As I previously mentioned in last week’s Fiddlehead Frolic part one, I’ve been doing some research into pickling fiddleheads. There aren’t too many recipe books that include recipes for fiddleheads, so I’ve had to experiment a bit. I really enjoy … Continue reading
Ahh… December 1. With the gardens put to bed, the cupboards full of preserves and the root cellar stocked, the food action committee has finally had some time to reflect on the growing season. Here’s a short slide show of some of our favourite photos from the season:
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For details from any of our workshops, search this blog and our sister blog at the Halifax Garden Network.
Yours in food,
Marla
This post comes from Megan, neurotic first-time canner turned pro!
A few weeks ago I inadvertently volunteered to do a preserving demonstration at the Maritime Fall Fair. Inadvertently because I’d thought I was volunteering to man a booth, standing by while folks look at a display or pamphlets, and maybe answering some questions. Having never preserved anything in my life, I likely would not have volunteered had I understood I’d be demonstrating lacto-fermentation and canning to a seated audience. On a kitchen platform. With a microphone headset. Eep!
(This misunderstanding was no fault of the requester; I need to read my emails more closely and make fewer assumptions).
Realizing what I got myself into I figured I’d better learn in a hurry. Mixing up sauerkraut was easy – chop, salt, pound, wait. I texted a friend who’d taken the sauerkraut workshop: could it be that easy? I was forgetting something, right? But as with many of the foods that we’re used to harvesting from grocery shelves, it really isn’t complicated; we’ve just gotten out of the habit of doing things for ourselves. Lacto-fermentation, check.
Next: canning. Much more intimidating. In preparation I borrowed a book on canning and bought myself a canner and the appropriate utensils (all for less than ~$40 new). I got home and set out all of my equipment, along with my jars and a bag of valley apples I’d picked up, and got busy reading through all the steps. After going through it four times I felt ready to give’r.
After an hour of peeling and chopping I had a pot of apples and spices simmering into applesauce on the stove and I began heating water in my canner with the jars and lids. This was the first important safety step in the manual: making sure that your jars are hot enough that they don’t break when you add your hot food. Check. Within little time my apples were turning to frothy, foaming, pillowy goodness. I carefully removed a jar from the canner, filled it with applesauce, removed air bubbles and checked the “headspace” as directed, placed a lid and sealing ring, making it “fingertip tight” (another important safety step), and put it back in the canner. Ditto the second and third jar, add enough water to completely surround them, and they were on their way. Voila!
At this point I grew skeptical; this was too easy. So I started worrying about whether they would actually seal – did I get the headspace right? What exactly is “fingertip tight”? Did I get out all the air bubbles? And if I got any of these steps even minutely wrong, could it work?
As I pondered this something startling began to happen – boiling water began shooting from the canner and cascading down its sides, creating an alarming sizzling and popping noise akin to a tiny fireworks display. I leapt into action with tea towels, trying to avoid the boiling water droplets flying through the air while attempting to stop the water from running down between the stove and wall to areas unreachable – already late in the evening, I didn’t fancy ending my night by having to pull the stove into the middle of the kitchen to mop, knowing that such an endeavor might uncover a much scarier mess. Standing as far from the stove as possible, arm out-stretched and oven-mitt protected, a quick assessment told me that while my canner was tall enough for the jars I’d chosen, with the steamer insert (used to keep the jars off the direct heat source – another important safety step) there wasn’t enough room to completely cover them with water, and once boiled it had boiled over.
Okay. Time for a quick decision. Remove enough water to stop the overflow (but then the jars wouldn’t be completely surrounded!), turn the jars on their side so they could remain completely immersed (but the directions said not to tilt the jars!), or completely abandon the process? I went for option two, thinking it was probably the wrong choice but going for it anyway. I tipped them on their sides, took out a bit of water; the effluence stopped. As I waited for them to process I lamented that my instructions hadn’t told me which steps are fudge-able and which aren’t. Not being science-minded, I figured the process was probably pretty picky. Twenty minutes later I removed the jars from the canner half-heartedly and stood them back up on the counter, believing that they wouldn’t seal and my foray into canning would be a failure.
