An Easy Tomato Sauce is a must if you garden It's that time of year with which I have a love/hate relationship. The tomatoes are starting to come in the back door in multiple 5-gallon buckets now. That means that no matter what else is going on, I have to deal with them. Mostly because we only have so many buckets, and there are plenty more tomatoes where those came from. This easy sauce method helps me get through a lot of tomatoes quickly. It's been a challenging year in the ... Read More about Easy Tomato Sauce for Canning & Freezing
Food Preservation
Preserving the Harvest: How to Freeze Blueberries
Where we live, here in Upstate NY, it's blueberry time, which means preserving some of that wonderful harvest. Freezing is a fast and easy way to save that summer goodness for later in the year. I'm bringing this post up from a few years ago, for a fresh audience [and maybe for you to enjoy again!]. Once blueberries start ripening, there's a pretty short window of opportunity to get them picked and dealt with. You can only eat so many fresh berries. You might want to check out a few ways ... Read More about Preserving the Harvest: How to Freeze Blueberries
Garlic Scape Chimichurri Sauce
The best topping for any steak! We grow a LOT of garlic. We eat a lot of it and sell some, plus it's good for the chickens. That does give us a LOT of Garlic Scapes to deal with though. Garlic scapes are the flower of a garlic plant, and leaving them in place robs the garlic bulb of growth. The plant will put more energy into maturing a flower, which will eventually fling seeds around - nature's way of growing more garlic. Our way is to separate the cloves and plant them, but nature takes a ... Read More about Garlic Scape Chimichurri Sauce
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Concord Grape Preserves {no pectin recipe}
Concord Grape Preserves with Deeper Flavor, and Less Sugar It has been a crazy summer around here - lots of work outdoors, training a new puppy, doing Farmer's Market every week, and still finding time for family visits, and getting all of our produce saved for winter. It's not left much time for blogging I'm afraid, but now that things are getting a little calmer, I am feeling like sharing some recipes again. The grapes that went into these marvelous Concord Grape Preserves, came from vines ... Read More about Concord Grape Preserves {no pectin recipe}
Quick Pickled Radishes
It does not get much more seasonal that fresh radishes. We've been enjoying a bumper crop of them this spring. A few springs ago, I shared this Sauteed Radishes with Sea Salt & Lime recipe, that we still enjoy at least a few times each spring. Cooking radishes does something really special, that we never dreamed of till we tried it, so I hope you will check that recipe out too. And I am always happy to eat freshly pulled radishes with just a bit of coarse salt, or sliced very thin and ... Read More about Quick Pickled Radishes
Jalapeno Garlic Dill Pickles
I think this is the busiest time of year for any gardener. As the summer winds down, we have to get everything put up for winter - currently that consists mostly of squishing tons of tomatoes into various jars and running the canner for hours every day. I try to mix of what I am making, so it doesn't become too tedious - today it's crushed tomatoes. But before I move over to the kitchen to get those going, I want to share my fast and easy recipe for these Jalapeno Garlic Dill Pickles. It's a ... Read More about Jalapeno Garlic Dill Pickles
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Raspberry Preserves {no pectin recipe}
It has been a mighty busy summer around here. A good busy though. In addition to having a bigger garden and selling at the Farmer's Market, we found a new church that we are trying, I got into essential oils [okay, that should probably say I became instantly obsessed with essential oils!] and now, any day, we expect to be called suddenly to drive 3 hours south to watch our granddaughter while her little brother gets born! I am trying to get everything from the garden put up for winter in ... Read More about Raspberry Preserves {no pectin recipe}
Kale Walnut Pesto
One thing that enjoys a cool summer is kale. Man, do we have kale! Usually, we have a lot of kale early in the summer, and then again in the fall, but this summer the spring kale never tried to go to seed, so it is still going strong. Every morning, when I go down to tend to the chickens, I make a detour through the garden to grab a handful of kale for my breakfast smoothie. Often we have it for dinner as well, and we are still overloaded. So, I wanted to find a way to use up a lot of kale ... Read More about Kale Walnut Pesto
Refrigerator Pickled Hot Peppers
This is just another iteration of one of the most popular recipes on the blog, Refrigerator Garlic Dill Pickles. Just like the original, it makes fast work of an otherwise more time consuming chore - and I maintain, with better results. Our hot pepper plants have been quite generous this year, providing us with a steady stream of Hungarian wax peppers, jalapenos, red cherry peppers and pepperoncini, plus another kind, for which I can't find the seed packet, but they look like jalapeno's taller ... Read More about Refrigerator Pickled Hot Peppers
Tomato Jalapeno Jam
This was inspired by Mark Bittman’s recipe in the New York Times back some time ago. We found his version a bit too sweet for us, but liked it enough that I decided to see if I could alter it sufficiently to suit our taste. It’s not like I have a shortage of tomatoes for experimenting. In order to achieve a truly jam like consistency, you can’t reduce the sugar very much, because sugar is what gives jams and jellies their texture. Without it, this will just end up as a spicy tomato sauce. So ... Read More about Tomato Jalapeno Jam
Blueberry Preserves {no pectin recipe}
It seems to be another amazing year for blueberries here in the northeast. The bushes are packed with berries, and they are sweet and juicy. Even if you aren't blessed to live next door to the family farm where 20 gargantuan blueberry bushes reside, you are still going to find great prices at the U-pick places, as well as at Farmer's Markets. We eat a LOT of blueberries when they are ripening, and we get a considerable number of them into the freezer for use in baking through the winter ... Read More about Blueberry Preserves {no pectin recipe}
Lemon Ginger Apple Butter
What do you make when life hands you apples? Like the half bushel of them that I picked up on sale because they were starting get a bit on the old side? You have to search pretty hard to find something better to do with them than make this Lemon Ginger Apple Butter. There is so much flavor here - deep and nuanced with undercurrents of the spices and lots of the zing of lemon and ginger. It ain't your granny's apple butter, that is for sure! Whenever I start working on a recipe idea, I look ... Read More about Lemon Ginger Apple Butter