Sunday, December 26, 2010

Pickling



Making pickles is an excellent day project for late August when cucumbers are plentiful. With kitchen cleaning time, expect a 4-6 hour project for a dozen quarts.

DILL PICKLE RECIPE
(makes 3 quarts)
6-8 cucumbers, depending on the cut
2 quarts water
1 quart vinegar
1/2 cup salt
6 sprigs dill
6 cloves garlic, crushed with side of knife handle

Step 1: Clean
To avoid botulism it's very important to have clean surfaces. I washed the entire kitchen with bleach water.

Step 2: Veggie prep
Our garden did give us a season of fantastic cucumbers, however there were never enough at one time to undertake such a big project. So we supplemented with cucumbers from our neighborhood farmer's market. Look for canning-sized cucumbers. Small, green/yellow cucumbers are preferred. We opted for a variety of cucumber cuts: whole, spears, and whole with ends cut off. Wash the cucumbers and cut them as desired. Wash the fresh dill and cut into individual sprigs. Peel the garlic and crush the individual cloves with the side of the knife handle.


Step 3: Canning liquid
Combine the salt, vinegar, and water in a large pot. Bring to a boil.

Step 4: Prep canning jars
Wash the lids with warm soapy water. Boil the jars and rings for at least 3 minutes each. The boiling of the jars needs to be timed with the boiling canning liquid.

Step 5: Fill jars
Fill a freshly boiled (still hot) jar with cucumbers, 2 garlic cloves, and 2 sprigs of dill. Cover with boiling canning liquid to fill line. Place lid on top and tighten the ring. Set the jar aside and wait for the satisfying pop of the lid. Continue this process until all jars are filled. Lids should pop closed within the hour. Group the hot jars together, as they need the heat to seal. Let the jars cool over night.

Step 6: Final check
Just to avoid sickness, check that all the lids sealed. If the lid is not popped, it didn't work and should be discarded. For those that did seal, loosen the rings slightly (or remove altogether, if you prefer) and store the pickles for 6 weeks in a cool, dry place.
Six weeks later - enjoy!

Helpful hints: we placed a cotton dish towel at the bottom of the boiling water to help cushion the jars as they boiled and we removed the jars and rings from the boiling water with metal bbq tongs.




Big thanks to Annie and Christa for the pickles. And another one to Annie for the post.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Fun with Hockey


If you're committed to something, it will touch everything else in your life. Let me explain. One of the places I enjoy spending endless time is in the garden in front of our row house. Another, is a hockey rink in the back of Francis Hammond Middle school in Alexandria. Seminary Rink is nestled in a wooded area surrounded by apartment buildings, parking lots, and soccer fields. Its right next to the highway, but you'd never know it's there, and good luck finding it, even with directions. On Sundays, when my team plays there, the school is packed with families, and the parking lots overflow with minivans. All the soccer fields are full of kids playing in their shiny, sharp-looking uniforms, and the rink is loud with the clatter of wooden sticks, cheers, and "what the f's". On a nice autumn day, some of us spend an hour at the rink, showing up for a game, and going home. Some stay the whole day, watch, referee, keep track of goals and penalty minutes. Sometimes I like to show up early and hang out for an hour or two before the game, watch hockey on tv behind the benches, talk to whoever is there, lean over the boards and watch the games, or just read a book. That's on a nice day.



Sunday, December 5 was not nice. It was a freezing evening, and there were three guys inside a car in a dark, quiet, empty parking lot, hesitant to go out in the cold.
'Where is Scott, I thought he'd be here?'
'I'm surprised he's not behind the shed sacrificing a chicken.'

This was the night of the championship game, and this was us waiting for our goalie to come so we could start warming up. Its not surprising, but we didn't wait in the car long, it doesn't matter how cold or dark it was, there was a hockey rink right next to us, and we were out there shortly. Some extra layers and pads, the lights were switched on, a few more teammates arrived, a few stretches, warm-up shots, sprints, and here comes the opening face-off.

One bad shift, and we're down. One good shift, and we're up. 2-1 Group Therapy at the end of the first. 3-1 at the end of the second. Our team moves from the bench to the penalty box in the third, but we get through it. One last kill. Game.



If you're committed to something, it will touch everything else in your life. If you want to know what I'm daydreaming about when I'm weeding the garden, it's scoring a game winner in OT. If you want to know where all the hockey sticks from Seminary Rink end up, that would be my garden. I guarantee you that all those sticks spend more time holding up tomatoes and cucumbers then they do at the rink.



Here is my favorite Jack Falla story, from the days when Wayne Gretzky began winning Stanley Cups in Edmonton:
"...As I headed out the dressing room door, Gretzky called me back.
'You shoot left?' he asked.
I said I did and he gave me one of his sticks. I appreciated the stick, but not as much as the question that suggested what Gretzky intended I do with that stick. The same thing he'd do. Use it. I caught a late morning flight home, and by mid-afternoon, I was out on the backyard rink using Gretzky's stick in a pickup game with kids from the neighborhood. It was a good stick. Light. Strong. It survived the backyard rink season and held together for a few games of spring driveway hockey before someone inevitably stepped on the blade, whereupon I threw it in a corner of the garage with all the other broken sticks. In June, I did the same thing with Gretzky's stick that I did with 23 other bladeless shafts. I hammered it into the soft ground of the garden and staked a tomato plant to it."



