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.

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.

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.

Cooking on the Fire

We had a cookout tonight with some hot dogs from Bailey's Local Foods. They were really good. And first I sauteed some onions on the stove so they were like gourmet camping.

Peppers from the Garden

We don`t have many peppers in the garden but we do have some and the first were ready! We ate 3 sweet peppers in our vindaloo curry last night. They tasted good, just like regular peppers.

``Sun``-dried Tomatoes

I had been thinking I had planted way too many little tomatoes which I can`t do much with but eat fresh and not enough big tomatoes that I could try canning with. But then I remembered that Eliot Coleman said he dries his tomatoes and of course cherry tomatoes are better for that. So I looked up the best way to do that without a dehydrator and found that people were doing them in their oven without any special equipment. So I did it.

I washed the tomatoes and cut them in half (great thing about doing cherry tomatoes was I didn`t have to bother cutting out the stem part and they turned out fine). Then I lay them cut side up on a baking tray and put them in the oven.
People on the internet were talking about putting their oven as low as it goes to about 200F but mine goes all the way down to 100F so I did that for a while. But I got impatient so eventually I went up to 175F. And sometimes I had the door open and sometimes I didn`t. They really started going once I turned the oven to 175F. So it took about 6 hours in total but could have been faster if I had had the oven at 175F for longer.

Anyway I think they turned out pretty great! A lot were crispy, not really sun dried tomato texture but still worked and some were still too juicy to be sun dried tomatoes. But they all tasted like sun dried tomatoes and I figure will be great to add to pasta and maybe even some kind of really fancy soup. And so that I didn`t have to bother getting them all perfectly dry I just threw them all into the freezer when most were done so I don`t have to worry about mould. It was fun too. I am now thinking I definitely want to buy a dehydrator. Just think of all the fun things I could dehydrate!

Squirrel Soap Dish

I finished another soap dish today. A squirrel for the washroom near Kevin's study. This time I am not putting any protector on the soap dish and we'll see how it lasts. It's so much nicer not to have to deal with that and I think it will do well for my natural type marketing should that ever come up.

Oyster Mushrooms

I received my oyster mushroom growing kit in the mail today. It is just a bag of sawdust and spores I guess. I keep it indoors in a cool room where it gets indirect light. I've put it in the basement next to a window, even right by the window I think it counts as only indirect light and I hope it is enough. I meant to buy some oyster mushrooms from the grocery store before we bought this to make sure we liked them but never got round to it and I was too excited to keep waiting. I'm sure we will like them. I just have to try to remember to mist it twice a day. We got it from this company, we'll see how many mushrooms it gives us but it seems like a pretty good deal to me.
http://www.wyliemycologicals.ca/kits.php

Dilly Beans

Since we have just about an infinite amount of green beans I thought I'd try the dilly beans recipe that shows up in every canning book. It is just pickled green beans. Can't imagine really liking them but thought it was worth trying. Have to wait several weeks for them to get properly pickled.

Zero Mile Salad (except for the dressing)

Now that we have tomatoes in the garden we have everything that we need for a salad! Today at lunch we had a salad of romaine lettuce, baby tomatoes, cucumbers, chives, and a few green beans and peas. It was delicious.

Corn Relish

I made corn relish! Used the recipe out of my Blue Book of Preserving and it smelled just like the corn relish we usually buy from the market (for $4 a jar) so I think it will be good. I have some more canning planned too.