Pickling Cucumbers: Hope Burns Eternal

Lavender's blue, dilly dilly, 

We visited the food auction again, and it was a night of great significance.  

I have been searching for the last few months for any farm or farmer that produced pickling cucumbers, and most particularly looking for someone who had them in bulk.  At the farmer's market I'd seen several booths with little quart boxes of the cukes, but that wasn't going to suffice.  Quite truthfully, I'd given up all hope of ever finding any this year and confided to Mr H that we may need to be satisfied with pickled okra, instead. 

It wasn't that they couldn't be had in bulk at all - I had seen pickling cukes at the food auction, you see - but they were growing rubbery to the touch, and their skin was starting to shrink, indicating to me that they were already a day or two old; too old for my purposes, which were whole dill pickles.  

Pickling cucumbers contain less water in their flesh than slicing cucumbers, and are smaller and firmer.  A slicing cucumber would make a very soft, smooshy pickle, and not very appetizing.  Pickling cucumbers hold their firm texture even after brining, whole or sliced.  And they need to be pickled as quickly as possible after picking, or they will go soft in the jars.  Preferably within 24 hours - the sooner, the better.  

When I arrived at the food auction on Wednesday night, my second time going there, I saw a pallet with five boxes of pickling cucumbers that looked fresh, moist and crisp.  There were a few boxes on other pallets, but a brief glance told me they were too old for my perfect dill pickles.  I hoped I could possibly score at least a box of the fresh cucumbers - I jealously wished I could get them all! - but I didn't hold out a great deal of hope because I had seen a box go for $23 a week ago, and I knew that was too high for me.  

The night progressed very nicely, and I picked up a few different items: a half-bushel of peaches for a friend, a crate of long green snap beans to be canned, two flats of jalapenos to be sliced and canned in vinegar, two watermelons and two canary melons.  

The auction wore on and the crowd thinned.  Prices started dropping.  There was about a bushel's worth of chilies  divided into separate containers, on the same pallet as the pickling cucumbers.  My heart was thudding in my chest as the auctioneer approached the pallet.  First he offered up a container of the peppers. He started the bidding at a few dollars, and nobody made a move.  He put all the containers in a stack and said, "Seven dollars for the whole thing!"  I raised my card.  

"Eight dollars!" he called to the crowd.  Nobody moved; they were bored of peppers, had bid on a dozen boxes of them at least so far, and nobody wanted any more.  "Eight dollars - eight dollars -"  He looked at me and I didn't move. "Eight dollars - sold for seven dollars, number three-four-six."  He waved towards the peppers and I, concealing my pleasure, stacked them all on a separate pallet for Mr H to load into the Jeep. The chilies all got washed and set in the dehydrator as soon as we got home that night, to be crumbled and added to recipes at a later date.  

The auctioneer reached a box of small tomatoes, separated into clamshells.  Nobody bid on them for a long time, and finally somebody took them for $2.25 a clamshell.  The bidder only took two clamshells, and I raised my card and scored the remaining eight.  These will be turned into tomato jam, as suggested by the Mysterious Mrs S.  

The last item remaining was the cucumbers.  My heart was in my throat.  I had no idea where he would start the bidding - or how high it would go, as I had seen cukes, a popular item, skyrocket quickly when everybody started bidding fast and furious.  

To my shock, he started the bidding at $5 a box.  Nobody twitched.  He blared on and on, and nobody moved a muscle!  I cast my bid.  I won them for $5 apiece.

He asked, "Do you want them all?"

I said yes.  110 pounds of pickling cukes for thirty bucks!

One of the auction old-timers said to me, "You're learning too fast.  You're gonna take us all."

I essentially use two strategies for the auction.  One is in the interest of cashflow:  I purchase things which I know I will not be able to get at a later date, in order to control the flow of spending.  For instance, I'd love to stock up on butternut squash, and a lot was sold the other night for a very fair price.  But I know butternut squash will be available well into the winter, and I won't be able to get the pickling cucumbers in a few weeks.  So, I buy cucumbers now, squash later.  The second strategy is a very simple one, which I learned the first day:  When there are seven pallets that have zucchini on them, don't bid for zucchini until the seventh pallet.  Then you'll get the lowest price, because everybody will have gotten all they wanted already, and won't bid against you.  

I was giddy about the cucumbers.  Mr H, our friend The WalDorf, and the little Farm Boy were all watching me make the bids.  "Looks like you're staying up late," Mr H said.  Miss WalDorf was planning to spend the night at our house in anticipation of canning items from the food auction that night.  "I think we'll need to stop at the store for some more apple cider vinegar!" I told her.  We picked up some ice cream, as well.

A vat of relish

Bread and Butter Slices

And stay up late, we did!  We made sliced bread and butter pickles - ten quarts, and one pint.  Relish - ten and a half pints.  And dill pickles - sixty-seven quarts, packed as tightly as I could cram them, with every inch taken up by additional spears and chunks of cucumber.  We canned all night, until 6:30 AM.  We were ridiculous, laughing at everything, falling on the floor with hysteria, and processing jar after jar.  We didn't get it all done, and Mr H and I finished the next day; but it was a relief to have been able to do much of the hot work during the night, when it was cooler and the little Farm Boy was asleep.

Dill Pickles - both spears and whole.  Miz Carmen gave me the original recipe! 

Mr H will easily eat a pint a day of these dills! 

I refuse store-bought pickles - once you've made your own, nothing seems
to compare ... so this is a happy sight for me! 

