Skip to content

preserving

Provisioning

The Iambic Cafe has been mostly offline these past months, enjoying the summer, which seems to have been abnormally short this year, though things have kept growing and so has the list of things I’m preserving in the kitchen.

So far I have put up three cases of salmon (pink, sockeye and coho), four litres of gingery apple butter, a dozen jars of assorted mixtures of apricot and plum and blackberry jam, and a case of canned apricots. My freezer is crammed with bottles of apple & blackberry juice, I have two quart jars of lacto-fermented red cabbage sauerkraut in the fridge, have dehydrated herbs and kale chips and raisins, and am about to start in on the tomatoes. A case of Red Haven organic peaches is finishing its final ripening while the fruit flies wait, loitering hopefully on the cover to the apple scrap vinegar-to-be.

But even after all this, I can’t sit idle. I find myself thinking how useful it would be to make my own sea salt: perhaps a winter chore once I start stoking the wood stove, which I expect to heat me through till spring on the bounty of the mighty Douglas fir I had to have felled this spring when its roots intruded on my house’s foundations. The feller tossed giant rounds down as he worked – many so big I could hardly push them – and of such heft they made deep gouges in the soggy ground, creating a whole new landscape where the lawn used to be. Eventually, after several weeks’ chopping and hauling, the woodshed is stacked to the rafters and it should be about ready to burn by the time the autumn chill descends.

Aside from a brief and festive sojourn into the darkest reaches of the Shuswap, I’ve remained close to home, tied to house and garden and enjoying a satisfying run of good weather. A steady stream of visitors has kept me hopping between visitations of renovators and obligations with paintbrushes and restoration of trampled garden.

This week classes started up again in Nanaimo and we’ve commenced the final year of nutrition studies with a class on Eco-Nutrition, working through the fascinating if sometimes dispiriting text of Thomas Pawlick’s The End of Food. Not entirely new territory for me, as it echoes the UK situation described in Felicity Lawrence’s Not On the Label, and numerous American books by the likes of Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Eric Schlosser, et al. Looking forward to the assignment – to research the origins and production of any five foods. We’ll have to choose carefully: I expect our findings are more likely to make us queasy than easy with what we eat.

Preserving the harvest: apples

I came upstairs from a round of apple-wrapping to find some questions on apple preserving from Ruth, who is the lucky recipient of a quantity of hangingoverthefence apples.

Like me, she had heard that wrapping apples individually in newspaper is the way to go. She’d read that coloured inks are toxic so to avoid those, but I’ve been told that Canadian newspapers use soy-based colour inks so they are ok (but glossy inserts are not). (I don’t know if this is really the case or not, so if in doubt, avoid them.) I’d heard it from the Compost Education Centre which suggests that you can add newspaper to your compost (for a “brown” layer), which means the apple wrapping can do double duty if you end up with some spoilage later in the season: you can just chuck the whole thing into the pile. The point of wrapping is to keep the apples from spoiling one another if they’re bruised or damaged. Lacking a root cellar, I am fortunate to have a little bar fridge that I use just for apples and it works reasonably well.

My first year of bounty, Adrienne gave me a wonderfully liberating tip: you can peel, core and slice apples and put them in ziplocks in the freezer – works brilliantly for cooking apples. Don’t worry if they brown a little en route to the freezer as they go brown when you cook them anyway. But I suppose if you can’t bear the thought of any brown, you can always dip them in syrup while you work, as the PickYourOwn folks recommend. But I don’t find they brown too badly if you work quickly on fresh and fully ripe apples. The ones in the picture were frozen a year ago with no syrup or preservative: I’d still use them in baking.

If the apples are of a fairly firm texture you can slice and dehydrate them (my tree is a yellow transparent, which produces very soft apples great for applesauce but impossible for drying). Here are some instructions on drying apples in a dehydrator, an oven or a hot car!

I have an apple peeling machine which makes a lot of the labour-intensive aspects slightly less so. As long as you’re dealing with firm, regularly-shaped and very fresh apples. It doesn’t work well on my transparents which tend to be soft and misshapen. It’s also less frugal than I when it comes to peeling and coring: such is the trade-off with labour saving devices of all kinds.

Or you can make applesauce and can that – it’s a high acid food so you don’t need a pressure canner, just a pot large enough to cover the jars with water and process (boil) for 20-25 minutes depending on the jar size and altitude (again from the PickYourOwn website, good instructions on applesauce, with photos) I’ve made it with plums or quince and those are nice combinations; perhaps saskatoon-applesauce or raspberry-applesauce would be good if you have an alternative source of berries.

I own a centrifugal juicing machine so that’s what I use. Because my apples are very tart I always add carrots for sweetener (sugar as a last resort); or blend them with sweeter varieties or other fruit. This year I decided to use up some surplus jam from my larder, so I heated that and added it to blackberries I’d picked, and strained the juice and used that for sweetener. I also used raspberries and carrots. I don’t have a recipe, just go by taste. I put the juice into jars or plastic tubs, cover them and freeze them. Because the liquid expands while freezing, if you’re using screw-top jars, be sure to leave the lids loose until the liquid freezes, to avoid any messy explosions.

I have made apple butter in years past, but find I don’t use it.