A group of stragglers lay in the crisper of the fridge: those last minute green peppers that kept calling out to be used in something, anything. I know many of you out there also have that final group of peppers, right at this moment, calling out to you. Are you going to slice them up and freeze them? Put them on a pizza, in some chili, or in a batch of spaghetti sauce? There are so many great things to be done with green peppers, but one of my personal favorites has to be…STUFFED!
I’ve made many a stuffed pepper in my life, and there are a ton of delicious stuffed pepper recipes out there. I like this one because it’s so very simple. I usually have all these ingredients on hand. The recipe makes a lot of stuffing, more than I needed for the peppers, but that’s ok. I ate the stuffing on its own for a couple of lunches; it’s a tasty meal on its own. Enjoy!
Vegetarian Stuffed Peppers
4-6 medium peppers
2 T. olive oil
1 c. brown rice (I used 3/4 c. brown rice, 1/4 c. pearl barley)
2 c. vegetable broth
1 small red onion
1 clove garlic
7 oz canned chopped tomatoes
pinch each of dried thyme, parsley and rosemary
1/2 c. peas (can thaw from frozen)
salt and pepper
1. First cook the rice in the vegetable broth and 1/2 c. of water. Either cook in a pot using instructions on rice package or use a rice cooker. Assemble all your other recipe ingredients while the rice cooks. Brown rice can take a bit to cook. So find a good book and put up your feet. 🙂
2. Turn oven on to 400 degrees F. Wash and dry peppers, put them on a baking sheet and brush lightly with olive oil (I misted them with olive oil using a mister, click here to see). Bake peppers for 12 minutes.
3. Let peppers cool on the pan enough so that you can slice them in half, remove stems and seeds. Lay them, open side up, on the baking sheet.
4. Peel and dice the onion. Pour 1 T. olive oil in pan, bring it to medium heat, and throw the diced onions in. After 3 or 4 minutes, mince the garlic and add it to the onion. Cook for another minute, then add the tomatoes, herbs and a little salt and pepper. Let the mixture bubble and simmer on med/low heat for about 5 minutes. Add the rice and peas to this mixture, then spoon into the halves of pepper.
5. Put the stuffed peppers into the preheated oven for 10 minutes. For extra flavor, sprinkle shredded cheese of your choice on top of each pepper after the 10 minutes are up, switch the oven to broil, and broil for 3-4 minutes or until cheese is beautiful and bubbly.
I thought this was a nice chart showing some easily obtained ‘brown’ (carbon) material for your compost pile. I always seem to have plenty of ‘green’ materials (vegetable scraps, mostly), and I’m trying to focus on adding more carbon to make our compost as balanced as it can be. Though this chart is certainly not exhaustive, it’s a nice start!
I’ve become very interested in projects that normal, everyday people can do that will harness the free power of the sun. This ‘solar flower’ is intriguing, and it can be built very cheaply, or even for no cost if you visit a scrap heap and rummage through your own ‘junk’. What is it used for? “Basically, generating heat. With that heat you can then run external applications such as generating electricity, smokeless cooking, heating and purifying water, making charcoal, anything that heat can be used for.”
A solar energy collector you can make easily using scrap materials.
What’s it for?
Basically, generating heat. With that heat you can then run external applications such as generating electricity, smokeless cooking, heating and purifying water, making charcoal, anything that heat can be used for.
How much does it cost?
Depends. All the materials are things you can find in a corner store or scrap heap, so it could potentially cost anywhere between nothing and, let’s say about €$£50 per device.
How much power does it produce, and how efficient is it?
One square meter of full sunlight is about one thousand Watts of power, which is the collector size for which the SolarFlower is designed (although it can probably drive something twice as large). Depending on the materials used, you can assume at least 50% thermal efficiency overall (probably higher), so that would give you 500 Watts in full sunlight. This is enough to heat 50 litres of water to 100 C in a little over 8.5 hours.
What principle do you use to track the sun non-electrically?
It’s a little complicated to express in text, I’m working on some animations at the moment which will make it clearer.
