Welcome to our kitchen that truly is the heart of our home! One of life's greatest pleasures is enjoying good food with family and friends. Here you will find recipes, tips for frugal cooking, how-tos for food preservation especially canning and anything else food related. Tea is brewing and warm cookies are fresh from the oven. Please sit a spell and enjoy your stay.
I started home canning peaches a couple of weeks ago with beautiful, large peaches from the Niagara region. At $45 per bushel which works to a price of $28.13 per hamper (5/8 of a bushel) or $8 more than the price per hamper of pickling cucumbers, the peaches were not cheap. Tomatoes and cucumbers are usually available by the hamper; apples, pears and peaches by the bushel, and other produce by the quart (1.1 L) or lb for home canning or freezing purposes.
We are in the midst of the busiest canning for the year. This means the canners are running as much as four times a day. New home canners often panic when they see a colour change in their home canned product. Now, the rule of thumb is always if in doubt, throw it out but some colour changes are completely harmless. Fruits and vegetables contain pigments giving them their gorgeous colours. These pigments are sensitive to pH, minerals or metals in water, heat, light, oxygen and food additives (eg. anti-caking agents) in other ingredients.
Two weekend we met up with the kids for dinner at Moxie's Grill & Bar in London located at 441 Richmond Street. This is a premium casual restaurant that was founded in Calgary in 1986, now operating 63 restaurants in seven provinces. The atmosphere is delightful, their wait-staff are very friendly, the food is delicious but their presentations are outstanding! The children's ice cream came served in a bowl surrounded by a cloud of fog (caused by dry ice) that was quite impressive especially for our little grandkid (age 4). I really wanted to share that picture but my policy has always been to not post pictures with my family in them.
I am in high gear doing a lot of home canning. The produce is coming in fast, back to back right now. I just finished up doing cucumbers just in time to start peaches. I'm a bit disappointed this year in that we have two peach trees and a pear tree at our new home but due to a very abnormal heat wave back in March followed by heavy frosts, we won't see much in the way of fruit. Local peaches are very small because of the adverse weather.
We started camping in tents when our youngest was still in diapers on the Labour Day weekend with good friends of ours. In October of the same year, we packed up our kids and gear in the pouring rain to head to Pinery Provincial Park. It rained the entire time we were there but as a family we were hooked on camping. The following spring we bought a pop-up tent trailer and less than a year later bought a 28' Prowler. Our kids were fanatics about homemade trail mix and beef jerky as snacks so I splurged and bought a Mr. Coffee 5 tray dehydrator (135 W). When we bought our Jenn-Aire range in 2005, I switched to using the dehydrating cycle on it as the Mr. Coffee had burned out. When we moved here, the Jenn-Aire went to one of our kids because I wanted natural gas for home canning. Since last September, I have been unable to do much in the way of dehydrating as my new gas range does not go low enough in temperature. It wasn't much of a problem until this spring when I wanted to start replenishing our dried food supplies.
Friends of ours own a large chain grocery store franchise. They have often told us even though we support their store by shopping there that we are horrible customers. They said if everyone shopped the way we do, they would have been out of business a long time ago. Why? We don't fall into the grocery store fallacy of shopping every week and having to buy the latest gimmick the food manufacturers are promoting. We shop the outer aisle focusing on Canadian produce spending very little on imported produce, not much in the lines of breads or meats or poultry, a little dairy and occasionally a couple of frozen food items. We buy raw products like flour, sugars, vinegars, oils, dried beans and dried pastas. We buy very, very little in the way of commercially preserved anything. We don't shop weekly but rather pick up the odd item here or there if absolutely needed or cherry pick the sales. On average, very little of our food dollar is spent in a grocery store. I'd be surprised if we spent as much of an eighth of of food budget in a grocery store! Yet we put high quality, nutritious food on the table without spending an astronomical amount of money. In fact, we spend about a third of the amount on food that a normal couple spends which I think is impressive giving the amount of entertaining and hosting family events that we do. How do we do this? Here are a few things we do to basically avoid grocery stores.
I picked up another five dozen ears of corn from the only local farmer close to use selling yellow corn. Despite the adverse weather conditions and price of peaches and cream corn in town ($6/doz), his price is quite good at $3 per dozen. He's only about a mile out of town so that is a nice bonus. Yellow corn is a sweet corn with a lower sugar content than bi-colour corn so it is better for freezing and canning.
Many perceive home canning to be making strawberry jam, canning peaches, making dill pickles and applesauce but in reality home canning is so much more than that. With the exception of a few commercially canned foods like pickled eggs and canned pastas pretty much anything can be home canned and more. Now, it is not recommended to home can pasta, rice and barley but I have had good success with all used in low amounts. Home canning is an excellent way to put convenience foods on your table for a fraction of the cost of store bought.
Salsas have become extremely popular. Contrary to some beliefs and salsa does not always have to be tomato based although some of the most popular salsas are. One of the ways I save money when canning is to always make one or more products in addition to my standard products for that produce that only uses a small portion of the product. Quite often this is an experimental recipe I am working on but not always.
