canning and preserving: salsa

We found ourselves with an abundance of tomatoes and peppers at the same time - particularly hot peppers - and decided to see if we could can a batch of salsa, one of our favorite canned tomato items. We used the zesty salsa recipe from Ball this year, with our abundance of hot peppers.

This recipe takes more time to prep than it does to process! You start with skinned, chopped tomatoes.

And then a million peppers. We wear rubber gloves when doing salsa since we don't know when and how much we'll be touching the hot peppers and don't really want to spread capsaicin all over the kitchen and ourselves. I've had to throw out too many pairs of contacts over the years from hot peppers in the eye. 

After cups and cups of peppers, chop onions until you cry.

We make salsa in our dutch oven, so since we don't have enough measuring cups to hold everything during the prep, we start piling it in the dutch oven right away.

This salsa uses garlic and apple cider vinegar as well as the peppers, onions and tomatoes. Thank goodness for a garlic press because my hands were done chopping.

Mark is the master herb chopper of the household, so he handled the cilantro while I got everything mixed up to cook. 

Hot salsa gets ladled into hot jars. We managed to get 7 pints in to process, but had an extra pint we saved out to eat fresh, so the recipe made more than the 6 pints promised. 
  

I like how you can see Captain America's foot peeking out above the canning pot from his spot on our fridge. Geek house!

A short processing time later, 7 sealed pints. Nothing broken, thanks to making sure the temperature of the jars and food stayed consistent. We let the canner come to boiling with the jars submerged this time, so no replay of the tomato canning breakage from last week. (Salsa is hot pack anyway, but we weren't taking any chances.) 

We've got some more catching up to do on grape juice/jelly canning this week, and we hope to fit that in before we head off to Seven Springs for the Mother Earth News Fair this coming weekend. Can't wait to see what kind of ideas and tips we bring home!

Real Life CSA: week 15, produce

Lots of end-of-summer staples this week, as well as a few surprises!

Not being big fans of beets in this house, those were immediately set aside to donate to a beet-tolerant friend. Green beans will make it as a side dish, or possibly combined with beans and tomatoes we already have for loubieh.

Check out that bell pepper in the middle. So big, and perfect for stuffing! If only we had a second one of that size.

The potatoes we've had this year have been delicious as a quick side. If you've never tried it before, throw a bit of lemon zest and some parmesan cheese in your mashed potatoes.   

Tomatoes out the wazoo means we might try to can salsa this weekend. We have an abundance of hot peppers from our own garden right now and nothing beats opening up a pint of salsa in the middle of January and having it feel like it came straight from the garden. 

Any extra tomatoes will be made with the basil into freezer tomato sauce. It's Mark's specialty, and he uses Cooks Illustrated's recipe.
 

Happy to have some corn this week, especially because it works equally well as an ingredient in a larger dish or by itself. The apples will be nice too - we had Kretschmann apples with honey on Rosh Hashanah this year and it was delicious! (The apple and honey are sweet foods that signify a sweet new year.)

As for our garden, we haven't seen the tomato explosion that we really wanted with all the varietals of red tomatoes. But are few are doing okay ripening off the vine, and the yellow globe tomatoes? We're buried in them.

At least the slightly blighted tomatoes don't go to waste - the chickens go nuts for tomatoes. (Probably why one of them made a nest in the patch like a ninja.) They are walking, produce garbage disposals! 

Real Life CSA: meat, month 4

I can't believe we're already on our fourth month of the meat CSA from Clarion River Organics. It snuck up on us to the point where we had to "emergency can" two batches of grape jelly from juice we had in our chest freezer to make room for the meat delivery. We did it, and now we have some more room for this month's meat share. 

The three chickens were all roasters this time. We also found out from the farm's update email that last month's share had three roasters as well. The last share will be three stewing chickens, but that's good as we'll be getting into chili and stew season anyway! 

Pretty excited about the beef share too, seeing that we got my favorites: burgers and steaks.

We got four premium steaks this time - beef loin rib steaks, and beef loin T-bones, as well as 20 quarter pound burger patties. We always make our own patties from ground beef, but Mark and I both are happy to have some of the convenience of pre-formed patties in the freezer (without having to worry they will end up recalled for e.coli!).

While the steaks and burgers were pretty exciting, the greatest discovery (and biggest preparation challenge) this time was in the pork share. 

We've got our regular sausages, ground pork, and pork chops, plus some country style ribs. But take a look up at the top right. What have we here?

Pork jowels.(Cheeks.)

Oh yeah, and a pork heart.

I felt like a zombie, reaching into the box and pulling this baby out in particular. I mean, look at it. It actually kind of looks fake, like a Halloween prop!

This is when you start practicing what you preach with eating farm raised meats - everyone loves steaks and chops and Christmas hams, but what about the other parts of the animal that are perfectly edible, but that can make us shudder at the thought of consuming?

I'll admit. I don't know the first thing about how to prepare pork jowels or pork heart. Mark thinks from the look of the jowels it's something that will be cooked low and slow. As for the heart, I've had beef heart before, so I'm wondering if it will be similar in texture, if not taste.

