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Muddy Valley Farm

~ Life on a tiny west coast hobby farm

Muddy Valley Farm

Category Archives: Preserving

Eating Local

01 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by Jodi in Farm Produce, Gardening, Preserving, Seasons

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Wednesday is my day off, and the day I head to the feed store. The feed truck arrives early in the morning on Wednesdays, so I know they will be freshly stocked. Some weeks, they sell out of my poultry feed by the weekend.

Although stocking up on fresh feed for my feathered friends and the rest of the barnyard crew is my primary goal, my route takes me down country roads past many micro farms like ours, so all year long I stop along the way to pick up whatever is in season. The less I have to buy at the grocery store the better, and there is just something special about eating seasonally. Everything tastes so good! And fresh produce preserved in season runs a close second.

RG grows lots of different veggies and fruit, so my stops are predicated by what other locals have that we don’t. One farm grows wonderful kiwi; it’s on my list from November through till February. Another place grows delicious organic cherries. In early summer as soon as their ‘Cherries for Sale’ sign goes up, they get a visit from me. The cherries always sell out completely in less than a week. I usually stop at Dan’s Farm Market too, he grows a wide variety of unsprayed food, if we’ve eaten all our broccoli for example, or our lettuce has bolted and turned bitter, I can get some there.

Then there is the little table at the end of a long driveway on Oldfield, steel cash can welded to its side, that in July and August proudly carries a selection of good sized mixed bouquets tied with twine, for the ridiculously cheap price of, (I kid you not) a TWOONIE! These twoonie bouquets always sell out before noon. I try to buy two.

Also starting in July each year, Wednesday becomes corn pickup day, right through until the crop is done. Resident Gardener grows sweet corn each summer, she has a nice patch growing now, but she doesn’t grow near enough to keep us in corn for the whole year. Luckily sweet corn grows incredibly well on our peninsula so it’s easy to get. There’s a place on my route that offers a baker’s dozen of peaches and cream corn picked that morning for twelve bucks, and worth every penny.

I buy enough on my Wednesday trips to see us through till next summer, and freeze it. It’s worth the trouble. Home frozen corn tastes about a million times better than store bought, and it’s so easy to do. We all love to sit down to a nice feed of summer sweet corn in the middle of winter!

This also means of course that Wednesdays are corn-on-the-cob days, which Dear Husband likes very much. I cook up a couple cobs for us to butter, salt, and gnaw on, and in the same pot of boiling water I blanch the rest of my bakers dozen for 3-4 minutes, plunging them into ice water to cool quickly. After dinner I stand each blanched, cooled ear in my trusty Angel-food cake pan, and slice off the kernels. If I had a table with a hole in it, I could just set my pan above it, push the cobs through, and the kernels would effortlessly strip off, like you see on the internet, but I don’t. Maybe one day.

From there its into a freezer bag and then the freezer. All in all it takes about twenty minutes each week to process my bakers dozen. I used to spread the kernels carefully on cookie sheets and then bag when frozen, to keep each separate, but I’ve learned that if I just reach into the freezer and shake up the bag a few times while it’s freezing up I can cut the cookie sheet step out entirely.

By October my freezer is bursting with corn and lots of other homegrown and local food that we usually manage to finish over the winter. The bits and pieces we don’t get through by the time the season rolls around again go to lucky chickens. But they never get any sweet corn, it’s so darned tasty it’s usually all gone by May.

Dried Clean Tomatoes!

05 Saturday Sep 2020

Posted by Jodi in Farm Produce, Gardening, Preserving, Seasons

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Ready for the dehydrator

Spaghetti, butter chicken, tacos, tomato soup, salsa, meatloaf, chicken paprikash, mulligatawny, hamburgers, curry, chili, beef stew. It makes sense for us to grow tomatoes, because we use them in so many dishes. Resident Gardener starts them from seed, usually saved or traded, in January each year. This means they are easy on the budget too. 

Since the sixteen century when the Spanish brought tomatoes home to Europe from South America, their use has spread around the world like…well, like an indeterminate tomato plant. You know…the ones that just grow, and grow, and grow.

Our gold nugget cherry tomatoes always ripen first, in July usually, and by late August we are buried in tomatoes of all colours, shapes and sizes.

Heavenly. There is nothing better, in my view, than a still-warm-from-the-sun Italian Stallion tomato, sprinkled with pepper and eaten out of hand…buttery, umami, nirvana. 

By the time September rolls around I’m preserving tomatoes like crazy. RG picks them a couple times a week, taking everything from fully ripe to just starting to pink up. I finish the half ripe ones in the house. Tomato harvesting is a race against the weather in our damp climate, and in this way we maximize our harvest. Once picked and brought in, which can be done as soon as they “break” (10-30% of the surface turns pink) I set them along the window ledges so I can easily see when they turn red. 

In another month or so, when we pull the plants, hopefully just ahead of the blight that shows up each fall, I’ll fill paper grocery bags with mature green unblemished fruit and then check for pink ones every few days as they ripen slowly in the bag. Some years we are eating homegrown tomatoes almost until Christmas. I know some folks make green tomato salsa, and pie, and chutney, and I admire their innovation, but I like them red. Or golden or black or chocolate…depending on the variety.

I process our ripe tomatoes in various ways, with my goal being to enjoy them in all the dishes mentioned above, all winter long. I used up my last bag of frozen 2019 tomatoes in June this year. Perfect timing.

Prettiest tomato award for 2020 goes to this beauty.

