Pickles, Beans, Relish and Corn.

It's food preservation season! You probably already knew that!

Thursday night I cut 10 pounds of beans to length to fit into my canning jars for dilly beans, the rest I cut into bits for freezing. I then took my pickling cucumbers and separated them by size, the biggest ones I cut into quarters for bread and butter pickles, the mediums I split down the middle for dill pickles and the very tiniest I left whole for bringing pickles. I then put all the canning cukes into a brine overnight, to insure they'd be crisp once pickled. To make the brining pickles I placed several grape leaves into my 1 gallon crock, a few heads worth of garlic cloves and 2 dill blossoms, plus cucumbers and brine. Those are hanging out in my basement with a cloth over them, and doing their thing.

Friday was a day of canning... 6 pints of bread and butter pickles, 10 pints of dill pickles and 10 pints of dilly beans. It took ALL day and was interspersed with meetings, house painter aggravation, fussy baby and my wonderful mother's helper. It was also my 1st day of juice fast. After canning all those pickles, I see why people would make bringing pickles... they're much less work on the front end!

On Saturday we went mackerel fishing on the breakwater, I caught my first fish! I actually caught lots of fish! It was quite exciting... Rafi brought them home and smoked them that evening. While we were fishing I also managed to shuck 60 ears of corn, which I then cut off the kernels, blanched and froze that evening! I also put away those green bean off cuts while I was at it! Phew! On Day 2 of my juice fast, exhausting! But we have A LOT of corn in our freezer now, which is reassuring. And then yesterday morning I made 20 half pints of zucchini relish! which we'll eat on crackers! In winter! Yum!

Phooo... So much preservation feels good, a pat on my back. Though I have one regret... that I didn't grow the food myself, I try to keep in perspective that my garden's small, I've been overwhelmed for much of the year with house and baby, but it's something I want, to have big gardens which we eat from.... perhaps I can do more next year! I also feel so secure, and proud to be putting all of this food on shelves in the basement and into my freezer, because it means we'll be eating vegetables, locally for so much more of the year! And that feels wonderful to me, I feel as though I'm really serving my family well with this gift of my time now, which will enable us to eat healthy (free) meals when things are the tightest, we're paying our oil bill and we don't want to leave the house in winter... Plus it will be delicious.

Next... broccoli, kale and sauerkraut!