Canning Photo Journal

Spent the afternoon canning one day - pretty pics...'nuff said.

Glean a Little Glean for Me

I am, what one might call, a freegan - I will eat pretty much any food if it is free.  Ok...not really ANY food, but I do look on a daily basis to capitalize on what is out there for me to consume.  There is so much food waste in this world, and I am totally OK with being a scavenger.  Working on a college campus I end up at a lot of pickup pizza parties!  I don't mind if it is out of date - I body test it and see whether or not it's good.  And - I glean.

Three weeks or so ago I was taking out the trash, and I noted that there were a number of apples in my front yard.  My front yard sports a plum tree, so I knew it was not that.  I looked around and saw no other evidence, so I wrote it off as some random thing...neighborhood kids or the like.  But earlier this week smashed apples starting showing up in the street, and I started looking carefully.  I found that there is a lone apple tree across from my house in an empty lot.  Right above what I had known was there for some time now - blackberries.

Rolling home from work on Thursday, I decided it was time to get my glean on.  The only other time that gleaning was this easy for me was when I picked 15 gallons of peachcots from my neighbor's backyard...and in that scenario I had to deal with hauling the buckets around the fence!  I stepped across the street and started with windfalls - then spent some time shaking the tree.  At about 5:30 my neighbor came home from work to find me waist deep in the brush, hauling on apple tree branches and chasing apples out into the street.  Hey - at least my dog does not bark and I don't play loud music!

I picked blackberries next.  I ended up with about 5lb of apples and a quart of berries.  Not too bad considering I was within sight of my house the whole time.  I took my spoils into the kitchen and whipped up some blackberry applesauce.  Here's my VERY simple recipe.

• 5lb. of apples cut up into small pieces (I leave skins on, but then again I am lazy)
• 1qt. blackberries
• 1/4c. honey
• 1c. water

Place the fruit and water into a large cookpot and simmer.  The water helps to keep things from burning (I hate to sit there are stir the whole time).  Once the fruit is cooked down you can either leave it chunky, or mash it up with a potato masher or some other implement.  I add the honey at the last minute to taste.

I do want to say a few things about gleaning.  In my town there are gleaners programs that pick food for local food banks.  Seeing as I run one of those, I try not to step on toes.  I also am not a proponent of picking fruit guerrilla-style.  In the case of my picking from my neighbor's yard, I left them a note in their mailbox asking if I could pick there.  They were not using the fruit, and I offered them some of the finished product once I processed it.  They were happy to comply.  That said, there are plenty of places where no one owns the tree/bush.  I am going to head to the park today and pick - there are a number of others who do the same.  Freegan for life!

Frame of Mind

My roommate Emily had a great idea for a poster frame to go in the living room of our new place.  Thought I would share it here since so many people loved the Doorknob Coat Rack I did a while back.

We started with an old salvaged window.  One side of the window was an awesome reddish-brown, but we wanted the hardware to face out, so we ended up painting it.  I used some of the leftover paint from a bookcase Jason and I built.  I only put one coat on and streaked the paint a bit to let some white or chipping show through - get a bit of a distressed feel.

Once the paint was dry, we had to get the poster to lie out flat on it.  This was the scene in our kitchen for several days... see the cool color on the flip side?

Once the poster was flat, we put magnets on both sides of the glass to hold it in place.  The poster is behind the glass to protect it.  I used some eyelet screws and wire from an art frame I reclaimed to mount the whole thing on the wall.

Couldn't resist getting my pic in here too I suppose...

Closeup shot of the magnets and some of the distressed paint.

I plan on hitting up some of the local reused and reclaimed building supply stores in order to get another window.  The plan is to get one that hangs lengthwise with another poster.  Cool matching tip - paint things that are similar but don't match the same color to bring them together visually

Mommy, mommy, tired and groggy, how does your garden grow?

Not very well apparently: 

 

Now, to be fair, I have been busy since I last posted; more so than the average bear. And, we did manage to harvest quite a lot between then and now. We had a small crop of broccoli and an even smaller crop of carrots. We had plenty of sugar snaps to munch on and two meals worth of green beans came off the vine.

None-the-less, I am embarrassed by the state of my garden, overrun with weeds and an overall eye sore in the back yard. I share these photos with you on the unspoken promise that you quit giving yourself a hard time about the state of your garden- and a sisterly acknowledgement on how easy the rest of life gets in the way of our best intentions. 

With that said… YOU SHOULD SEE THESE TOMATO PLANTS!

It is the land of nightshade, and I am the Queen!! What once stood a glorious 5 feet high, my monstrous plants have now buckled under their own weight. I am easily harvesting 50 tomatoes a week.

Picking them is a family affair, but eating them is not. My husband, sadly will not eat tomatoes. As you can see, our daughter does not share his distaste. The evening of these photos, she ate tomatoes for dinner.

Enjoying Summer Herb(s)

Oh I totally lucked out!  Just wanted to boast a bit about my good fortune.  Two people in my life - my former neighbor Michelle, and Jason - gave me a large amount of delicious herbs that I dried over the past few weeks.  I have lemon balm, kaffir lime, rosemary, spearmint, oregano, lemon thyme, and spearmint.  

I started drying the herbs by being all fancy - I tied them in small bundles and tacked them to my bulletin board.  Sadly I ran out of string (I'd used it all making pea trellises and candle wicks).  So, I ended up just setting them in paper bags by my sliding glass window in the sun.  They dried up very nicely.

Though I am ok with some stems in my tea, I aimed for getting mostly leaves crushed up and into the jars.  I did so by rolling the bundles in my hands over newspaper on my kitchen floor.  It made quite a mess, but it I got a ton of product.  Well...not oregano.  That went straight into dinner.

Be sure to store your herbs in dry containers so they won't mold.  You have to make sure they are DRY before you do that.  My herbs sat out for 3 weeks before I put them up.  They look really pretty don't they?