As the final step was to check the seal 24 hours later, I put the venture to rest for the night. All the following day at work my mind would return to the jars of applesauce on my counter, waiting for me to come home and do my check, mocking me as the lids would lift easily from the jars. I’m not sure if I would have been so wrapped up in their success or failure if I hadn’t been aware that in one week I’d be doing it in front of a group of folks who would probably know better and I would be revealed as a preserving fraud. The ego is a powerful thing.
But sometimes miracles happen. They sealed! I’d googled “seal test” earlier in the day and tried four methods, just to be sure. I was elated! It worked! I’d canned something! I celebrated by promptly opening one and diving in.
Over the next week I stoked my confidence by preparing jars of lacto-fermented kimchi and dill pickles, and pickling and canning the last of my summer carrots. The satisfaction of chopping and mixing, bubbling and boiling, setting aside and tasting, is addictive. Part science experiment, part artisan craft, and results that celebrate our local harvest well into the winter.
And I avoided appearing as a complete novice at the demonstration. I was paired with someone with plenty of experience – a whiz with preserving – who took the lead while I played the role of assistant / beginner, demonstrating that you don’t need to be a kitchen or harvesting expert to make the most of our local produce – you don’t! It was fun – and I added pickled beets and salsa to my list of Things I’ve Preserved. What will be next?
Chinese Cabbage
Ahhh…cabbage. I really like cabbage, but I often run out of recipe ideas. There’s just so much cabbage in, well, a cabbage.
I know we’ve talked about kimchi on this blog before, posting recipes and such, but I recently got a kimchi lesson from my roommate and wanted to walk you through the steps. A big thanks to Janette for the lesson and the recipe!
Kimchi Ingredients
Here’s your ingredient list:
* For each head of cabbage (nappa or chinese) you’ll need:
- ~1.5 cup coarse salt
- 1 cup KOREAN chilli pepper powder – AKA go-chu-ga-ru (not flakes, not chili powder must get from Korean/asian grocery)
- 1 cup of white daikon radish (long and white, not small round and pink), peeled and shredded or cubed
- 5 green onions, washed and sliced about ~1″ pieces and a couple times down the length
- 1/4 korean/asian pear (can substituted an apple if not available), peeled and cubed
- 1 medium onion – diced
- 1/4 cup fish sauce – i.e. Oishi sauce (optional)
- ~3 tbsp of garlic, minced
- ~1 tbsp of ginger, minced
- 1.5 tbsp sugar
- 1 heaping tbsp glutinous (glue-like there’s no gluten) rice powder/flour AKA chap-sahl-ga-ru – i.e. Mochiko Brand or Ah-Shi Sweet Rice Flour
While a lot of the ingredients sound exotic, you’ll be amazed at how many can be grown locally. I’ve been able to find chinese cabbage and daikon at the Halifax farmers’ market. And green onion, white onion, garlic, and apples are all readily available locally.
Step 1: SALT THE CABBAGE
* There’s AT LEAST a 3 hour waiting period you must allow for the cabbage to sit.
1. Wash and remove any bad parts from the nappa (or chinese) cabbage.
2. Cut it into halves, then into quarters, remove the heart, and cut into ~1.5″ to 2″ piece (bite sized so they fit into a jar).
3. In a bowl, large enough for the cabbage to be submerged in water, put a layer of cabbage then sprinkle a handful of cooking salt over it. In the same way, put another layer of cabbage and sprinkle with salt. Repeat until all the cabbage is salted.
4. In another bowl dissolve ~1/2 cup of salt in ~1L of water. Pour the salt solution over the salted cabbage and allow to sit for AT LEAST 3 hours.
* Don’t worry about making your kimchi too salty – here we are just using the salt to take the water out of the cabbage and let the salt solution to be absorbed – the cabbage KNOWS how much it can take.
Step 2: KIMCHI SAUCE
* This needs time to cool so make this while waiting for the cabbage to wilt.
