Happy Halloween!

Wishing everyone a Happy Halloween from the Handspun Homestead!

May you share many bountiful harvests with your loved ones in the coming seasons!

Dehydrating Plums: Home Made Prunes

It is very late in the season for fresh fruit now, but I was gifted a small box of homegrown plums this week.  I hadn't really planned on getting more plums this year, but I wouldn't turn down free homegrown fruit.  I had plenty of plum wine brewing and I still had plum jam in my pantry from last year so I thought I should try something a little different with them.  I decided to dry them and add them to my collection of dried fruit.

Preparing them for drying is simply a quick scrub to make sure they are clean and then cutting them in halves to remove the pit.  Each half was then turned inside out to help it dry better and then placed skin side down on my dehydrator trays.

The drying itself took almost two days before they were done and they were still leathery and pliable when I finally took them off the trays.  These late season plums were super sweet and each dried plum tastes like candy.  I am happy to be able to add a few more quarts of dried fruit to my already brimming pantry shelves.

Making Apple Cider Vinegar

With my recent endeavor of processing a box of apples, I was left with lots of apple peels and cores that I didn't want to go to waste.  Normally I would just throw them into the compost pile or feed them to the chickens but this year I wanted to add an extra step to the process to make the most of what I had.  A good portion of the peels were cooked and made into apple cider that I will drink little by little over then next few weeks.  The rest of the peels would become something even a little better: apple cider vinegar.

I had looked up the recipe online and came across quite a few sites that had good instructions.  Basically they all called for fresh clean apple peels and cores, water, and a little sugar.  Pretty simple, right?  It's almost the same as making wine.  The only difference is that you want your juice to be exposed to the air, so it has aerobic fermentation as opposed the the anaerobic fermentation that makes wine.  I also am not adding yeast to the juice that will become vinegar.  I want the natural yeasts that grow on the apple peels to do the work.  They may take a little longer to take off, but I have plenty of time to let them do their thing.

After a week of hanging out in a warm part of the house, I strained out the liquid from the peels and put it back in the jars to let it ferment further.

It already has started to smell like vinegar but I imagine it will be several more weeks before it finished.  For now it can bubble away to it's heart's content on my kitchen counter.  This is my first time attempting to make my own vinegar and I am impressed by how simple the process is.  I am happy that I could make something useful from apple peels that would otherwise go to waste.

Bottling the Cherry Wine

Months have gone by since I started my first batches of cherry wine for the year.  I started the wine with fresh boxes of cherries back in June.  I washed and pitted the cherries, then squashed them to release their juices.  The addition of yeast kick started the process and fermentation went on for several weeks.  Once things died down the wine began to clear and I racked it into a fresh carboy and let it rest an extra month before it would be ready for bottling.

Finally the day had come to bottle the wine for long term storage.  I went through the process of sterilizing all the bottles with boiling water and setting them out to dry.  Once all the bottles were ready I lined them up close to the carboy filled with cherry wine and then began filling them.  One by one each bottle took on the ruby red color of the dark cherry wine and when I was finished I had filled 15 bottles.

The rainier cherry wine was started a couple of weeks later, but followed the same process on a smaller scale as I was only making one gallon.  This variety of cherries for wine gave the finished product a much lighter rosy yellow color and it filled 5 bottles.

Some of these bottles have already gone to trade for various things such as boxes of fruit for future batches of wine.  At the low price I already paid for the fruit to make the wine, I feel like I may be getting the better end of the deal.  Either way, my stores continue to grow and I will be enjoying the fruits of my labors for months to come.

Preserving a Box of Apples

Fall fruits are in full swing here and this week I had the opportunity to work on a box of fresh gala apples.  I wanted to make more apple pie filling this year since last year's was a delicious success.  I also wanted to dehydrate some of the apples to add to my inventory of hiking snacks.

I began by peeling, coring and slicing the apples one by one.  I treated the apple slices in a lemon juice solution to keep them from browning.  Once I had enough apple slices for one round of pints in the canner, I prepared the sweet filling in a sauce pan.  It has to thicken a bit before it can be canned, but once it is ready I add the apple slices to the mix and then fill the pint jars.  It took about half the box of apples to put two rounds through the canner.  In the end I had made fifteen pints of apple pie filling.

The next stage of preserving the apples went much like the first stage.  The apples were scrubbed, peeled, cored and sliced.  They were also dipped in a lemon juice solution before being laid out on trays to dry.

The rest of the apples filled a little over six trays in the dehydrator.  When they were finished I had reduced over ten pounds of apples down to 9.5 ounces of dried apple slices.  These tasty treats will become a part of my fruity trail snacks that I will be eating when I go for hikes.

Freezing Tomatoes

This year's tomato crop has been quite plentiful.  I ate what I wanted fresh, made four different batches of salsa, dried boxes of them and gave away more boxes of them and still they come.  Soon though there will no longer be garden fresh tomatoes so I am doing what I can to preserve my harvests as the season comes to a close.  In this case I am freezing them now to make sauce with them later when I have more time available.