We're going to do some research on preparation, and I'll report back. I'm looking forward to the challenge!

canning and preserving: whole tomatoes

Last week with our CSA, we did an add-on and bought a case of canning tomatoes. This is one of the great perks of a CSA - having an "in" when it's harvest time and there are extras. But at the same time, you have to move quickly and preserve them before they turn. So we took our annual spur of the moment "canning vacation day" to get some whole tomatoes put away. 

Tomatoes do freeze, so why do we bother with canning? Because home canned tomatoes are delicious - and don't require any defrosting. They are great in pasta sauces or chilis or any number of other dishes that would have you buying canned tomatoes at the store. We still do freeze tomatoes from time to time, but canning is our preferred tomato preservation method. 

We decided to do quarts, since it's roughly what you'd need when a recipe calls for a 28 oz. can of tomatoes (as there's more liquid in home-canned tomatoes).

We also had a ton of extra Beam's Yellow Pear Tomatoes from our own garden. So far they've been the only ones to actually ripen on the vine, though we're having some success ripening the others indoors. Leftover from the CSA, we also had some cherry tomatoes that we threw in the mix.

For any canning or freezing project where you're preserving tomatoes, the first thing you need to do after washing the tomatoes is remove the skins. You do this by first cutting an X in the bottom of the tomatoes. For larger tomatoes, also remove the core.

Next, you blanch. Boil some water and drop the tomatoes in for 30-60 seconds depending on the size of the tomato.

After their dip, pull them out and immediately dump them in an ice bath. This will make it so the skins fall right off.

Once the skins are removed, they look like wrinkly raisins. This time around we did all of the skinning first, so that we didn't have to keep repeating the set up. (Canning is often a dance of multiple pots, containers and bowls all over your kitchen.) 

For large tomatoes, cut into quarters. (It helps them fit into the jar better, and it also helps you crush them later for sauces, etc.)

Pack them into jars with boiling water and citric acid. (Tomatoes in a water bath canner need citric acid to ensure the acid content is high enough to kill all the bad stuff.) 

Leave the appropriate headspace and close the jars with hot lids and bands.

Process them according to the directions, and then open the canner. And find...

A broken jar and floating, delicious wasted tomatoes. Yep, of 12 quarts we tried to can, we broke a jar in each batch. Clean slice, right across the bottom. (But obviously you can't eat the floaters, since glass shards are not considered edible.)

We've canned hundreds of jars of food since we started doing this three years ago and we'd only ever broken one jar before, I believe. So why two this time? Any why tomatoes?

We did some research and realized that because our jars were sound and not cracked or splintered, it was probably due to temperature. When you make jam, you pack hot jam into hot jars and drop them into the hot water bath, so the temperature of the jar remains relatively constant during the canning process. 

For tomatoes, we cold pack. That means that hot jars get filled with room temperature ("cold") tomatoes and boiling water, but that water quickly cools inside the jar while you're packing and measuring headspace and sealing. We added the jars straight into a boiling canning pot, which means some of the jars were probably too "cold" and got shocked into the clean break you see in the photo. The way to avoid this when you're cold packing is to wait to bring the canner to boiling until the jars are all ready, so the temperatures can gradually rise and the differential isn't too large to cause a break.

While it's frustrating to lose two quarts of perfect tomatoes, I don't mind making mistakes when we can figure out what went wrong. That way we avoid it next time. I'm just grateful for the 10 quarts we managed to save!

finding recipes for clean eating

I'm often asked where I get recipes to support the way I eat, especially easy meals that fit into a busy lifestyle. The following are some cookbooks and sites I use to make healthy meals from whole, clean foods.

America's Test Kitchen's cookbooks and its Cooks Illustrated magazine and website are my primary go-to locations for recipes. While some of their recipes are more time consuming to make, with heavier prep, they are reliable and tasty. They also take care in their light and healthy recipes to not rely heavily on "diet" foods like fat free cheese (gag) and fake sugars, etc. Here are my favorites:

Links are to Amazon where applicable for convenience's sake, but I'm not an affiliate and receive no compensation for clicks.

• America's Test Kitchen Healthy Family Cookbook (has everything from breakfast to desserts, with all nutritional content)
• America's Test Kitchen Light & Healthy series (annual from 2010-2012)
• Cooks Illustrated (magazine and website, both available at a subscription, not limited to just healthy recipes, but uses primarily whole foods and doesn't rely on processed ingredients)
• Slow Cooker Revolution (some recipes take a lot of prep, but others are marked 'easy prep' - a great way to get a gourmet, real food meal out of a crockpot)

The following are some other blogs that I watch for new recipes. I will also note that not every single recipe on these sites would fall under my own guidelines for what I would eat, but generally they are a good guide. (I try to stay away from food blogs where the author is regularly paid or perked by food companies to shill their product and make a recipe around it.)

