Natural food, sustainability, and delicious living.
While I was in Washington State, I was introduced by my cousin Laura to actual, real huckleberries! Before, I’d only encountered huckleberries as part of the name “Huckleberry Hound“. They grow on her property, near the evergreen trees. It was tart and reminded me of a pomegranate seed. Really tasty.
This week’s share was a bit more modest than last, but still full of amazing fruits and vegetables. We got:
1 bunch beets
1 pound zucchini
1 head red leaf lettuce
1 pound string beans
1 bunch carrots
1 bulb fennel
1 cucumber
2.5 pounds red plums
2 pounds nectarines
The carrots came with the fronds, and I’m looking into ways to use them. They could be good!
I was considering lacto fermenting the fennel with carrots, but I’ve read that fennel can get bitter in the fermentation process, with lots of shrinkage after a few days. Carrot fennel slaw I think is in my future, instead.
The fruit continues to be amazing and I am loving eating the plums with raw yogurt for breakfast. Jenny from Nourished Kitchen recommend poaching yellow plums in honey-vanilla syrup, and I bet these red plums would also be great that way.
We’ll be eating salad with the lettuce as opposed to the no so successful lettuce soup I made last week.
Zucchini will be eaten with tomatoes from my garden!
Summer is amazing.
This season I’ve been preserving often, and that makes me very happy. The processes are fun, and I love the idea of having food on the shelves/in the fridge that I can enjoy when the food in its natural state would be past its prime. I plan to continue preserving food throughout the summer – my next big project will be canning tomatoes in August or September.
Earlier this year, I was taken by this DIY handbook published by the NY Times. I ended up making Vin d’Orange and Maple Vinegar. I’ve been enjoying the Vin d’Orange all summer, and it really just screams “warm weather” to me. I drink it mixed with sparkling water and it’s very refreshing.
I also made the maple vinegar, which is pretty good. It’s made of raw cider vinegar, maple syrup, and rum. It still has a bit of an alcohol kick to it, which is a bit odd. Still, it’s fantastic as part of a vinaigrette on salad. That’s my favorite way to use it.
As far as this DIY handbook, I still have plans to make the tomato chili jam and the kimchi. I’ve used up most of my preserved lemons, so I’ll need to make some of those again soon.
Apart from that, I’ve made apricot jam from the apricots off the backyard tree. I used a very basic jam recipe, and added some organic orange zest to it. I love that addition. I think in a lot of jams and preserves, the addition of orange is a wonderful flavor contribution.
As I wrote before, strawberry lemon preserves were made at my home, as part of an event put together by my CSA. I was fortunate to be the recipient of a jar of these preserves by AJ.
The spicy cherry preserves I made are simply amazing. I love the combination of sweet-tart-spicy, and these cherries really deliver on this. I liked the half pint I made so much that I bought more sour cherries at the greenmarket and made another pints’s worth of sour cherry preserves! The cherries with some syrup mixed with sparkling water make for a nice, barely sweet soda.
I also used some of the sour cherries for a liqueur, which is coming along quite well.
I’ve started experimenting with simple syrups and made a very tasty mint simple syrup with the mint on my back deck.
With the last of the first yellow plums of the season, I made plum shrub syrup, which turned out beautifully. I like it in sparkling water, though it could be added to a wheat beer with pleasant results, especially if you like sour beers (I do).
If it’s not evident in this post, I’ll just say it – I love vinegar. So, I’ve made some vinegar pickles out of snap peas. They are very good, but I think next time I’ll make them spicier.
I even did some short term preservation with the peaches and nectarines that were really ripe – sorbet! I sweetened it with sucanat and used a bit of the maturing sour cherry liqueur, and it turned out just so well. Sucanat – an unrefined sweetener – turns things a bit dark, but I’ll sacrifice a little bit of aesthetic beauty for something sweet that doesn’t mess so intensely with my blood sugar.
Lacto-fermented dilly beans are on the schedule for this week, which I’m really looking forward to making.
So, that’s a run down of my preserving activities! What have you been preserving this season?
This post is participating in Fight Back Friday, hosted by Food Renegade.
I’ve been writing a lot about my garden, but not much about the harvest. Well, it’s been kind of small so far… I expect that will change as we get into August. However, I have gotten to eat a few homegrown tomatoes, and some ground cherries, as well as plenty of apricots.
The first tomato I harvested was a Tommy Toe, which is a large cherry tomato.
