Preserving
Ideas for how to preserve the produce you have.
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Pickled Peppers
Try our recipe for pickled peppers. We love it with Mariachi's but you can use the same recipe for jalapenos or probably any kind of pepper.
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Sweet Relish
This sweet relish is pretty simple to make. Though it is rather time consuming to chop and then soak all the veggies. But I think it is worth it!
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Tomato Sauce
We eat a lot of tomato sauce in this house. It is easy and fast. I make some kind of Italian dish at least once a week. Plus, we started having pizza and movie night every Friday and I use tomato sauce for the pizza as well. We have started planting enough tomato plants that we could keep ourselves supplied in tomato sauce without buying it from the store. That is usually about 10-12 tomato plants. That means that I make a lot of tomato sauce. So we had to come up with a good method for doing it. I think we have got it down. I have looked up…
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Plum Fruit Leather
Our plum tree did pretty well this year. It doesn’t usually produce a ton of fruit which is good, because I don’t know what I would do with any more plums. My favorite way to use them currently is to make fruit leather. Plums get very sweet on the inside, but the skin stays pretty tart. And they are so juicy, they can be so messy to eat. Unless you pick them before they get ripe. But then they are super tart. As you may have noticed, I am not exactly sure how I feel about eating plums. I can’t say they are my favorite, but I do enjoy them.…
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Pickled beets
This year we dicided to try a new variety of beets. They are supposed to be striped like a peppermint candy. They turned out to be really pretty. Unfortunately they don’t look quite as good pickled as the good old dark red ones. But, they taste just as good. Maybe even better. It’s hard for me to compare because the last time we grew beets I was expecting our second baby and I was a bit nauseous when I was doing the pickled beets. I had to fight to overcome my association with morning sickness and beets. I have been dragging my feet a bit actually. This time around Tyler…
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Pickles
I was a little surprised at how easy pickles are. I didn’t think I liked pickles because my family only bought dill pickles growing up and I just didn’t like them. But as an adult I had sweet pickles. I don’t even remember when I first tried them. They changed my opinion of pickles forever! When I was pregnant with my first child I didn’t understand what all the hype about pregnant women craving pickles was about. I wanted rot kohl. Long story. But anyway, that was before I knew about sweet pickles. With my second pregnancy all I wanted was pickles. Luckily we had cucumbers growing in our garden.…
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Apricots galore
If you have, or have ever had an apricot tree, you probably know that they don’t do well every year. And you probably also know that when they do well, they go a little crazy. One apricot tree, in a good year is enough to keep anyone rolling in apricots for a few days. You will probably end up giving a lot of them away as well. Well, that being said, we have four mature apricot trees! Needless to say, on the years that we get apricots we are swimming in them for a few days or weeks. We recently bought a freeze dryer which is great and it means…
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Apricot Fruit Leather
So, I guess I am a little particular about my fruit leather. Partly because my kids are. I mean, what is the point of making fruit leather if my kids won’t eat it? I have posted about making Pear fruit leather. My pear fruit leather almost always turns out the way we like it. Which is chewy and kind of thick. The taste is never really a problem for me. If it tastes good before you dry it it will taste good after. The problem comes in the texture. I have had fruit leather that turns out more like paper in texture and it just isn’t as enjoyable to eat.…
