Something New!

This week I ventured into the low-acid territory of pressure-canned beef stock!  I've made stock and broth and soup before, no problem, but have never canned it.  Recently the farm family who we purchase our grassfed beef from gave us the soup bones from a cow they had butchered as they didn't have the space and the desire to use it themselves. Wow!  Free soup bones from a grassfed, humanely treated animal!  Huge score!  We are running low on freezer space and I loved the idea of having soup stock all ready to go, so...I did it! 

I followed the Ball Blue Book recipe, but rather than simmering the bones and veggies on the stove, I decided to let it cook up in the Nesco roaster, out in the breezeway.  No scent lingering in the house that way, and no flame to watch over.  It worked out well.  It cooked out there for about16 hours, as a nice long cook time is said to concentrate the flavor nicely and pull out much of the nutritious marrow.  The batch calls for 4 lbs of bones and is supposed to yield about four pints of beef stock.  Well, in my book, four pints is nuthin'.  I figure if I'm going to go to all that effort, I want a lot more than four dinky jars.  So, I doubled the recipe, using eight lbs of bones.

End result:  lovely, gelatinous (translation:  really good stuff) stock.  Unfortunately, though, I still only ended up with four pressure canned pints...plus one pint which didn't seal (destined for the freezer) and one nearly-full pint which we used as a base for 16-bean soup the next day. 

Lessons learned: 
1.  Use the stock pot next time, maybe the use of the roaster was part of the problem in my attempts to double the recipe (not enough space in there for double the water).  And/or just keep to a single batch.
2.  Don't let it boil.  Boiling results in cloudy stock...not a quality issue, but a prettiness issue.
3.  Strain really well.  Use cheesecloth with the strainer to get all the gunk out.  Again, just a cosmetic think, I think.
4.   Find the baster.  It was hard (well, impossible) to ladle off every last bit of fat.  Interrupting the recipe to let the stock cool in the fridge, and allowing the fat to harden so it's easy to remove, would also prevent this issue.  Once more, it's a cosmetic issue.

Despite my complaints and self-criticism, I'm really happy with the results.  Did I mention I made this with two littles at home with me?  I almost never water-bath can without Brian to help with the kids, and have never pressure-canned without his help in some form or another.  Finally, it's always a feeling of accomplishment to have a new canning recipe under my belt, and four, yes even if it's only four, nore pints of good, nourishing food on the shelves.

Lessons Learned: 2011

Every year I learn a lot of things about our garden, our soil, and our plants.  If I'm lucky I remember those things and make use of the info the next year.  If I'm not, I repeat the mistakes or fail to make the improvements I should have made.  Maybe keeping track of them here will help!  This year it was great to look back at my list of 2010 tomatoes and know just what to purchase this spring.

Without further ado, here we go:

• Polish Linguisa tomatoes still rock!  (Just as 2010.)  They are enormous (a canner's dream).  Need I say more?  Oh yeah, not very prone to ick, bugs, splitting, and so on.  
• Kate Hau, True Leaf Organics, is the best vendor to buy transplants from.  (She will blush when she reads this.) They were huge and reasonably priced.  Every one of them did beautifully.  Her peppers turned into enormous plants!  I purchased Tobago Seasoning peppers.  Normally I'm not a great pepper-grower, and these plants grew into the size of a Yugo (nearly!) and produced well.  Too bad for me that I didn't care for the taste of those particular peppers.  
• I really can grow onions, contrary to previous experience.  Ditto for full-size carrots. 
• Extending the season is awesome and makes Wisconsin's short growing season less depressing.  (I have radishes, turnips, carrots, green and regular onions, and several kinds of greens flourishing right now, at a time of year when I'd typically have just green tomatoes and floppy rhubarb. You just don't know how happy that makes me.)
• Brian was right.  Ix-nay on the orn-cay.  Sigh.  More space for better stuff next year.
• Must.have.cherry.tomatoes.  We tried to this year, but they were mislabeled and turned out to be a slicing tomato.  A nice slicing tomato, but Audra loves anything little that she can count and put into baskets and we had to beg, borrow, and steal to accomplish that this year.

Stuff I don't want to forget to plant next year:

• Kale - early!  As in April, or maybe even March.  As soon as there is bare mud.  
• Lettuces and spinach - early, too.
• Carrots, lots of them, and don't forget to do a late crop too.
• Turnips - they flourish...I hope we like them, 'cause we sure can grow 'em.  
• Brussel sprouts, because I love them.  Plant late enough, they are best after a frost or two, I'm told...might have to start my own seedlings.
• Maybe leeks?  I am starting to really love root crops and find that they generally do well in our soil and are great keepers without requiring canning, freezing, or other labor-intensive processing methods.

My little excitement for 2012:

• Multiplier onions!  I love nearly effortless crops!

August 2011 Update

Having three children -- the youngest of them being a new crawler -- has put canning on the back-burner this season.  Thank heavens for our upright freezer!  It is getting a workout this summer, with peaches, strawberries, strawberry jam, blueberries, and a half of a cow.  We have managed to can a few things this year, but nothing close to the previous two summers.  We've done pickled asparagus, dilly beans, peach jam, and cherry jam.   The tomatoes are just starting to ripen and that will be a priority for the water-bath canner for sure;  stewed tomatoes are a staple for us. 

First Canning of the Season

We have our first canned item of 2011 under our belts...pickled asparagus!  We enjoyed our dilly beans from last season so much that we decided to use a similar recipe for asparagus this year.  We have yet to taste them (have to let them "brew" a little bit first), but are hopeful that we will enjoy them.  We used tall 12 oz. jelly jars rather than shorter pints so that we could pack them with long spears.

We have also been working on our garlic scape pesto and have made two batches of that so far.  Yum!  Always a hit.