Catching Up with Vinegar and Booze

Last week, we expanded our horizons up at our cabin; thus, we missed the vinegar preservation challenge.

However, we'll make up for it this week for whatever it's worth. Last night, we filled two jars with plums and brandy. It wasn't very complicated overall. The organic plums were smaller, and they were a lot harder to pit. As a consequence, we lost more of the meat than we would of liked. In contrast, the second set of plums was easy to pit and went quite smoothly. We chose not to add any sugar to the mix, but we did spice them with cinnamon. We will add some vanilla beans as soon as they arrive in the mail. The whole process took about thirty minutes. We have never tried brandied plums before, so it will be interesting to try one.

For the vinegar challenge, we chose to preserve herbs. Unfortunately, locating organic white vinegar was more difficult than we imagined, so we settled for the basic sort. After picking a handful of Marjoram, Chives, Oregano, and a few sprigs of Parsley, we diced them after removing stems, and then mixed them thoroughly before pouring them into the two jars. Finally warming the vinegar slightly, we topped off each jar and sealed them.

Preserve The Bounty Challenge: Fermentation

Until this year, I have never, yes never, tried to preserve food. Unless of course, you count freezing leftovers. With our family's new commitment to eat local food as much as possible, my lack of experience with food preservation might be a bit of a problem this winter. With this in mind, I began a bit of research on the net, and bought a couple of books on the subject of food preservation. In addition, I am currently enrolled in the How to Cook Real Food eCourse led by Jenny at Nourished Kitchen. The eCourse includes a lesson on fermenting vegetables, but I wanted to know more, so when Jenny decided to host a challenge related to the preservation of food, I jumped at the chance to sign up.

The Preserve The Bounty Challenge  is a 5-week course. Each week will focus on a different preservation technique, "sun-drying, oil curing, freezing, fermentation and salt-curing – traditional techniques that optimize nutrition and don’t heat up the kitchen like canning." Every Monday, I will blog about our adventure with food preservation.

The first week focused on fermentation. Perfect, especially since I just fermented my first sauerkraut--thanks to Jenny's eCourse.  I am still very new at this, so I  decided to start with something small: Ginger Carrots from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions.

I had a fresh bunch of carrots from our local CSA. These particular carrots came from Tierra Gardens in Leavenworth, WA.

These carrots made almost eight cups of grated carrots, so I doubled the recipe. I added all of the ingredients in a bowl.

8 cups grated carrots
2 tablespoons freshly grated ginger
2 tablespoons sea salt
8 tablespoons whey





Then, I pounded them with a meat hammer and my wooden spoon (I really need to purchase a wooden mallet.) I wasn't getting much juice, so I asked my husband to help, just in case my arms were just wimpy. 

Finally, we packed the mix into our Fermentation Jar that we purchased from Cultures For Health.

Now we leave them at room temperature, and wait three days before we decide whether to make a larger quantity. This gives us time to purchase some larger jars as well.