- Pick basil leaves off stems, rinse well
- Blend 1 tablespoon of olive oil into each cup of basil leaves
- Fill an ice cube tray with the pesto and after frozen place cubes in a freezer bag for single serving use later
Image credit: Cale Ruiz
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The basil is doing great, so today I picked 4 cups and made some very simple pesto cubes for the freezer.
Two more channel catfish fillets for the freezer!
Image credit: Cale Ruiz
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Some of the black beans have dried in their pods, so this week I started picking. I have two beds of beans. The second bed was planted about 3 weeks after the first. So I'll be picking the majority of the second bed in about 2-3 weeks.
I love how dried beans look, especially black beans. These have been put in a jar in the cabinet. Image credit: Cale Ruiz "The Potato Harvest". Wow, that sounds pretty awesome! This is the best garden thing that has happened this year so far. I hate to say it, but I have the worst overall garden this year. I've been keeping that to myself, but it's out now! I think part of the reason it's so bad is because I have devoted more time to...foraging. I know. Quite the gamble, huh? But I don't want to dwell on any of that right now. I have potatoes!
On March 27th I planted $1.91 of seed potatoes. This was the first time I had ever planted potatoes, so I was hoping not to screw it up. A couple weeks ago, as the potato plants were all nearly dead, a sign that it's about time to harvest, I stopped watering. We haven't had much rain, so this evening was the best time to dig. I have 10.75 pounds total of Red Norlands and Kennebecs. These were all growing in one of my 6'x5' raised beds. I certainly wish it was more; it's all about "more" right now. But none were rotten, and nothing bad happened. This is success for me. Also, I just opened up another planting space. This bed will be replanted as soon as possible. Image credit: Cale Ruiz I thought I was all jellied out, but I managed to get back in the mood and make more jelly when I saw all the Rose of Sharon popping up. This is barter jelly. A person only needs so much jelly. I've got Redbud, Forsythia, Mint, and now this batch. 24 half pints total. See what I mean?
There is a certain annoying hedgerow that I have to drive by near my house, and the owner has never trimmed it (even when asked), and the city isn't concerned about it. So to avoid having cars scratched up, I go cut it back when it gets ridiculous. The hedge includes a lot of Rose of Sharon. I decided to start eating that mofo. Rose of Sharon petals are also good raw in a salad for a colorful, mild nutty flavor. Making this jelly was the exact same process as my other jellies. The Redbud jelly post has the full recipe if you're interested. The recipe takes 8 cups of petals. I suggest you add another half cup or so. You've got room in the quart jars used for steeping, so you might as well get as much color and flavor as you can. For Rose of Sharon, you want only the petals. Remove the green base and white pistil. There are still more jelly foraging opportunities, and I do have plans to make other kinds later. I am hoping jelly will be a good bartering currency for me. These aren't your typical jelly flavors. Hopefully others can appreciate that. Image credit: Cale Ruiz Dried herbs. The drying screens are full again with rosemary and thyme. My dried herbs so far total 3.5 quarts of mint, 1 half pint of rosemary and 1 quarter pint of thyme. The batch I put on the screens tonight should give me another half pint of rosemary and quarter pint of thyme. The basil has really taken off, so I'll be cutting it very soon too.
Blackberries. I have been searching for them and hoping to find some, but my labors have been...fruitless. A couple days ago, quite unexpectedly, a coworker asked if I wanted any of her garden blackberries. Why, yes! And in exchange I gave her a half pint of my redbud jelly. I have a pound and a quarter of blackberries in the freezer now. How perfect! Wine. Yep. Intimidating Minnow has been involved in making a couple gallons of blackberry wine and peach wine, and I have become Wine Assistant. These batches are made from purées that Intimidating Minnow bought in order to use for practicing, getting the process down, and of course drinking. The primary fermentation just ended this week and we have racked the wine into jugs for the secondary fermentation phase. In a few weeks we will bottle and let age. And by then...we will be ready to forage for fruits to make country wines that fit within the parameters of my winter challenge. This thing is sounding better all the time. Image credit: Cale Ruiz Cattails. North America's most widely abundant edible. I've been scouting out the cattails and making note of those that were in areas least likely to be affected by things like lawn fertilizer runoff and large amounts of trash. It's amazing how much trash you see collected in the low areas where cattails often grow. But there were a lot of healthy cattails near a local lake, so those were the ones I chose to use. The first thing to be done was to cut down the cattail at the base of the stalk, peel a couple large leaves off, and cut again about a foot from the bottom. This let me leave the site taking only what I really needed - the last 6" or so of the inner stalk. I have some dried dill leftover from last year but I decided to spice this batch of pickles up with some of my fresh garden basil and leftover wild garlic cloves that I set aside from roasting recently. For the basic recipe I used Ball's Dill Pickle Recipe with Reduced Sodium. Instead of dill, I inserted two small garlic cloves and two basil leaves into each jar. Probably half the cattails I collected were too hard. I started with 4 pounds and ended up with 1/2 pound to can. Yikes! But I was choosy and only canned the very best and most tender inner stalks. Hopefully these will be a nice side to go along with baked fish.
Image credit: Cale Ruiz
The grapes have ripened. The best bunches were picked last night from a fence line that I've been keeping my eye on.
Initially I thought of freezing them whole. Then I thought of drying them outside for raisins, but someone suggested to me that the raisins would be really small given that wild grapes are already small to begin with. So my final idea was to make grape juice. Here was the process:
I have 22 ounces of juice. I'm thinking enough for three breakfast servings. Image credit: Cale Ruiz Look at these beauties. Straight from nature's produce section. These are garlic bulbs from the same plants that gave me the bulbils I froze previously. The long necks with bulbs have been sitting out on my back deck in a paper bag, and today I got them taken care of. It has taken me hours to cut, peel, and roast them. This has been so far the most time consuming thing I have done, but in the back of my mind I just keep thinking about the elderberries that are coming and know it can be worse.
To roast the bulbs, I first cut off the roots and peeled down until the thin sheaths were clean (they were completely covered in dried mud). Then I lightly greased a 9" x 13" Pyrex pan with olive oil and sat each bulb on its base inside. I cooked them in a 350 degree oven for about 45 minutes. After the bulbs cooled, I pulled some of them apart and squeezed the buttery garlic out of the cloves. For the rest, I just peeled again down to a very thin layer on the cloves and froze them whole. I have just under a pound total. Image credit: Cale Ruiz My house stinks. But it just means I have more garlic. Which is worth a stinky house.
On the chicory digging day I saw a big batch of field garlic growing near a ditch. A week later, once the bulbils were starting to open and get some color, I picked a bunch of them. Lately I like the finding and picking parts of this whole challenge more than the 'now I have to preserve this stuff' parts. But I'm still truckin'. These bulbils have many fine sheath bits that are really hard to separate from the good stuff. Tonight I had an idea to help it along though. I took two big bowls outside, plugged in a fan, and slowly poured the bulbils from one bowl to the other in front of the fan. Little sheath bits went flying each time. I did that quite a number of times until I got almost all of those pieces out. I rinsed, patted dry, separated into quart freezer bags, and put those bags inside a larger gallon freezer bag. I figured the second bag can help hold in any residual smell. I now have 1 and 1/2 pounds of frozen bulbils. Image credit: Cale Ruiz |
A food preservation journey from garden to forest and everywhere in between for winter subsistence.
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