Author: craig

How to Can Apple Juice

Posted on by craig

Fruit trees are something we’ve always been interested in, but there’s just no room for them on our property. Thankfully, a friend’s parents have a few fruit trees and don’t do anything with the fruit, so raiding their trees is a summer tradition for my husband and I.

Three of those trees are apple trees. Unfortunately, one of them didn’t get a single apple this year and another still needs about another month before the apples are ready—but the third tree was ready this past week, so John and I headed out for our first apple tree raid of the year.

We managed to get 142 pounds of apples from the one tree! We’re being more diligent this year about making sure we take everything. Last year, we took most of the fruit, but not all. I ended up juicing the apples and we soon learned we loved having apple juice on hand in the fridge. Our supply of juice last year ended up lasting almost a full year. We drank our last one about a month ago.

Last year we got 285 pounds of apples, so about double what we’ve harvested so far this year. We don’t think the second tree will give use enough to match or beat last year’s haul, but fingers crossed it’s still a heavy yield.

Juicing the apples

How you juice the apples is up to you.

Last year I did them with a traditional juicer with the spinning grate. The benefit of this is that it’s quick. I managed to juice all my apples in one day. The drawback is there’s a lot of sediment in the juice and it gets very messy when doing large batches. I was constantly cleaning the apple pulp out of the juicer, which meant it was often accidentally splattering all over the place.

I collected the juice in a large pot and skimmed off all the foam that was forming, as this often had a lot of sediment in it.

This year I pulled out my new steam juicer. WOW was it ever cleaner and easier to do—I chopped up the apples, put them in the juicer, and let the thing do its work. The drawback though is how long it takes. It took me three full days to juice all 142 pounds of apples. But the juice was sediment free and required no filtering.

A steam juicer is a three tiered pot where the bottom level contains the boiling water, the top level is a colander that holds the fruit, and the middle level collects the juice that drips down from the colander. The steam heats up the fruit and makes the juice burst out of the fruit. Here’s a more detailed post from when I juiced cherries with a steam juicer.

Whether you’re using a mechanic juicer, a steam juicer, or some other device, follow the instructions that came with the device if they differ from what’s written here.

If you don’t have a juicer, here’s a post on WikiHow that explains how to do it on the stove or in a blender.

You want the juice to be as clear and sediment free as possible. A steam juicer does a great job, but a mechanical juicer can create some sediment, and the methods in the WikiHow article could also create sediment. You can strain the apple juice through a sieve lined with several layers of cheesecloth to filter this out. Alternatively, if you’re doing a smaller batch, you can store the juice in the fridge overnight so the sediment settles, and then carefully ladle the juice out into a clean pot.

Safely canning apple juice

However you choose to juice your apples, once you’ve got apple juice, the juice can be easily canned with a water bath canner.

I found some difficulty in nailing down a recipe for safe apple juice canning. The recipe I used last year required no lemon juice as it was assumed the apple juice is acidic enough on its own. In researching again this year, I found a recipe that called for 3 tablespoons of lemon juice for a three-liter batch (which is a tablespoon per liter), and then found a recipe that called for 3 tablespoons of lemon juice for a six-liter batch (which is half a tablespoon per liter).

While I had no reason to doubt any of the sources, I went with the last one—3 tablespoons per six liters—as that was from my Bernardin canning book (the Canadian version of the well-known Ball canning book), which is a very trusted source.

The next step was figuring out how I was going to do this. The recipe calls for juicing apples, adding the lemon juice to the apple juice, pasteurizing it, and then canning it. But I wasn’t doing the exact 24 pounds of apples the recipe calls for, I was doing 142 pounds. Plus, I don’t think these apples are as juicy as the ones they used in the Bernardin recipe. So I altered the recipe to add the lemon juice straight to the jar, which makes the recipe highly adaptable to any amount of apples and apple juice.

How to can apple juice

Once you’ve got clear, sediment-free apple juice, transfer it all to a big pot and heat it on the stove until it reaches 190 degrees Farenheit, and hold it at that temperature for five minutes. A candy thermometer is helpful for this step. I have one of those laser temperature readers, which seems to give a pretty accurate reading. This step pasteurizes the juice to get rid of any bacteria or yeast on the apples.

While the juice is warming, prepare your jars. I find I don’t need to immerse the jars in boiling water, but running them under a hot tap for a moment can help warm the glass and prep them for hot apple juice.

Add lemon juice directly to the jars:

  • 1/2 Tbsp of lemon juice for a liter / 1,000 ml jar
  • 1 tsp of lemon juice for a pint / 500 ml jar
  • 1/2 tsp of lemon juice for a half-pint / 250 ml jar

Make sure to use bottled lemon juice rather than fresh squeezed lemon juice. You need to reach a certain level of acidity for safe canning and bottled lemon juice has consistent acid levels, whereas fresh lemons can be highly variable.

Ladle hot apple juice into the jars, leaving 1/4 inch of headspace.

Wipe the rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. This removes any juice and sugar from the rim that might prevent a proper canning seal from forming. Screw on lids to fingertip tightness.

Place the jars in a water bath canner and fill with hot water, submerging the jars with at least an inch of water. Bring to a boil on the stove. Once the canner has reached a full boil, remain at this boil for ten minutes. (Putting a lid on will prevent your kitchen from getting too steamy.) If you turn down the temperature and it stops boiling, bring it back to a boil and re-start the ten minute timer. If you’re in a higher elevation, adjust your processing time with this chart.

When the ten minutes is over, remove the pot from the heat and let it sit for five minutes, then using a jar lifter carefully remove the jars and let them sit on a towel on the counter or table overnight. In the morning, check that a seal has formed (the lid is depressed). Sealed jars can be stored in a cool dark space for at least a year. Any jars that did not seal should go in the fridge and be used immediately.

Canned Apple Juice

If you're making homemade apple juice, canning the juice is a great way to keep it fresh all year long.
5 from 1 vote
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 15 minutes
Cook Time 10 minutes
Course Drinks
Cuisine American

Equipment

  • 1 Water Bath Canning Pot
  • Mason Jars Size and quantity depends on how much juice you're canning

Ingredients
  

  • Apple Juice
  • Lemon Juice

Instructions
 

  • Start with clear, sediment-free apple juice.
  • In a pot on the stove, bring the apple juice up to 190℉ and maintain this temperature for five minutes.
  • In a mason jar, add lemon juice — ½ Tbsp for one litre jars, 1 tsp for pint (500 ml) jars, ½ tsp for half-pint (250ml jars) — and then carefully ladle in hot apple juice, leaving a ¼ inch headspace.
  • Wipe jar rims with a paper towel wetted with white vinegar. Put on lid and screw band to fingertip tightness.
  • Process in a water bath canner for ten minutes. Once the water boils is when the timer starts, and the water must boil throughout the ten minutes. If it stops boiling, bring to a boil again and restart the timer. If you're in a higher elevation, adjust your processing time using this chart.
  • When timer is finished, remove pot from heat and let sit for five minutes.
  • With a jar lifter, carefully remove jars from pot and transfer to a thick towel on a counter or table and let cool undisturbed for 12-24 hours. If seals have formed (lid is depressed downward), jars can be stored in a cool dark place for at least a year. If seals have not formed, place jars in the fridge and consume promptly.

Notes

This recipe can be used for one litre (1,000ml) / quart jars, pint (500ml) jars, and half-pint (250ml) jars.
Keyword apple juice

Garden Update: August 2024

Posted on by craig

What a difference one month makes!

In the last monthly update, I wrote about how this year is not a good year for the garden. May and June were very cool and rainy and by the time I was writing up my July update, things looked like they do in early June.

Pretty much right after that post, the weather turned and became much more like a normal summer. We get occasional rain—more than we get some summers—but the days are now hot and sunny, which the garden loves.

Everything looks so lush. This is one of my favourite times of year for looking at our house. We’re not the only ones on the block that garden, and we’re not the only ones with front yard gardens, but when it comes to the scale of what we do, we stand out.

When someone comes to our house in the summer for the first time, I tell them the house number but then say “look for the garden, you’ll understand when you see it.”

