No snow here yet. Mount Baldy has some on top of it so the termination dust writing is on the wall.
The only problem with growing a bunch of stuff, is having to take care of all of it.
So many leaves.
The first thing that needed to be done was to take care of the swiss chard leaves. I had two kitchen garbage bags full of leaves. It was a daunting amount of leaves.
Clean and ready to begin processing.
First thing to do was to wash them all. The leaves end up taking several baths, hot (very hot), and a couple of cold baths. The plan is to freeze the leaves so they are ready to just pop into any dish I want to use them in, like tofu scrambles 🙂
We put all the stems out behind the greenhouse for the deer to discover. And discover them, they did.
The stems do not take kindly to freezing. The texture is horrible, so they need to be removed from the leaves completely prior to freezing.
Lots of greenery to work on. Chard leaves and parsley leaves and stems in a bouquet.
After all the leaves have all had their stems removed, I piled the leaves on to cookie sheets, and I had three hefty piles of leaves.
The parsley I picked I put into a large bowl with water to wait its turn. It sat behind the cookie sheets for a few days.
These are all eating tomatoes, not the roma tomatoes for making into sauce.
Ooooo, pretty tomatoes…. wait, focus. Must do chard first. But… they are so pretty spread out on the table in the sunroom.
This was kind of an intimidating amount of tomatoes to deal with at one time. It would have been smarter to make them into sauce in smaller groups, as they ripened. But we picked them and made them into salsa instead.
Even the green ones are pretty – Christmas. No wait. Focus!
The chard smells good as it is cooking.
Ok, back on track. Grab a handful of chard leaves, 10-12 of them, and put the leaves into boiling water in batches, and set the timer. 2.5 minutes later pull them out of the hot water and put them into cold water.
I cooked all the leaves on each cookie sheet, and made layers of the towels so I didn’t have towels all over the kitchen. I just covered the island with several layers of towels.
Spread the cooled chard leaves on towels and let them dry off as much as possible. The less water on the leaves, the less frost it makes in the freezer bag. Then pile the driest chard leaves, eight of them at a time, on a cutting board and cut them into strips, and put the strips on a piece of parchment paper, which is then folded over to make a package.
Another thing that, if I had kept up with it as it was growing, would have yielded more packages of chard leaves in the freezer. Oh well, it was an overly busy year.
All the packages are put into a ziplock freezer bag, and I removed as much air as possible, and then into the freezer it goes. I made one freezer bag for each cookie sheet. So three ziplock baggies for this year. Yay! that’s done.
Next thing I did was to remove the stems from the parsley, and washed the leaves off in cold water, and spread them out on a towel to dry. Then I put batches of the parsley leaves into a narrow container, added some canola oil, and use my immersion blender to puree it. I put the mixture into ice cube trays and froze them for about 36 hours, and then put the cubes into another freezer bag. And now, whenever I want to make some gravy or something else that needs fresh parsley, I’ll just take a cube out of the freezer and add it the dish.
I only use this attachment once a year, and have to figure out how it works each time. Well worth having though, it speeds this process up incredibly.
Next it was time to do tomatoes. I put the attachment that peels and seeds the tomatoes on my Kitchen Aide blender. First step, wash the tomatoes off and remove the stems and leaves. Then all I had to do is cut them into small enough pieces to go down the hatch.
This is a very messy process, and we had to clean the cabinet faces and counter top when I was done.
The peels and seeds and core comes out one end and the juice and pulp comes out the other, and I collected it in a large measuring container and put it into a pan to get hot. I ended up filling every large pan I had with tomato juice and pulp. Dan put the pulp out where we put the chard stems and the deer had a feast.
A steady stream of steam comes out of the top of the canner for 10 minutes before I can put the weight on top and actually start the canning process. All in all, it takes about an hour from putting the hot jars into the canner until it is cooled enough to remove them to a towel.
And then just do the normal canning routine, only this time I have to use a pressure canner which, for some reason, I find intimidating. Each jar is filled with hot tomato sauce, add salt and lemon juice, and put on a lid, and into the pressure canner it goes.
Making room for the finished jars in the pantry is really the fun part.
So far I’ve canned 16 pint jars, and 5 quart jars of tomato sauce from the Roma tomatoes, and I have at least another 2 quarts worth of Big Beef eating tomatoes to process. And that will definitely be enough tomato sauce to last us the year.
Once all the tomatoes are done (hopefully today), I will freeze the Walla Walla onions as they don’t keep well, and then I will make pickled beets, and figure out what I want to do with the peppers. I think I’ll chop those up and freeze them, actually. That’s the easiest thing to do.
And then I’ll be done with all the garden produce. The carrots and potatoes don’t need any special treatment, just store them away for fresh eating as we want them.
And then I can start back on my knitting project, which hasn’t had a stitch added for weeks.