• Aggie's Kitchen
• Annie's Eats
• Food for My Family
• Green Kitchen Stories
• Healthy Green Kitchen
• Naturally Ella
• Whole Foods Market Recipes
• Cookie + Kate
• Honest Fare
• My New Roots
• Simply Recipes
• Sprouted Kitchen
• The First Mess

I also use other tools like Fooducate, which has a blog and an app. Using the app, you can scan products in the store to see their nutritional content and ingredient list demystified - a great way to see past the health claims on the box. 

Finally, I am a great lover of print publications, so I also enjoy these magazines (and their online sites). You can buy these at the check-out at some grocery stores and also at Barnes & Noble, etc. or get a subscription online, which is much cheaper!

• Edible Allegheny
• Eating Well
• Clean Eating
• Mother Earth Living
• Whole Living

Also consider following a lot of these blogs or websites on Twitter - you can get links to new posts as well as links to other sites. It's a great way to keep the new ideas flowing so you don't get bored.

Real Life CSA: week 14, produce

Classic end of summer CSA share this week. Primarily a tomato explosion!

We're starting to build another stockpile of veggies in the fridge, so we're going to be eating a lot of salad, carrots, beans and dishes with eggplant this week. 

Red cabbage will definitely end up as sweet and sour red cabbage, easily our favorite preparation of this veggie. Goes great with pork chops. If you need a good recipe, I have one!

We got two kinds of parsley this week. The kind on the top in the photo is curly - the kind towards the bottom is flat. 

I LOVE this variety of green tomato. We'll definitely be eating these fresh. 

One of the pieces of our share this week illustrates a good point about CSAs in general. I reached into the bag and actually almost put my finger through this pepper.

Yeah, it is gross. We have enough green peppers from our own garden that we decided to just straight compost this pepper instead of cutting off the bad side and eating the other. It's a great reminder that the food you get in a CSA share is real food. It will rot and go bad. You'll get soft spots that turn nasty overnight, and sometimes you'll get a bad pepper in your share or a brown or wormy apple. It happens. 

Ever see those news articles about McDonald's burgers that petrify and 20 years later they basically look the same? That's the comforting thing about eating clean. The foods you eat are real - they're meant to decay, to break down. Do you want to eat something that in 20 years will look exactly the same with no visible signs that it was food? There's something unnatural about that.

You might think that a soft pepper in your share is a waste. For us, composting comes in handy, or giving certain items to the chickens. Thankfully, with the food being so fresh in a CSA share, this rarely happens. 14 weeks of food so far, and it's the only thing that has come to us past its prime. Think of what you bring home from the grocery store that goes from unripe to rotten overnight and it's easier to get over a soft pepper in your CSA share.

This weekend, I'm definitely not worried about a soft pepper, because we've got these to deal with:

It's canning time, baby.

Book Review: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906 and since that time it's become a classic example of muckraking (journalism that exposes corruption). It also is possibly the first book to address industrial agriculture - and what happens when Big Food interests run amok.

I wanted to read The Jungle because it's a classic piece of the American literary canon, and also because I was interested in early food journalism. I didn't realize that it also qualified as creative non-fiction, being centered around a fictional Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus who moves with his family to Chicago, following the promise of a better life. There, he gets a job in "Packingtown" at one of the meatpacking houses. And basically? It all goes to hell from there.

The horrid conditions (and I mean horrid) that Sinclair describes through Jurgis and his family caused public outcry. Sinclair himself worked undercover in the meatpacking plants for weeks, doing research. The book was originally published as a serial in a socialist newspaper (Sinclair was an active socialist), and he eventually paid to publish the first edition of the book on his own. Ironically, his goal was to further his political agenda - to expose the plight of the working man. But what the public cared about was the impact the book had on how they saw their food.

Though the government denounced his book because of his socialist agenda, President (Teddy) Roosevelt commissioned a report that confirmed Sinclair's claims. Public outcry eventually led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act (required mandatory inspections of livestock, postmortem inspections of carcasses, sanitary conditions in slaughterhouses and housing plants, and USDA monitoring of facilities) as well as the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established what would later be called the FDA, and carried penalties for mislabeling and adulteration of products, which at the time was rampant - and frankly, foul.

For all of the issues that I have with modern industrial agriculture and confined animal feeding operations, this book put into perspective how much worse it actually was 100 years ago. While there are still additives in processed food that I don't want to eat, it is because of modern food production that we can buy milk that isn't 50% chalk, and if we buy a carton of rancid yogurt at the store, we can return it for a full refund. While people still do die of food poisoning, and I'm not making light of that, the mortality rate from adulterated food is drastically lower today than it was 100 years ago, thanks in part to the legislation passed after The Jungle was published. We can definitely thank Sinclair and the other muckraking journalists at the time for that.

It's worth noting that Sinclair was disappointed that people cared more about the food they were eating than the plight of the working man, but that is sadly an issue that hasn't gotten much better today. It's important that we eat pesticide free, organic produce not just because of the danger of pesticides to our own health, but because the exposure to farm workers is orders of magnitude worse.

I wonder what Sinclair would say if he could see what his book began - and how far we still have to go.