Growth progress

A lot of things have come up quite rapidly. Tomatoes and peppers are still quite small and struggling, though the tide is slowly turning and things are looking vibrant, but the rest of the garden…

Potatoes and garlic are the tallest we’ve ever seen them. Strawberries are more prolific than we’ve ever had. Carrots and beets are looking lush too.

One of the surprises this year has been chamomile. We’ve tried growing it from seed a couple times and gotten nowhere, but this year I found a few seedlings at the greenhouse and scooped them up.

We only have three plants but they are heavy with flowers, and it’s the flowers that are harvested for chamomile tea.

To harvest chamomile, you pluck off the flowers, with as little stem as possible, and you set it to air dry for 10-14 days. I’ve got a good system going where I harvest every weekend and I have two baking dishes filled with flowers to help keep straight which flowers were picked when.

To make tea from dried flowers, it’s about 1 teaspoon of flowers per cup of tea.

Homegrown chamomile tea is much stronger than the store-bought stuff in tea bags. It’s likely because it’s so fresh and hasn’t been on a shelf for weeks or months.

The first time I had a mug of home-grown chamomile tea, I was soon stumbling around like I was drunk because the sedative effect was so strong. I’ve had a couple cups since then, and while I haven’t had as strong a reaction, I can definitely feel it trying to conk me out.

The mushroom beds

We planted mushroom beds under our cedar trees a little while back. Mushrooms need cooler temps, in the 15-20 degrees Celsius range, to fruit (to grow mushrooms), so it’s been too hot for that. I suspect right now it’s doing a lot of the underground work and growth.

However, despite the slightly-too-warm weather, it looks like the white oysters have attempted fruiting.

Unfortunately, the day after I took this pic, the temperature jumped to over 30 degrees Celsius and stayed there for a few days. These mushrooms stopped growing and dried out. However, once the cooler temperatures come in the fall, we should start seeing action here again.

In the meantime, I need to start looking at how to preserve mushrooms; in the fall we should be harvesting mushrooms faster than we can eat them.

A lot of mushrooms can be dried, such as the king oysters we have growing in the back patch, and that’ll likely be what I do for the others we’re growing. However, from what I’ve read, regular oyster mushrooms like these generally don’t do well with drying. The dehydrate just fine, but when you try to rehydrate them, they either don’t rehydrate well and remain tough or they take in too much water and then they become mushy. (A friend gave us a bag of dehydrated oyster mushrooms last night, so I’ll be able to test how well they do or don’t rehydrate!)

Oyster mushrooms can be frozen, though, but they have to be blanched first. (According to one site I’m reading, if you don’t blanch them first, frozen oyster mushrooms that are then thawed become a mushy mess.)

The fruit tree harvest

We don’t have fruit trees on our property, but we know some folks that do, so every year we head over there a few times throughout the summer to raid their cherry tree and their apple trees.

From one cherry tree, we managed a harvest of over 40 pounds of cherries, which is about double what we harvested last year. It’s not necessarily that there were more cherries this year, but rather we were more thorough in taking as much as we could, stripping the tree of everything except the impossible-to-reach cherries.

These cherries will be juiced and turned into wine, though I did try canning some cherries so we have them for eating later or to use as garnish in mixed drinks.

We went back a few weeks later to do the first of what will likely be two apple picking visits. From one tree, we managed to get 142 pounds of apples. They have a second tree that might need another month or so before the apples are ready, so we will be heading back to get more. However, I’ve been told the second tree (it’s in the back and I didn’t see it) did not produce as many apples as in the past. So, we may not quite reach last year’s haul of 285 pounds of apples, but we’re going to try!

Looking ahead, we need to figure out what to do about fruit trees.

Their cherry tree is slowly dying. They keep telling us each year that the next year might be the last year, yet the tree keeps going, but one day it will actually be that final year.

There’s a similar fear with the apple trees, that one of them might die. And, oddly, this year one of their three apple trees didn’t produce a single apple.

While we will continue to harvest cherries and apples as long as their trees bear fruit, we are starting to explore options for expanding our harvest. We’ll start inquiring if friends or friends-of-friends have fruit trees in their yards. There’s a neighbour across the street that has a cherry tree and an apple tree, so we’re looking for the right opportunity to strike up that conversation with them. And we’re also exploring the idea of planting trees in our neighbour’s yard; they’ve asked us to do more garden stuff in their back yard, and some fruit trees would be an easy way to do things without adding a ton of garden maintenance time to our routines.

The annual rhubarb harvest

We don’t have rhubarb, but both our neighbours do, and neither wants any of it, so we take it all for ourselves. This year we harvested 115 pounds / 52 kilos of rhubarb, which is our largest harvest ever!

We’ve chopped, washed, bagged, and frozen the entire harvest. My mom’s basement freezer is stuffed to the brim with rhubarb.

We usually don’t do a whole lot with rhubarb. I make a big batch of rhubarb wine and maybe a batch or two or rhubarb ginger gin, but that really only uses a fraction of our harvest. My step-dad will often make rhubarb crumble and rhubarb pie, but even he has his limits to how much he can use.

This year, since we likely won’t get as many apples as we normally do—which means we won’t get as much apple juice as we normally do—we’re thinking of juicing some of this rhubarb and working that into our weekly rotation of juices. This would use up some of the rhubarb and would help make the apple juice last all year since we’re drinking less of it.

Foraging ahead

I happened to find a mention somewhere that wild hazelnut trees grow in Manitoba, and this piqued my curiosity. Around the same time I learned that wild cranberry bushes also grow in Manitoba. After doing some research and asking around, I may have found a couple spots where these plants exist, so in August (for hazelnuts) and September (for cranberries), I’ll be heading out to see if I can find them and forage them. (In Manitoba, it is legal to forage nuts and berries from provincially-owned land.)

I’m really hoping the foraging adventure is successful because I’m already researching how to preserve these things and what to make with them. I’m mostly eyeing hazelnut butter and cranberry juice.

I’d like to learn more about foraging and how to do it in or surrounding the city. I remember from visiting the family cottage when I was younger that there were wild blueberry and strawberry plants to pick food from, but that was out in the woods immediately surrounding the cottage. Doing something like that here in the city or in a place I have to drive to feels monumentally impossible—the first task is finding these things when they’re not part of my immediate vicinity. It sort of feels like looking for a needle in a haystack. I could pick some random place to forage stuff, but it’s a total shot in the dark if anything is there.

But, like with anything else I do food related, I’ll do some research, I’ll ask around, and I’ll figure out how to get it done.

Making Use of Scraps

Posted on by craig

Gardening, especially on a large scale, means creating a lot of organic waste.

While there are some plants where the whole thing is edible, such as chives and leeks, most plants result in edible products but the rest of the plant dies at the end of the season. Or in the case of perennial bushes and trees, the leaves fall off as the plant goes into hibernation.

Nothing truly goes to waste, though. We compost religiously. We have four bins in our backyard and collect compostable goods from our house, my mom’s house, a coworker, and occasionally the discarded coffee grounds from the office.

But beyond that, I’ve always enjoyed looking for new and creative ways to use the scraps or parts of plants we’d normally throw out.

Garlic scapes

We’ve already talked about garlic scapes a few times here on Urban Homesteading, and I’m sure I’ll be posting more about them as time goes on.

Scapes are the flower stem of the garlic plant. They’re long, thick, and have a delicious bite of garlic. They can be pickled, grilled on the BBQ, turned into hot sauce, or thrown in dinner where you’d otherwise use garlic. The possibilities are almost too much to list here.

Pea pods

This is one I haven’t tried yet but I am so curious to do so: pea pod wine.

We grow a ton of peas. Along our front and side fence we grow sugar snap peas, which are meant to be eaten whole. When the harvest gets too large, I usually shell them and freeze the peas, discarding the pods.

In our neighbour’s yard, we have a long trellis set up where we grow Alaskan peas. These ones are a bit hardier and can be pressure canned and sit on a shelf until ready to eat. This similarly involves shelling all the peas.

With either harvest, I’m left with quite the pile of empty pods.

