Fermenting Pickles

So, our local farmer's market opened yesterday so I swung by to check it out. It's still really early, so there were mostly just greens and other early spring veggies available, but I did pick up some pickling cucumbers. I started fermenting them today and should hopefully have delicious dill pickles in a few weeks.

It's pretty easy to ferment the pickles. The recipe I used was from "For the Love of Pickles". You just load up a jar or crock with all your veggies and ingredients. In this case - cucumbers, garlic, mustard seeds, dill, allspice seeds, peppercorns, and red pepper flakes.

Then mix up your brine (water and pickling salt) and cover your veggies with brine.

Then put a Ziploc bag in the top of the jar, and fill with the remaining brine. This should create an airlock and prevent nasties from making a home in your pickles. 

The hard part is waiting 2 weeks til they are ready to eat! Will update you then and if the recipe is successful - will post it in it's entirety. 

Canning Weekend

So we decided to do a bunch of canning this past weekend, as we had about 15 pounds of ripe tomatoes, and a huge amount of peppers.   So we made an entirely homegrown salsa, plus we bought a box of "seconds" tomatoes from the farmers market to make tomato sauce and ketchup.  Since our cucumber plants  died before we got much of a harvest, we also bought a box of pickling cucumbers from the farmers market to make pickles.

Ingredients for the harvest salsa (we also used our homegrown garlic and parsley)

 Tomatoes cooking down for the sauce

 Fresh basil, purple basil, oregano, and parsley from our garden for the sauce

 simmering sauce down

Finished tomato sauce ready for canning

 

Finished salsa ready for canning.  

 It was way spicier than we anticipated.  We think it was maybe the fish peppers or jalapenos that was hotter than expected

 Skinned tomatoes for the ketchup

Ketchup simmering down

 

Pickling spices for the pickle brine

  

Total: 5 pints of tomato sauce, 4.5 pints of ketchup, 6.5 pints of salsa, and 32 pints of pickles (4 different recipes)