As the Pacific Northwest gardening season winds down, our focus shifts from the garden beds to the kitchen counter. The harvest is in, and now the quiet, magical work of preservation begins. One of our favorite methods is lacto-fermentation, and there’s no better visual for this living process than a jar of pickles, happily bubbling away. Many people who are new to fermenting get nervous when they see this activity. Is it safe? Is it […]
Some years, the garden just decides to give you a gift. This year, for us, that gift was cucumbers. And more cucumbers. Thanks to a perfect PNW summer, our Boston Pickling and White Wonder vines were incredibly productive, and every day brought a new harvest. When you’re swimming in cucumbers, there’s only one thing to do: make lots and lots of pickles! Our preferred method is lacto-fermentation. It’s a simple, ancient technique that creates a […]
This week I was able to get 20 pounds each of Elephant Heart Plums and Freestone Peaches. This has made for a busy weekend of processing and canning. We processed and froze the peaches for future use. Then we processed the plums for plum jam. We have discovered that plums have a lot of natural pectic so we decided not to add any and to add very little sugar and cook it down until it […]
A large glass jar filled with vibrant, red beet green kimchi, fermenting on a kitchen counter.
This week we had the opportunity to get asparagus from the group that is driving to eastern Washington to get excess produce that would otherwise go to waste. We decided to pickle it to preserve it. We found an awesome recipe in WECK Small-Batch Preserving, see recipe below.
We are still working our way through the 50 pound bag of onions that I got. Seemed like an awesome deal until you have to do something with all of them. We are about halfway through the bag with a lot of work left to do. Today’s endeavor was pickled onions that I canned for long term storage. I am not really confident in my canning efforts yet as I haven’t done a lot of […]
We have a local couple that has decided to help us all support the farmers on the east side of Washington that have a surplus of produce that they cannot get rid of. So we got 50 pounds of red onions for $10! We have turned most of them into fermented onions and pickled onions of several flavors including some with turmeric which are awesome. We will be enjoying these onions for months to come.