I happened to notice a recipe for pea pod wine and my curiosity has gotten the better of me and I will be trying it this year. I’ve found that vegetable based wines rarely taste like the vegetable they’re made from, while fruit wines tend to preserve that flavour. I’ve made beet wine and parsnip wine, and the beet wine ended up fruity and the parsnip wine tasted like a regular white wine.

Vegetable juice

This past weekend, my husband thinned out the carrots and beets. When planting these, the usual practice is to over-plant and then when they start coming up, yank some out so the remaining plants have enough room to keep growing.

After he did this thinning, he gave me a crate full of baby carrots and baby beets. And when I say “baby”, I don’t mean the size of baby vegetables you get at the store, I mean micro-baby, too small to really do anything with.

We decided to juice these. I pulled out my steam juicer, which is incredibly convenient, mess free, and easy to use. It took three batches, but I juiced all the carrots and beets—including the greens—as well as an old bag of frozen celery from last year that we never ended up using.

I got 20 cups / 5 litres of juice. I put them all in individual one-cup jars, leaving headspace in case of expansion, and put them all in the freezer. My husband will be drinking them once a day as part of his lunch.

Onion and garlic seasoning

While there isn’t much waste when cutting onions and garlic—it’s mostly the papery skins and perhaps the tops or bottoms—this is still flavourful waste. One way to use this up is to create onion and garlic seasoning.

When chopping onions and garlic, separate the papery skins from the waste. (If there are any bits that have actual onion or garlic attached to them, like if you slice off the top of the onion to help you peel it, hold onto that for the next idea down in this post.) Discard anything that doesn’t look great.

After giving these skins a quick wash, you can put them in the oven to dry them, then grind them in a food processor or blender. While it’s not quite the same as onion powder or garlic powder, it can be used similarly. However, I tend to sprinkle it over my fries for an extra tasty kick.

You can also save the skins in a bag in your freezer until you’ve got a big enough batch to make this project worth the effort.

Vegetable broth

Save any usable vegetable scraps! Anything that looks in good condition (blemish and rot free) and is safe to eat (remember, tomato leaves and potato eyes are unsafe to eat), throw into a Ziploc bag or container in the freezer. When you’ve got a big batch, you can make vegetable broth.

To do this, simply dump all the frozen scraps into a big pot, fill with water, and let it simmer for an hour or so until all the deliciousness of the scraps has leeched into the water. Strain out the solids and you’re left with a rich broth. If you have a pressure canner, you can use that to can the broth, and if you don’t you can freeze it in jars, ensuring you leave headspace in case it expands in the freezer.

You’ll want to avoid anything that has an off taste or would overtake things—broccoli can be bitter when preserved and beets can make everything beet red. But the options are almost endless and allow for creating unique broth—I often throw in onions, garlic, herb scraps, mushroom stems, squash peels, carrot peels, celery leaves, tomato skins, and more.

How to Make Fermented Garlic Scape Hot Sauce

Posted on by craig

The garlic scapes are up and this year we got quite the haul, coming in at around 1.5 kg, or about three pounds. Normally we get just a smattering and they’re usually quite thin, but this year we have at least double the garlic planted and these scapes grew nice and thick.

Scapes are the flower stem of the garlic plant. They grow nice and tall and then curl in on themselves. At the end is a bulb that will form garlic seeds. Once that bulb flowers, the garlic bulb underground will stop growing, so you want to harvest the scape before that happens.

In my previous post about pickling garlic scapes, I talked in depth about the process of harvesting them. In a short summary, you’ll want to cut or break the scape where it emerges from the top leaf of the plant.

Scapes have a strong garlic taste and can be used multiple ways. They grill up great on the BBQ, they have a wonderful garlic bite to them when you pickle them, they make a zesty pesto, and there’s a garlic scape jam I want to try next year that I think would go great on a baked Brie.

Garlic scape hot sauce

A few years ago I tried doing the farmers market thing, selling jams, pickles, and preserves. It was an interesting experience but ultimately not one I’ll likely return to. While there, I made some great connections with local food folks and got to try some amazing foods.

A highlight for me was the garlic scape hot sauce that I bought from the hot sauce guy. While his prices are affordable and I continue to buy garlic scape hot sauce off him, it was a hot sauce I wanted to see if I could make myself.

In my research on garlic scape hot sauce recipes I found that there’s almost nothing. I did come across one fermented garlic scape hot sauce recipe, and so my variation is based on that one.

I made a couple alterations in the batch I made for this post and have noted further alterations for next year’s batch that I’ll make. The recipe on this post is for what I’d do next year.

The art of fermenting

Fermenting is very much a science. You create an ideal environment for beneficial bacteria to thrive, which then outcompetes bad bacteria, preserving food for weeks, months, or even longer.

Because of this careful balance needed and the fact that this whole preservation method relies on bacteria, I’d always been quite intimidated by it. I’d follow recipes to the T and never vary.

A couple years back, a local chef loaned me a copy of The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz and even on just the cursory flip-through that I gave it, the book opened my eyes to the fact that while fermenting is very much a science, it is also very much an art. As long as you’re following the basic science of fermenting, there’s tons of wiggle room to customize what you’re creating and make culinary works of art.

This recipe relies on creating a salt brine with water and submerging the foods in it. (Versus something like sauerkraut that relies on salt drawing the moisture out of cabbage so it’s in a salt brine of its own juices.)

That brine will create the environment for beneficial bacteria to thrive, allowing us to then create some artistic customization in what is being fermented.

Making the ferment

Before we start making the ferment, we’ll want a vessel to do the ferment in. I have a Mason Tops fermenting kit that comes with a jar, an airlock lid, and a glass weight. Here are some kits on Amazon that can be adapted with a regular mason jar. In a pinch, you can jerry-rig a ferment vessel by using a mason jar, a Ziploc bag of water as a weight, and a loose-fitting lid that will keep bad bacteria out but still allow venting of gas.

The first step is prepare the veggies going into the ferment. This recipe calls for 175 grams each of garlic scapes and jalapeno peppers. The scapes can be chopped up in small pieces. The exact sizing doesn’t matter too much because at the end you’ll be pureeing everything. The peppers can be stemmed and then sliced in half—and keep the seeds so they add heat to the sauce. They can be chopped up smaller if you’re having difficulty getting everything nicely in the ferment vessel.

While the recipe calls for jalapeno peppers, you can use any green-coloured hot pepper. This is a hot sauce that gets its kick from the garlic scapes, so it’s more of a flavour with heat than pure heat. That being said, with my initial taste-test of the final product, I felt it wasn’t quite hot enough, so next year I’ll look at either a hotter pepper or adding more jalapenos.

And while ideally you want a green-coloured hot pepper, this is purely to maintain the green colour in the final hot sauce. If you don’t care so much about the colour, you could put in any hot pepper of your choice. I grew some scotch bonnet hot peppers and discovered they have an interesting flavour along with their intense heat—they’d go quite well here, but the green scapes and red pepper might create a muddied colour.

In a pinch, if you don’t have fresh hot peppers, you could use pickled hot peppers, but I would add them at the blender step. After the full ferment, you add some vinegar before you blend it, so you could add pickled hot peppers at this stage.

Anyway, back to the ferment!

Put the scapes and jalapenos in your ferment vessel and then chop and add a few green onions.

Now we’ll create the brine, which should be 2% by weight. To do this, add two teaspoons of salt to two cups of water, and heat it in a pot, stirring until the salt dissolves. Allow the water to cool a bit and then pour it into the ferment vessel, ensuring everything is submerged. If you add the brine immediately after boiling, the heat may kill the beneficial bacteria you’re trying to help.

Add the fermenting weight on top, as well as the airlock, and store in a cool, dry, dark place for 7-10 days. You may want to put a plate or bowl under it as ferments sometimes bubble over. You can check on it every few days; if you see bubbles, you know it’s working and it’s fermenting. After seven days, start tasting the scapes to see if you’ve got a good taste going. Mine took eight days.

Once things taste ideal—and this is another place where the art of fermenting comes in since “ideal” is completely up to you—the ferment is done and we can move on to making the hot sauce.

Turning the ferment into hot sauce

Strain the ferment, reserving the liquid.

