This past week brought us many delicious vegetables and fruit. We got:
1 pound japanese eggplants
2 pounds tomatoes
1 bunch leeks
1 head lettuce
1 pound summer squash
1 pound green beans
2 pounds apples
1 pound nectarines
1 watermelon (missing)
Sad news about the watermelon – it kind of died. Hard to describe, but it was very sad. I’ve also been on an apples and peanut butter kick, which is a terrific, satisfying snack.
The tomatoes went into tomato jam. Everything else has been eaten as is, sauteed and such together – all these summer veggies go so well together! Except the lettuce, which is languishing in the fridge. So much lettuce.
I’m a big fan of lacto-fermented foods, and I especially like lacto-fermented vegetables. I love sauerkraut but I especially love fermented root vegetables. I fell in love with them after the fermentation workshop I took with Andrew Faust a few years ago. There is just something magical about how all vegetables change in the fermentation process.
Of course, lacto-fermentation shoots up the nutritional value of what is fermenting, especially the vitamin C levels. Natural probiotics and beneficial enzymes also flourish. This is yet another reason to consume such foods.
When I got back from Washington, I looked in the fridge and saw that I had some CSA carrots and radishes left over. I thought fermenting them would be a great way to preserve them. The carrots were tiny, so grating them would have been a pain (perhaps even literally, as I was using a box grater), so I decided to slice them thinly into rounds, just as I was slicing the radishes. Then I figured that onions and garlic would be a nice addition.
Finally, I wanted to make them spicy. I didn’t have any fresh peppers on hand but I did have a bunch of dried ones. I love smoky and tangy together, so I chose to use a few of my dried chipotles.
I also wanted to use a brine with a smaller percentage of salt. More salt means the food with ferment faster, but lately I’ve been dissatisfied with the saltiness of the end product. I’d been using this brine: 1 tbs of salt to 1 cup of water. I referred to Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation, and saw that he uses a weaker brine for some things: 3 tbs salt to 4 cups water. I decided to try it out, though I did halve it, as I wasn’t making a huge batch of vegetables.
I am very happy with the results of this ferment! It took a little longer to get to where I wanted, but I love the salt level, flavor-wise. But I love how it’s turned out – it’s not overly salty at all, it’s smoky, spicy, and tangy. Perfect!
Carrot Radish Chipotle Ferment
1 pound carrots, cleaned and thinly sliced (do not peel)
1 pound radishes, thinly sliced
1/4 white onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, peeled and cut in half
3 chipotle peppers, softened in warm water
1.5 tbs sea salt
2 cups warm water
Combine carrots, radishes, onion, and garlic in a large bowl.
After the chipotles have softened a bit, slice into four pieces, stem to blossom end. Add to the vegetables.
Mix the sea salt and water until the salt dissolves. Add it to the vegetables.
Scoop vegetable mixture into washed, sterilized mason jars – either two pint jars or one quart jar. Top off with remaining liquid.
Tighten lid – but not too tight – and store in a warm, dark area for 3-5 days. Check after a few days and see if you like it. Leave a little longer if you don’t. Check each day, and when it is to your liking, store it in the refrigerator.
Makes 4 cups.
This post is participating in Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
I have no idea what I’ll do with the bitter melon. It is a mystery to me. The tomatoes are gone, eaten in part with the cucumber. I think I’ll pickle the peppers. The eggplant was made into baba ghanoush – quite garlicky this time around.
I made the peaches into peach cobbler on Sunday, and it is quite tasty! The sprouted flour gives it a bit of a crunch. I may make this instead of crisp topping in the future, as I can get around the need to soak grains this way, plus it’s much less sweet. It’s sweetened with sucanat, which goes great with the peaches. It’s so far my favorite recipe in which to use sucanat.
I’ve been eating the apples out of hand. Sadly, the plums bit the dust after sitting out too long. Our plums this year have been a bit problematic, arriving over ripe to begin with. Still, the ones I’ve been able to eat have been fabulous.
This is the share we got a couple of weeks ago, on August 2. This was the day before I left for Washington, so I left most of it for our housesitter. So, we got:
1 head of lettuce
1 bunch radishes
2 pounds mixed of summer squash and cucumber
2 bell peppers
1 pound white peaches
1 pound plums
1 pound donut peaches
I ate half the tomatoes the night before I left. I took a few donut peaches and plums with me on the airplane, and they were a welcome change from the starchy snacks I was offered there.
I ended up fermenting the radishes with carrots from the week prior, and am excited to see how this mixture comes out. The white peaches ended up going into peach thyme jam this weekend.
The following week, Week 9, will not be documented, for a variety of logistical reasons. Week 10 is this week, though!
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!
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.
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.
Sour 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!
