Lately we’ve been putting chutney on our burgers, sandwiches, crackers, or just putting it on the table where people can decide to do with it whatever pleases them.

I wanted to use up a few of the pears from our tree as well as the leftover peaches from our canning session a few days prior.  The recipe is loosely based on a few others but one unique feature is the use of the peach and pear peels to add color and pectin to the chutney.

The peels are normally just discarded so this gave throwing them in to boil with the vinegar and lemon juice gave them a good use.  The skins of peaches are often saved and used for making peach jelly (or honey as it’s sometimes called), while pear skins contain good amounts of pectin.

I was especially pleased with just how much color the peach peels added, turning the finished product a deep pink as opposed to a more yellow color that would have likely been the result without them.

I spent almost three years of my life living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.  While living there my absolute favorite food was pupusas.  They’re not hard to love, considering they are pretty much like the corn tortilla version of pizza (which I am rather obsessed with).

It’s a simple idea, you take a ball of masa dough, make a hole in the center and stick in a lump of cheese, or meat, or veggies, or a mixture of those, pat it flat, fry it up with a decent amount of grease, and serve it with a variety of spicy cabbage slaws and krauts.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but the main type of kraut used on top of pupusas is called curtido, which is pretty much just a broad term for pickle.

I have played around with various non-fermented versions of curtido over the years but it wasn’t until I won a copy of Fermented Vegetables by Kirsten and Christopher Shockey (available also in Canada) that it finally hit me what was missing from my version—mine wasn’t fermented!

The recipe is very simple, just cabbage, carrots, onion, garlic, and chile pepper flakes, and oregano and cumin.  You can take the curtido in different directions by tweaking the ratios, making it hotter or milder, more herbs or less, more of one vegetable or less, and so on.  I was running out of carrots the day I made mine so I think I’ll use more next time, partly because it will add more color to the final product.

The recipe is adapted from Fermented Vegetables, and if your library doesn’t have this book I highly recommend getting yourself a copy (or asking them to get it!).  I’m so happy to have won a copy because I love the book and have read through pretty much the whole thing!  Now I see before me a summer full of fermenting….

It will be a week or two before it’s fully fermented, but making it now will help connect you to the spirit of Cinco de Mayo, which is ¡perfecto!  Once it is ready make your favorite tacos, burritos, or even try making pupusas, and then be sure to put tons of curtido on top.

The last sweet corn of the season will soon be harvested, but it can be enjoyed for the next year until a new harvest begins by simply buying and cooking a bit extra right now.  Find a local farmer, and buy 3-4 times as much as you’d like to eat for one or two meals.

The easiest way to preserve all that extra corn is by freezing it.  Simply cook the corn the way you would normally cook it, but shorten the cooking time to roughly half.  For us that means cooking it about five minutes.  And make sure to leave a few cobs of corn in the water for the full cooking time to eat while you’re working on this project.

Then trim the kernels off the cob with a knife.  Aimee from Simple bites recommends using a bundt cake pan to support the cob and catch the kernels that fall down.  Once you have collected enough corn spread them out on baking sheets and freeze them (or skip this step and go straight to bags, we do this extra step so they don’t all freeze together).   Once frozen transfer the corn to large freezer bags labeled with the year.  Stick them in the freezer and that’s it!  Now you can enjoy local sweet corn all year!

Oh and don’t make our mistake and toss the cobs until you’ve used them to make corn stock!  There are tons of recipes on the internet for this, including Aimee’s, but here are the basics:

• 1 onion, chopped a bit
• 5-10 (or more) corn cobs
• 2 (or more) quarts of water
• Spices and herbs if you want

Simmer for 45 minutes, then strain and save the broth for soup!  Freeze it if you want, or you could can it so it doesn’t take up freezer space.  Yes, as I’ve said before you totally can can soup!

Now, if you still have energy then you can be a good prepper and freeze some peppers!  Or can some salsa.  What about peach salsa.  There’s lots to do….

(This post has been updated a few times since 2014, including the past two summers with info about prices found at St. Jacob’s Market in Ontario).

Our final batch of salsa that we canned for the year, Chunky Peach Salsa, was definitely our best.  And maybe that is because after canning 3 other batches we learned a couple things.

One thing we learned was not to cook the peaches very long or they got lost amongst the tomatoes.  Basically we now just add the peaches to the salsa right before we’re ready to start canning.

Second was that if you don’t want to add tomato paste to thicken the salsa then you’ll have to cook it for a long time.  This could mean simmering the salsa for 1-2 hours….

So our final canning session for salsa leaves us with a total of 56 pints of 4 different kinds of salsa (including the homegrown salsa I wrote about earlier this week).  And while 56 pints may seem like a lot it’s essentially 1 pint a week for the next year with 4 extra for sharing or larger eating events.  Yes, we eat a lot of salsa.  Well, my family eats a good amount of it, but without me around they’d likely only need about 20 pints for the year.