The scapes, peppers, and green onions are then put into a blender. (If possible, use an actual blender. I used an immersion blender / stick blender and it didn’t work that well, so next time I’ll dig out the actual blender.) Add in half a cup of vinegar and 2/3 cup of the brine.

The choice of vinegar is up to you. The original recipe calls for apple cider vinegar, but I found the apple taste clashed with the garlic and jalapeno. I’d strongly suggest white vinegar or unseasoned rice vinegar, or a vinegar with a complementary flavour profile.

When I make this next year, I’m going to either use my homemade chive blossom vinegar, which would add a chive flavour, or I’d use my homemade sinamak. Sinamak is a Filipino vinegar infusion; white vinegar is infused with hot peppers, ginger, garlic, and black peppercorns. I made a batch a while back with some thai chili peppers and it has a real kick to it that would go fantastic in this hot sauce.

Blend until smooth.

From here, you have two options.

If you like a smooth sauce, you can strain the pureed sauce through a strainer or cheesecloth. If you like a chunkier sauce, you can transfer the whole thing to a jar as-is.

The original recipe calls for the sauce to be strained and then xantham gum to be added, which would thicken it and give it some consistency. I chose to go without the xantham gum and without straining. The hot sauce I buy always needs a good shake because it settles easily, but then you get all those garlicky bits from the pureed scapes and it’s oh-so-good.

Because it’s a ferment that’s ultimately preserved in vinegar, this should last in the fridge for weeks, if not months.

Garlic scape hot sauce can be used the same as any hot sauce, but the garlic taste opens up some ideal pairings. This goes great on any food where garlic is a complementary taste, such as on pizza.

Fermented Garlic Scape Hot Sauce

A hot sauce with the mouthwatering tang of garlic makes for the perfect topping on things like pizzas and burgers.
5 from 1 vote
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 20 minutes
Fermenting Time 10 days
Course condiments

Equipment

  • 1 Fermentation Kit / Vessel, see notes for alternatives
  • 1 Blender

Ingredients
  

  • 175 g Garlic Scapes
  • 175 g Jalapeno Peppers, or other hot pepper, preferably green
  • 2-3 Green Onions
  • 10 Peppercorns
  • 2 tsp Salt
  • 2 cups Water
  • ½ cup Vinegar, see notes

Instructions
 

  • Chop garlic scapes and add to fermentation vessel. De-stem jalapeno peppers and quarter or chop and add to fermentation vessel. Chop green onions and add to fermentation vessel.
  • Add salt and water to a small pot and heat, stirring until salt dissolves. Let the saltwater brine cool, then add to the fermentation vessel.
  • Place the weight in the vessel, ensuring all vegetables are below the water line. Close with an airlock. Place on a plate (in case it bubbles over) and put in a cool, dark, dry place to ferment.
  • After a few days, you should start to see bubbles in the ferment. This means it's working.
  • After 7 days, taste a scape to test for readiness. (There's no real measure of when it's ready, you go by taste and preference.) Ferment should be done in 7-10 days.
  • Strain vegetables, reserving the brine.
  • Add vegetables to a blender, vinegar, and ⅔ cup of the reserved brine. Blend until smooth.
  • If you prefer smooth sauce:
    Strain though a strainer or cheesecloth, then store remaining liquid in a bottle or jar in the fridge.
    If you prefer chunky sauce:
    Transfer blender contents to a bottle or jar and store in the fridge.

Notes

If you don’t have a fermentation kit, you can piece one together using a large jar as the fermentation vessel, a Ziplock bag filled with water as the weight, and a loose-fitting lid as the airlock.
For vinegar, white vinegar is usually best, but any vinegar with a complementary flavour profile would work well, such as chive blossom vinegar or sinamak.
Keyword garlic scape hot sauce, garlic scapes, hot sauce

How to Pickle Garlic Scapes

Posted on by craig

One of the things I love about growing garlic is that you get two different harvests from them—the garlic, of course, but also the garlic scapes.

Backing up a bit—there are two types of garlic: hardneck and softneck. Hardneck is more weather resilient and can overwinter, so we plant it in the fall and it’s one of the first things to pop up in the spring. Hardneck garlic grows a thick flower stem, called a scape, that can be harvested and used in various recipes. (For more on the differences between hardneck and softneck garlic, I found this webpage informative.)

There are many ways to use garlic scapes, such as barbecuing them, turning them into pesto, and even a garlic scape jam that I want to try next year. I’m also currently attempting a fermented garlic scape hot sauce that I’ll post about when it’s done.

One of the easy crowd-pleasing scapes dishes is pickled scapes.

How to harvest garlic scapes

At a certain point in the life cycle of hardneck garlic, the plant will shoot out its flower stem. It gets really tall and then circles back in on itself, sometimes creating several circular loops. Toward the end there will be a bulb forming—this will eventually become garlic seeds.

Garlic scapes must be harvested before a flower forms on the scape. If the flower is allowed to form, the garlic bulbs will stop growing, but if you harvest the scape before the flower forms, the plant will refocus all its energy on growing the garlic bulbs.

There are two schools of thought on how best to harvest the scapes. One is to use scissors or a blade to cut it off at the base of the top leaves. The second is to grasp the stalk and tug the scape; theoretically, the scape will break further down inside the plant and you get a longer scape.

I normally cut them, but this year tried to tugging method. There was no difference; it broke at the spot I would have cut it. However, it meant I didn’t have a pair of scissors or a blade in one hand, meaning I could move a little quicker since I had two hands.

Once you’ve harvested them, it’s a good idea to give them a quick rinse to get rid of any dirt or insects clinging to the scapes.

Scapes can be stored in the fridge for up to a few weeks. However, their firmness does reduce over time, so if you like the crispiness of a fresh scape, it’s best to use them as soon as possible.

How to make pickled garlic scapes

There are different flavour variations for garlic scapes. Last year I did straight-up normal pickled scapes, and this year I did spicy pickled scapes. Both variations are in the recipe card at the bottom of this post. An internet search can bring up a variety of recipes if you’re looking for a different spice combination.

The first step is to put the spices in the bottom of the jar.

Next, cut scapes to appropriate lengths and stuff them into jars. I generally find I’ll have jars of mostly straight scapes all standing upright, and jars where the curly scapes circle the inside of the jar and a handful of straight scapes will fill the centre void. I usually end up with lot of little bits of scapes from all the trimming, so I top off the jars with these. You can pack them in tightly.

The next step is to boil some brine, which is a combination of water, vinegar, salt, and sugar. Pour the brine into the jars, leaving a half inch of headspace. Wipe rims and put on lids.

If you’re refrigerator pickling these you can put them straight into the fridge. If you’re canning these, they can be processed for 10 minutes, adjusting for elevation as needed. Refrigerator pickling will result in crisper pickled scapes that are a brighter green and have a bit more of a flavour bite to them. Canning them will result in softer scapes that are a muted green and the bite of garlic will be a bit milder since they cook while processing and that reduces the flavour a bit, but canning them will give you a much longer shelf life. Regardless of which preserving method you use, give the scapes at least a few days to fully pickle before opening a jar and enjoying them.

