Dehydrating.

I have a dehydrator now. I haven't used it yet - tomorrow is going to be the day. I have a day off work and although i'm planning an outing with my kids, given it's school holidays, I'm going to use the dehydrator.
I bought it from a friend who found that it didn't suit her needs. And I confess - I bought it mostly for ONE thing - making roll-ups for the kids.
Kids seem to love roll-ups. they are sugary and tasty and easy to eat and fun to fiddle with. Only the bought ones at the shops have all sorts of added colours and sugars and thickeners and flavours and other things that Master 5 can't eat due to gluten intolerance, and master 7 shouldn't eat, because... well, who needs to eat NUMBERS when one can eat real food!

Anyway, I have made rollups before in a borrowed dehydrator from a friend. So i already know what I'm doing.

I use plums that I preserved in the Fowlers waterbath unit a year or so ago. They are a beautiful rich dark-coloured plum with a nice tart flavour. I preserved some alone in a light syrup, and some with some nashi pears, just in water.

So I drain the fruit in a sieve and use the juice for flavouring in ice-cream or something dessert-related. And the fruit itself gets blended up into a thick puree, poured onto the plastic sheets in the dehydrator (I only have one plastic sheet with this one. I'm going to use baking paper on the rest of the trays. It worked fine last time!) and spread out to an even thickness. Then we switch it on and away we go!

I've not used a dehydrator like this one before - it only has one setting and the fan is on top, not on the bottom. It will be interesting to see how well it works compared to the one I borrowed last time. If it seems to be fine I'll buy some extra trays for it as it's only got 4.

I'll let you all know tomorrow night how it went - hopefully with pictures but there are no guarantees there as our internet is being naughty at the moment.

Ali

Preserving is something you do when...

you aren't working a whole lot.

BUT....

You can still preserve when you are!

The other weekend I came across a bargain at a local market. An enormous bag of butternut pumpkins, locally and 'organically' grown, for $10 a bag. I reckon it weighed about 15 kilos.

(I put organic in quotations because the gentleman who grows them isn't organically certified, but I did have a lovely chat with him about his garden and how he is a no-spray natural horse-poo fertiliser kind of fellow!)

So I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with them all. Originally I had planned to can some pumpkin cubes in the pressure canner - note, you can't can pureed pumpkin soup. According to the USDA the density of the resulting soup is such that even pressure canning for extended periods of time will not guarantee that the required temperature be reached in the middle of the jar, hence if you want to can pumpkin soup, can cubed pumpkin in stock, and puree it when you re-heat.

Of course, I haven't had a day when I'm not in paid employment since the pumpkin purchase, so I haven't had the time to pressure can anything.

I did, however, make up an enormous batch of pumpkin soup and fill my freezer with it. I still have other pumpkins left, which is fine, and I will post more recipes that are not preserving ones here about that later on - but this is my made-up pumpkin soup recipe.

Firstly - I heard from a friend that butternut pumpkins, when fresh, do not need to be peeled. This is great, because I hate peeling pumpkin. So when I was prepping this lot, instead of peeling them I scrubbed them all.

This recipe 3/4 filled my enormous stockpot, but cooked down to about 2/3 full once it had finished.


Scrub 8 small-medium butternut pumpkins, chop into biggish peices, de-seed and throw into stock pot.

Chop 3 onions and throw in as well.

Fill stockpot with chicken stock ( or vegie stock, or whatever you have on hand - I used powdered stock as my canned stock from last year is all gone)

Throw in some flavoursome bits - I used Nutmeg, and Sumac, and some "mediterannean" seasoning that I had, which has oregano and almonds and a few other bits in it. Taste it to see if it's ok.

Throw in some red lentils. I used a half a packet. Adds some protein and some fibre and some other good bits too.

Cook until pumpkin is soft, then use a stick blender (carefully! because the soup is hot!) to blend all the pumpkin into a puree. Then cook for a bit longer until the soup has reached a consistency that you are happy with.

Ladle into containers and fill your freezer up! I tend to use Tupperware in my freezer - mostly because I take soup to work as it's easy to heat up/defrost.


Well, that's it really. Easy and by keeping the skins on the pumpkin the texture is a little bit more chunky, and I reckon you get more vitamins included in the mix (if the heat doesn't cook them out first...)

Enjoy!

The tomato sauce odyssey

*this is a pic-heavy post!*

So! Some sauciness!!!

Herein lie the tomatoes. Was pleasantly surprised this time - this big 20 kilo boxes were $22 each, but they are Roma tomatoes! Last time the 'sauce' tomatoes I bought were big round ones with more juice than flesh. (love the 70's carpet, and 70's lino??? Keep an eye out - there's more!)
Next step - I put the tomatoes in a big bowl of water, wash them, then chop them and put the chopped up bits in another bowl. (Roll on moss green tiled splashback and another shade of moss green faded laminate....)

