Preserved

[magid]

Today's food play started with strawberry liqueur, mixing the infused vodka from last week with the liquid sugar pulled out of the boozed strawberries this week. I'd started two quarts of berries two weeks ago (a pound of berries each), and ended up with eleven 5-ounce bottles of liqueur.

The other thing I'd planned to do was pickle the green beans I'd gotten in last week's share, since I hadn't gotten around to using them for Shabbat. I started heating water in the big canning pot, and realized I'd gotten ahead of myself, since it takes ages to get to a boil. I wanted to be productive, and suddenly remembered the apples from a couple of weeks ago. I'd planned to turn them into applesauce once another week's worth of apples arrived, but that was the last of them; there's other fruit now. Six apples don't make a lot of applesauce... but could go very nicely into a large batch of chutney. I had an over-sized (3-pound) bag from Costco, and enough other things around the house to make a creditable cranberry chutney.

I turned the heat on under the rice vinegar again, realizing I should have used cider vinegar, but I'd already poured this into the pot, on the green bean pickle assumption. I supplemented it with cider vinegar, though. I picked over the cranberries, then chopped up four organic lemons (my usual recipe uses limes, but I have none, and no inclination to go to Trader Joe's for some). I peeled and diced six apples, then added raisins, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger powder. That simmered a bit until I had enough jars and lids boiled and ready, then I mixed in walnuts, poured it into cans, and processed them in a boiling-water bath in two batches, 9 pints in all.

Once the pot was cleaned of chutney, I heated rice vinegar again, this time with tricolor peppercorns, a pinch of salt, a pinch of sugar, and a bit of ginger powder (not sure why that, but it appealed at the time, since I don't have fresh dill), and started topping and tailing the green beans. There were enough to fill 3 wide-mouthed pints, with some left over for snacking. Once the chutney was done, the green beans went in.

Last week I'd started three batches of liqueur, one strawberry and two ginger. By rights I should have left them until tomorrow, for a full week, but I was in the mood to get things done, so I drained each jar of infused vodka, and put sugar in with the fruit/rhizome. I was a bit unsure whether there'd be enough liquid in the ginger to be pulled out by the sugar, but first indications look good.

Finishing the two strawberry batches in the morning meant there were two more sets of boozy, shrunken strawberries to add to the one already sitting in my fridge from last week. I zested and juiced a lemon, adding that to all the strawberries with a bit more sugar, then left to do some errands in the Square. When I came back, I added some cornstarch, put it in a pie crust, added a top crust, and started baking it. It's not as much fruit as I would normally put in a pie: three pounds of strawberries became less than a quart of drunken strawberries after the liqueur process. Still, I have hope that the boozy strawberry pie will turn out reasonably.
eta Except that I trusted an online recipe rather than paying attention to my intuition, so baked it at too high a temperature for too long. The crust is overdone, while I'm not sure about the inside. Phooey. /edit

And now I am done with all food prep today.

Comments

[twostepsfwd.livejournal.com]

food question - we preserved a bunch of lemons for chanukah gifts, including one jar for ourselves. i just pulled it out of the fridge and the liquid has gone an inch or so below the level of the sliced lemons and is very whitish and thick/slimyish. does this mean they are no longer good? or is this to be expected? is it unsafe that the lemons have been above the level of the salt for a while? i'm guessing it's ok because there was SO MUCH (probably too much) salt in there that they were no doubt quite well-coated, especially since they were in the liquid for a while. i don't know how the liquid level went down. maybe the lemons absorbed some? whaddya say?

[magid.livejournal.com]

I'd think they'd be fine, especially if you kept them in the fridge (I don't), though I know they don't last a year (I tried from one Pesach to the next, and they were a bit too far gone). In general, though, it's good to keep the lemons under the level of the liquid as much as possible. The liquid does gel somewhat over time; that's normal.

[twostepsfwd.livejournal.com]

yeah they've been in the fridge teh whole time. thanks, that made me feel better!