A busy month

Since I dropped the online moodling one month ago, it's been a pretty busy time, to put it mildly. Looking back at my list of to do's, I see that I managed most things...

• 3 apple pies (with more to come yet, I hope) and plenty of other fruit baked into yummy things
• Jams made
• Veggies blanched and frozen
• Apples and plums picked with my 92-year-old Italian friend, Ralph, and a couple of wonderful visits with him and his lovely wife, Lidia (that included delicious Italian cookies and espresso to keep my nerves jangling for the rest of the day)!
• Plenty of dog walks through autumn splendor
• Jay gone back to school (grade twelve!)
• Compost sifted, dug into garden boxes and started up again for the winter with freshly pulled garden stalks, plus Red Wiggler worms shared with several vermi-composting friends
• Tabs kept on my in-laws, mostly by phone
• Tomatoes gathered from the L'Arche community garden bed with my friends at Day Program (and another fun time with the Library Lady)
• Lovely sunset strolls with my hubby
• Minutes taken for the monthly L'Arche board meeting
• Hot dogs handed out at my very last Welcome Back School Barbeque and Meet the Teacher Night
• Almost finished reading The Brothers Karamazov
• Next spring's tulips planted
• Letters written to a few friends, and last but not least
• The garden went from this...

to this...

still a bit of work left...

And there were special visits from friends who don't come to town very often anymore, we had a September Taizé prayer, I prayed with seasonofcreation.org, and life moved along as it does. At times I was tempted to cut short my "time off" from moodling because I really wanted to write about something, but at other times I wondered if I'd ever pick it up again. 

But I'm back, after a very busy month. Did you miss me?

Working for our food

On Saturday, I spent most of the day either in the garden, catching up with the produce that ripened while we were away, or in the kitchen, turning the harvest into soup.

Root veggies and my over-abundant kale were the day's focus. I made about 14 liters of kale soup just from our onions, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, beets and kale. The only things that didn't come from our yard were the sausage, kidney beans, and chicken broth. Here's the recipe (which I multiplied by four) in case you'd like some of your own:

1 lb kale

1 lb potatoes

1 lb beets

1 lb sausage 

1 cup chopped onions

1/2 cup chopped carrots

2 tsp chopped garlic

2 Tbsp olive oil

2 Tbsp butter

8 cups chicken broth or combination chicken and beef broth

3 lb peeled, seeded and chopped tomatoes (or a large can or two)

1 cup kidney beans

Salt and pepper

Strip the leaves from the washed kale and cut diagonally into wide slices. You should end of with 6 - 8 cups lightly packed kale. Wash, peel and chop potatoes and keep in cold water. Prick sausage; blanch in boiling water for 5 - 10 minutes to release fat. Drain; cut into 1/2 inch slices; set aside. In a large saucepan, saute onions, carrots and garlic in oil and butter, cooking until softened, about 5 minutes. Add potatoes, beets and broth, and simmer, partially covered, for 15 or 20 minutes or until the potatoes are cooked. Stir in tomatoes and kidney beans and simmer for 10 - 15 minutes. Add the kale and sausage, cook 5 - 10 minutes longer and season to taste. (Serves 6 - 8)

I love that our freezer is filling up with hearty and nutritious stuff from our garden. It hasn't travelled thousands of miles to come to us, and it's organic. All those frozen strawberries, raspberries, beans, zucchini and my sisters' cherries mean that we have some local food to carry us through the winter.

But what really blows my mind is that my grandma spent all spring, summer and fall every year to put away food to carry her family through the year -- in the early years of her family's life, she couldn't turn to a grocery store every time she ran out of something. Preserving food, butchering animals, baking and parenting (12 kids) were her full time job. Especially in August and September, I find myself thinking of her and all her hard work, realizing that I don't do half of what she did. The planning alone boggles my mind!

And I think about how far our society has come from knowing how to create our own food -- how my daughter's 12-year-old friend didn't know that salsa was made from tomatoes! So much of what we find in our grocery stores comes in manufactured packages of "food-like substances" from Ontario or the US because we just don't have the time to do much from scratch any more. But I know that I'll never appreciate any of that packaged stuff as much as I will enjoy the soup made from scratch on August 22, pulled from my freezer in the middle of January, warmed and served with some homemade bread or biscuits.

Somehow, there's something satisfying about working for our food instead of taking the store-bought, easy way out...