1. Combine 1 heaping tbsp of rice powder/flour with 1/2 cup water in a pot, stirring vigorously over a low heat until the mixture has turned white, has a very thick consistancy and starts to bubble. BE CAREFUL hot rice liquid likes to burp at you. Set aside to cool down.
2. In a blender (or use a hand mixer) mix together the garlic, ginger, korean/asian pear (or apple), diced onion and daikon radish into a pulpy liquid. Once the rice powder glue is completely cool, stir in the korean chilli pepper powder, sugar and fish sauce, green onion and combine well.
Rinsing the cabbage
Step 3: DRAIN THE CABBAGE
1. Rinse the cabbage in cold water 3 times to get rid of excess salt. At this point your cabbage should have drastically reduced in size and be limp but still crispy (think pickle crispy)
2. Wring the cabbage squeezing out as much water as possible.
3. Let sit for ~1 hour in a strainer to get rid of excess water.
Mixing the Kimchi
Step 4: FINISH IT
*Janette’s note: I find it easiest to mix and jar with my hands so I wear gloves or put a baggie on my hand. Kimchi stains when it sits on anything too long so if you spill clean up right away.
1. Back into the large bowl, mix the cabbage well with the kimchi sauce. (At this point in the lesson, Janette demonstrated the kimchi squat, which she wouldn’t allow me to take photos of. Basically, put your bowl on the kitchen floor, squat down there and mix vigorously.)
2. Put the kimchi into glass jars or containers, packing it down and use left over sauce to top up.
3. Screw the lids on but don’t tighten yet. Leave it outside (room temperature) for about 3 days (less if it’s hot weather) in a shady area.
4. Tighten lids before putting it into the refrigerator. It will take several days to a week until it is properly fermented.
5. Enjoy! This kimchi will be good for up to 3 months in the fridge.
Kimchi!
Thank you to everyone who submitted a story and/or photos to our “Preserving the Harvest” Contest! All the names were entered in a draw. And our lucky winners are… (Drum roll please)
Grand Prize: Elisabeth Bailey
Runners up: Cory Mooney & Jennifer Naugler
Enjoy your preserving books, ladies!
The stories and photos I received were too good not to share. Here’s a smattering of what I received:
(More to follow in the coming weeks.)
From Elisabeth
Here are a few preserving pics to share–drying a variety of heritage tomatoes from the Lunenburg Farmers’ Market, and blueberries packed in lemon syrup for the freezer. Enjoy!
From Jennifer
This is a photo from the first time I made jam. Strawberry jam. I was so proud of myself…that lined the jars up on the kitchen windowsill….and stared at them all day. 
I would never dream of buying jam again.
From Georgina
Around this time last year, three of my friends and I decided that we would try canning tomato sauce. One of us had canned with other people once before, one had made jam, and the other two of us were complete newbies. We figured that by doing it together we could combine our collective knowledge, help each other, and learn how to do it together. Little did we know that we’d learn most lessons the hard way.
Lesson 1: Don’t Over-Do It.
We also figured that we’d save money: the greater bulk we purchased, the cheaper the tomato sauce would be. We all wanted to walk away with enough tomato sauce to last us through the winter. During one of our planning sessions, we sat around my kitchen with a calculator, price quotes from various local farmers, and an Excel spreadsheet open. We made lists that would have been incomprehensible to anyone else, with things like:
Tomato Sauce – Pare (4.5 lbs – 3.5 pints) (40 lbs for 7 jars each)
(6.5 lbs – 12 cups 3 L 6 pints)
(1 L 2 pints 6 lbs)
Stewed Tomatoes
Roasted Tomato Sauce – Small Batch
When my roommates wandered into the kitchen and saw the mathematics and heard our conversation, they looked at us like we had lost our minds. But we were sure we weren’t crazy; in fact, it would be crazy NOT to buy a massive amount of tomatoes and can them ourselves! We continued crunching the numbers and finally settled on an amount: we would buy 50 pounds of tomatoes.
