Has anyone read this book by Barbara Kingsolver (released May'07)? I'm about half way through and I can't put it down. I got it from the library but his will be a book that I'm going to have to purchase.

For anyone who hasn't read it, I highly recommend it! She and her family did a year long project where they grew or raised all of their own organic/free range food or purchased only from local organic farmers. They moved from Tucson, AZ to her family's homestead property in the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia.

She writes "a year of food life" where she covers what was done each month, what they grew/harvested, canned/froze/dried with recipes and menu ideas by season.

She and her husband's insight about small local farms, organic produce and meat/dairy is compelling. Even though I agreed with her arguments prior to reading the book, it has really broadened my understanding and deepened my convictions for local organic food and products. She is on the list of "Most Dangerous People in America" because of how outspoken she is about this subject.

She has a great website with all of the recipes in the book for canning and freezing. I'll be trying several and am most excited about "pumpkin soup in the shell."

Inspiring and makes me want to start canning, freezing and planning to make the garden even better next year!

I'd love to converse about the book if anyone's interested :)

Charlene

It is funny that you posted this tonight, as I had wandered over and did some lurking on the Harvest forum to try to learn a little bit about canning, something I have never done before. There was one poster over there that kind of scared me, LOL. I got the impression if I didn't have a $250 pressure canner, and follow these complicated procedures to a T, that my entire family was certain to die of botulism. But then I thought about the fact that people without a science degree have been canning successfully for many, many years.

I didn't really have a big enough harvest this year to necessitate canning, but I'm hopeful that next years garden will be more productive. The thought of doing something wrong and wasting a whole crop really does scare me though, which makes me hesitant to try canning. There's always the freezer!

Thanks for the info on the book. It sounds like one that I would enjoy.

Bonnie

I sometimes post over on the harvest forum. There are many delightful people there, a lot of wonderful recipes, however....... Not a thread goes by without dire warnings of contracting botulism through home canning. They, the cumulative Harvest Forum Gurus, have their valid reasons for doing so. Some of the questions asked are astounding; there is no telling what kind of nut is going to try to can frog legs in béchamel sauce in an old tuna can because he saw it once in a French movie kind of stuff.

Don't be afraid of doing this. With a bit of basic understanding and some common sense, it is a remarkably safe way to preserve a lot of home grown food. Very safe. I've linked to a study by the CDC, scroll down to the tables and see that the incidence of botulism for canned tomato sauce is once in 10 years. And one doesn't know if that person tried to can a tomato in béchamel sauce in an old tuna can.

So far this year, I've made 80 quarts of tomato sauce, 24 pints of wild plum jelly, 20 pints of grape jam, 26 qts of dill pickles, 4 qts of pickled okra, 20 pints of mango peach ginger chutney, and I have 6 gallons of green chili sauce fermenting away - I'll can that in late October. Yesterday, neighbor brought a 20 gal crock up, tomorrow he's bringing me 30 head of cabbage for sauerkraut.

Its all good fun. And good eats.

I stick to canning safe things like pickles, fruit and tomatoes. Squash and such go in the freezer.

The new thing we're trying this year is wine using grapes and apples. That's a bit scary because I won't know for a year if it's any good.

I'm going to see if the book is in the library, since I can always use more ideas on what to do with all the stuff I've got this time of year. It all seems to come in at once.

Off to make more apple jelly.

A jar of pickles gets sliced up for hamburgers and sandwiches, that goes pretty quick. A jar of jelly or jam gone in a week - note pp&j sandwiches mentioned above, and toast for breakfast. We'll eat a pint of the green chili sauce at a sitting. I'll do 100 quarts of the tomato sauce, but that works out to about two meals a week, either chili, a pasta dish, stew, or something like that.

I have to admit that even I'm surprised that we ate a 1200 lb steer (live weight) in 12 months. And that sauerkraut will last a couple of years.

I bought a canning kit at Walmart last spring that included a large black kettle type pot, the canning rack, and funnel.