Simple Suggestion #135...Try canning

I'm a latecomer to the world of preserving food. It's only since I've had a decent-sized garden that I've taken a real interest in it.

Wait a sec, that's not true. I bought the odd box of peaches or plums before that, and wished I knew how to can things because it would be so nice to taste peaches in mid-winter!

Eventually, my mother-in-law gave me her canner, and my mom donated a few jars to my cause. My girlfriend sent me her Best Batch Salsa recipe, and I trepidatiously embarked upon my career as a canner by making one batch of salsa. It was tastier than storebought, had no MSG or preservatives, was made mostly of things I grew myself, and made me feel proud of my achievement. I was hooked!

Since then, I've inherited a barrel full of gem jars from back alley Ruby, who is now almost 102 and in a retirement home. I blessed Ruby this week as I was canning spaghetti sauce, and I blessed the women who figured out canning in the first place. I bless my grandmother and my mother for being canners before me. I bless my neighbour Mary and my Auntie Cathy for sharing their dill pickle recipes with me. I bless my friend Cathy for being the first person my age who canned her own salsa, for inspiring me to try it myself.

There's no shortage of information on the internet, or at most libraries, about how to go about preserving food. Sure, it requires more effort than going to the grocery store and picking a jar off a shelf, but if everyone on the planet were living more simply and sustainably, we'd all be taking part in trying to produce and preserve at least a little bit of what we eat. Better than having it jacked up with chemicals and shipped thousands of miles from canning plants in faraway places with strange-sounding names. Tuesday, a few hours' work gave me 13 jars of very yummy spaghetti sauce that we'll enjoy throughout the year, no chemicals or grocery stores required.

You may be thinking, "Easy for her to say. She has a garden." But farmer's markets have great deals on produce this time of year, and Canadian Tire has all sorts of canning supplies (I know -- my hubby had to go get me some more snap lids last night). Yes, there are original outlay costs for a canner and jars, but remember, they're reused dozens of times at very little cost! There are also "canning clubs" in some places, like 'The Fruits of Sherbrooke' that came from a group of women in the Sherbrooke Community League here in Edmonton.

Canning is just one of many small, self-reliant things we can do for ourselves that is also good for our planet.

And if I can do it, anyone can! Pun intended.

Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Try here.

Dill pickles...

Every year, I'm always surprised at how easy it is to make dill pickles. I guess I grew up thinking that anything that came out of a jar had to involve a huge amount of effort -- but pickled cucumbers certainly don't. Or at least, I don't feel like it's a lot of effort with a garden in my back yard that's producing lots of cukes at the moment, and a few sprigs of dill here and there. You can find the same stuff at any farmer's market these days. The tricky part is learning what to do with them. Fortunately, I got some good coaching from back alley Mary, God rest her, my dear gardening buddy and neighbour whom I miss fiercely this time of year.

In her honour, I'm going to share with you my dill pickle recipe, in the hope that it inspires you to do something about preserving your own food rather than buying it off the shelf. This recipe is an amalgamation of the recipes of my friend Mary and my auntie Cathy, adjusted to suit the tastes of my family, who prefer their pickles with dill and garlic and not much else. My first pickles had store bought pickling spice because Mary's recipe called for it, but my girls say that pickles don't need anything but dill and garlic, and I tend to agree. My aunt's recipe called for sugar, but since I have diabetes, that went out the window... and I cut the salt a bit, too.

Brine:
14 cups water
2 cups vinegar
1/2 cup salt
dill flowers (the heads when yellow, without seeds) and leaves
garlic

Here's what I do: Wash seven or eight 32 oz/1 litre jars in hot soapy water, rinse, and let dry upside down. Boil sealer jar lids for about ten minutes to soften rings. Put a dill head and leaves in each jar along with a clove of garlic, peeled and sliced in half. Pack cukes tightly into jars while brine comes to a boil on the stove (today I added a few carrots to one jar because I was a few cukes short). Arrange filled jars in sink and pour in brine. Put on sealer lids and tighten just until there is resistance.

Here's the fun part: set jars on cookie sheet and set them in a 300 F/150 C degree oven for an hour. When they're done, pull them out and listen to the lids seal with a POP! In about ten days, you'll have delicious pickles that you made yourself. My kids like them a little sharper than this recipe, so I've taken to doubling the vinegar and cutting the water by two cups...

So there you have it -- my secret dill pickle recipe that is no longer a secret. If you have any preserve recipes that you want to share, send them my way!