Welcome

Welcome All! I'm a dreamer, I hope you are too! A Posse ad Esse, or From possibility to reality, is a general state of mind. I hope you'll share your possibilities with me as I will with you. Namaste~

September 11, 2008

I promised

Ok, I promised a Harvest keepers post tonight, but it's gonna be a quick one. We were able to make some last minute plans tonight to go and hear T. Boone Pickens of "The Pickens Plan" speak to Utahns about the ideas that he has for resolving our nations energy crisis and moving us toward energy Independence. It was very interesting and I'll be posting on it as soon as I can, but right now I am t i r e d!!
And speaking of "can"...on to the harvest keeping post.
This year we've been trying to make sure that we put up any extras that we have from not only our garden harvests, but from our gleaning efforts and from the farmers market. We're pretty happy with the nice array that we're building in the pantry. (BTW, that's not everything. There's about twenty - thirty more can's of stuff down in the basement cold storage.) What you can't see to the left of the picture is pickles and some beets. All told I believe we counted 63 total jars of canned goods. Some are qts, some are pints, but all have been tallied on our new handy dandy record tracking system...Umm yeah, that's a regular school notebook but it works! As we have read and learned from a lot of books and many of the great blogs out there, we decided that we needed to keep track of what we have, or we may miss something later.
We are going to be beginning a similar tracking system for the dry goods in our basement as well as the stuff in our outside chest freezer.

I also had a question the other night about "what are dilly beans" and my mouth hit the floor as I thought "hmm, there only like, the greatest way to put up beans!". But here you go, you know who you are, here are what dilly beans are.

"How do you make them?" That was the question from Meadowlark the other day. Here is the recipe:
cook beans for 10 minutes. (approximately two pounds)
Into approx. 5 sterilized pint jars, place 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes. 2/3 garlic cloves, and 1/2 tsp dried dill.
Separately boil 3 cups vinegar and 3 cups water with 4 tsp salt.
After boiling beans, pack them into jars and cover with the boiling liquid.
At this point you will need to put on the rings and lids and boil the bean jars.
I'm sorry but I don't have the times available for water bath canning but if you Google it, you will find the answer I'm sure.

And finally, I leave you with this thought.
"Happy vegetables come from Happy farmers" ...Be happy!
P~

1 comment:

It's me said...

Yummy... red pepper flakes. Sounds tasty. I'm supposed to process 10lbs of beans this weekend. Thanks, you're just in time!

Your pantry looks great btw, and just remember: T. Boone Pickens does not have our nation's best interest in mind. He has HIS best interests. Between his stake in Natural Gas and the water rights he is buying up, his plan might provide a tiny bit of relief, but in the long term, it'll make things worse. Just my two cents.