Here is the recipe and it is loosely based on our friend’s (non-peach) salsa which we refer to around here as “Mr. Dan’s.”  When we made this the other day we did a double batch which produced 18 pints.  A single batch will likely produce 9-11 pints, but results will vary based on the variety of tomatoes used and how long they are cooked down.

Update, 2017

Here’s what I got at St. Jacob’s Market here north of Waterloo in late August, to make a quadruple batch:

• 1/2 bushel Roma tomatoes($11)
• 1/2 bushel San Marzano Tomatoes ($12 or $15 depending on vendor)
• 1/2 bushel sweet banana peppers ($12)
• 1/2 bushel Red Haven peaches ($15 for the smaller uglier ones)

And 2018:

• 1 bushel Roma tomatoes for $15
• 1/2 bushel long red sweet peppers $15
• 1/2 bushel Red Haven peaches $20

And what I generally have from our garden, CSA or elsewhere:

• 1 large bunch cilantro
• 5 lbs onions
• 3-4 heads garlic
• 1 litre/quart cider vinegar (we actually make our own… which it seems surprising I don’t have a post about!)

Somewhat absent-mindedly I decided to toss some dill from our CSA into my salad dressing.  In a rush I used a hand blender to whip the dressing up whereas normally I just use a fork and stir.  The blender helped make the dressing super creamy and the results were awesome.  The dill added such a different flavor the dressing, at least compared to what I’m used to in dressings, and I loved it!

At our beach picnic we enjoyed egg salad wraps and the salad was an perfect addition (or at least I thought it was!).  Sorry, no pics were taken, we just enjoyed the beautiful day, the warm water, the soft (and super-hot) sand, throwing a Frisbee, and time to relax.

Thus for today’s installation of Greens Week I’m featuring the dressing recipe since it was key in making the afternoon’s salad so tasty.  And keep in mind that you can omit the mayo but it’s nice to use a small amount because it helps to emulsify (hold together the oil and vinegar) the dressing.

(Above: green onion, kale, and spinach from garden, tatsoi from CSA)

I don’t really mind since I tend to love salad and greens.  However, at some point you run out of things to do with them and start wanting something else to cook.

This week I’m home alone because Madame and the assistants went to visit her family.  In the original plan I was also going to go but then I went and got a job and it didn’t seem appropriate to ask for a week off two weeks after starting.  As it’s a bit lonely I have given myself a few things to work on for the week.

One thing I decided to work on was the greens!  I decided to eat greens with every meal for a week.  I’m calling it Week of Greens.If you’re in a CSA you should try it too, what else are you going to do with a all those greens?  Maybe, if all goes well, it will turn into summer of greens!  Or I just might hit the wall and declare an early end to the week.  We’ll see…. Hopefully I’m alive and well when my family returns.

Here’s how the week began, with a breakfast of greens with one egg and no ham.  I wanted to include ham and call it “Greens, egg, and ham” but didn’t have ham.  Anyways, it was a delicious breakfast.  Instead of ham I added a few thin slices of potatoes fried in a bit of ghee.  I topped the dish with some Ontario greenhouse tomatoes and had a nice side of local strawberries that Madame and the assistants picked last week.

I am not willing to buy foods that claim to be something they are not, for example I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, and foods with names like Tofurkey, and Not Dogs.  These foods are rarely simple foods that could be made at home.  Veggie burgers are one exception to my list of substitutes I will allow, but only if they are homemade.  The same would be true for gluten-free hamburger buns, but I haven’t really wanted to attempt those… until now.

I love baking bread, and that’s the main reason why I always make homemade hamburger buns.  However, in attempting to meet the needs of members of my extended family I was unsure of how to enjoy a meal of burgers with them and still honor both my from-scratch love as well as my localism tendencies.

Then one afternoon I noticed a big round potato.  It seemed to kind of resemble a bun of sorts.  I realized that this vision would allow me to do the two things I wanted to do—make a “bun” that was gluten-free and local.  This bun would be easier to make than the English muffins we like to make for burgers, and just as tasty, albeit in a totally different way!

I’m happy to say that it worked great!  We’ve made them twice now and both times they were great.  Rather than write a formal looking recipe, I’ll just give a short explanation of the process.

All you need to do is find a large round potato, slice it in half, and then slice each half again to form two sets of buns.  The outer round part becomes the top of the bun, the inner flat part the bottom.  Lightly oil a baking sheet, and lightly salt the potatoes, then roast them at 425 for 15 minutes, then flip and roast 15 minutes more (longer for potato slices thicker than ½ inch), or until they are golden and beginning to bubble.  Treat the bun the way you would treat any hamburger bun—put on your favourite condiments and enjoy!

We’ve made them with regular locally and ethically raised beef burgers as well as with Oh She Glows’ “Perfect Veggie Burger” and both were great with the potato buns.  They’d also go quite nicely with The Sweet Life’s Beet Sliders, since beets and potatoes pair very well.  And hey, even if you’re not a gluten-free eater, you might as well try these buns just to change it up and keep things fresh!

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Sharing at Nomday Monday.

