I am so enjoying the change of season this year. We’ve had a glorious stretch of sunny, crisp days here in Philadelphia, and I’m feeling awfully grateful for the beauty of this particular autumn.
A dear friend sent me two boxes containing apples and quince from her trees. I dashed through the farmers market this morning and came home with apples, asian pears, sea scallops, and a giant bundle of white turnips, which are destined for this soup. Life is good. Now, links!
- Martha makes grape jelly (and with a swoon-worthy jelly bag, to boot).
- Roasted tomato butter (not safe for canning, but delicious sounding nonetheless).
- Ground cherry salsa fresca (sadly, I’ve seen relatively few ground cherries this year).
- What do you do with your apples?
- An interview with Erica Strauss, about fermentation, homesteading and her new book.
- Smoked garlic scape salt (bookmarking this one for spring).
- The last big canning session before packing it away for the season.
- Spicy pickled red onions.
- Honey sweetened quick dill pickles (just the thing if you’ve got any end of season cukes).
- Fighting germs with an asian pear remedy.
- Alana’s new book came out this week and Leite’s Culinaria has a little excerpt.
The winner of the Masontops Fermentation Set is #277/Camellia El-Antably. Congratulations! And did you see the announcement about the Masontops Pickle Pipe Kickstarter campaign? They’re doing incredibly well!
Congratulations to Camellia El-Antably on being the lucky winner
If you like ground cherries, they are super easy to grow. We were inundated with ground cherries this year, thanks to a bad garden clean-up job from the previous year’s plants (those little fruits are packed with seeds!!). They came up everywhere! Made one batch of jam from a recipe I found that used vanilla chai tea — my family gave it thumbs up. I have many more in the freezer, so looking for more jam ideas.
I am wondering if the roasted tomato butter could be canned with the addition of lemon juice or is it just too dense?
Awesome links – am feeling very inspired!
I think that the finished product is too dense. You could probably freeze it, though.
I’m thinking of freezing some in an ice cube tray so we can use as a condiment or to replace tomato paste – seems like we never need more than 1/2 can of paste. Just have to be careful not to mix it up with the hot pepper cubes!
That looks like a felted bag.
There are several ways to make one.
One would be to find some thick WOOL felt, boil it and then form it over a cone and wait for it to dry. This is how they used to make hats. But wool felt isn’t very easy to find and you’d have to create your own form. Hat forms are carved from hard woods.
The other way which would be much easier is to take very fine weight wool, like for socks and knit or crochet a bag with very fine needles or hooks, then wash it in very hot water and then toss it in the dryer. Repeat until it is shrunk and felted.
And you’d have to turn it inside out and wash it separately from everything else every time you used it.
I think I’ll stick to lining my sieve with cheese cloth. The fine kind for cheese making, not the cheap stuff from the supermarket.
The closest I can find on the internet is a felted maple syrup bag for $25.00. I really don’t see the advantage of the felt so I’ll stick to the cheese butter cloth.
thanks for the link-up~ how fun!