We made arrangements with a farmer at the market, and on the designated Saturday, we took my station wagon down to the market to pick up our tomatoes. It was only then that we got an idea of what 50 pounds of tomatoes looks like. This was the first time we wondered whether perhaps we’d gone a little overboard.
Lesson #2: Know Thy Tomato.
We had four large boxes of tomatoes. And they weren’t exactly the tomatoes we wanted. We had ordered plum tomatoes: solid, oval-shaped tomatoes that have fewer seeds and are ideal for making sauce and packing. But when we went to pick them up, the farmer told us that those tomatoes weren’t ready yet, so instead he’d brought us 50 pounds of field tomatoes. Field tomatoes are rounder and juicier, with more seeds and liquid. We should have turned down the tomatoes right then and there. But it’s hard to say no to somebody who has boxed up 50 pounds of tomatoes for you and is carting them out to your car. Plus, we’d all set aside this weekend for doing the canning; when would be able to align our schedules again? So we decided to carry on and make the best of our field tomatoes.
Lesson #4: Don’t Over-Do It. I repeat: Don’t Over-Do It.
We got back to my place and started working: boiling water, dropping the tomatoes in the hot water and then submerging them in cold water; cutting up vegetables; measuring herbs. We had picked three different recipes to use, so we’d have a variety of sauces to enjoy.
The first recipe was from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and was designed for large quantities. The other two recipes were from a book on small-batch preserving. Since we weren’t preserving a small batch, this meant we had to multiply the recipes by 16. One of them called for balsamic vinegar, and while it seemed like 16 times the amount called for was just too much vinegar, we were afraid of botulism, so we went for it. The other recipe called for roasted onions, peppers, and garlic, so we had to rotate trays and trays of vegetables through the oven to roast.
The hours wore on and soon it was past dinner time. My roommates had to snatch whatever morsels of prepared food they could get from the fridge or cupboards before escaping the kitchen. Squashed tomatoes and puddles of tomato juice were everywhere. The kitchen looked like a war zone. We had finished the first batch earlier in the day, and it had turned out pretty well: it was Kingsolver’s recipe, and though the herbs were very present, it wasn’t bad. We named it Herby. It was the most basic of the recipes, and we had high hopes for the other two. But when the second batch was finished, it had an overpowering flavour of balsamic vinegar. The tomatoes were very juicy, so the sauce was a watery, vinegary liquid. We tried to see the vinegar flavour as a positive, and brainstormed ideas for a name – things like “zesty” and “tangy.” In the end we settled on Zingy. Everything was now riding on the final batch: the roasted vegetable sauce.
Lesson #5: Work in a Good Space.
Before we knew it, it was past two o’clock in the morning. We’d been roasting vegetables for hours, and the sauce was finally simmering on the stove. As we sat exhausted and drooping around the kitchen, one of us suddenly perked up. “Does anyone else smell burning?” It turned out that our spoon wasn’t reaching the very bottom of the massive pot, and a thick layer at the bottom – about 3/4″ – had burned. We were so exhausted, we weren’t in a good mental space, and so we began stirring strenuously, trying to scrape the burned bits off the bottom. When we sampled the sauce, we realized that now the entire pot tasted of burn. “It’s like eating a cigarette,” I declared, despondent. Exhausted, we decided to can it anyway and figure out what to do with it later. We named it Smokey. One of my friends, too tired to bike home, slept on my couch that night. We finished at around 3:30 am.
It was several months before any of us tried our sauces – not because we were saving them for winter (we’d canned enough for 18 jars each) – but because we could hardly bear to even look at them. But eventually we started trying them, and finding creative ways to use them. “Zingy is great as a base for a stir fry!” someone would email. Surprisingly, Smokey became a favourite, as a base for chilli.
A few weeks ago, we got together to enjoy one of the last jars of sauce. Loaded up with black beans and veggies and seasoned with cumin and paprika, it was a pretty delicious chilli – with that distinctive smokey flavour. Sure, we hadn’t produced the most tasty batch of sauces ever canned, but we had fun and certainly learned a lot along the way. This year, we’re taking a different approach to canning. We’re sticking to basics, like whole tomatoes, and we’re doing our canning independently. In very small batches.