Here you can see half of the chopped tomatoes in my big pot. My stove is pretty annoying - there's not much room for big pots!
This is the post with chopped tomatoes (10kg), 6 big green apples also chopped, 2 litres of white vinegar, 5 cups of white sugar, assorted herbs and spices, and *just* enough room for the 2 kilos of onions that I chopped next. No, there are no pictures of me chopping onions. I was too busy crying and crying and crying. Next time I'm buying pre-chopped frozen onions and to hell with the expense.

This is my tomato puree device. It is awesome. However in my kitchen it is a bit of a PITA. The thing fastens onto a benchtop with a suction pad - but the only place I can really put it where there is space that's LOWER under the end where the sauce comes out is on my kitchen sink. And the draining board is NOT a flat surface that happily takes to a suction cup, so I kind-of have to hold it with one hand while turning the handle with the other....



Here is a dishrack full of washed jars. I will be sitting them in the sink with almost boiling water on them to get them hot again before I fill them. It's a tag team game in my kitchen - with only one sink it gets a bit tricky! You can see I'm using a mixture of FV jars and recycled jars with new lids.

The sauce all cooked down ready for processing through the machine.

A part of the processed sauce, ready for pouring into hot bottles.
Here you can see what's left over after the mix has gone through the machine. This lot is destined for my compost.


You can see here that my canner simply doesn't fit on my stove-top with anything else - so everything has to be done one at a time. When I sell enough craft to buy a new kitchen, I'm going to have a much bigger stove-top with bench space either side so the enormous pots can all fit at once *heaven*

The inside of the canner. I'll be using it as a waterbath only, so I won't use the lid.
The canner filled with jars, and water - I still need a little more in there though!

And the jars after processing. Three of the jars didn't fit in this round of processing - they will go in the fridge, and tomorrow when I do the next lot, I will pop those in too. Obviously, since they will be cold, I'll put them in the canner BEFORE the water starts to get hot, so they can be brought up to temperature first!


That's the first round of tomato sauce. So roll on tomorrow, for the pasta sauce version!

Tomato Weekend

Well, this is it.
It's 9.05 in the morning, and I've just printed out my recipes (again!), written the shopping list, and I'm just about to get out my jars and lids and things.
Then it's straight up to the fruit n veg place, and today will be tomato central.

I'm thinking that I'll only do a few kilos today. I know it's not going to be enough to last me the year. But my 'tomato weekend' just got turned into what is practically a 'tomato day' thanks to a 15 yr old and his excursion (yes, it requires my personal supervision!) tomorrow afternoon/evening, and what looks like a free floor for my craft space (aka the garage) which requires picking up. A days' worth of loading pavers versus another 70 odd kilos of tomato preserving .... well, I can't look a gift horse in the mouth, now can I!!

So The plan is to get through a Quadruple batch of tomato sauce (ketchup I think it's called in the US - on that side note, if ketchup is tomato sauce, what is catsup???) and a Quadruple batch of pasta sauce today. That's about 40 kgs of tomatoes.

I like my tomato puree machine, because without it I'd have to skin and de-seed the tomatoes using a seive, which would add so much time to the process! As it is, I just wash em, roughly chop em, cook em down for about a half hour til they are all mushy, then run them through the machine - then put the resulting puree back into the pot with the rest of the pasta sauce ingredients if it's the pasta sauce I'm making. If I'm doing the tomato sauce I do it the other way round - cook the diced tommys up with everything else and run it through the machine at the very end.

I should get off here and get on with it. It's 9.12. Lots to do!

PS I will try to take photos during the process today. Try. You'll have to forgive the kitchen. Even though it's not dirty at all, it's so old that it looks dirty. Too hard to explain - you'll see in the pics!

Preserving is fun - but not in a South Australian Summer!

In fact, South Australian summers are best reserved for .... making beer!

Well, sometimes.

I thought I would just blog a little about the making of beer. I have a standard Coopers brew kit and I really like it. I also have a few non-standard things that I prefer to use - like glass bottles instead of PET.

Making beer in the Coopers kit is really really easy. The main dramas to be aware of are cleanliness and temperature control.

Once you've got a sterile fermenter (the big round thing with the lid on it and the tap at the bottom) you pour in the can of premixed malt and hop extracts, add a kilo of your choice of extra fermentable goodness (white sugar, dextrose, malt, a combo.... hell, if you're making stout chuck in a can of condensed milk *droool*), stir it all up with some hot water, fill up with tap water to the 23 litre mark, throw in your yeast and stick the lid on.

It CAN get complicated. Different types of beer use different types of yeasts, which have a different ideal fermenting range. Keep in mind that if you aren't at all fussy about your beer, and you just want something vaguely beer flavoured, with a bit of an alocholic boost, for drinking after a hot day in the garden - temperature control aint that important.