Making ketchup has been at the back of my mind for quite a while now.  I had read about a girl in our community who makes her own and I was like I can do that!  So now I did.  Turns out it’s not much work, you just need to have an afternoon where you can leave a couple jars or cans of tomatoes slowly cooking down on the stove.  My recipe is fairly standard, and similar to the one linked above.  However, I use only local ingredients in my ketchup, and allow it to ferment a bit, taking inspiration from Sandor Katz:

“The revival of fermentation at the local and regional scale goes hand in hand with the revival of local agriculture in the movement toward relocalization of our food and our economics.”

-Sandor Katz, The Art of Fermentation, p.369

Of course projects like this raise the question of “why bother?”  Well, I bother partly just because I can, but also because I like knowing what’s in my food and where it came from.  I know the farmer that grew the onion, some of the tomatoes came from our backyard, the vinegar is from apples we pressed into cider last fall, the maple syrup and honey are from local farms, and there are no mystery ingredients!  But ultimately it’s about taste, this ketchup is really super tasty.  Sadly I didn’t make a huge batch, so maybe next time I’ll double this one.

The Process:

Cook the canned tomatoes for a long time over low heat, stirring a few times every hour.  You can use a slow-cooker, I just used a Dutch oven over very low heat.  Let them cook for 4-8 hours, however long it takes to get them thick.  If they are not sufficiently uniform puree them in a food processor or with an immersion blender.

While the tomatoes are cooking dice the onion and soak it in the vinegar to infuse it with some oniony goodness.

After the tomatoes have reached your desired thickness cook them a bit more.  Then add 1 cup of the onion-infused vinegar along with the honey, maple syrup, garlic, mustard, salt, and cook 15-20 minutes more.  Remove from heat and allow to cool.

When the ketchup is cool mix in the rest of the vinegar and the whey.  Transfer to a jar and allow to ferment at room temperature for 1 or more days.  Then store in the fridge.  You can even transfer it to a store-bought ketchup container in hopes of fooling your kids who may have a preference for how ketchup “should” taste….

I’ve been enjoying my  hot fermented carrots for a couple weeks now and will soon be making another batch.  Well, actually the next batch will be different, as I’m going to try different flavors than this batch because it ended up being a bit hot for Madame and way too hot for my Young Assistants.  However, I’ve enjoyed adding the spicy tangy carrots to different meals so maybe the next round should feature one jar of super-hot ones, and jar of not-hot ones.  The options are pretty endless in terms of the herbs and spices you can add to a simple jar of fermenting carrots.

 Okay, so those carrots were photographed last summer… these days carrots don’t look quite so lively, but it’s nice to remember what summer looks like….

The process is fairly straight forward.  But before I get to that I should also say if you’re new to fermenting and are considering where to start I would recommend NOT starting with Kimchi.  Not because Kimchi isn’t good, on the contrary it’s amazing!  But it is tons more work, probably 10 times the amount of work, what with all the chopping, dicing, pureeing, packing….  In the case of fermenting carrots you’re really not doing anything new if you already like cutting and eating carrots, therefore this is a good place to start.

Here’s how to get started fermenting:

1. Make a salt water brine with 2 cups hot water and 1 ½ teaspoons salt.
2. Peel and cut up carrots, place them in a wide-mouth pint jar (500 ml), packed to about 1 inch from the top.
3.  Add desired spices, herbs, seasonings to the jar.
4. Allow the brine to cool close to room temperature, dump it around the carrots.
5. Cover the carrots with a cabbage leaf and weigh down everything in the jar with a smaller jar filled with water.  Cover with a towel or plastic bag and let ferment for 1-2 weeks.
6. Start eating them.  When they taste the way you like transfer them to the fridge.  Otherwise let them keep fermenting until you reach your desired sourness and tangy-ness.

You can see the clove of garlic and the cabbage leaf floating amongst the carrots.  Eventually you can remove the cabbage leaf, it just helps get the fermentation going and can also act as something to help hold the fermenting vegetables down.

Notice that the brine is a bit too close to the top; leave a bit more space as fermentation can cause the brine to overflow a bit.

Read my original, more thorough post at Bailey’s Local Foods.  Guidance for making these fermented carrots came from Food Renegade and Well Preserved.

This post was originally written for Bailey’s Local Foods.

I’m very new to the world of fermentation, especially when it comes to foods.  I didn’t grow up eating sauerkraut and still find it a bit odd.  However, the first time I had kimchi I knew I’d have to learn how to make it (because I’m kind of cheap, but mostly because I love learning how to make new things!).  So I took two recipes and made my own version using as many local ingredients as I good.  The result is KWimchi, or KW-Chi, or a Kimchi for KW.

Trying to emphasize the ingredients we have available from local farms this kimchi is a bit more of what Sandor Katz would call a Kraut-Chi.  Regardless of what you call it, it is delicious enough to eat by itself (which I’ve been doing lately!).

Our recipe is based on these two:

The Kitchn’s How to Make Easy Kimchi at Home

Nourished Kitchen’s Hot, Salty & Sour: My Kimchi Recipe