Thanks for sharing your photos and stories with us…
(More to come!)
Yours in food,
Marla
Alternate title: Adventures in Fermented Cabbage!
Some samples of fermented treats. L-R - White - sauerkraut with seaweed and ginger, Pink - sauerkraut with white and red cabbage, Orange - Kimchi, Red - fermented tomato salsa
Our final summer preserving class centred around preparing kimchi and sauerkraut, which was a welcome break from the warm kitchens that canning can produce! Our instructor, Benjamin Lee, started off our class by discussing the history of fermentation as a preserving technique and moved on to the health benefits of pro-biotic foods and the value of do-it-yourself fermentation as a local strategy of resistance to the commodification, standardization, and mass-production of our culture.
In accordance to this sentiment, we all made our own non-standard variations to our kimchi and kraut. For the kimchi, we all started off with basic combinations of Napa Cabbage, daikon radish, green onions, garlic, carrots, apple and pear, which was massaged with salt until wilted. We then finished it off with miso or fish sauce and Korean chili pepper.
Stuffing the wilted cabbage into jars
We were encouraged to get a little more creative when it came time to making our sauerkraut. Some folks like their kraut pretty traditional, but once we had a taste of Benjamin’s homemade kraut with ginger and seaweed we were all converted to experimentation! It was a lot of fun personalizing our own take-home batches with seaweed, apple, pear, and spirulina.
After the cabbage and our chosen flavouring ingredients were wilted in a bowl with some sea salt, the kraut got stuffed into jars and pounded just enough to submerge it in its own juice. It’s important to keep the vegetables covered by liquid to keep down the growth of mold and scum – a larger piece of the discarded cabbage core can be placed in the jar to help keep the level of the cabbage underneath the liquid. Each jar was then covered with parchment paper and sealed up. In about a week, we’ll all be able to taste the fruits (or cabbage?) of our labours!
Here is a very basic, traditional recipe for sauerkraut. This method is for a bigger batch, but feel free to use the general ratios and experiment! Regular glass jars can also be used – just make sure your cabbage is submerged by liquid and you’re good to go!
Simple Sauerkraut
Ingredients:
5 lbs cut cabbage (approx. 2 small cabbages)
3 Tablespoons Kosher or pickling salt (non-iodized)
Directions:
On Sunday my team of intrepid volunteers and I headed out to the Select Nova Scotia Incredible Picnic. There were delicious lunches, honey samples, a microscope in which to check out soil samples, a petting zoo and more.
We had samples of lactofermented pickles (like the ones we made at the Bridgewater Sustainability Festival) and we were making sauerkraut. Now, if you’ve been reading our blog since the early days, you’ll know that sauerkraut was the great food adventure of last summer. My former co-worker, Keltie, and I got a little overzealous with the sauerkraut and ended up making about 15 heads of cabbage worth of the stuff. That’s a lot of kraut! All that kraut did force us to get creative. I like sauerkraut lightly sauteed with a little apple and onion. Keltie perfected the sauerkraut chocolate cupcake.
This year, I’m trying to hold back a little – just 4 cabbages went into this batch. Sauerkraut is possibly the easiest preserve to make. Here’s the recipe:
Simple Sauerkraut
Ingredients:
5 lbs cut cabbage (approx. 2 small cabbages)
3 Tablespoons Kosher or pickling salt (non-iodized)
Directions:
• Wash and cut (or shred) fresh cabbage. Remove any outer leaves that are damaged.
• Salt and mix the cabbage in a non-metal bowl. Use 5 tsp of coarse pickling salt for every head of cabbage.
• Pack cabbage into a crock or food-grade plastic bucket. Pack down the cabbage with a non-metal tool (such as a mason jar or rolling pin) – but, if you like your kraut crispy, be gentle. Water will emerge from the cabbage.