Basically there are two collector mirrors, one big one that concentrates all the energy you’re going to use to power your applications, and a smaller one attached to it which drives the tracker. When the main collector is pointing directly at the sun the focus point of the secondary collector is sitting just off the edge of a little boiler filled with a small amount of ethanol. As the sun moves off by about a degree that hot spot shifts onto the boiler, which in a minute or two starts the ethanol boiling, the vapor exits into a chamber (metal tin) attached to the boiler, and forces out some of the liquid ethanol in it. That liquid goes through a pipe and pours into the waterwheel assembly, turning it, which turns the gearing, which turns the two collectors into the sun, the hot spot shifts off the boiler, the boiling stops, the vapor in the tin starts to collapse and the resulting vacuum sucks ethanol from a reservoir below the waterwheel and refills the whole system.
It all sits there until the sun moves off again.
The small collector has about a two hour range, so if the sun goes behind a cloud or something the system can catch up to it.
What license / patent / protection is on the design?
None. This is an open source hardware project, and as such is not owned, or able to be owned by any one person or company.
Since the designs have now been published they are unable to be patented by anyone, including the original designer.
At some point the project may take on a Creative Commons or similar license, but it will be one which allows any form of use, including commercial. (In fact you are encouraged to make and sell these things, royalty free).
The only thing you are not permitted to do is stop anyone else making and using them in any way.
Fast Fungi Bricks: Mushroom Blocks Better than Concrete?!
Most people pay attention to the part of the mushroom we see (and sometimes even eat) that grows above the ground – but what about the latticework of tendrils that intertwine inside the dirt from which they grow?
As it turns out, this malleable network can, per Philip Ross, “be used to form a super-strong, water-, mold- and fire-resistant building material. The dried mycelium can be grown and formed into just about any shape, and it has a remarkable consistency that makes it stronger, pound for pound, than concrete.” (via Inhabitat)
Stools and chairs are just the start – stone-like arches and eventually whole buildings may be yet to come. Like bamboo, the speed of growth and workability of the material make it a great candidate for locally-grown architecture, particularly in fungi-friendly climates. The strength of concrete, but easier to create and lightweight to boot – we have not seen the last of mushroom-based building technologies.
We got out to the garden a couple of days ago, and on a whim, wheeled one of our yellow dump trucks with us. It made a great container for us to fill up with all the last-minute yellow pear tomatoes we could find. It was like a treasure hunt, peering into the jungle of tomato vines, trying to spot those beautiful golden gems. A few tiny red tomatoes were hiding in there too…which promptly ended up in Noah’s mouth as a juicy snack!
After loading up the tomatoes, we made a big production of driving the dump truck into the house, where we ate most of the harvest with our lunch. Some ended up in a pile on the counter, next to the last of our green peppers and one lone cucumber.
Each day we have been filling up our pockets with any green tomatoes we can find. The kids have found this hilarious: scandalous, even–for all summer long I have emphasized to ONLY pick the yellow or red tomatoes, NOT the green. They think they are getting away with something, plucking the green ones! But alas, all those green tomatoes are coming inside with us, for the warm ripening days are over. Of course tomatoes taste best when ripened on the vine, but we will try to get some more out of our last harvest by placing all the underripe ones into a paper bag with a banana. The ethylene gas released by the banana as it ripens will also help the tomatoes reach their potential. Last year we tried the same technique with an apple, and got pretty good results. I read that bananas release much larger amounts of ethylene than any other fruit (like apples), so we are curious to see if we get better results than we did with the apple.
(Note: Bananas, for all their wonderful qualities, are not a sustainable food source as sold conventionally. Many people who seek sustainable lifestyles and want to lessen harm to earth and their fellow earthlings have given up bananas completely. I have cut back, but have found it very difficult to give these amazing and versatile fruits. Keep an eye out for a discussion here on the blog about bananas and their place in a sustainable diet and world.)
There are several crabapple trees in our neighborhood that go unharvested. Every year the apples fall to the ground to rot, when they could be utilized in several ways, even if not for eating fresh. Most people do not realize that these little fruits can make delicious food! Here is an interesting way to prepare them: we will be trying it soon. -Andi
When most people think of crabapples, they think of small, inedible* fruit. The trees they grow on are often beautiful (even ornamental), and they are excellent pollinators, but traditionally, crabapples aren’t eaten fresh. They are more likely to be used to make jellies and jams, or, in the focus on today’s blog post, pickled crabapples. Some of you might remember pickled crabapples as a side at Thanksgiving along with, or as an alternative to, cranberry sauce. Try the recipe below to enjoy your own delicious, homemade pickled crabapples!