These tomatoes are a large cherry tomato with firm flesh, balanced tomato flavor, and there is a creaminess to them that is just delightful. They are super delicious. I’ve harvested a half dozen of these tomatoes.
I’ve also harvested a half dozen or so of the Mexican Midget tomato. This was one of two plants given to me by my friend Alex.
This is a small cherry tomato, almost what I’d consider to be a currant tomato as far as its size goes. It’s small but packs a big flavor punch. So delicious. Their size is perfect for snacking, and when I see ripe ones out on in the garden, I usually just pop them in my mouth and eat them right there. Super tasty.
Apart from the tomatoes, ground cherries have just started to become available for harvest. They are ripe when their husk dries out (the texture reminds me a little bit of onion skin paper) and they drop onto the ground.
I think of ground cherries to be an old fashioned sort of fruit. It has an unusual flavor, kind of a combination between a tomato and a pineapple. The fruit are about 1/3 inches in diameter and they’re full of seeds, sort of like tomatillos (which they also look like, and are related to). Some people consider ground cherries to be much like the cape gooseberry.
They are delicious to snack on and also make good jam, so I’m told. I have a lot of them out there, so jam may be in my future.
The apricot tree also produced enough apricots for jam.
More on the jam later, which is quite delicious. I picked about 4 pounds of fruit, one pound of which was not usable (blemishes, mostly), but 3 pounds was just enough to make 4.5 pints of delicious apricot jam! It will be nice to have that taste of summer in the winter.
This week in our CSA we moved full force into stone fruit season – yum. Nectarines and peaches made their debut, which made me really happy. There’s also lots of green stuff this week. We got:
1 bag of snap peas
1/2 pound of zucchini
1/2 pound of cucumbers
1 head of lettuce
1 pound of wax beans
1 bunch of spring onions
1 bunch of sorrel
1 pound of yellow plums
2 pounds of nectarines
2 pounds peaches
5 apples
I’ve already eaten the lettuce head. A recipe for a lettuce and mint soup arrived in my inbox, so I tried it. I must admit, it’s only ok. But ok enough to continue eating it over the next few days. I like drinking it out of a mug. I was able to use the onion heads in it, too. I also made a simple salad of chopped cucumber and onion in sherry vinegar and olive oil, with some hot peppers added.
I may pickle the snap peas again, and perhaps even make lacto-fermented dilly beans with the beans. Or saute them with garlic and ginger for dinner this week.
The peaches have been great in raw yogurt, and the plums are awesome for simply snacking on.
The way life has been moving at this point in my life, summer really will be over in the blink of an eye. Hard to believe we’re already at mid-July. September is just around the corner. I plan to enjoy the high summer bounty as long as possible and really savor it.
Lately, I’ve been on a preservation kick. So far, I’ve made jam/preserves, simple syrup, vinegar pickles, and now… shrubs. Actually, just one at this point.
Yes, shrubs. It sounds like a plant, but it’s a fruit syrup that basically consists of fruit, sugar, and vinegar in a 1:1:1 ratio. It’s another way to preserve seasonal fruit, hooray! And it’s easy to make.
My main reference in learning how to do this is this great article on Serious Eats, Cocktail 101: How to Make Shrub Syrups. Apparently the shrub was popular in Colonial America. They’d mix the shrub syrup with water, making for a refreshing summer drink. It pretty much got forgotten after refrigeration and products of the industrial food system became more and more popular in this country.
The shrub has been sort of “rediscovered” here in the 21st century – I actually first heard about the shrub at The Queens Kickshaw after our food swap. Ben, one of the owners, was experimenting with them. I tasted a few he had put together and they sure were vinegary and tasty, but I like the tang of vinegar, so it was all good with me. It wasn’t until I was poking around online that I came across the Serious Eats article that talked about making shrubs in more depth.
So, we got a lot of plums in last week’s CSA share, and by the beginning of this week, they were really starting to ripen. I wanted to do something with them to extend their life – I didn’t have enough for jam really, so the shrub was a perfect solution. I had a cup of raw apple cider vinegar in the fridge, too, and some organic sugar on the shelf. Everything I needed!
I decided to make my shrub with the cold-process method. This way, the raw vinegar would get to stay raw. There is a way to make a shrub by cooking the fruit, too, which is preferred by some people. With the cold-process method, the brightness of the fruit will shine through and be a strong match for the vinegar.
