22 September 2009

A bushel of apples

I ordered a bushel of St. Lawrence apples from Bailey's Local Foods on Friday and I've now used just about all of them up so all that are left are a few to eat as snacks over the next week or so.
I dehydrated most of them. It was easy with my new apple machine! It is just a simple machine where you turn a handle and it peels, slices, and cores each apple. It was awesome, I couldn't believe it.


And this is what you end up with!


Here's the final product, a huge bag of dehydrated apples, plus a few already ripped up in that measuring cup ready to be added to granola (I made the granola with extra cinnamon so it is really good!), and one sheet of fruit leather. I made the fruit leather just by blending up a few apples and adding some strawberries from the freezer - it is just like 'fruit to go'. I also made an apple pie and some apple muffins.

15 September 2009

Canning salsa and more

Along with dehydrating, I have been doing a lot of canning. Recently I have done some cucumber relish with cucumbers from the backyard.


Then I made some pear chutney with some pears I bought that I didn't like the taste of.


And last night Kevin and I made salsa - got 7 pints of it. All the tomatoes were from the backyard along with some of the jalapenos. It was really fun to be doing it together. We used the tomato salsa recipe from the Little City Farm Blog.
http://littlecityfarm.blogspot.com/2009/08/canning-preserving-workshop.html

Drying Mushrooms


I bought my dehydrator and it arrived last week. I settled on the Nesco Square dehydrator and bought the maximum number of trays. So far I have done another big batch of little tomatoes. And some mushrooms. My home grown mushrooms still aren't doing so well, am still working on reviving them. So when I had the opportunity to buy 3 pounds of local organic shitaake mushrooms I took it. Here are some pictures of them drying process, I used all 8 drying trays and filled up to the top 2 small freezer bags. I also kept a bunch fresh to put on a pizza later in the week. I definitely want to try to do a cream of mushroom soup sometime when it gets a bit colder.

04 September 2009

Mushroom Harvest




Our mushrooms are ready already! It's been less than 2 weeks since we got them! They only took a few days to sprout and then they went pretty quickly. Except I bought a dehumidifier to run in the basement yesterday and they are not too happy about that, have started being a bit dry around the edges. The laundry room really smells like mushrooms, not in a good way.


Today we had them in a pasta with a basil and sun dried tomato pesto sause. We used sun dried tomatoes and basil from the garden. It was good, the oyster mushrooms had a lot of flavour. And yesterday we had a mushroom gravy that was also good. So far we've harvested one bunch, there are 2 more to go. And then they're supposed to grow at least 2 more times.