Canned (Pickled) Crabapples
Preparation Time: 2¼ hours Yield: Approximately 6 pints
You need:
3 pounds crabapples
3 cups extra fine granulated sugar or 2½ cups honey
2½ cups cider vinegar
2½ cups water
1 teaspoon whole cloves
1 teaspoon whole cardamom seeds
3 sticks cinnamon, each broken in 2 or 3 pieces
Directions:
Wash the crabapples (discard those that are blemished), wipe clean the blossom ends, and leave the stem intact but trimmed short.
Prick the crabapples in 2 or 3 places with a fine skewer and place half in a large kettle. Cover with the sugar (or honey), vinegar, and water. Stir all together.
Tie the spices in cheesecloth and add to the crabapples in the kettle.
Cover the kettle and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a gentle simmer and cook for 15-20 minutes, or until the apples are tender but not falling apart.
Remove the crab apples from the hot syrup and put aside. Repeat with the remaining half of the crabapples.
When all the crabapples have been cooked, remove the kettle from the heat and return the first batch to the hot syrup.
Allow the apples to cool in the syrup.
Drain the crabapples, discard the spices, return the syrup to the pan, and bring to the boil.
Pack the crab apples into pint or quart jars, cover with the boiling syrup to within ¼ inch of the tops, and screw on the lids.
*Note: There are also edible varieties of crabapple that are slightly larger and much sweeter. If you are using sweet, edible crabapples in this recipe — like Chestnut Crabapple or Whitney Crabapple — consider adjusting the amount of sweetener used (sugar or honey), since such a large quantity will not be necessary.
A Sunflower House is an awesome garden experience to work on with the little ones in your life!
Our dreams of a sunflower house started when I checked out a copy of Roots Shoots Buckets and Boots by Sharon Lovejoy. What a magical book! With soft watercolor illustrations and easy to read instructions (she calls them ‘recipes’), Lovejoy showed us such wonderful ideas: a pizza patch, a tub of potatoes, a butterfly garden. This book is such an amazing tool for drawing kids into gardening, that I actually bought a copy of it. We like looking at the pictures and reading about the ideas during story time.
The illustrations for a Sunflower House project drew us in immediately. A clubhouse made of sunflowers! The kids were all as mesmerized by the idea as I was, and we started making big plans that very day. This ‘RECIPE‘ is not from Roots Shoots Buckets and Boots, but it looks great, too, check it out!
Here are Noah and Ella, measuring our space:
Now, things did not go as smoothly as I’d hoped, in the beginning. It took us a lot of tedious labor just to prepare the trench into which the seeds would eventually go. With the first plunge of our trowels into the soil, we realized we were actually digging into a bed of stones. Using a large shovel and several trowels, we spent hours (spread out over several days) scraping out stones, filling our little wheelbarrow, emptying it, repeating. I simply could not believe how many little stones could take the space of a tiny trench!
Here we are, working on our trench:
Next we filled the trench with soil.
The most exciting part came when we put in the seeds. We had several different varieties of sunflowers (which I had found at the dollar store for 3/1.00!). We followed Lovejoy’s ‘recipe’ for measuring out the space between each seed, and alternating varieties in order to create a variegated wall of flowers. This took much more concentration than I had expected (I ended up with quite a headache, actually).
THEN the struggles really began. Within two days, almost all of our seeds had been very obviously sabotaged. Only little, empty holes remained. Some critter had come to feast, and I can’t say I blamed them. I mean honestly, there is not a much more tasty seed to eat than a sunflower seed! I was chagrined to think of all the concentration that had gone into the careful measuring, counting, planning—all for the benefit of some tiny paws (or beaks) set on indiscriminate devouring. We put more seeds in. This time, we just sorta kinda followed a plan. The holes left by little digging paws showed us where to replace the seeds, so no measuring.
Result of planting effort #2? Almost every seed, dug out and eaten. A few of seeds that had survived the first planting were starting to sprout. Out of those, 2 had been sliced, I’m assuming by cutworms.