• Lay a plate, fitted to the size of your container, on top of the sauerkraut. On top of the plate, rest a weight (such as a clean rock, heavy jug or bag of water).
• Let stand up to 6 weeks (depending on how strong you would like your sauerkraut to taste). If you’re keeping your kraut at room temperature it may be done in as little as 3 weeks. Cooler temperatures (less than 18 degrees Celsius) will require longer fermentation, but some say it gives you better flavour. Keep tasting the kraut as the weeks progress and refrigerate it when it achieves the tanginess you like!
Delicious Additions to Sauerkraut:
- grated apple
- grated beet
- chopped onion
- dill seeds
- juniper berries
- caraway seeds
- white wine
- celery seeds
- bay leaves
What’s your favourite way to enjoy sauerkraut?
Update:
I just got this email from Food Action Committee volunteer Angela Hersey:
Hi Marla!
I have a question about sauerkraut – when it’s finished fermenting, can I simply store it in jars? And does it need to be refrigerated or can I keep it on a shelf (maybe then it would need to be processed?)
Thanks!
Angela
My response:
When it’s finished fermenting, you should put it in the fridge (or a root cellar). This will slow down the fermentation and it should keep for a few months. If you kept it on a shelf, it would keep getting stronger. Alternatively, you can process it in a boiling water bath and keep it on the shelf. This, however, will kill off the good bacteria that lacto-fermentation is so famous for.
Last Saturday the Food Connections gang had a fantastic time at Bridgewater’s Growing Green Sustainability Festival. It was a beautiful South Shore summer morning and everybody we met had big smiles on their faces! It was easy to see why – the festival had music performers, a ‘walk and roll’ parade, an expanded farmers market, kids activities, and lots of booths with information on helping you live greener and healthier.
We were there to talk about making natural brined mixed pickles using lacto-fermentation, the ultimate method in low-energy food preservation. Just like sauerkraut, these pickles will become sour over time, simply by fermenting in a salt brine. This is a great way to preserve your veggies on hot summer days when the last thing you want to do is boil a huge pot of water to can your produce. All you need to do is use impeccably fresh produce (which wasn’t hard for us to do with vendors like the Broadfork Farm, Indian Garden farm, and Watershed farm surrounding our booth!) and cover it in a salt brine and maybe throw in some herbs. Then you let it sit at room temperature for a few weeks. That’s it.
We used a two-litre commercial pickle jar to brine our vegetables. You don’t normally want to use this type of jar for hot-water canning, but they’re perfect for a brined pickle. The jar is not sealed during the fermentation process so you can taste your pickles from day to day as they go through changes – in fact, you know when your pickles are done when they taste nice and sour! (Jars are a nice way to ferment small batches of pickles, but you could definitely use the classic method of filling a crock or big plastic pail and weighing your vegetables down with a weight if you have a big batch.)
We used plastic sandwich-sized Ziploc bags full of brine to cover our pickles. The advantage of using this method is that the liquid-filled bag changes shape to fit your jar really easily, and will ensure that your veggies remain submerged in the brine. During the fermentation process it is normal for a little bit of scum to form, and you can just lift the plastic bag out of the jar and rinse it off if it starts to develop.
You can leave the jars out in room temperature to ferment for a few weeks - warmer rooms speed up the fermentation, but some say you get better flavour out of your pickles, if it’s a bit cooler . 
Our three big jars of mixed pickles are now starting to bubble away in our kitchen at the Ecology Action Centre. I snuck a green bean out of one of the jars today, and I’ve got to say they’re tasting great. The transformation is starting to happen!
Are you a Pickle Princess?
A Kraut Crusader?
A Dehydrating Diva?
A Canning King?
A Freezing Fanatic?
A Jam Jar Juggler?
We want to get Nova Scotians excited about PRESERVING OUR HARVEST, so we’re holding our first ever contest!
Send us your best canning or preserving story, or a picture that you took that really shows your enthusiasm for preserving the Nova Scotia harvest! This could be anything from a picture of you canning with all your friends, to a story of how you involve your kids when you ‘put food away’, to a favourite memory you have of using your local food in the middle of winter. Deadline for entries is Sept 30.