I haven't attempted canning on my own yet but I will in the next week or two with all of the tomatoes we have.

This summer my son and I did make refrigerator pickles (good for three weeks) and raspberry freezer jam. I also made pomegranate freezer jelly (in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep) using just organic bottled pomegranate juice. It took forever to set but it did finally. So I'm feeling more confident to water bath can on my own now I think :)

I'm with you cnetter - sticking to pickles, fruit and tomatoes.

David, the amount of food you can is amazing!

A few questions...

What's the method to cook tomatoes down for sauce before you can? Believe it or not I've only made sauce from scratch using store bought canned organic no salt tomatoes.

Can I use any kind of peppers to make a chili sauce? I have some Italian roasters that are soooo hot, cherry belles, lots of jalapenos which I'd like to try making some jalapeno jelly for gifts.

I think we'll need a freezer before we can purchase half a cow. moo :)

I've grown Corno di Toro (extremely productive but the skin is too tuff, can’t remember the heat), Cubanella (too tuff, requires cooking), Marconi (productive, nice), Giant Marconi (not very productive, very large, tender, and very sweet). None of these have been what I would think of as warm. And certainly, they are not as spicy as my Anaheims (Big Chili).

We've got half a beef in the works. I grew up with this lifestyle - used to search the freezer trying, often without success, to find anything other than beef. We'd have it processed into bacon and sausage so it would show up at the table 3 times a day.

Mom didn't like chickens, we didn't eat pork . . . a steady diet of beef made us welcome wild game. My aunt could take an entire deer and can it all as MINCEMEAT! They'd have it as a side dish at dinner as well as in pies. Mmmmm

digital Steve

For the tomato sauce we can, I use one of those hand-cranked mills that separates out the seed and skin. I've tried cooking it down, but that takes forever for the volume we do, but a wide, shallow, electric skillet works very well - think big surface area = faster evaporation. I cheat. I use Contadina tomato paste and stir that in with a wisk. Its the only tomato paste I can find here that tastes like tomato, and not just paste. With that, the sauce still has that fresh garden tomato flavor, I dunno how to describe it, and its thick enough.

Steve, beef bacon? I'm pleased to see that we now have some shops around here that have locally grown pork, lamb, and beef - always thought it in-effecient to have the steer grazing in the field 300 yards behind the Safeway, but the meat they sell comes from a thousand miles away.

If that's it, then I follow the instructions in my old Betty Crocker and it works perfectly on getting those skins off and leaving nice pretty tomatoes.

Am so tired but contemplating getting up the energy to go pickle beets. This time of year is nuts.

Anyone else know what I'm talking about? Anyone else make it?

Today am skipping pickling beets and instead dehydrating a brazillian cherry tomatoes.

I've frozen some pureed zucchini, but that's the only thing so far. If I had cucumbers, I'd do refrigerator pickles - I have a nice recipe from my aunt. I've been trying to figure if I have an appropriate place to store potatoes and squash... everything says 50 degrees or so. I'm thinking about a basement, under the stairs closet. But the basement is finished, and stays pretty warm. What do others do?

You don't have to do production canning. Canning in small batches isn't so bad - and less messy. The days of putting up 100 jars of tomato sauce or "chili" in a weekend are past me, so I do small batches almost every day instead. Heat disables me - as it does many with MS, so I do lots of little batches. Jelly works well in little batches.

Some people actually bury an old fridge in the yard to use as a root cellar.

If anyone's willing to share a good refrigerato pickle recipe though, my son would be most grateful.

Just to clarify, we're talking dill pickles, not sweet pickles here.

I just finished cutting up 12 huge heads of cabbage and started making the sauerkraut. I got the heads from my old gardening neighbor, who told me "ya might find a couple worms in there. But all they've been eating is cabbage".

There was something in the local paper about making your own root cellars. I cut out the article, but in this house, at least, we won't ever be converting part of the basement to root cellar.