Every year I roast tomatoes with olive oil and garlic, bag and freeze. The flavour is incredible, but sometimes I forget they are in the oven which never ends well. Or I make ketchup and can it. The easiest method is to simply de-stem, rinse, bag, and freeze. This has been my preference for years; it’s so simple. I add them straight out of the freezer to whatever I’m cooking that needs tomatoes. On the rare occasion when I want to get all fancy and remove the skins, I hold them still frozen under warm running water, squeeze slightly, and the skins slide right off. The single drawback to freezing tomatoes is that they take up a lot of room. And freezer space is hard to come by around here in the fall, even with our big upright freezer, RG’s small chest freezer, and three fridges going.

A couple weeks ago I saw a discussion about drying tomatoes on one of my preserving groups. Some people dry just the skins, left over from canning tomatoes. Others dry the whole fruit. “Oooooh boy”, I started thinking, “if I could get the tomatoes out of the freezer, maybe I will have room for some local lamb!”

A tomato mosiac

I had several pounds of ripe ones in the fridge, so I sliced them a quarter inch thick, the cherry toms into halves or thirds, then onto trays and into the dehydrator they went, for about eighteen hours at 135 F. I suppose you could do them in your oven. But my friend says tomatoes don’t go well in her little Nesco dryer…so be warned.

The gold nugget cherry toms shrunk the least.

Once they snapped when I bent them, I unplugged the dryer, piled them all into the blender together and zipped them into powder in about thirty seconds flat. 25 cups of tomatoes, eight 15×15 inch trays full, almost fourteen square feet of tomato slices, dried down into about 600 ml of super concentrated tomato powder.

So far, I have mixed my tomato powder with water (two tablespoons) to make an almost-too-rich tomato paste for spaghetti sauce and sprinkled it sparingly (two teaspoons!) into homemade veggie barley soup where it both added a tomatoey tang and reddened the broth. The flavour is intense. I can already tell I will need to be careful to not use too much. Best of all, it stores in glass jars in a dark cupboard where it takes up very little space. I added a silicone crystal sachet to the jar too, to keep it from clumping.

I will still roast, and freeze, a few tomatoes. But most of them are going in the dehydrator this year. And now to find me a nice box of lamb…

Homemade Butter in 30 Seconds

03 Sunday Nov 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Preserving, Reduce, reuse, recycle

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Our household went off margarine in August 2012. We had been thinking about it, so when a visiting cousin mentioned the canola processing plants in her area, commenting that one whiff would make us swear off marg forever, I reached my own personal tipping point. Since I am the grocery shopper, our house went margarine-free.

There isn’t much price difference between the two any more. That had been my main reason for buying marg over the years. But these days I can buy a pound of butter for $3.50 at my local big box store. A 2 lb tub of Becel is $6.49. Some say that butter is bad for you, but I would much rather consume butter than a tub of chemically-manipulated faux butter. Hell, it’s all bad for you…everything in moderation.

I have been experimenting lately with making my own butter. But no laborious churning process for me. It’s the 21st century. I can make butter in literally thirty seconds.

I picked up a half pint of whipping cream for under $2 last week, on clearance, best before Oct 28 – in two days time. It didn’t get used for pasta sauce, cream soup or dessert topping, so last night (Nov 2), I took it out of the fridge and set it on the counter overnight to bring it up to room temp, and maybe even get a little fermentation started.

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This morning I dumped it into my mini food processor, half at a time, and whipped it until it “broke”, which took less than 30 seconds. That’s what happens if you whip cream past the point of whipped cream. It separates into butter and buttermilk; and rather suddenly too.

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Once it breaks, you pour off the buttermilk (mmmmm pancakes), scoop the butter into a bowl with your spatula and rinse it under cold water, squishing it in on itself until the water runs clear. Then pour off the water, squish it some more until it stops shedding water, mix in a little salt if you choose (I like pink salt) and refrigerate or freeze.

Today, I got 194 grams of sweet delicious butter – almost half a pound – from my expired whipping cream. Isn’t that cool?!?

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Invasion of the Cucumbers

17 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by Jodi in Farm Life, Farm Produce, Gardening, Preserving

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Our resident gardener planted lots of pickling cukes this year, and they all grew. We  are absolutely inundated! Every few days, the garden disgorges another big basketful, as RG discovers another plant twining along in some random corner. The enthusiastic tone of her “I found another patch” announcements has steadily diminished over time. One can only use so many pickling cukes.

D8ECA2A1-EC8B-438B-BCD7-5540F0E5146EMason jars full of fermenting salt brine pickles are stacked all over my sewing table, friends and family are sharing in the bounty and the chickens are enjoying the ones that grew too big to pickle before they were located. And they Just. Keep. Coming.

Last night, in an attempt to gain the upper hand over the cucumber avalanche, RG gathered up every cuke on hand and came next door to use our big kitchen. It was time to scale up she decided, and make a whole crock full of pickles. After a bit of thought, we pulled out our tall glass kombucha vessel. It would do quite well. We have lots of big pots, but metal won’t work for making pickles. She scrubbed the kombucha vessel thoroughly and filled it with a big batch of pickles, topped and bottomed with fresh grape leaves for tannin (to keep ‘em crispy).

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Ten days or so on the counter, then into jars and the fridge, and we’ll have healthy fermented probiotic pickles and pickle juice good for up to a year, if they last that long (they won’t). In the meantime I am enjoying the beautiful pickle tower decorating my kitchen, glinting green on the counter, filled with quiet purpose as a billion friendly bacteria do their job. Tiny bubbles forming and shifting as the fermenting process unfolds.

One of my cousins has been crazy about pickles his whole life. A true pickle connoisseur, he makes his own, he wins pickling prizes at the fair; the man even owns a pickle suit.  If anyone can appreciate a good pickle, it’s cousin D. I will have to make sure he gets a jar. Especially since RG is already boasting about how her pickles are probably better than his. Are we on the verge of a pickle smackdown? Only time will tell…😘

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