We were already into the 3rd week of attempting to start our sunflower house, and feeling a bit gloomy. I had an ‘aha’ moment, after stewing for an entire evening about the critters that had found a free buffet in the yard. I thought we could start the seeds indoors, and then after the plants were bigger, stronger and less vulnerable to attack, we could transplant them into the trench.
For 2 whole weeks, we nursed the indoor sunflowers sprouts. By now we are pretty good at taking care of indoor starts—and I had confidence in our success due to the wild success of our tomatoes (which we started from seed this year and were at that point really starting to take off outside in the garden).
The day came for the transplant. Lovingly, gently, we put all the seedlings into their homes (and at this point I was still sort of trying to alternate varieties as we went along).
AND….within the DAY, all the sprouts DIED.
By now, my enthusiasm had been transformed into pure and utter frustration. I still wanted the kids to get a chance to have a sunflower house. I still believed in this project and could still see, in my mind, the magical playspace we had dreamed of. They had begun to look at me suspisciously whenever I talked of our sunflower house plans. They didn’t trust that the whole idea was even true anymore, and probably thought it was all a fairy tale. The project was no longer something they were thrilled about, so I sort of had to forge on with this one on my own, still determined.
I took the rest of the seeds that I had (plus I went the dollar store and bought the rest of their packets—not a huge loss at 3 packs for a dollar), and went on a seed planting frenzy. No measuring, no careful sorting and alternating. I just took those seeds and started pushing them into the ground, one after another, going around the perimeter several times. I may have cursed at the seeds a couple times (so much for tender loving care), so it’s a good thing the kids weren’t around during this planting.
But hey…there is a happy ending after all! We’ll just sorta skip over the ‘dark moments of the sunflower house project’ and pretend it all went the way it was meant to. 😉
Sprouts began to not only come up, but thrive. Critters stayed out of sight (I am pretty certain the neighbor’s trusty cat had a lot to do with this. And I am also pretty certain we praised that cat profusely when we saw him stalking a chipmunk). I began to really believe that we might have success, and the kids began to notice that something was happening with our seemingly abandoned project.
Fast forward to now—after weeks of tending the finally successful sunflowers–and the dream has become a reality. Once the sprouts established themselves all they needed was occasional watering. The kids now have a magical place to play. With no prompting from me, I find them in there with their snacks, books, or just hanging out.
The bees have come to our flowers in droves. Initially this alarmed a few of the kids, who are terrified of anything that buzzes. I explained that the bees won’t usually sting if they are left alone, and that they have a wonderful job–helping all plants to keep growing and thriving. The kids have learned to get excited when they see a bee happily crawling around on one of the flower’s faces.
We can see the sunflower house from Noah’s bedroom window, which is a nice touch. When it’s not quite time to go outside for the day, the kids can peer out the window at the wonderful thing we have created! All the struggle, hard work, and frustrations were absolutely worth it, and you can bet that a sunflower house will grow in our yard every summer from now on.
Though the title claims it’s shocking, I feel a sad lack of shock. I’m still very disturbed, however, and as more studies are conducted, perhaps all of us will start to take the threat more seriously. We NEED to know what is in our food, and we need to start protecting our water supply!
We, unfortunately, live in a world where the dollar is king. It takes priority over everything, and everyone — well, except for those few who possess a lot of them. Any attempt to regulate profit-centric industry is proclaimed as ‘communism’ and deemed an injustice and an obstacle to everything from economic prosperity to world peace. This thinking somehow concludes that market forces and self-interest are always working in our best interest. But they are not.
When the U.S. Constitution was formed, the U.S. government’s role was to protect the rights of its populace, and little else. Today the goverment’s role is to protect the interests of Big Business, and little else. For us, the little people on the ground, the government, Big Business and the media — their PR department — have all the appearances of being on an extractive offensive against us all.
When it comes to GMOs, industry has been allowed to call its own shots. In the World According to Monsanto documentary we saw footage of George Bush senior on an early 1990s tour of a Monsanto laboratory, where Monsanto executives complained to him that they couldn’t sell their exciting new products due to onerous regulatory requirements. The ecologically inept Mr. Bush then essentially told them that this would no longer be a problem, as “we’re now in the deregulation business”. Today, in countries like the U.S. of A., the GMO industry simply regulates itself. If the biotech industry deems its wares safe for people and place, they are placed on shelves ready for purchase. Worse, instead of a situation where discerning buyers can, at the very least, choose to take or leave these items, the industry has managed to get GMO ingredients into most of the nation’s edible, drinkable products, and unlabelled, so consumers don’t have a choice.