Highalt, my refrigerator pickle recipe is for sweet pickles - sorry! But I like your new name for them! Sounds like something out of the 1950's... "You have to try these new REFRIGERATO pickles!! They're out of this world!"

I think that with squash it is almost more dryness than cold that's important. I have kept them for weeks on the kitchen floor and, when I lived way out in the country, the floor under the bed was filled with squash each Winter. A comforter that hung all the way down kept the warm air out. It worked very well.

digitS'

Alice, I had no idea your garage froze. Mine gets very cool, but doesn't freeze, and I have shelves in there for storage. I keep my dahlia and begonia tubers in there too.

I think the problem is we let the dogs out though the garage. And last winter we had a new puppy... so lot's of in's and out's. I might be tempted to try an experiment this year with some shelves like you mention.

Jams are the easiest to start canning, simple instructions and hard to mess up. Jellies take a little longer and can take weeks to months to set up. The first time I tried canning jam I bought Sure-Jell and followed their recipes using frozen fruit that was on sale at the grocery store - that way it didn't cost too much if they didn't work out.

A few more complicated recipes for Apple Pie Jam , Banana Nut Bread Butter and Holiday Fruit & Nut Jam from the Kraft Foods website are really good. Our favorite was the Holiday Fruit & Nut jam - tastes like fruitcake (without the cake of course).

I've been hanging out in the Harvest forum quite a bit lately. Someone posted a Chunky Basil Pasta Sauce that is supposed to be really good and can be done in a Boil Water Bath instead of a pressure canner. I may try it in the next couple of weekends.

I pickled cauliflower, beans, tomatoes and garlic for the first time three weeks ago and finally get to see how they turned out Monday. I've only done pickles once before and was disappointed with the results, but it was before I found GW and I'm not a big fan of pickles anyway.

Dafy

I've been wondering if any remodelers know how to create a root cellar? I have space in my basement and possibly even in my garage for a root cellar.

I ordered the book, btw.

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/lane/sites/default/files/images/eb1326.pdf

Then, if energy suffices, I'm going to make the mango chutney I promised my daughter, with the 5 lbs of dried mango, mango juice and cider vinegar to swell it up, brown sugar, cinnamon, dried ginger, and powdered chipotle. Let it set a month, and it takes a peanut butter sandwich into a whole new realm.

Then rest and go fishing, and late october, time to can the Sauerkraut and green chili sauce.

Then we eat it.

Just made more crab apple jelly. Am contemplating rose hip jelly, but wondering if those icky hairs would come through the strainer.

My grapes are ripe for pickin, so are the tomatoes, pumpkins, herbs, lots of strawberries. Now I need to get busy and start canning. I'm going to try the tomato sauce recipe someone posted from the harvest forum and also the recipe out of the book that has cinnamon and nutmeg which sounds different and yummy.

So far I've only read canning recipes that call for tomato sauce or puree to begin with. How do I make the raw tomatoes into sauce or puree? Slip the skins like Cnetter mentioned? How? Maybe I should invest in a hand crank mill like David--are they expensive? All of my grapes have seeds and maybe I could use it for that too? Any advice is appreciated :)

I liked the homemade ketchup idea. Most of the ketchup sold is full of sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Heinz makes organic now that is just sugar instead of HFCS. How else would we get kids to eat most anything?!

Peppers...we've eaten most of the sweet ones and have some orange ones just about ready and are they good!
*Italian Roasters--I bought as transplants and the tag only says 'Italian Roasters" describing them as mild & pungent and they are not mild! I had a small get together where everyone brought their own meat to barbecue and we provided all the side dishes from the garden. I sliced and grilled only one of the roasters with a bunch of other veggies from the garden and all of our guests were on fire including my husband who loves anything as hot as possible. The jalapenos are milder. Maybe they were misnamed? I don't know what to do with them and about 20 of them.
*Red cherry bomb peppers- best for salsa?
*Lotsa jalapenos-I'd like to make jelly

Cnetter I have crabapples too. Next year I'll try some jelly with 'em!