Pickled Garlic Scapes

Pickled garlic scapes perfectly preserve the scapes from the garlic plant in the form of a tasty appetizer with some zing.
5 from 1 vote
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 30 minutes
Processing Time 10 minutes
Course Appetizer
Cuisine Pickles

Equipment

  • Canning Jars with Two-Part Lids, either 2x pint or 4x half pint sizes
  • Water Bath Canning Pot, if canning

Ingredients
  

  • ½ pound Garlic Scapes

Regular Pickled Garlic Scapes

  • 1 ¼ cup Water
  • 1 ¼ cup Vinegar, can be white, white wine, cider, or any vinegar as long as the acidity is 5% or greater
  • 1 ½ Tbsp Canning Salt
  • 1 Tbsp Sugar
  • 2 tsp Mustard Seeds, 1 tsp per pint jar
  • 2 tsp Black Peppercorns, 1 tsp per pint jar

Spicy Pickled Garlic Scapes

  • 1 ¼ cup Water
  • 1 ¼ cup Vinegar, can be white, white wine, cider, or any vinegar as long as the acidity is 5% or greater
  • 1 Tbsp Canning Salt
  • 1 Tbsp Sugar
  • 2 tsp Red Pepper Flakes, 1 tsp per pint jar
  • 2 tsp Black Peppercorns, 1 tsp per pint jar

Instructions
 

  • Cut scapes to appropriate size and pack tightly in jars. Add spices directly to each jar (mustard and black peppercorns for regular scapes, red pepper flakes and black peppercorns for spicy scapes).
  • Create brine by bringing water, vinegar, salt, sugar to a boil, dissolving sugar and salt.
  • Add brine to jars, bringing up to ½ inch headspace. If you're short on brine, top up with vinegar. Wipe rims and put on two-part lids.
  • For Refrigerator Pickles
    Put jars in the fridge and let sit for at least a few days before consuming.
    For Canned Pickles
    Put jars in a water bath canner filled with hot water, with the jars submerged by at least an inch of water. Bring to a boil and boil for 10 minutes. (Adjust for elevation as needed.) Remove canner from heat and let sit for five minutes. Remove jars using a jar lifter and let sit undisturbed overnight. If jars are properly sealed, then they can be stored in a cool dark place for up to a year before quality (but not safety) starts to degrade. If any jars did not properly seal, they should be put in the fridge and consumed first. Allow jars to sit for at least a few days before consuming.

Notes

This recipe is intended for two pints of scapes, but can easily be divided or multiplied for smaller or larger quantities. I usually pack the jars first to see how many pints I get before figuring out the brine, and then I usually do a little extra brine just in case. (If you’re dividing or multiplying, ensure your math is correct so you get the correct ratios of ingredients.)
Feel free to add more spices to the jar if you want spicier scapes.
Refrigerator pickles will result in crispier and bright green scapes, but canned pickles will result in shelf-stable scapes that can sit in a cupboard for several months before opening (but refrigerate upon opening).
Keyword garlic scapes, pickled garlic scapes, refrigerator pickles

Garden Update: July 2024

Posted on by craig

Every year, my husband says something like “this is not a good year for the garden”. It’s either too hot or too dry or too cold or too wet, but usually it’s all fine in the end.

This year… is not a good year for the garden. We’ve had a combination of too cold and too wet. It’s already the first week of July and our garden is weeks behind compared to last year.

For the most part, this will likely be okay. Things might take a little longer and be harvested a little later in the season, but they’ll be fine. Other things that are harvested late in the season — like popcorn, for example — may not do that well. As always, we will see what happens.

One casualty already has been the black beans and kidney beans. Almost none of them have come up. We’re wondering if it was too wet and the beans ended up rotting. John has replanted a ton this past weekend. They might end up being harvested a little before they’re fully dried but in the past I’ve found I can just run them through a dehydrator and they’re fine.

The plants really enjoying this weather seem to be the underground vegetable crops, particularly the garlic and potatoes.

Potatoes and garlic growing in the back yard.

The garlic is about waist high, which I think is the tallest I’ve ever seen it. In this photo you can also see all the curly scapes growing out of the garlic in the front half of the photo. Scapes are the flower stem of the garlic plant. You want to cut or pull these off before the flower opens, otherwise the garlic will stop growing. I’m planning to harvest all the scapes tomorrow—I’ll pickle a bunch of them and the rest I’ll turn into some fermented garlic scape hot sauce.

Not loving the weather this year is the tomatoes, peppers, and corn. Normally this view would be lush and full, but this year it’s kind of depressing.

Small plants in the neighbour's yard.

The weather seems to be taking a turn for the better, though. Today is supposed to be hot and sunny, as is much of next week, so hopefully we’ll see a growth spurt in these plants.

Small tomato plants.

Food for a year

Really, a few plants not growing isn’t that big of a deal — I go grocery shopping every week, so I can always pick up a can of beans if the crop at home isn’t successful. But we like the challenge of eating only what we grow.

We haven’t had broccoli since, I think, January, when our frozen harvest ran out. We just harvested a little bit this weekend and I’m so excited to have broccoli again.

We’re at the low point in our food cycle. This is the food storage room in my mom’s basement. (We use her place since we don’t have a basement, and in return she has free access to whatever she wants.)

While we’ve got a few things left, it’s quite empty. The freezers are mostly empty too.

In a few months this will be FULL of jars and boxes and the freezers will be stuffed to the brim as well…provided the garden picks up some speed with all the growing. Then we’ll eat well until the spring when our choices narrow as things run out and we’ll start dreaming of the upcoming harvest and new round of amazing food.

Mushroom beds

The BIG new project this year are our new mushroom beds!

We’ve been wanting to grow more plant-based protein, which is partly why we’re upping our beans this year, and mushrooms were part of our plan. We weren’t sure if we were going to get it off the ground this year or not.

I received a great mushroom book for my birthday back in March—Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation by Tradd Cotter—which gives great instructions for how to set up mushroom beds on your property. (Despite the complexity of the title, it’s a remarkably novice-friendly book.) But… I was overwhelmed and decided to make this year the research year so that next spring I’d be ready to go.

In the meantime, I follow a local mushroom spawn producer on Instagram and saw a post about mushroom spawn kits that would be great for a garden. After a few DMs to get my nervous questions out of the way, I picked up the kits and we created our first mushroom bed for black pearl king oyster mushrooms.

Bags of mushroom spawn and sawdust pellets.
Mushroom spawn and sawdust pellets.

With how easy it was to set up—and it’s still to early to see how productive it is—we hit up the mushroom guy for some more, and we’ve set up a second bed for white oyster mushrooms.

I’ll do a full post on at-home mushroom production later this summer. A friend of ours has done an in-the-house mushroom set-up that’s quite impressive, so I’ll take some pics and grab some details from him to share in my eventual mushroom post.

Pride season

For many parts of the world, including Winnipeg, Pride happens in June.

As a fairly-masculine cisgender white gay man, I realize that I have a lot of privilege in society. Folks who have different gender and attraction identities or different gender expressions, or have different intersections with skin colour, socioeconomic status, and disability do not have as easy an experience as I do just existing. I don’t experience much homophobia and discrimination, though it does occasionally come up.

When I started this blog, I made a conscious decision to be openly queer here. I want this website to be a place where absolutely everyone is welcome.

Most homesteading sites would make the same claim, but then they also post Bible verses, make explicit statements about the importance of family and children, and often express a distrust of society. While all of these are perfectly fine to find important and have on one’s site, it does not create a welcoming space for 2SLGBTQ+ people who are interested in homesteading. And when I’ve gone onto some of these homesteaders’ social media accounts, I’ve been further alarmed by the content I’ve seen. Unfortunately, most homesteading sites and folks are not welcoming to queer people—they might in theory be, but not in practice.

I imagine some future people reading this section of this post and demanding what someone’s bedroom activities has to do with growing tomatoes. And, really, if that’s your question then that highlights the problem. If a straight person can post about their spouse and kids and importance of family in their post, then why can’t I post about my husband and the importance of Pride in my post? It’s that old double-standard that continually oppresses queer people and their identities.

If you’ve read some of my posts, you’ve likely seen references to my husband. I don’t hide it.

I’ve decided to take a tiny step forward—I’ve updated the banner graphic at the top of this site to include a progress pride flag.

There may be future inclusive changes and posts, once I figure them out. I know one thing I’d like to do is compile a great list of queer homesteaders and farmers. I follow a great account on TikTok, but a list need to be more than one item long. 🙂

Garden and project photo dump

Here are random photos of the things I’ve been up to the past few weeks!

We’ve added chamomile to the garden this year, so I’m working on plucking these flowers and drying them for tea.

Chamomile flowers.

The saskatoons are ripening; when they’re a dark purple, they’re ready. The challenge is to get them before the birds do. Last year on a Saturday evening I looked at the saskatoon bush and thought These look ripe, I’ll harvest them tomorrow morning. Twelve hours later, Sunday morning, the birds had completely decimated the bush, eating every single saskatoon. As I walked up to the bush to take this photo, a robin gulped down a berry and flew away.