Currently, up to 85 percent of U.S. corn is genetically engineered as are 91 percent of soybeans and 88 percent of cotton (cottonseed oil is often used in food products). According to industry, up to 95% of sugar beets are now GE. It has been estimated that upwards of 70 percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves–from soda to soup, crackers to condiments–contain genetically engineered ingredients. —centreforfoodsafety.org
Big Biotech has even fought and made it illegal for other industries to market their goods as being without GMOs. The hypocrisy here is difficult to overstate. In order for a seed to be patented and sold under license, it needs to be shown to be substantially ‘different‘ from the non-GMO version. And yet, a Ma & Pa corner store cannot market their organically produced food as ‘non GMO’, due to the law of ‘substantial equivalence‘, which states that GMO and non-GMO ingredients are essentially the same, and thus to use ‘GMO-free’ labels is biological discrimination. (It should be noted that the person who initially coined the term ’substantial equivalence’ and pressed it into law in order to ensure the speedy approval of GMO strains, is non other than Michael Taylor, the Obama administration’s senior advisor to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is responsible for “protecting and promoting public health“. These are the same people who are conducting armed raids on organic farms, and this Michael Taylor also happens to have spent the last few decades in the revolving door between either working for the biotech industry, or legally representing/defending it, or working at government level to oversee the regulations (or lack of) for it. Talk about a conflict of interests….)
New Long Term Study Throws Cat Amongst the Pigeons
Until now, most studies on the possible health implications of GMOs for us captive customers have been organised and monitored by the very same industries that make those GMOs. And, normally those studies have lasted no longer than 90 days. When an industry has spent billions on researching new GMO strains, it’s not hard to imagine there might be at least just a tad of bias about their products involved… but this is exactly how it works.
Now we have a new study at hand, one that has been independently financed and researched. And, unlike the industry-led studies, this one has been run over a much longer period — two full years. It’s the world’s first long term study of Monsanto’s widely used Roundup herbicide and Roundup Ready Maize — unless you want to count the decade of experimentation on the human race itself…. (But, that can’t count, of course, as there has been no proper research or control groups in this area….)
In the first ever study to examine the long-term effects of Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, or the NK603 Roundup-resistant GM maize also developed by Monsanto, scientists found that rats exposed to even the smallest amounts, developed mammary tumours and severe liver and kidney damage as early as four months in males, and seven months for females, compared with 23 and 14 months respectively for a control group.
“This research shows an extraordinary number of tumours developing earlier and more aggressively – particularly in female animals. I am shocked by the extreme negative health impacts,” said Dr Michael Antoniou, molecular biologist at King’s College London, and a member of CRIIGEN, the independent scientific council which supported the research.
GM crops have been approved for human consumption on the basis of 90-day animal feeding trials. But three months is the equivalent of late adolescence in rats, who can live for almost two years (700 days), and there have long been calls to study the effects over the course of a lifetime.
The peer-reviewed study, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Caen, found that rats fed on a diet containing NK603 Roundup resistant GM maize, or given water containing Roundup at levels permitted in drinking water, over a two-year period, died significantly earlier than rats fed on a standard diet.
Up to half the male rats and 70% of females died prematurely, compared with only 30% and 20% in the control group. Across both sexes the researchers found that rats fed Roundup in their water or NK603 developed two to three times more large tumours than the control group. By the beginning of the 24th month, 50-80% of females in all treated groups had developed large tumours, with up to three per animal.
By contrast, only 30% of the control group were affected. Scientists reported the tumours “were deleterious to health due to [their] very large size,” making it difficult for the rats to breathe, [and] causing problems with their digestion which resulted in haemorrhaging.
The paper, published in the scientific journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today, concluded that NK603 and Roundup caused similar damage to the rats’ health, whether they were consumed together or on their own. The team also found that even the lowest doses of Roundup, which fall well within authorised limits in drinking tap water, were associated with severe health problems.
