miia monthly

So onto canning recipe number two and the spicy pickled beans. My original thinking about making the spicy pickled beans, was as a garnish for my occasional bloody mary’s. Plus this is another way for me to clear out all the bean plants, so that I can get the plot ready for a second planting [...]

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So onto one of the first canning experiment, making a batch of pickled carrots. My original idea was to use the bag of carrots that I had in the fridge to make a carrot soup recipe that I saw in Food & Wine magazine. But as usual, one thing led to another, and the carrots [...]

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For some reason this year, I’m going to need to do a lot of canning/freezing, since the garden is putting out way more food then I can eat each day. And this bounty already includes plenty of stuff that I’ve already given away to friends and co-workers. Just to give you an idea of the [...]

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After a little bit over two months, I’m pulling the plug on the fermentation phase of this sauerkraut and moving on to the consumption phase of this batch. There was only a couple of things that I did to the sauerkraut before placing it into the fridge.
1) Cleaned and sanitized a 1 gallon glass jar [...]

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Its been a little over a week, and the cabbage is finally starting to slowly look and taste like sauerkraut, though it still has quite a bit of the cabbage crunch. Another couple of weeks fermenting, and we should be in sauerkraut city.
Side Note:

When my mom mentioned if I had collected a large stone to [...]

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This is one of those strange projects that I’ve wanted to try for a very long time. Somehow an email chain was started in my clique, about one of them being on a cabbage fix lately. Since that chain email planted the cabbage seed in my head. When I ended up going to the grocery [...]

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Since I’ve basically mulched the garden and cleared everything out, I had to do something with the sage plant that was still alive and kicking, even after the killing frost in October. So I basically stripped all the good leaves from the plant and laid the leaves on a screen for the dehydrator to do [...]

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After I made the first batch of jalapeno rings, I started to think that I might want to try and make the jalapeno rings a totally different way. In case I run into any issues with the first batch (such as the rings being too salty). Don’t ask me how, but somehow I ended up [...]

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Now that I have the box fan dehydrator built, its time to dry something. And I just got a bucket full of basil from my farmer neighbor, at first I thought about making it into pesto and freezing it into ice cube trays. But why not put the box fan through its maiden voyage, to [...]

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Oh mother were these some hot peppers. When I got a bag of these aji limo peppers from my farmer neighbor. I tried one in the yard, and they packed some heat, which at the time I thought was around the same level as a jalapeno (they are actually about 3 to 10 times hotter [...]

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