If you want something specific, like a german lager clone, you need to get fussy both with your yeasts and possibly whether or not you go the whole hog and malt and mash your own grains to get the goodies to brew the beer from in the first place.

I'm lazy, I use the can options above. I have a heat mat for brewing when it's cold. Somewhere I have a thingy that you plug in between the powerpoint and a fridge, with which to set the fridge temp to about 12 degrees which is perfect for lager brewing. I've not used it, because my brew fridge died.

Anyhow once your beer has fermented as much as it's going to (there's a small art to determining this effectively - it uses a thing called a hydrometer. It comes with the kit, and is fully explained, so I"m not going to!), put it in sterile bottles with a little extra sugar (comes in handy pre-measured doses in tablet form from - you guessed it - Coopers!), stick on your lids, and let it sit for a couple of weeks. Then drink it.

Another thing I've been doing lately is brewing some cider. It's quite possibly even EASIER to do than beer. All you need to do is get yourself a set of these and then you can follow said directions to your heart's content. I use bought long life juice. Apple and blackcurrant is the preferred choice here, because it's quite difficult to find Apple and berry where I am. Sometimes I spice it up with some nutmeg and cinnamon when I add a little bit of sugar in it - for extra kick.

So enjoy the hot water by making your own cooling beverages!

PS despite the heat, it will soon be tomato time again. I'll be taking 2 weeks off work this time round. We ran out of sauce, pasta sauce and soup, and I'm also down to my last jars of passata, so I really really need to do more this time! I shall endeavor to take photo blog type things of this mammoth tomato effort!

Making Baked Beans from Scratch

Well, due to some dietary restrictions that I have meanly imposed on my youngest lad, buying baked beans in cans is now frought with difficulty. He can't have gluten, wheat, wheat by products, or anything dairy. So all those little words like "thickener" and "starch" are a no-no!

SO today I'm making a large batch of baked beans from scratch, so I know exactly what's in them, and I know that they are safe for him to eat.

First step - select the beans. Contrary to popular opinion, you can make baked beans out of ANY type of bean. It just depends on what you like. I happened to have some dry navy beans left from last time I made them, and I also threw in a few handfuls of dry black-eyed peas. (no, not the band.)

These were put in the big stockpot and covered with water to soak. I ended up soaking them for about 18 hours, although overnight is usually fine.

Then I drained them into the colander. At this point I had a heaped large colander full of soaked beans. Yep, that's the sum total of the measurement you'll be getting today *grin*

Now there are a number of different ways that you can follow from here. One is to simmer your beans in fresh water for about and hour - hour and a half. Then drain again, mix with sauce ingredients, and back in oven on low heat for about 6 hours.

However - I don't like the bake in oven for long periods thing. And today I really didn't want to be in and out of the kitchen all day either.

So I pulled out the slow cooker.

Put beans in slow cooker. If you are making these the same way I am, add about 3 cups of water, about 1 litre of passata (mine is home made from last years tomato preserving frenzy - one litre is approximate, i used one size 27 Fowlers Jar) and stir.

Then I threw in - some garlic powder (to taste), about a cup of dark brown sugar, a tablespoon or so of powdered mustard, and a good teaspoon of ground cloves. It now smells like baked beans in there!!!

Switch crockpot on. Here directions may vary. I have read 12 hours on low. But because I chose NOT to pre-cook the beans (as well as the pre-soak) I have put the pot on high for a few hours first.

I will probably stir in once in a little while and see how they are going, and then perhaps turn it to low, all things depending.

And if I was going to work tomorrow, I would definetly be pressure canning these babies. But since I AM going to work, they will go into the freezer instead.

Today!

Today i am going to pressure can carrots. I'm following the instructions from an internet friend who is quite possibly the most helpful woman ever whenever I have a preserving question - and I will ask her later on if it's OK for me to publish her instructions here so everything is all in one space.

If I can find batteries that are charged for the camera I will try and do a bit of a step by step photo thing too. But I won't make any promises on that one!

We eat a lot of carrots here - and often they are kinda expensive. So I thought I'd can some, and buy the juicing ones or even the horse ones from the local feed store. Given that I can buy a 20 kilo bag of carrots from there for $10.95, and the stupidmarket carrots are often around the $1.40 per kilo, I figured it would save us some dosh, at the cost of a day in the kitchen. And since it's school holidays, a day in the kitchen isn't that surprising anyway - I'll probably get the kids to roll some biccies for the teeny tiny oven while I peel carrots!

However - it did occur to me that attempting to get 20 kilos of carrots into jars meant that I had to have storage space for 20 kilos of carrot jars... and it meant that I would possibly get RSI from peeling all that many carrots - and I thought it might take me a couple of days....

To get rid of all my excuses, the stupidmarket had carrots on sale for 99c a kilo - so I decided I'd start this venture small rather than large and bought 6 kilos.

So today - canning 6 kilos of carrots. And if there's time a couple of jars of pumpkin cubes too.