Plum Jelly--gotta a good recipe David? A friend called and says they have hundreds ripe and falling of their tree and to come pick em.

I need to turn down any request for a social life during the month of September!

http://www.amazon.com/MIU-Stainless-Steel-Tomato-Vegetable-Mill/dp/B0000DZDFN/ref=sr_1_5/102-4512968-1017703?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1190898070&sr=1-5

Both work just fine. The tomato strainer needs about 2 quarts of tomatoes to start with, and will do about 3 gallons of puree before it needs cleaning, the food mill works for smaller amounts.

For plum jelly, I've been using something called Pomona Pectin, which allows one to drastically cut the amount of sugar and allows me to make up vats of jelly at once. I dunno if you want 20 pints.......

Other than that, the addition of about 1/4 volume cranberry juice to plum juice makes a great jelly.

I stopped at Target and Walmart last night; Walmart had an electric food grinder for $50 mostly for meat/sausages with a tiny little opening (I didn't buy it). We have a kitchen supply store nearby that I'm going to try today.

I can't find Pomona Pectin. I was at the Denver Whole Foods store recently and they were all out. I can see where planning ahead next year will be beneficial. I'm glad I bought jars in the spring.

I did go to the library yesterday and got some books on canning and pickling and renewed the Barbara Kingsolver book too. Found some great recipes for making flavored vinegars and oils too. Great holiday gifts.

Concord grapes and unknown white grapes need to be picked this weekend for sure. Last year I did it myself on a tall ladder; this year I'm recruiting hubby and son for pickin'. I'm canning them myself without the neighbor's help this time. Wish me luck;)

Charlene

If you have to use Sure-Jell, use the low sugar stuff.

If you slip your tomato skins, you still have the seeds, which doesn't bother me any. Directions are in my old Betty Crocker, but they can also be found online. It involves dipping tomatoes in a hot water bath just long enough for the skins to come loose, but before they are cooked. Kinda fun, but somewhat messy.

Back on topic! :-)

I read Animal Vegetable Miracle.

I also read the book of essays Kingsolver wrote prior to it called Small Wonders. The essays are sort of the incubation of the latest book. And the inspiration for Small Wonders and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was This Organic Life by Joan Dye Gussow.

I have thoroughly enjoyed all of them and they have changed my life. Would be happy to discuss!

Kate

David- I got a food mill and will try it out tomorrow :) I don't think it's a Foley brand but it looks just like it and I got it on sale for $19. Thanks for the links and pics. It was helpful.

Cnetter- the Whole Foods off of Hampden & East of I25 does carry Pomona Pectin but they've been out and when a shipment comes in they say it's gone just as fast. So I bought some boxes of low or no sugar Sure Jell at the grocery store.

How do you all "slip the skins" off the grapes? I was up late last night squeezing each individual Concord Grape pulp which popped right out but boy was it a task and I have so many more batches to do. My fingers are purple. The neighbor helped last year and I think we just squished them through a hand press she had but I remember it wasting a lot of the skin and pulp.

Charlene

Thats a long way around to suggesting cooking the tomatoes first.

With grapes, I used to cook them and strain them through cheese cloth - doing it the traditional way.
This year I got a good juicer and life is soooo much better.

Finally pickeled and canned my beets - the colour of those things never fails to amaze me.

Child's Selection: "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" by Brian Selznick

Adult Selection: "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver

Since I recommended the adult selection they have asked me LAST MINUTE (YESTERDAY!) to lead the adult book discussion this coming Tuesday night. I will have help from a friend/teacher at the school.

I have some ideas about what to discuss but if anyone who's read this book has some feedback about what they loved (or didn't) about the book, I'd love to hear it!

I'd also like to pass out a sheet that has local/Colorado resources for food, gardening, etc. If you have favorite links or books what are those? There will probably be some people that are new to growing food in the garden and I'd like to provide some resources and inspiration.

Thank you!

Charlene