in the kitchen

Our kitchen has been so productive lately!  I just love harvesting and preserving all the delicious flavours of the season!  I somehow feel more prepared to face the upcoming colder season, don't you?!  We picked some blackberries at an overgrown closed school yard so we just had to make blackberry jelly!  We also picked some yellow plums from a kind neighbour's tree so we made plum jam too!  We used the same pectin that we used in the strawberry jam and just followed the no sugar recipes in the package for the blackberry and plum.  Our jam shelves are now overflowing into other cupboards in the kitchen!  And next year those nasty canning lids will be GONE thanks to soulemama for the heads up about the BPA!

We also have been harvesting a lot of tomatoes from our garden so I have started drying the roma and cherry tomatoes.  Someone recently suggested drying the cherry tomatoes and they turned out so well I'm going to do it every year!  I store them in the freezer in glass jars after I have dehydrated them so that they last longer.  *note* - I tried drying the yellow Gold Nugget cherry tomatoes and they taste awful, however the red cherry tomatoes are delicious!

The green beans have done pretty good this year, not a huge yield but we're happy that we get to have fresh beans a few times each week!  The kids like to eat them raw so I've been putting them in their lunches too.

I have also started saving the seeds from our tomatoes and dill as well as some pepper and squash seeds from produce that we've bought from local organic farmers.  The June bearing strawberries sent out so many runners with baby plants on them so I've been carefully laying them over pots of dirt so that they root.

After reading Ani Phyo's books and then visiting Salt Spring Island recently I've become fascinated with raw and sprouted foods!  We've been sprouting our nuts and seeds and have really been enjoying them!  I really want to try making dehydrated sprouted seed and/or nut crackers, does anyone have a good recipe?

Another recipe book that we've been devouring is refresh by Ruth Tal and Jennifer Houston.  The soups so far are my favourites but every recipe that we've tried has been a huge success!

Drying our own herbal tea has been a new thing for us this year.  We usually dry mint but this year I've also dried bergemot, calendula, lemon balm, apple and I'm on the hunt for rosehips! 

::  barrel of potatoes  ::

Here is the yield from the barrel of potatoes we grew.  Unfortunately they were planted way to late so they were very small but I'm guessing still weighed about 15lbs total.  The photo is probably deceiving, it's a pretty big basket.  I just love all the colours!

And then the apples!  A very good friend has an apple tree and allowed us to pick bags full of organically grown apples!  I've dried most of them, made juice (and then muffins with the pulp!), made apple/cinnamon and apple/berry sauce, my husband makes the most awesome spiced apple/cabbage dish (so yummy), and I plan to make jars of apple pie filling for the freezer!   I couldn't have done it without this cherished tool, LOVE my apple peeler corer slicer! (it's even fun to say!)

Oh and one last thing, see the vinegar jar in the photo?   It's my homemade fruit fly trap!  A friend showed me how to almost eliminate our fruit fly problem.  Fill the jar with about half an inch of apple cider vinegar, water and a squirt of dish soap and leave it on the counter!  They are totally attracted to the apple cider vinegar so they crawl down the hole on the top and get stuck in the soapy water.

So what's going on in your kitchen?!

xoxo

~ joey ~