We’ll post them on our blog throughout the summer, and on October 3 we’ll draw from all the names of people who submitted something to us and the lucky winner will win a Fantastic Food-Preservation-Related PRIZE!!
Just e-mail us at preservingtheharvest@ecologyaction.ca with your story or photo – or leave them in the ‘comments’ section below this post – and you will automatically be entered in the contest.
Here’s a sample story of my own from a few years ago to get ya’ll started….
I woke up early one Thursday morning to cut up cucumbers and zucchini so they could sit in salt during the day when I was at work (the salt draws out the moisture from the cut vegetables and keeps them crunchier once they’re pickled). Once I got home from work, my plan was to spend the entire evening in the kitchen, canning some bread and butter pickles and making venison meatloaf for a friend at work.
At work I was offered some free Blue Bomber tickets for a CFL football game that very evening. (I was living in Winnipeg at the time). I’m not the biggest football fan, but I’m not one to say no to free tickets so I accepted them, thinking that my husband could find a buddy to take to the game and I could continue my evening pickling plans. So when I got home, I got ready to make my pickles and started boiling the water in the canner. An hour later, after the first batch of pickles had been canned and I was into mixing up the venison meatloaf, my husband came to me and said he couldn’t find anybody to go with him to the game. The onus was on ME to accompany him to the damn football game. At this point, kickoff was about an hour and 15 minutes away. No problem, right?
At about this time I checked my e-mail. There was a new message from the farmers from our CSA saying that there were extra FREE CUCUMBERS available for pick-up a couple of blocks away on a first come, first serve basis. My mind raced… If I could get Jeff to run over and pick up a couple more pounds of cukes, I could get the meatloaf in the oven in the meantime, and then when I got the cucumbers from Jeff, I’d cut them into slices and get them soaking in salt by the time the meatloaf was ready to come out of the oven in time to go to the football game, and then I could can them when we came home from the game! I could make it all work! We might miss the beginning of the game, but it would all work out!
For some reason my dear husband agreed to this plan and he ran off to fetch the free cukes. He must really love me. Or maybe he just loves pickles. I don’t know.
To make everything more unmanageable, I decided that I didn’t want to make sweet bread and butter pickles from this new batch of cucumbers – I wanted sour dill pickle rounds even though I had no dill. Wasn’t it convenient that we would walk by a large supermarket on our way to the football stadium? It certainly was a strange feeling to walk into the game with huge fronds of dill erupting from my purse – I got my share of heckling from the drunken football fans when they caught a glimpse of it, but I felt quite vindicated when the Bombers actually won the game, the first win of the season. I totally chalk that up to the power of dill. Anyway, the Bombers won, the second batch of pickles was successfully processed later that night and EVERYTHING WORKED OUT.
The moral of the story – pickles wait for no man. When it’s cuke season, you gotta work around the cukes!
Yours in Food,
Alison
I just came back from a great Lunch and Learn session at the Seaport Farmers Market that was co-ordinated by the Women’s Community Space at the YWCA. The meeting was designed as a community-based brainstorm session to discuss access to nutritious food in NS. It was a great opportunity to share experiences and ideas on how to strengthen food security in Nova Scotia from diverse groups all over the province.
Lil from The Wooden Monkey started us off with a rousing talk about the importance of food sovereignty in Nova Scotia and spoke passionately about the importance of eating REAL food that is grown in Nova Scotia in a sustainable way.
We eventually broke off into small groups to discuss the issues around food security that sometimes get neglected in larger discussions. Increasing confidence in our community’s food skills, and looking for ways to increase accessibility were common threads in most of the group discussions. It was really inspiring to talk to people across different communities to realize that we all want to work toward the same goals. I came away from the meeting with a lot of enthusiasm about planning our own canning and preserving workshops with the EAC this summer.
What does food security mean to YOU? What kind of food skills do you want to gain in order to strengthen your own food security in your community?