Unripe saskatoon berries.

In the realm of preserving projects, I finally tackled the chicken broth. I’ve had a few chicken carcasses sitting in the freezer for months and they needed to get used up before this year’s harvest started filling the freezers again.

I took the carcasses, covered them with water, and added dried herbs and seasonings from last year’s garden. Piled on top here, you’ll see parsley, thyme, and a powered seasoning made from dried onion and garlic peels.

A pot of chicken broth with seasonings on top.

Once it’s boiled and then simmers for an hour or two, everything gets strained and the broth is then canned using a pressure canner. I ended up with just over eight litres of broth.

A jar of chicken stock.

I also made a batch of chive blossom vinegar for a friend. It’s normally made with white wine vinegar, but this batch is made with unseasoned rice vinegar. It has a lovely chive flavour and smell, and a gorgeous pink colour. Over the next few months the colour will fade and turn brown, but the taste and smell will stay the same. I’m hoping to get the recipe up on this site soon.

A bright pink bottle of chive blossom vinegar.

A new-to-me recipe this year is fermented chives. Chives are ridiculously difficult to preserve. Drying or freezing them diminishes their flavour pretty quickly, so it’s very much a use-it-fresh type of plant…which is disappointing because they produce so much chives and you can only eat so much in a meal. These fermented chives turned out pretty nice. If anything, it intensified the chive flavour and smell, and the fermenting has added a bit of a sauerkraut flavour to it. Fermented foods usually last at least a few months in the fridge.

A small jar of fermented chives with a spoon sitting in it.

I’ve also got my annual batch of dandelion wine underway. It’s really cloudy right now, so it’ll take at least a few months to settle and clarify. Normally dandelion wine is made with orange and lemon juice, but I stumbled across a recipe that used lemon juice and ginger and couldn’t resist. So this will be my first batch of dandelion ginger wine. Fingers crossed it tastes good!

A big carboy of golden-coloured dandelion wine

And, lastly, we almost have a gazebo on our deck!

We host a lot of barbecues in the summer but the mosquitoes and wasps make it incredibly unpleasant. We usually have a big mosquito net that drapes over the patio umbrella, but it tears so easily that it barely lasts a summer before we need a new one.

We’ve been talking about getting a gazebo, but we were always put off by the cost…until my mom and step-dad found this abandoned gazebo frame sitting in the middle of a field on public property outside the city. John and my step-dad went back to take it apart and bring it home and they put it together on the deck.

We’ve ordered mosquito screen siding. We couldn’t find the right gazebo canopy since each make and model is different and we have no idea which one this is, so we ordered extra mosquito netting so we can at least wrap the top of this with netting and prevent the bugs from coming in. In a future year we can look at a more formal canopy. All the netting arrived yesterday, so we’ll have it put together this weekend.

A gazebo frame on our deck

And that’s about it for this month’s round-up!

How to Make Dandelion Capers

Posted on by craig

It was only a few years ago that I discovered just how truly versatile—and tasty—dandelions can be.

It started with one project: dandelion wine. I’d just recently gotten winemaking experience under my belt and was eager to try something that wasn’t an expensive store-bought kit. I soon found dandelion wine, and looking out at the dandelions in our then yard (we have no yard space now, only garden), I knew it wouldn’t be hard to collect what I needed.

While the end result wasn’t perfect, I knew the mixed results were largely due to my limited winemaking experience. Every year since I’ve worked on perfecting my dandelion wine and it’s now a year-round staple at our place, and one of the first projects every spring is a new batch.

From there, I started to explore the other offerings of this “weed” that people were so desperate to get rid of.

  • There was dandelion green pesto—which wasn’t quite our thing but was well-liked by some family members.
  • Then there was dandelion cordial—which is nice and tastes quite refreshing served over ice.
  • Soon following was dandelion jelly—or poor man’s honey, as it’s sometimes known. While my husband and I generally don’t eat jelly, this was indeed tasty and it’s an easy giveaway gift.
  • This year I ventured into dandelion root coffee to great success.

And the remaining dandelion recipe in my arsenal is dandelion capers.

What are capers?

For the longest time, I thought capers were seafood. I didn’t know exactly what they were, but I’d always believed they were from a fish or a clam or an oyster or something. Maybe it was the slightly salty taste they sometimes have.

So when I first heard about dandelion capers, I was beyond baffled.

Regular capers are pickled and seasoned flower buds—nasturtium flowers, to be specific. Suddenly this food that I typically avoided at all cost were mildly intriguing.

And when I learn of a new canning recipe, especially a unique one, I have to try it.

Picking dandelion buds

To start, you want to pick dandelion buds. Not soon-to-bloom buds on the end of long stems. You want the buds that are tightly nestled at the centre of the leaves. Sometimes after you pinch off a bud, there are even smaller ones beneath that.

(This year my step-dad picked all the buds for me, so I don’t have a picture of what this looks like, so you’ll have to use your imagination! I’ll try to remember to update this page with a pic next year.)

The quantity needed is entirely up to you. You can pick just enough for one jar or go bananas and make gallons of capers.

It’s best if you process the buds the same day. However, we couldn’t work that timing out this year so my step-dad froze the buds and I used them within a couple weeks. There does not seem to be a reduction in quality for having been frozen, but I’d recommend not letting them stay frozen for long—ice buildup and freezer burn will certainly degrade the quality of the final product.

When sorting through what you’ve picked, you want to keep the tight bugs that likely don’t have any petals formed yet. A bud that’s close to opening or which you can see hints of yellow poking through are too mature and should go in the compost. Ideally, the buds you want are about the size of a pea or smaller.

Once the buds have been picked, rinsed of dirt and bugs, and sorted so you have all the best buds, you can begin the process of pickling them. From here you can look to the recipe card lower down for the full directions, which include boiling water, vinegar, and salt to create a pickling brine.

You can choose to refrigerator pickle them or water bath can them. Processing in a water bath canner will get you a longer shelf life since they’ll be properly canned, but refrigerator pickling them (just sticking the jar in the fridge and not processing them) will likely result in a crisper texture since they’re not being boiled.

How to use dandelion capers

You can use dandelion capers any place where you’d use regular capers. Which, I must admit, I rarely do. Given my earlier aversion to capers, caper recipes are not in my personal stash of dinner recipes.

With a quick google search you can find some great recipes that use capers.

Personally, with my wide variety of pickled and canned goodies, I often serve them at a barbecue. I’ll have a “choose your own appetizer” spread set out with a baked brie and crackers at the centre, dandelion capers, pickled beets, pickled garlic, and whatever pickled or fermented produce I have in my fridge. It’s a great way for people to taste test a bunch of projects and also a great way to use up something I don’t often personally eat.

Dandelion Capers

Turn dandelions from your yard into tasty, tangy capers.
5 from 2 votes
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 20 minutes
Cook Time 10 minutes

Equipment

  • Mason Jars

Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups Dandelion Buds
  • ⅔ cup Vinegar, either regular or cider, as long as it's at least 5% acid
  • ⅓ cup Water
  • 1 tsp Salt

Instructions
 

  • Clean dandelion buds and discard any that are too large, close to opening, or in bad shape. Pack dandelion buds into mason jars.
  • Combine vinegar, water, and salt in a pot and bring to a boil, ensuring salt is dissolved.
  • Pour brine over dandelion buds, leaving a ½ inch headspace.
  • Refrigerator pickles:
    Put lid on and place jar in the fridge. After a week or so, they will be ready to eat.
    Water bath canning:
    Wipe rims and screw lids on to fingertip tightness. Process in a water bath canner for ten minutes. When the ten minutes is over, remove pot from heat and let sit for five minutes. Carefully remove mason jars and set on a towel on the counter to sit overnight. In the morning, check that the lids have popped / sealed; if they have, they can be stored in a cool dry place, if any jars haven't sealed, refrigerate them and consume them first.

Notes

Any size mason jar can be used. I tend to use one-cup or half-cup jars.
If you have more or less dandelion buds, this recipe can be easily multiplied or divided as needed.
If you find you’re short on brine, top off jars with vinegar.