Yes, I do that too. I have many non-Gretzky sticks in the garden. When my parents visited DC for Cherry Blossom Festival, I couldn't go with them because a stick bruised my ankle and made it swell up. It isn't unusual for me to not be able to sleep on my back because a stick was jammed into my lower back during a game (guess I run too close to the net). I did score a game winner in OT once, and that stick is in the garden too. I just don't know which one is which.


Stanley Cup pumpkin from last Halloween

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Composting


Shhh, don't tell the rats in the alley or the squirrels playing in the trees all up and down the street, but there is a bin full of decomposing food right in our garden. So far all the furry creatures have been staying away from our compost, except maybe our cat, who likes to sit next to it and warm up on really cold days.

First let me tell you how easy it was to set this whole thing up. I bought a 32 gallon trash bin with a lid for about twelve bucks. With a drill, using a 1/4 inch bit, I cut drain slots all around the bin from bottom to top, as well as bigger drain holes in the bottom of the container, about 1 inch in diameter. All of this would take no more than a few hours, if your drill is even marginally better than mine. Placement is important. Obviously it doesn't have to be in the middle of the garden, taking land away from plants, or in plain sight of everyone in the neighborhood. Its not unsightly at all in my opinion, but as Dalton put it, opinions vary. So I thought it would be nice to be as considerate as possible to others, after all we all live in very close proximity in the city. Once I found a nice spot for it, by a brick wall in the corner of the garden, and not too close to the house itself, I dug a hole in the ground a bit less than 1 foot deep and set the bin in there. I transplanted some marigolds right around the bin, which covered and camouflaged it nicely, put some dirt at the bottom of the container to get it started, emptied the first load of kitchen scraps in there, and covered them with dry leaves. And here we go.



This was in late summer. Every once and again I turn the contents of the bin over with a shovel. From time to time I add water to the compost to help decomposition. And even though I have no idea if this is effective, sometimes I put cat hair into the bin after our cat is brushed. My thought is, the scent acts as an extra deterrent for the furry creatures that live all around us, but to my knowledge this has not been scientifically proven. Other than this, compost is on auto pilot, we empty out kitchen leftovers in there, and others in our row house do the same. We cover things that will decompose with things that are already dead, dry leaves, shrubs, cut up newspaper, and we wait for the spring when the first batch of decomposed organic material will be ready to go into the garden as fertilizer.

In our bin, we put almost everything that comes out of the kitchen in food preparation, not so much the table scraps. Onion peels, pepper insides, broccoli ends, potato peels, banana peels, celery ends, tea, apple cores, etc. No meat, no dairy. There is container with scraps in the fridge, and sometimes what used to be garbage, now lives in the freezer until its time to put it out. Its not that strange since I already keep all the egg shells in the freezer for months at a time, and also ask anybody from San Francisco what they have in their fridge since the whole city started composting, and you will see that a few leftover veggies next to your butter is not the end of the world. When it comes time to put things in the compost, we try to keep about 50/50 balance of green stuff (from the house), and brown stuff (from the outside, leafs, mulch, etc.).

So there it is. Compost. Almost no trash in the house, except a few recyclables, free fertilizer in the spring, free leaf cleaning service for our neighbors, and a cat warmer.


"Opinions vary"

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Last Harvest


Today, 4th of December, the last edible plants, and stalks were pulled from our garden. It was nearly freezing here last night and tonight is going to freeze, weather forecast is calling for snow, but I doubt it. It is, however, safe to say the pepper flowers are not going to turn into veggies any more. We picked two beautiful peppers, and pulled up twelve plants. they will be set aside to dry and be used in the compost later, in the winter. Overall the pepper crop this year was less than plentiful, but satisfactory. We were not able to make stir fries very night, or jar any peppers or hot sauce, but there were enough for salads and sides with dinner.

Everything was pulled today, plants, flowers, lettuce. We gathered leaves from our neighbors, and incorporated them into the soil for some mulch. A little fertilizer for the spring time as they decompose during the winter. We gatherer some more leaves and put them aside for the use in the compost bin later (I say "we", although I did very little of this physical labor, Annie and Saylor were responsible for most of this).




We also had four different kinds of lettuce growing in the garden since early Fall. Three were too bitter to eat, but one variety is very flavorful and will be the final crop we grew that will end up on the table this season. Some people grow lettuce in green houses outside all year round, but we just came back from many weeks of traveling and there was no time to build the little green guys a home before the freezing weather. So I guess we'll have to have lots of fresh salads this week.

Yes, there are some more plants like basil, and lettuce that will grow on our window sill through the winter, but as far as the out-door garden goes, this is it for 2010.

Coming up:

Composting, pickling, late season planting experiment, backyard garden design, masonry heating units, green house designs, cob construction.