Category Archives: food preservation

Salsa Verde

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This week was fun!  My friend visited from out of town for 3 nights and we canned up quite a few things from the last remains of my bountiful garden.  It is looking pretty bedraggled by now, but we found a few items that we could still use. She brought a few green tomatoes and a few peppers from her garden as well. The recipe we used was from the Foods of the Pacific Northwest pamphlet, Salsa Recipes for Canning.   One thing we decided to make was Green Tomato Salsa, or Salsa Verde.  The recipe is also on the website for the National Center for Food Preservation.  It is called Tomatillo Salsa, but I always use green tomatoes for it.

We made a triple batch.  The onions I grew this year were very small.  We had to peel a LOT of them!  We both cried a couple of times while peeling and as we got a whiff of the aroma when we started to whirl them around in the food processor.  The rest was easy.  We just chopped everything up, measured it out into a big pot, and followed the directions in the recipe.  Then we canned it up.  We got about 22-24 jars of various sizes, but most were pints.  They all sealed and the next day, after they were cool, we put half in my basement and packed half for her to take home.  We had a wonderful time, visiting and canning and agreed:  We both have a strange sense of what fun is–but we both love to can and got a lot of pleasure from each other’s company and the rows of jars gleaming on the counter when we were done!

Freezing Cauliflower

IMG_1577IMG_1580I was blessed when a friend gave me an entire banana box full of cauliflower she had gleaned from a field that was about to be tilled up.  I was delighted to get it and decided to freeze it.  Some of it was a little muddy from the field, but I washed it very well and then chopped it into pieces.  Then I blanched it for 3 minutes in boiling water in my blanching pot.  You could drop it into a pot of boiling water and fish it out with a sieve after 3 minutes if you didn’t have one, but having it contained in a colander makes it easier.  After that, the cauliflower was dumped into cold water in my very clean sink.  The water was changed frequently so the cauliflower could cool down.  When it floats, it is still too warm.  Once it sinks, it is cool enough and was fished out and placed into a colander to drain.  I was able to get 30 quart sized zip-top bags full.  We love it eat it with cheese on top during the winter.  It was a totally unexpected way to spend my evening, and I was very tired when I finally got to bed last night, but I was excited to have the cauliflower.  A lot of food preservation happens when you “seize the moment” and I’m glad I did!  My food storage was increased by quite a bit because my friend thought of me.