How to Make Chive Blossom Jelly

Posted on by craig

It seems like every food gardener has an arsenal of jam and jelly recipes. After all, it’s a sweet, tasty, and easy way to preserve fruit and, in some cases vegetables and herbs, for the year ahead.

The problem is that my husband and I rarely eat jam or jelly, so most of these recipes don’t appeal to us since they’d just sit on the shelf. I still have some dandelion jelly from two years ago that I’m unlikely to ever eat.

Every once in a while, though, I come across a jelly recipe that does appeal to us. We tend to like savoury jellies, partly because they have wider uses than “spread it on toast”. Later this year I’ll do up a batch of hot pepper and wine jelly, which goes phenomenal on a baked brie.

My discovery this year is chive blossom jelly.

The first harvest of spring

Dandelions and edible weeds aside, chives are often the first produce to come up in the garden and the first to be harvested.

So in the spring our garden looks like this…

…with the ground mostly barren and the only plants showing life being the perennials, trees, and bushes.

But the chives are quickly growing and very soon look like this…

They’re the first burst of colour in the spring. And they bring with them a tantalizing aroma that you can sometimes smell just being in the vicinity of them.

There are two common types of chives — onion chives and garlic chives. These are onion chives. (We bought some leek seedlings and planted them and our neighbour says he thinks the plant was mislabeled and we bought garlic chives instead. So now we might have both?)

Onion chives have a green onion taste to them — oniony and fairly strong, but without the harsh bite that green onions can sometimes have in the bulb area. Both the green stalks and the purple blossoms are edible.

The only problem with chives is that they are difficult to preserve. You can freeze them, but they lose their flavour pretty quickly. You can dehydrate them, but they lose their flavour even faster.

I’ve got a batch of chive blossom vinegar on the go as a way to preserve the flavour and I’m attempting a fermented chives recipe I found (and I’ll report back when they’re done). Chive blossom jelly is a new preservation method added to my arsenal.

Frankensteining a recipe

I sort of Frankensteined this recipe together.

There are chive blossom jelly recipes out there, but they all call for low-sugar pectin which, to the best of my knowledge, is not easily found in Canada. The grocery stores don’t have it, Amazon has it for super expensive, the nearby department stores with canning supplies (Canadian Tire, Walmart), don’t have it. I couldn’t find an easy way to adapt a low-sugar pectin recipe to a full-sugar pectin recipe, so I half-invented this and half-adapted this to work with regular pectin.

You start by boiling and then simmering chive blossoms in a mix of water, white wine (optional, you can use additional water instead), and cider vinegar to leech out the flavour and some of the colour from the blossoms. I had some chive blossom vinegar from last year on hand, so instead of using cider vinegar I used the chive blossom vinegar for some extra chive-y taste. After it simmers for a while, you strain out the solids and let the liquid cool to room temperature.

From there it’s a pretty standard jelly recipe involving pectin, boiling, adding sugar, hard boiling, and canning. All instructions are in the recipe card below.

For an extra splash of fun, I picked apart some chive blossoms and added them to the jar before pouring in the hot jelly.

After canning, this is the final result…

Uses for chive blossom jelly

Chive blossom jelly has a very vibrant chive taste and even though it’s a full sugar recipe, it doesn’t seem too sweet to me, which opens it up to several different uses.

There’s, of course, the obvious use of spreading it on toast, but here are some ways I’m looking forward to using it:

  • As a topping on sandwiches. I make an excellent bagel breakfast sandwich with mayo, cheese, egg, and bacon, and I find a thin layer of savoury jelly often caps it off perfectly.
  • As a topping on a baked brie. During BBQ season I love to bake brie cheese on the grill and putting a thick layer of savoury jelly on top just adds a little something special to an already delicious appetizier.
  • As a side for a charcuterie or a cheese board. A little slathering of jelly on a cracker served alongside sharp cheese or cured meats would be heavenly.

Chive Blossom Jelly

Savoury, chive-y, and slightly sweet, chive blossom jelly looks gorgeous, tastes delicious, and can be used for savoury breakfasts, charcuterie boards, and baked bries.
5 from 2 votes
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 2 hours
Cook Time 15 minutes
Course Appetizer, Breakfast

Equipment

  • 1 Strainer
  • 1 Water Bath Canner
  • 4-5 1-Cup Canning Jars with Lids (Or 8-10 Half-Cup Canning Jars with Lids)

Ingredients
  

  • 2 cups Chive Blossoms, plus a few extra for garnish
  • 1¼ cups Water
  • 2 cups Dry White Wine (cooking wine is fine)
  • ¼ cup Cider Vinegar
  • 1 box Powdered Pectin (57g)
  • 4 cups Sugar

Instructions
 

  • Clean blossoms. Be sure they're free of insects, dirt, and debris; wash/rinse if necessary.
  • Place blossoms (except the few saved for garnish), water, wine, and vinegar in a pot and bring to a boil. Simmer for twenty minutes, stirring regularly.
  • Strain to separate blossoms from liquid. Leave to drip for 1-2 hours. Discard solids. Let liquid cool to room temperature.
  • Measure sugar and put aside so it can be added quickly when needed. Prepare canning jars by ensuring they are clean and warm. Pick petals off the saved chive blossoms and drop into the jars. When jelly is added later, the petals will float to the top and be part of the jelly.
  • Put three cups of liquid in a large pot. A larger pot is necessary as the jelly will foam up in the next few steps. Whisk in powdered pectin until it dissolves.
  • Bring to a boil. Whisk in sugar and return to a boil. Boil hard for one minute, stirring constantly.
  • Working quickly, remove pot from heat and skim off any foam. Immediately ladle into the jars, leaving a ¼ inch headspace. Wipe rims. Put on lid and screw to fingertip tightness. Place jars in canner and cover with an inch of water.
  • Process in canner for ten minutes. The ten minute timer starts when the water is brought to a full boil.
  • Remove canner from heat and let sit for five minutes. Carefully remove jars using a jar lifter. Let sit undisturbed on the counter overnight.
  • In the morning, test if lids have "popped" — they bend downward, indicating a seal was made. Sealed jars can be stored in a cool dry place. Unsealed jars (ones that did not "pop") should be refrigerated and consumed first.

Notes

If you’re located at more than 1,000 feet above sea level, you’ll need to adjust the processing time. This chart will help you figure it out.
If you’re avoiding wine, you can use water instead.
Cider vinegar can be replaced with any vinegar that has a mild or complementary taste, such as white wine vinegar. When I made the batch pictured here, I had chive blossom vinegar on hand, so I used that for an extra burst of chive-flavour.
Keyword chives blossom, jelly

How to Make Dandelion Coffee

Posted on by craig

Several years ago, a strange plant appeared in our garden.

We have a habit of letting these things grow, to see what nature has inadvertently given us. That strange plant ended up being wild mustard. With a little bit of googling, I learned how to harvest mustard seeds and then how to make my own mustard.

In the years since, we learned that wild mustard is an noxious weed in the province of Manitoba (because it will invade canola crops), so we acquired seeds for a different variety of mustard and now grow that. Mustard is an annual crop for us and friends and family look forward to my homemade mustard.

Since then, I’ve always been on the lookout for other edible plants in the garden, especially ones that we haven’t planted ourselves.

That’s when I focussed on the dandelions.

Dandelion Uses

Dandelion has several different uses and every part of the plant is edible. And while there are multiple varieties of dandelion, they are all safely edible, and there are no dangerous look-alike plants, so you can be confident in using the dandelions in your yard without giving it too much thought.

The uses of dandelion are surprisingly extensive. They include:

  • Dandelion wine
    • This is really good and I make a big batch every year
  • Dandelion jelly, sometimes known as “poor man’s honey”
  • Dandelion leaf pesto
  • Roasted dandelion roots
  • Medicinal salves

The list really does go on. I recently came across a recipe for “dandelion root fries”.

This year I tackled one I’ve been eyeing for a while — dandelion root coffee.

I’ve had dandelion root coffee a few times before, which is sometimes marketed as dandelion root tea. It has a surprisingly robust flavour that is quite similar to coffee. Sometimes it seems to have a hint of mocha flavour too. As someone that can’t have much coffee (I react poorly to it if I consistently have too much), I’m always on the lookout for good-tasting alternatives — and this is it!