“The rat has long been used as a surrogate for human toxicity. All new pharmaceutical, agricultural and household substances are, prior to their approval, tested on rats. This is as good an indicator as we can expect that the consumption of GM maize and the herbicide Roundup, impacts seriously on human health,” Antoniou added. — TheGrocer.co.uk
Monsanto is already in active denial over this study. And this is perhaps the saddest part for me — as Monsanto and their ilk can turn the whole issue over whether GMOs are bad for us or not into an extended sideshow distraction that can be argued for years, or even decades. Just like the current U.S. election fiasco, where the critically important issues of climate change, peak oil and transition away from the perpetual growth paradigm are totally sidelined to instead focus on far more trivial campaign nonsense, the argument over the health implications of GMOs, as important as that is (don’t get me wrong on that point), still distracts us from far more profound root issues about them.
My point here is that the era of large scale, globalised industrial agriculture is coming to an end. We no longer have the energy to maintain it, and nature cannot take its abuse any longer. This ‘end’ will occur by one of the following means: 1) rapid human transition to smaller scale, biodiverse, low-carbon systems that actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back to work in our soils, or 2) it will happen by necessity as fossil fuels wane and starve the system to death, or 3) it will occur via the destructive forces of a biosphere out of balance.
In reality, all GMOs are is an attempt to deal with, and capitalise on, the symptoms created by reductionist industrial agriculture. Battling symptoms is a process that can never be won. The only real cure is prevention.
It’s clear that Big Biotech will ignore and/or work to undermine any study that contradicts their own. To be able to actually prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ the health implications for humans themselves, in a way that would satisfy them completely, I think, we’d have to have an island set aside just for a 20 year experiment, where half the population ate imported GMO products, and the other half ate island-grown organics. This would be the only way to ensure that all other conditions were at least similar. But even then I’m sure the industry would find ‘discrepancies’ in lifestyle between individuals in the groups, and the argument would go on, and on, and on….
In short, if the outcome of a study is negative towards GMOs, then that study will never be regarded as truly scientific by Big Biotech. You will never hear a Monsanto CEO —who has a legal obligation to make profit for shareholders — come out and say, “Oh, hell, I learned something new. You’re absolutely right — we’ll close up shop right now!”
As far as the consumer side of this goes, the base issue is the freedom to choose. Even though the cigarette industry denied its harmful effects for decades, at least people were not forced to smoke. Yes, through stealth advertising you were made to feel you were very uncool unless you partook, but at least it was not ground up and included, unlabelled, in almost every product available for purchase.
I hope this new study provides impetus to Proposition 37. Gaining critical mass in public desire to see GMOs labelled will do wonders towards seeing supermarket chains boycott them. This could spell the death knell for GMOs. But, as mentioned above, I’d like to see the ‘critical mass’ evolve even further, to include an holistic understanding of soil science, peak oil, climate change, industrial agriculture, perpetual growth economics, an unravelling ecology and society, and their interconnectness with each other. Unless this happens, we’ll always be dealing with symptoms and isolated ‘issues’, and will never create a permanent culture.
We got a little too excited this year when planting our tomatoes. We remembered how much we loved the luscious little yellow pear tomatoes, so we planted 5 of them. That may not sound like a lot, but when each plant keeps producing, and producing, suddenly 5 plants create way too many tomatoes to enjoy.
Big red tomatoes are easier, I think, to deal with in excess. Simply make sauce! I toyed around with the idea of making yellow tomato sauce (and I still may), but then I remembered this idea that I had seen somewhere. Ideally, I’d like to dehydrate the tomatoes in a food dryer, or a homemade solar dryer, to remove all the moisture. I have neither of those options at the moment, so a long slow roast in the oven is the way I went. This is an excellent way to do something different with all those little cherry, grape or pear tomatoes that keep piling up! Here is what I did:
1. Slice the little tomatoes in half and lay them on a baking sheet, cut side up. You can do this with any little tomatoes, of any color. Drizzle with the tiniest bit of olive oil (I find my handy mister perfect for a task like this to get a nice, light even coating). Sprinkle with a tiny bit of salt. I used pepper this time, but next time I won’t–the pepper flavor was a little too much in the end.
2. Place tomatoes in an oven that is preheated to 250 degrees. Then walk away and find a great book to read. Do not clean the house. That’s not fun. Do something FUN and relaxing, but don’t leave the house for 3 hours. That’s how long it will take for the tomatoes to be mostly leathery, with just a bit of moisture left in their centers.