I talk a lot about home canning on this blog because it is one of the most frugal activities to do if you want to save on your food costs. While I home can year round, this is the busiest time of the year for canning. It's the time of year that my garden is producing well and local produce is available. Everything has been about two weeks ahead of normal this year but because of adverse weather conditions spanning back into last winter, the price of local produce has increased. I only buy the produce that I don't grow but even then still realize a savings in the products I make with purchased local produce over the cost to buy commercially canned in the grocery stores. However, it is sometimes hard to envision that cost savings when shelling out $15 for 5 dozen ears of corn, $20 for a hamper of cucumbers or $45 for a bushel of peaches. Dill pickles, whole kernel corn and canned peaches are fairly inexpensive in the grocery store which is not to say don't can them but rather divide the amount of the produce purchased into making a few products that are considerably lower cost than store bought. Here's a few things I do to maximize my home canning dollar:
Appetizers are great meal starters that don't necessarily have to reflect what the meal is about. They are fun and tempting but in most restaurants are over priced for what you are getting. Appetizers range in price from $5 to $12 in restaurants and yet many can easily be made at home for a fraction of that cost. One of the easiest and least expensive appetizers to make at home is loaded potato skins.
Continuing with dill pickles, I made a batch of fresh pack dill pickles. These take a bit more planning as they require and overnight icing in a brine. Icing is one method of crisping pickles. This particular method involved also using a brine (salt solution) that helps draw moisture out of the cucumbers to give crisper results as well. After their overnight icing, the pickles were ready for draining and jarring.
Vacuum seal home dried foods and store at 15ºC (60ºF) or less in a dry, dark storage area to extend the shelf life and nutritive value.
Quite often I work with hampers of produce when home canning. A hamper is 5/8 of a bushel so eight hampers is the equivalent of 5 bushels. My comfort level tends to be 1 to 3 hampers depending on the produce and the complexity of the products being made. This is the amount of that produce I can comfortably process within usually a day but sometimes it spreads into the following morning. I have four of the cheery yellow hampers, courtesy of a relative who is a commercial grower. The vast majority of the hampers of produce I process are not purchased produce. When I buying produce, I take a couple of hampers with me as many vendors are reluctant to part with their own hampers and rightly so as they are expensive. Vendors will transfer the produce into plastic bags or cardboard boxes but I'd rather use my own hampers. Plastic bags can cause produce to sweat and over heat on the journey home and wet produce causes the bottom of cardboard boxes to give way spilling produce everywhere.
Continuing on my pickle making quest to find a good dill pickle recipe and after doing a couple of batches of bread and butter pickles, I made my first batch of dill pickles. Now I have a very long history of dill pickle failures. The pickles have always come out limp and that just isn't acceptable in a dill pickle! I even tried adding alum (potassium aluminum sulfate) which is an old fashioned crisping agent but that can give a bitter flavour to the pickles and may cause digestive upsets. I am armed for success this year. I have pickling lime (calcium hydroxide), Pickle Crisp (calcium chloride) and copious amounts of ice for soaking.
Pickling lime is a crisping agent that requires soaking the prepared cucumbers in a solution of pickling lime and water for at minimum 2 hrs to overnight, The pickles must then be rinsed at least three times to remove all traces of the pickling lime. Pickle Crisp can be added to any jar of fresh packed (not cooked) pickles like the Fast Favorite Garlic Dill Pickles I made. It's easy to use with no extra timing to worry about. Icing is used in many dill pickle recipes to firm the pickles. Salt is usually added to draw a bit of moisture out of the cucumbers then they are covered with ice and allowed to sit overnight.
The ability to dehydrate foods is a fundamental component of home food preservation. Ideally, any food preservation you do should be in the form of home canned, frozen and dried for any given food. What this means is, for example, if you are preserving tomatoes - a portion will be froze, a portion will be home canned and a portion will be dried. The preference as to which is the larger portion will depend on a few factors. I personally preserve tomatoes in many forms as home canned (about 80%) with drying and freezing at about 10% each. However the reverse is true with respect to meats where the bulk of preservation is freezing. Still, I dry and can meats as well because you never want to put your food storage into one basket.
Food dehydrators come in three forms:
Locally grown pickling cucumbers became available about mid July. I bought 2 quarts to start on my quest to find at least one good dill pickle recipe. That was quickly followed by another 4 quarts of cucumbers an finally a hamper. I spent a total of $30 on pickling cucumbers. In perspective that would have bought me 6 - 1 gallon (3.8 L) jars of kosher dill pickles but store bought dills have sodium benzoate (a preservative) and yellow dye 5 (allergen), two ingredients we are avoiding wherever possible. To break even on pickles I needed to have a total yield of 22.8 L of homemade pickles but only if I made all dill pickles. Other store bought pickles, like sweet bread and butter pickles are as high as $3.89 for a 500 ml jar. I decided to make a variety of cucumber based pickles to ensure I realized a savings. Over the next few days I will share what I made with you.
When we first looked at our new property back in September of 2011, I noticed the fruit trees and over grown gardens. Tucked into one side garden in the backyard is a gooseberry bush but I didn't know that is what it was until this spring when I noticed a robin frequenting the bush. Upon closer inspection, I discovered it was a gooseberry bush so officially declared war on the robin. I wanted those berries for jam! Well, the robin didn't quite see it that way. He would sit on the fence yelling at me every time I got close to the bush. He rounded up other birds in the neighbourhood to pull the sheets off the bush. Finally, I broke down and bought three packages of bird netting at the dollar store, sewed them together and fastened them securely to the bush. He was none to pleased at this turn of events but I did manage to get enough gooseberries to make a small batch of low sugar gooseberry jam.
'Tis the midst of the busier home canning season with the busiest tomato season just around the corner. Last week, the canners ran a couple of times a day. I was very fortunate to find a local farmer about a mile out of town who is selling old fashion yellow corn. All of the vegetable stands in town are selling peaches and cream corn (bi-colour) which simple is not a good corn for canning or freezing.
Most vegetables must be blanched before dehydrating to slow the enzyme action that promotes spoiling during drying and storage. The exceptions are onions, garlic, peppers and mushrooms.