Dandelion Root Coffee

The “how to” is surprisingly simple.

You dig up roots.

You wash them, dry them, and trim blemishes and straggly bits off. And chop them into small pieces.

You roast them. You can do them in the oven at 400 F for about 30-45 minutes; put them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and give it a shake every 5-8 minutes. Alternatively, I used the air fryer with the same method — 400 F for 30-45 minutes, give it a shake every 5-8 minutes. The only difference is I lined the air fryer basket with foil instead of parchment paper.

Let it cool completely. Then store in a cool, dry place, in an airtight container.

To make coffee, you can either use the small pieces and steep them like tea, or you can grind them and use them in a French press, or any other coffee-making appliance. I used the same amount of ground roots as I do coffee.

The result? Delicious.

Even better — it costs nothing and it’s caffeine-free.

Dandelion Root Coffee

When roasted and ground, dandelion roots make a very tasty coffee substitute, with a full-bodied flavour and just a hint of mocha.
5 from 2 votes
Print Recipe Pin Recipe
Prep Time 5 minutes
Cook Time 45 minutes
Course Drinks
Cuisine Coffee

Equipment

  • Oven or Air Fryer

Ingredients
  

  • Dandelion Roots

Instructions
 

  • Wash dirt off dandelion roots and trim off any blemished areas or thin strands.
  • Chop roots into equal-sized small pieces.
  • Roast at 400° F for 30-45 minutes. This can be done on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper in the oven or in an air fryer lined with foil. Check every 5–8 minutes, shaking each time. If some roots are roasted and dried before others, they can be removed.
  • Allow to cool completely. Store in an airtight container in a cool, dry place.
  • To make dandelion coffee:
    Roasted dandelion roots can be used in chunks or ground with a coffee grinder. If using chunks, use them like tea, steeping until desired taste is achieved. If using ground roots, use like ground coffee in a French press or other coffee maker, using similar number of scoops.
Keyword coffee alternatives, dandelion root coffee, dandelions

Garden Update: June 2024

Posted on by craig

After getting through the garden hibernation period—AKA winter—life is starting to appear in our yard again.

Many, many years ago, I knew a newcomer family that came from a very hot part of the world. Their first winter here was their first experience with below-zero temperatures. When the plants died off and the trees shed their leaves, they thought that everything was dead. By mid-winter, one of them asked a mutual acquaintance why no one was cutting down all the dead trees. It amazed and delighted them when spring rolled around and all of those supposedly-dead trees came back to life.

The garden is much the same.

When the snow first melts, all we’re left with is dead plant matter and barren soil. But when the spring sun finally starts to warm things up, then life comes rushing back.

While garden season in Winnipeg usually starts in late May, we’ve had a rainy late spring / early summer, pushing us into June. We’ve almost got everything in the ground now.

The Early Risers

There are a few very early signs of spring in our yard that mean the season is finally starting:

  • The double-flowering plum tree blossoms
  • The garlic we planted in the fall springs up
  • The rhubarb comes rushing back
  • The chives sprout straight up

The double-flowering plum trees covers itself in bright pink blossoms for about a week, then they all fall off and suddenly this seemingly-barren bush is covered in lush green leaves.

The plum tree, at least in this climate, doesn’t produce any fruit. It’s purely an ornamental tree. When I was researching that a couple years ago, amateur gardeners said it’s likely because the blossoms come and go before pollinators arrive, so it misses out on its chance to produce fruit.

I happened to catch a bumble bee happily working away on the blossoms while they were still in bloom. If that amateur gardener theory is correct, well, this early bee might mean we get a plum or two. If anything happens, I will report back on that progress here.

The garlic is always one of my favourite crops. I think it’s because we get two harvests out of them. There is, of course, the harvest of bulbs in mid to late summer—most of which I pickle—but in early summer come the garlic scapes.

Scapes are basically the flower stem of the garlic plant. They shoot up nice and high and then do several twists and turns. You let them get nice and big, but just before they start flowering, you yank them off the garlic plant. These scapes taste fantastic roasted on the barbecue or are a nice little treat if they’re pickled. There’s a vendor at the local farmers market who makes a mind-blowing hot sauce from garlic scapes, an idea I might explore this summer.

The dwindling pantry

This time of year is also where the shelves start to look a little bare.

We still have a lot left from last year, especially frozen chopped bell peppers and frozen chopped squash, but we’re down to our last few jars of apple juice and tomato juice, and we’ve long run out of things like frozen broccoli and salsa.

We really don’t like to buy what we don’t have to, so we haven’t had broccoli in months now and we’re eating a lot more bell peppers than we normally do. Our goal is to see if we can go a whole year without buying vegetables—and except for a few exceptions (like mushrooms and the occasional potato), we’ve managed to do that.

Although it’s a massive amount of work, I can’t wait for the preserving season to hit full-swing and I get to stock all of these shelves again. I always look forward to a year of great food.

Planning for a new year

As successful as the challenge has been, we’re always looking at what changes we need to make to do better next year. For us, this means increasing broccoli, paying attention to what tomato products lasted and what we ran out of, and figuring out how to massively increase our fruit production (because we don’t preserve or utilize much fruit, mostly because we haven’t grown much). A new challenge for us is to also expand our protein production with beans and the eventual crop of mushrooms, though the mushrooms might not happen till next year.

Oh, and we might be expanding our garden space yet again.

We do our whole property, the backyard of our west neighbour, and a strip along the fence of our east neighbour, but this year we might add some garden space at a retreat centre just outside of town. We’ve been offered some space there and John, my husband, AKA the gardener, has been out there to turn some soil over. It’s a great plot of land, but it’s a bit of a drive to get there, and on his first trip out there he came home with 19 ticks crawling all over him. So, we’ll see.

John determines which crops go where and there is a draw to the out-of-town garden. One possibility is moving our popcorn crop out to the retreat centre—they apparently do not have a squirrel problem. Last summer when we had popcorn in our neighbour’s yard, a solitary squirrel decimated our entire popcorn crop in less than half a day.

This Year’s Crop

If I’m remembering everything correctly, here’s what we’ve got ahead of us this year…

Perennials that come up every year:

  • Saskatoons (AKA service berries, June berries)
  • Raspberries
  • Strawberries
  • Blueberries
  • Horseradish
  • Mint
  • Oregano
  • Parsley
  • Thyme
  • Chives
  • Rhubarb
  • Flowers — I’m not sure if I’ll do anything with flowers this year, but in the past I’ve done lilac jelly and lilac wine, as well as peony jelly
  • Dandelions

Perennials from other people’s properties (not our neighbours) that we harvest:

  • Apples
  • Tart cherries

Things we’re planting, either as seedlings or as seeds:

  • Sweet peas
  • Peas for canning
  • Sunflowers
  • Corn
  • Popcorn
  • Leeks
  • Onions
  • Potatoes
  • Garlic
  • Chamomile
  • Basil
  • Catnip
  • Black Beans
  • Kidney Beans
  • Pinto Beans
  • Scarlet Runner Beans
  • Chickpeas
  • Tomatoes
  • Bell Peppers
  • Jalapeno Peppers
  • Hungarian Wax Peppers
  • Habanero Peppers
  • Kohlrabi (for our neighbour)
  • Cabbage (for our neighbour)
  • Broccoli
  • Brussels Sprouts
  • Kale
  • Spinach
  • Mustard
  • Ginger
  • Cucumber
  • Sweet Potato

Whenever I do a list like this, I always forget something, so there’s likely more than what’s listed here.

As well, tomorrow is our tenth wedding anniversary, and a tradition we fell into a few years ago is to go to a greenhouse on our anniversary and buy something new for the garden. We’re going to head out and look for a new fruit for the front yard. I’d love to get a cranberry bush, but they didn’t have it last year, so perhaps a haskap berry bush (which look like oblong blueberries).

I look forward to the summer and fall ahead as I start really filling this blog with recipes, updates, photos, and more. Thank you for tagging along on this journey.