3. Eat a whole bunch of them. Mmmm! Now stuff the rest in a jar and cover with olive oil. If you are little horrified, like I was at first, about dumping a bunch of olive oil into a jar–don’t worry. The oil can still be used for other recipes once your tomatoes have been eaten up. You can keep these in the fridge for a few weeks. Some sources say several months. I really doubt they would last that long without being devoured! Eat them plain from the jar, or put on a salad, or a pizza. Use them like you would sundried tomatoes. If you have a great recipe using sundried tomatoes, or a cool use for these little roasted nuggets of tomato goodness, please post a link to it in our comments!
This past Friday was very busy in the Little Hands Kitchen!
We didn’t harvest a thing from the garden, but we took a little trip out of the suburbs and into the country. My Uncle Loren (gardening guru, and one of my heroes) has apple and pear trees on his property, and he gave us permission to come do a little picking. When we arrived, we were amazed by the sheer amount of apples available to us, for free. They were beautiful!
We filled two 5-gallon buckets (I would have kept going, but the kids were getting wiped out!). We also picked 5 pounds of mini-pears while we were there (not pictured, but trust me). The sweetness of those mini pears is something I can attest to from prior experience; there was no leaving without taking some magical sweet pears with us.
Once we were home, and had gathered up the rest of the gang from preschool (Rylee and Brady were the lucky two who were out of school due to teacher-in-service, so they were my apple helpers), it was time to get to work.
First we filled a pot with chopped apples. We didn’t need to core the apples, since we’d be using our new Roma Food Mill, but to mix things up a bit, sometimes we’d go ahead and just core/slice them with an apple slicer-do-hicky. Rylee liked showing her strength with it.
In batches, we put the apples into a pot with about an 2 inches of water at the bottom. We’d start the apples boiling, then turn down the heat and let them cook until we could poke a fork into them.
The mini-pears were put into a large pot whole. All we did was remove the stems. I had already made a batch of pear sauce with these magical little pears and I knew that the food mill could handle them whole.
When the apples/pears were soft enough, we scooped them out into a colander in the sink (reserving the water to reuse for the next batch of apples), then processed them in the food mill. This is the VERY BEST part of the applesauce project. The kids (and me too) LOVE to see the soft apples squish into the hopper and separate into a pile of mushy skins/seeds, and a bowl full of luscious sauce. The mill is easy to operate, and the handle is easy enough for even the 3 year old to turn.
The sauce making was more time-consuming than I had thought it would be, and we only got through a small portion of our apples. In one day we were able to process 9 pints of applesauce, and still had a TON of apples left.
Here are 7 out of 9 pints of canned sauce. One went home with Rylee. One broke in the hot water bath as I tried to can it…oops! Everything has a learning curve!
These apples are so amazingly delicious, that we have been eating them right out of the bucket.
One of those pint jars (or maybe more) will be going to Uncle Loren, since they were his apples! Many thanks to him for allowing the Little Hands Garden to use up some of this wonderful fruit. I will can a few more batches, and we will be enjoying the applesauce all winter long. This stuff blows the store-bought stuff out of the water COMPLETELY! We didn’t even have to add any sugar or cinnamon.
Here is a link to the site that helped me figure out how to make/can the sauce. I am a complete newbie, so sites like this are essential. My mom told me she has canned ‘tons’ of applesauce. Of all my childhood memories, this is one I simply do not remember! Thanks to the internet, I figured out the basics, and it wasn’t hard. Time consuming? Maybe a little. But once you taste a bit of fresh, homemade applesauce, you will realize that going through the apple-to-jar experience is SO worth your time. The link above suggests using different types of apples for a sweet sauce. We used the magical little pears to suit this purpose. The apples alone are delicious, but the super-sweet pears added just enough bursting flavor so that we didn’t have to add any other ingredients.
Now get out there and find yourself some apples! Find an orchard HERE, or ask around to see if anyone has an apple tree that they would let you pick from. You’d be amazed how much fruit goes to waste. I know of two apples trees in my own neighborhood that produce lots of fruit, only to fall to the ground to rot. Knock on doors, and ask for permission. Make some delicious applesauce, and have some fun!