I started by washing, pitting, and quartering enough yellow plums to make a cup of fruit. I then combined that with a cup of organic sugar. I stirred it together, put it in a glass bowl, covered it in foil, and set it in the refrigerator.
I let the fruit macerate for 24 hours. At the end of the 24 hours, I was looking for fruit sitting in syrup created by its juices and the sugar, which is what I found.
Really ripe fruit would probably take less time to exude its juices and make a syrup, but even then you can leave the fruit in the fridge for a day. Even two or three days, it will be ok.
I then drained the fruit over a large stainless steel bowl, pressing the plums a little to get the last bits of juice out.
There was a bunch of sugar sitting on the bottom of the glass bowl, so I scraped that out and into the syrup.
I then added a cup of raw cider vinegar to that, whisked it, then poured it into a bottle and capped it. Finally, I vigorously shook the bottle, attempting to dissolve some of the remaining sugar.
I’ll likely have to shake the bottle more times to get the sugar to dissolve. The acids in the juice and vinegar will dissolve it all eventually.
I tasted it – it was tangy! And fruity. Reminded me of kombucha when it’s got a big tang. The shrub will mellow, though, and I’ll likely notice a substantial change in that direction after a week.
All in all, this is very exciting. I can see myself making shrubs all summer long. I expect the syrup would be great mixed with sparkling water, or make into this suggested cocktail from Serious Eats:
Pair a small amount of shrub (about half an ounce) with 2 ounces of vermouth or sherry. Top that with some seltzer or club soda.
It also might be good in wheat beer (just a splash) or with some gin.
Shrubs should last quite a while – at least a year in the fridge. Some believe you can keep it on the shelf instead, but I like my syruped drinks cold, so I’m just going to store mine in the refrigerator.
As far as the science behind the drink goes, here’s a great explanation from mixologist Neyah White:
When a shrub ages, it is like an ecosystem. The ambient yeast (yeast on the fruit itself and yeast from the air) turns the sugar into alcohol, and the acetobacter (the bacteria in unpasteurized vinegar) turns the alcohol into more vinegar. Eventually this will stabilize and not turn the whole shrub into fruit vinegar since the bacteria-induced pH change will stall out the yeast’s fermentation process (and thus the bacteria’s acetic acid-producing pathway).
Very cool. I like it when people talk about ecosystems in food.
So there you have it – shrubs!
This post is participating in Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
This week in our CSA share, we received sour cherries. I was really excited about that – they only come once a year and the window to access them is very short. They are gorgeous – I think they are prettier than sweet cherries.
They are smaller than sweet cherries and quite sour. I was amazed at the CSA pickup site when my friend’s son just started eating them like they were sweet cherries, apparently unaffected by the puckeryness of the cherries (I tasted one on its own – way sour). But this kid has an amazing palate at 2 years old, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at what he gladly eats!
Anyway, for most of us, these are not snacking cherries. They are meant to be preserved or made into pie. I wanted to preserve them, so I chose two ways to do that – hot cherry preserves, and cherry liqueur.
The sour cherry liqueur was very simple – I took a cup of pitted cherries and mixed it with 3/4 cup of organic sugar. I put that in a quart sized mason jar (it took up about half the jar) and added a combination of vodka and dark rum to that – the original recipe specified white rum, but I didn’t have any, so I used what was in my cupboard. We’ll see how it is in a couple of months. I can’t imagine it will be horrible or anything.
I’ll stir the mixture once a week or so. It’s in the back of a cupboard that doesn’t get opened regularly, so the store-it-in-the-dark thing is taken care of. The liqueur should be ready mid-September.
The Hot Cherry Preserves took a little more work, but not much. I mixed 12 oz of pitted sour cherries with 2/3 cup of organic sugar, a vanilla bean, and two guajillo chiles and let that macerate in the fridge overnight. The next day I heated it up to boiling and let that cook for 10 minutes. I added a tsp of organic lemon juice to it, and after it all cooled down a bit I put it in a half pint jar, and then in the fridge, where it will stay until I eat all the cherries. That really might not take very long, too.
I didn’t think a half pint jar would be big enough at first, but after the cherries cooked down, it made a scant half pint. They’ll sit in my fridge and I’ll use them in cocktails. Sour and spicy is one of my favorite flavor combinations. I may have to pick up more sour cherries this week (assuming they are still around) tomorrow and make more preserves!
Here’s to the awesomeness that is sour cherries!