Dill pickle chips

I have no picture to accompany this post, but you all know what sliced cucumbers, and pickles, look like, anyway, right?

I've been using my mandoline in the kitchen lately (story of why to follow, assuming I ever catch up on all the posts I haven't written this summer), so I sliced the 3 lbs. or so of pickling cukes I got at the Waltham Farmer's Market nice and thin.

I threw in 2 or 3 crushed garlic cloves as well as a bunch of dill flowers from my wildly overgrown patch of dill (I planted six plants this spring, so when they went to seed, they went with a vengeance!)

Here is the recipe I used for the brine, from one of my new favorite blogs. I made about 1.25 quarts of brine, which was a lot, but I've had trouble in the past with lacto-fermentation and liquid evaporation. It's much better to have too much brine than too little.

If the temperature hadn't been quite so extreme, I think I'd have left them out for another day or two to ferment before packing them into jars and fridgeing them. It was awfully hot, though, so I went with 48 hours.

(Thanks, Susan, for the nudge I needed to get this up here!)

How To Freeze Kale (for chichimama)

(I started to write this as a comment on the previous post after chichimama asked . . . then I realized it was really too long for a comment.)

Bring a big pot of water to a boil.

Wash and prep your kale -- I usually coarsely chop it.

Prepare a bowl full of cool water and dump in some ice cubes.

Line a large cookie sheet or try with an absorbent towel, and have another handy.

When the water boils, drop in the kale. Leave it in there for two minutes, regardless of when or whether it returns to a boil. It should turn a brighter green.

Drain thoroughly in a colander, then dump into the ice water to "shock" it. After it's thoroughly cool, drain it again, pressing the moisture out gently.

Spread it out on the cookie sheet, and press the other towel gently on top to wick out as much moisture as you can.

When it's dry, pack it into a ziplock freezer bag, pressing out as much air as you can. Fold over the top of the bag and then put it into another ziplock freezer bag, again pressing out air.

Label the bag, then put it in your freezer. (If you press the kale-filled bag sort of flat, it will make it more compact for storage.)

Apple butter and applesauce

I've had so much fun making these and canning them in the past weeks.

I did have a little issue with the applesauce "siphoning" when I tried to can it -- somehow the seal failed and it oozed down the sides of the ostensibly sealed and processed jars. I took a little sauce out, used new lids, and reprocessed with no ill effects. Phew.

The apple butter is really wonderful -- made with cider, a little cinnamon, and some sugar -- spread on pumpkin bread, it is amazing.

I'm looking forward to giving it to friends for the holidays.

Raspberry leaf tea

Herb tea has never really done it for me.

I like black tea, and a few flavored black teas (say, Earl Grey?), but I'm pretty boring in my taste.

Some fruit-flavored herb teas are just awful. I like chamomile when I have an upset stomach, and sometimes when it's late in the day and I don't want a caffeine hit yet I do want something warm to drink, I suck it up and drink something -- red zinger, or honeybush, or whatever I might have bought thinking maybe this would be the one to convert me to the wide world of herb teas.

When I was pregnant with Annie, I read a lot about raspberry leaf tea: just dried raspberry leaves, steeped in hot water. I wasn't using caffeine at all, so I decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised. I was so happy to find something else I liked. I think it's the tannic acid -- it has a little of that same puckery bite to it that black tea has.

(Oh, I also happened to like nettle infusion, which I drank for the iron after Annie's birth, but I haven't seen nettle growing in my yard.)

The raspberries I planted last year yielded some berries -- enough for the kids and me to go on a daily quest for the few that we'd get -- but I was eyeing those leaves all summer. Last weekend, I clipped off about 8 or 9 branches, tied them into bunches, and hung them upside-down on the basement clothesline to dry. I wasn't sure how long it would take, but they certainly seemed dry enough inside of a week. Last night I pulled off the leaves and put them into a jar for storage.

Now I'm just waiting for an inevitable cool late-afternoon tea-drinking urge to see if it lives up to my memories . . .

Red pepper jelly

We have friends whose usual pre-dinner snack is a chunk of cream cheese covered with spicy red pepper jelly, served with crackers and a knife for spreading. There's something sort of retro about it, but it is delectable, and addictive! I asked them where they get their jelly, and of course they make it. Well. I can do that.

So last week at the farmer's market, I bought a pile of red peppers, and I finally, after several days of admiring how pretty they looked in a basket, set out to make some of my own!

I trimmed them and cut out most of the seeds, but I wasn't religious about it. My fingertips stung for about the next 15 hours -- if ever I make a bigger batch, I'd better wear gloves! I think I wound up with about 9 oz. of coarsely chopped peppers. I pretty much followed the recipe in the Ball book I've used lately, but I used the weird "crunchy" brand of pectin Jon got me at Whole Foods.

As the jelly was coming to a boil on the stove, I was standing there studying the directions that came with the pectin, and trying to decide how much to use since it's not really a standard kind . . . and the jelly boiled over. That's what you get for turning your back on the stove. I actually coped pretty well, and managed to clean it up and even finish the batch and heat processed it and all without getting injured or bursting into tears. Lucky for me Jon had just gotten home and washed about a million dishes to ease me through the rest of the project. Thank goodness.

The other night I finally cracked it out (Phantom was visiting!) and we were quite pleased with the results. I think I'm going to check and see if there are more peppers at the market tomorrow . . .

(Oh, and do you remember the peach jam debacle? the one of the lost directions? I found the directions this week -- tucked inside Peter Reinhart's Crust and Crumb, of course. Where else? Sigh.)

More freezing and canning

Although I didn't take pictures, I wanted to record that I made a large batch of potato leek soup (as the broth, I used some cannellini broth I had in the freezer) and froze it in four containers. It hasn't been soup weather lately, really, but it's my favorite thing to do with a plethora of leeks.

I also froze 2 more quarts of green beans -- I think that's 6 quarts I have in there, now!

I also experimented. I had five eggplant. Two I peeled and sliced and breaded and fried and ate happily.

The other three, I baked, scooped, mashed, and froze. I'm envisioning stirring the puree into a vegetable/lentil curry, maybe, or else spreading some into a lasagne? Or even trying to make baba ganoush with it? I froze it into four small containers.

Finally, I canned 5 pints of crushed tomatoes from the farm pick-up yesterday. I estimate we got about 10 lbs of tomatoes; I think I canned around 6 lbs, or maybe a little more. I just peeled and crushed -- seeds and all.