name this is actually a thick, firm and delicious apple jam.



Apple Butter
3lb Cooking Apples
1 3/4 pt Water
Approx 3lb Golden Granulated Sugar
1/2 tsp Ground Cinnamon (optional)
1/2 tsp Ground Cloves (optional)

Wash and chop the apples without peeling or removing the cores.
Cover with water and simmer gently until pulpy.
Sieve and weigh the pulp and return to pan.
Add 3/4lb of sugar for every pound of apple pulp.
Add spices if using.
Heat gently, stirring occasionally until the sugar is dissolved.
Boil until thick and creamy.
Pour into sterilised jars and seal.

I don't think this will last long in our house we have already eaten one jar!

Fruit Leather

I had never attempted to make these before and understood them to be easy to make. I did a lot of Internet research to work out what I needed to do before starting. The recipe, if you can call it that, was to cook your fruit sieve it, spread it on a baking tray and place in oven for the lowest setting for 12 hours simple right? It took me three attempts to make these. The lowest setting on my oven is 40°C which is not really warm enough I have found the ideal to be 60°C. All the blogs etc I looked at suggested spreading the fruit to a 1/4 inch which I did but again it did not dry as it was too thick, perhaps the writers do not actually know what 1/4 inch is! The ideal thickness for me was between 1/16 and 1/8 of an inch.

I used apples to make these leathers but now I have found the best method to make them I will try this with other fruits next year as they come into season. My children love to snack on these.

I have had real fun making all these different preserves, I just hope they last the winter!

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