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Love,
Lettuce and Spinach
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Fall Means Busy Time.
It was a long day of canning tomatoes and preparing some garden beds for Fall crops yesterday. Today the Fall/Spring lettuce and spinach crops are now planted and I have enough tomatoes put up to feed our family for the winter. Tomorrow I should get the carrots, radishes and chard in. I am going to miss Summer, but I love fall as well.
I’ll leave you with a photos of the Tomato jars I filled yesterday and watch the blog for a full post on how we canned them.
Making Sunbutter – Sunflower butter the easy and cheap way.
We recently found that one in our household had a peanut butter allergy and being lovers of the famous PB&J this hit us hard. We knew we had to find a substitute that we could all live with. Enter SunButter, the peanut butter substitute to brighten your day!
Well, at about $5.00 a jar, it hurt, but we needed to do it. It tastes very similar to peanut butter and made those bleary eyed morning lunch packing chores much easier. I just couldn’t stomach the price though and last week I started googling recipes. What I am posting here today is a conglomeration of a couple that I found and seems to be the road to a sunflower butter that closely rivals that of the store bought product.
Ingredients to assemble:
3 cups roasted sunflower seeds. (Use raw sunflower seeds and roast your own. DO NOT buy pre-roasted or salted seeds as they are too dry and too salty)
1 teaspoon sea salt. (I prefer Maldon)
1 teaspoon sugar
Sunflower (or any oil of choice) to drizzle.
I started with roasting 3 cups of sunflower seeds that were under $2 a pound at our local Whole Foods. It takes just about 5 minutes on the stove in a heavy pan, I prefer the All-Clad French Skillet
When most of your sunflower seeds are golden brown you are ready for the next step. Now pour all of your seeds into your food processor along with a teaspoon of sea salt and the teaspoon of sugar (you can add more to taste later if you wish) . It is going to be running for a long time and will probably get hot. Don’t panic. If you have a sturdy, quality, food processor, you shouldn’t have any problems. I use a Cuisinart Elite 12-Cup Food Processor
Once you have your seeds loaded up you are ready to go! So turn it on. In just about 30 seconds you should have a pretty grainy batch of ground up sunflower seeds. Most recipes tell you stop here and add the oil. Don’t. Let it keep going so that the seeds can release the oil within them, naturally.
Here is the grainy stage.
Keep going and you will see it starting to clump.
At this point you want to start using a rubber spatula to scrape down the sides. Do this every so often, but don’t be afraid to walk away and open up your chicken coop for the day. I did. Found an egg.
It’s getting shinier.
Then you will soon be here.
Now you can start drizzling in the oil a little at a time until you reach a nice spreadable consistency.
And here it is, looking good.
Scoop it into a pint jar and you are ready to go!!! Sunbutter for less than half the cost of store bought and in less time than it takes to load up the kids and head to the store!!!
What can you do with a few cherries?
We have probably been through 15 pounds of cherries this year and all of them were eaten straight from the bag. While I love to put up food for later I have never been a big fan of canned cherries or cherry pie, so I never gave any thought to canning them, that was until I was thumbing through Chef Michael Symon’s book. Michael Symon’s Live to Cook: Recipes and Techniques to Rock Your Kitchen
Symon has a chapter on pickling and within that chapter was a recipe for pickled cherries. I immediately knew what I was going to do with the next batch of cherries I purchased. The thought of those cherries sounded like something I could buy into and was a wonderful way to preserve cherries for winter. I can just imagine them accompanying a wonderful short-rib dish.
So I set to work assembling my ingredients and for the most part I had what I needed. I substituted and added a few of my own touches. I do think they turned out pretty well. The Recipe makes about 2 quarts and I doubled the recipe for the brine to ensure that I had enough liquid to submerge the cherries into two quart jars.
Ingredients: (remember to double all the ingredients below, except the cherries, if you are going to preserve them beyond 30 days in the fridge)
2 pounds bing cherries
2 cups red wine vinegar
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons kosher salt
2 strips orange zest, removed with a vegetable peeler (I used grated orange peel)
1 tablespoon black peppercorns (skipped these, don’t know why, but I just didn’t like the sound of them)
2 cinnamon sticks and 2 cardamom pods (to replace the peppercorns and add a bit of a floral note)
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 bay leaf
Instructions:
Prick each cherry with a fork several times and put them in a nonreactive jar or container.
Mix the vinegar, sugar, salt, orange zest, black peppercorns, cinnamon sticks, coriander seeds, and bay leaf in a nonreactive saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat so the liquid simmer, and cook for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cook for 10 minutes. Pour the liquid over the cherries (they should be completely submerged).
When the concoction is completely cool, seal or cover the cherries, and refrigerate for up to 1 month. In my case I placed the cherries into two sterilized quart canning jars and poured the hot brine over the cherries. I then sealed the jars and processed them for 30 minutes in a water bath. Remember to adjust your water bath time based on your location above sea level.
(Adapted From Michael Symon’s Live to Cook)
