Spinach and rhubarb! I chopped the rhubarb and put it in the buckets in the freezer. I have almost enough now to make five gallons of rhubarb wine! I'll do another cutting at the end of June and that will be it. The plant needs to grow and nurish itself for the rest of the summer. I found the stalks to be a bit thinner this year. It needs to be fertilized. I think I will add a mulch of old sheep manure soon.
The spinach was chopped small and frozen under water in ice cube trays. When it is frozen solid, I will pop it out and put it in a big freezer bag with the previous spinach from this year.
It's so handy all year long in ice cube size servings from the freezer. I just toss a few of them into just about anything. It's very good for you!
Today I had time to make some jelly. I didn't really have the time to spare, but I took it anyway. Sometimes you have to just "Do it, anyway". The fence is not finished, but it is at a place where Buck is running free now, so we can slow down a bit. The chichiquelites are producing very well and I had to do something with the berries or lose them.
I made jam. I made grape jelly from Welch's grape juice and I made a combination chichiquelite and grape jelly with the berries and the left over juice. Both turned out to be delicious, although the grape jelly did not gel. I made is exactly according to the directions in the pectin box, but that doesn't surprise me. I sometimes have problems getting the pectin to gel properly. Its finicky stuff and a tricky worker. The acid balance and sugar amount has to be right or it doesn't work. I used the recipe on the paper that comes with the pectin, followed exactly, and it still didn't gel. It will have to be done again. Oh well, its only half a dozen pint jars.
Lately I have been making jam with gelatine and am finding it much easier and more foolproof. It always gels, sometimes too hard if not enough juice is used with the package of gelatine. You can use unflavoured genatine, if you want to keep it organic and all natural. I sometimes use flavoured jelly powder too, like Jell-O, but generic, to add even more flavour to the jelly I am making. If your berries or fruit do not have a lot of flavour, the addition of flavoured jelly powder can give it a real boost!
The combination chichiquelite and grape jelly I made today was made with flavoured jelly powder. I used grape and berry flavours.
This is the recipe for all types of juice made with jelly powder:
1 small box jelly powder
2 cups juice
2 cups sugar
Directions: Bring the juice to a boil, stir in the jelly powder until dissolved, add sugar. You need the sugar to help preserve the jelly at room temperature if using a water bath to seal the jars. If you are going to keep this jelly in the freezer, you can use whatever amount of sugar you want. You don't need to sugar to make it gel.
Stir it all until the sugar and jelly powder are well dissolved. Pour into hot, sterilized jars. Wipe the rims, put on the new seals and rings. Lower gently into boiling water deep enough to cover the jars with about 1" of water above the tops of the jars. Boil for 10 minutes. Start the 10 minute count after the water has returned to a boil. Remove gently and sit on a towel until cool. Label and store in a dry, fairly cool location. Jellies and jams preserved in this manner will keep for many months.
I ran my bowl of chichiquelites through a juicer and used just the juice. I had about 5 cups of juice. I added 1 cup of Welch's grape juice that I had left over from making the grape jelly that didn't gel. That gave me 6 cups of juice. I added 2 boxes of berry jelly powder and one box of grape and added 6 cups of sugar. After following the recipe above, I put it in the storage room and left it to gel. This morning I tested it. Wow! It's great stuff!
Hubby pronounced it "Delicious!". Since he is the one who usually eats it, that's important. That's also the reason I made jelly instead of jam. Hubby prefers it. I do make strawberry freezer jam too, but we are trying to cut back on our freezer use. The corn is going in there in another month or so.
I don't think all of the corn I planted this year will fit in our freezer. We will give what corn we cannot freeze or eat to the Salvation Army Soup Kitchen in town. They get all our excess food. I wonder if they are a bit overwhelmed with all the zucchini they have received this year? I have some stored in the cold cellar to take to them in another couple of months, just to spread them out some. I took them an armload of flowers with the veggies one week simply because I had them to give. They seemed to be appreciated.
I realize that flavoured jelly powder is not organic but it sure has made jelly making a lot easier and fool proof for me. Even plain, unflavoured gelatine, which is organic, makes a big difference in the ease of jelly making!
UPDATE: I have since been told that the grape jelly didn't set because it was made from the frozen can. If it had been made from the jug of pure juice then it would have gelled properly. I don't know what the difference is. Next time I will be using grape juice from the jug.
We had a break from fence building today, due to the rain so I had a chance to make pickles from all those cucumbers I picked in the garden last week. When I picked them, I didn't really have pickles in mind, I just picked what was there.
Many of the cucumbers I picked are too large for pickles, having gone to seed with a watery center. The larger ones had enough solid flesh to make long strips after the seedy center was cut out. I was making long sandwich pickes, anyway. We love the Strub's garlic dill sandwich pickles and I have their recipe from their website!
I sliced all of the cucumbers into long slices with my very old "Vegematic". We don't have a slicer but plan to buy a slicer "one day soon", along with a lot of other things we can use. We do have a 20 year old vegetmatic, however, that makes slices, julienne, fries, etc. and works very well. It made short work of the cucumber slicing for today's pickles.
After slicing enough cucumbers to fill all 8 quart jars, I had this scrap left. Some will be saved for salad and sandwiches, the rest will go tino the compost.
This is the Strub's Sandwich Pickle Recipe
Make brine: 6 ml salt, 250 ml vinegar, 1 litre water (x3 for 8 quarts).
Into each jar put 4 cloves garlic chopped and 2 tablespoons dill. I used fresh dill.
I put two cloves of chopped garlic with 1 tablespoon dill into the bottom of each sterilized jar. Stiffed as many sliced cucumbers into the jar as I could and topped with another 2 cloves of chopped garlic and another tablespoon dill.
I put all the jars into my waterbath canner, covered with 1/2" of water and boiled for 10 minutes. When they were cooled I heard the seals pop, removed the lids and put away into the pantry.
In a week I will open a jar and try them! We are all excited about these pickles as we love the commercial Strub's garlic dill sandwich pickles.
