Food, glorious food

As I mentioned last week, there's been a lot of food preservation going on around here lately.  Let's begin with Tres' sauerkraut.  This is our second year making sauerkraut and let me just say, despite being raised a good German and having really enjoyed sauerkraut previously, there is NOTHING that compares with homemade sauerkraut.  Man, it is just so good.  At any rate, here's the deal.  We bought about 50 pounds of cabbage and Tres got to work - a food processor is a great tool for doing this on a big scale, but a grater would work fine too, especially if you were making less.  Next, the shredded cabbage goes into a crock (or a 5 gallon food-grade bucket in our case - another instance of re-purposing beer brewing equipment) with salt and gets mashed until it's submerged in its own juice.  Then, it's just a matter of weighing it down and waiting until it tastes ready.  This year, we let it ferment for two weeks before canning it and ended up with 20 quarts.

Next up were apples.  We headed to our local orchard (the same place we picked peaches and nectarines  over the summer) and picked 83 pounds of Fujis.  I tackled applesauce.  First, I cored, peeled, and sliced the apples - thank you Sandy for the handy dandy apple peeler , it sure makes things easier (although I would advocate buying the model that clamps onto your surface, as the suction cup has given out on ours after a couple of seasons).  I heated the sliced apples in a pot, with just a little water,  until they broke apart with a spoon, then I ground them with the grinder attachment for our mixer.  I use the grinder because I like my applesauce chunky, but when I made applesauce with kids at school, I used a food mill, which gives you the smooth texture that you find with most commercial apple sauces.  After grinding, I added cinnamon and nutmeg, heated the apples back up,  and canned them (I didn't add any sugar because the Fujis were very sweet, a little too sweet for me actually, but most people add sugar to taste as they're reheating).  After several slow batches, reheating in a pot, I took a cue from my brilliant husband and heated the ground apples up in the crock pot.  While it takes longer, you can heat more at one go and you don't have monitor them to keep them from burning.  When all was said and done, I ended up with 21 quarts of apple sauce.  Tres used a similar technique to make apple butter, adding brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, allspice, cloves, cardamom, and ginger to his ground apples, before cooking them in the crock pot until they had reduced in volume by 1/2, about 20 hours.  One full crock pot yielded 7 pints.

We've been wanting to store root vegetables over the winter for a few years now, but either haven't gotten enough from our garden or haven't had a good space in which to store them.  This year, we decided to experiment with a root cellar (with the hopes that this will be a method we can continue to use and improve upon in the future).  You might recognize the barrel as the tank from our former shower (it used to hold strawberry kiwi flavored syrup and was purchased at the local junk/hardware shop).  Tres sawed off the top, put a piece of leftover plywood in the middle to separate our items, and filled it with straw.  We bought 25 pounds of beets, 25 pounds of carrots, and 50 pounds of potatoes at the farmer's market and filled the barrel, then buried it in the dirt and put the lid back on the top.  Yay for fresh vegetables in the winter!