The process is quite simple.  Each tomato gets washed and cored.  One by one they are cut into chunks and tossed into a gallon freezer bag.  I don't bother skinning them because the skins will fall off as they thaw when I am ready to use them.  Once a bag is full, I squeeze out all the air and then throw it into the freezer.  So far I have packed six gallons with tomato chunks, and may have to find room for a few more gallons before it is all said and done for the year.

When I am ready I will throw the frozen tomatoes into my big stock pot and cook them down.  After they soften a bit they are run through my food mill to remove the seeds and skins.  The skins and seeds will be bonus treats for the chickens (they really love that kind of stuff!).  The remaining pulp will continue to cook down until the sauce reaches the thickness that I prefer.  Last year I cooked down several gallons of tomatoes and only wound up with enough sauce for one batch of nine pints in the canner.  This year I am hoping to have more to show for my hard work because I specifically grew sauce tomatoes.  They have more flesh and less seeds than other tomatoes which will hopefully result in more sauce with less effort on my part.

Dehydrating Celery

Celery is one of those crops that I don't give much thought to during the growing season.  It takes a long time to grow to harvest size, so I usually wait until late summer/early fall to start collecting it.  I use celery in my soups and stocks and add it fresh to stir fries and salads for a little extra crunch.  It can tolerate some cooler weather, but not hard freezes so I am doing what I can to preserve some of my celery harvest while it's still here.

The easiest way to preserve celery is to dehydrate it or freeze it.  Dehydrating is as simple as washing the stalks, then chopping them into chunks and laying them out to dry on a tray.  I usually dry them on a screen because they shrink so much they will fall through the regular tray as they dry.  I only have one sheet like this for my dehydrator, so I can only do one tray at a time.  I don't use a ton of celery in my day to day cooking, so I should be able to dry enough for my purposes before the season ends.

If I end up with a lot of dried celery I may try grinding some and making my own celery salt for seasoning different dishes.  I have a whole bed of this stuff which is way more than I will use in a year, but if I can preserve enough I may be able to skip growing celery next year and just use what I have stored up.

So far I have fit over 60 celery stalks into this quart jar and there is still room for plenty more.  Hopefully the weather will cooperate long enough for me to finish filling this jar, but even if it doesn't I think I will still have plenty for this winter. 

Dehydrating a Box of Peaches

Signs of autumn are everywhere and the time for summertime fruits is coming to a close.  I picked up a box of some of the last peaches of the year at the farmers market this weekend for $26.  They were perfectly ripe and wonderfully sweet and I ate as many as I could fresh out of the box.  I have lots of jars of canned fruits in storage this year, so in an attempt to save space I decided to store this box by dehydrating them.  My dehydrator is limited by the number of trays that I have, so this endeavor took several days to work through the whole box.

One by one the peaches were washed, peeled, pitted and sliced.  I like my dried fruit a little chewy so I try to make the slices a little thick when I prepare them for dehydrating.  I laid them out on the trays as closely packed as possible and then stacked the trays up to dry.

The thicker slices take a little longer to dry, but most of them were done after about 24 hours.  Anything that wasn't totally dry by that time was promptly eaten.  When it was all said and done I had myself five quart jars filled with the sweetest, most delicious dried peaches I have ever tasted.  They will be great pick me ups on long hikes and I bet they would make some excellent peach cobbler when they are reconstituted.

Peppers by the Pound

Cold nights are fast approaching so I have been spending today harvesting things that won't survive the frost.  At the top of my list was the peppers.  The plants were heavy with fruit and they wouldn't have the chance to ripen further, so I went through and picked every last pepper that I could find.  I was rewarded with a rainbow of beautiful peppers.

I also picked about a gallon of jalapenos.

I already have plenty of salsa canned for the year, so I decided that I would keep these peppers in the freezer.  The large bell peppers will be stemmed and seeded then cut in half and frozen for stuffed peppers.  The smaller misshapen peppers will get sliced up into chunks and frozen in portions for adding to all kinds of dishes.  The jalapenos will get stemmed and seeded and then I will prep them to become poppers and freeze the leftovers for later too.  

Frost is Coming

A few nights ago we had a cold spell and some of the more tender veggies ended up with some frost damage.  It wasn't a killing frost, but it was close and I wasn't expecting it since the forecast was only calling for overnight lows in the 40's.  Daytime temps have still been up in the 80's here, but being that it is high desert here, night time temps do tend to have some wild swings at this time of year.

There are a few crops that I did want to protect from colder temps.  The tomatoes and peppers are still heavily laden with fruit that needs more time to ripen so I will be covering those with a sheet of heavy plastic to ward off the night chill for a few more weeks.  They can also enjoy a little extra heat during the day if I leave them partially covered.  Other crops like my cucumbers, summer squash and green beans will be left to their own devices, so I am making my final harvests in those beds this week.  I am excited that my late nights of canning pickles will be behind me for this year.  I will also be cutting and drying as much celery as I can to preserve it for future use in soups and chicken stock I will be making this winter.

Some crops like my root crops of potatoes, carrots and parsnip I will harvest at my leisure for quite a few more weeks.  Their tender tops might die back, but the ground will protect the roots from freezing for a few more months.  I will try to harvest all that I can before the ground freezes solid, but for now I will let the cold nights add sweetness to my carrots and parsnips.