I am frequently asked what the difference is between canning/pickling salt (they are the same thing) and regular table salt.  The difference is that canning/pickling salt has not been iodized, as table salt is.  Table salt also can include anti-caking agents.  The iodine oxidizes the product being canned or pickled, and turns it brown or softens it.  This is, of course, unappealing.  Iodine was first added to table salt in 1924, as a government directive in the hopes of decreasing incidences of mental retardation and other malaise by assuring everybody received their recommended daily amount of this element.

And now, on to the little crate of green beans!

In a pickle, as always,

Mrs H
@_mrs_h
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Blog Launch: In Short, Stories

Dear readers and writers,

I am excited to announce the launch of a new blog, In Short, Stories!

This blog, edited in participation with several other authors, will feature a weekly story published each Sunday, a Monday writing prompt, and a Friday poetry section involving exercises, poetry, and prompts.

The blog is open for submissions from readers - so if you are a writer, or somebody you know pens short stories or poems, or you have a haiku stirring in your mind ...

write a little poem

you know you want to do this

or a short story

Many of us used to love writing, but our pen fell into disuse as life got busier, the English classes ended and we no longer "had" to keep writing papers and pieces.  The weekly exercises are meant to help us overcome that dry stretch and pick up the pen (err, keyboard for some of us) once more!

We don't all have a writing shed like Roald Dahl ...
but we can still write! 

Visit the blog at inshortstories.blogspot.com, and like our Facebook page at facebook.com/inshortstories to just enjoy the weekly stories, or to follow the prompts and submit your own work!

... And, since you are all my special readers and I want to give you a heads-up ... there will be a giveaway hosted at In Short, Stories very soon!

Excited,


Mrs H
@_mrs_h
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Skim Milk Makes You Fat? What?

Thanks for reading this post, I'm so excited to visit with you!  

After you've gleaned all the good information you need, visit our new blog platform at www.farmandhearth.com to read even more fascinating tidbits from the kitchen and the fields. 

Dear cookies,

I used to use skim, ultra-pasteurized milk - I can't say I drank it, because I would never just down a glass because it doesn't taste great straight.  I drank skim because I thought it was healthier. I didn't even realize you could drink whole milk – I thought that something akin to drinking half-and-half, or dancing in a moonlit field with the devil.  

I started learning about the devastating health effects of ultra-pasteurization a year or so after I got married and started seeking out low-heat pasteurized milk (which is still a better option if you can't obtain raw, in my opinion), and shortly thereafter my cousins introduced me to the glories of whole milk flavor - who knew?  Eventually I decided organic, non-plastic-bottled was another layer I wanted to add to our milk, and then I heard about raw - something I had previously thought may or may not kill you, depending on the alignment of the stars etc.  Shocker - it's safer than grocery store milk.  And better tasting, to boot.  This spring, with a confluence of education overwhelmingly pushing us in that direction, we made the leap to whole raw milk from grass-fed, organically raised cows.  And for you recyclovores, you will be happy to know we use the same glass half-gallon jars every week - so there is no additional waste involved. 

Really?  Because there is no science to
support that claim, and it doesn't taste
good at all, so I'm not seeing the perks ... 

What about ... feed differently?  Their government program
probably recommends a low-fat diet, including no butter and just
skim milk. Poor kids.  We need some new health tracts. 

Recently we were at a breakfast event and there were little cartons of milk on ice.  I wasn't a milk drinker before, although I used it on cereal and had it with brownies or cookies, - but, having now developed this taste for it I was hungry for a glass.  In fact, speaking of drinking more milk, my "lactose intolerant" husband won't go a day without drinking a huge glass of milk in the morning - hmm, maybe he's just "garbage intolerant?" At any rate, I wanted some milk so without really considering the facts I took one, popped it open and chugged a sip.  Too late, I realized the milk had spoiled and gone bad – the distinct rotten flavor was revolting and I almost spit it out, but didn't want to gross out my tablemates.  But then I took a sniff, and another small sip, and realized with a sinking feeling that it hadn't actually gone bad – it was supposed to taste like this.  I had just grown so accustomed to the purity of good milk that this thin, watery, rank liquid being sold to a trusting, uninformed public as milk was now apparent to me for what it really was – garbage!

Mmm serve me up some more sewage-like ultra-pasteurized
homogenized re-constituted powder-added pus-filled milk. Thanks!

Maybe you are a taste fanatic and would switch to raw (or low-heat pasteurized, cream-top) milk just for the beautiful flavor, or maybe you're a coffee addict and get really technical about things, but maybe you – as I did – need some scientific convincing before a) spending lots of dollars because real milk is not as cheap as mass-produced skimmed milk, and b) flying in the face of convention, something we seem to do a lot of around here. 

Over the summer, I read The Untold Story of Milk.  It is a pretty long book but if you are of a scientific mind, you will perhaps need a long book to convince you against the years of tradition (and by years, I mean just the last few years in America, not the entirety of human history around the globe - because that evidence never changed).  However, if you are concerned now, and you don't have time to read the book at the moment, you can get a nice summary of the basic health facts here, in an article titled Why Skim Milk Will Make You Fat and Give You Heart Disease.  To perhaps the alienation of some of her audience, this authoress does not mince words when addressing a topic that is near and dear to her heart - but she should be angry, I suppose, because misinformation is killing people in our country on a daily basis.  

The irony of the < 3 is not lost on me

I don’t want to regurgitate everything she says, because she puts it all quite eloquently (although she does bash us for drinking skim milk, which hurts … ouch, Sarah! Enough of the bashing, we’re already dying of heart attacks, no need to twist the knife), and more succinctly than I could.  If you want to examine the studies to which she refers, you can find citations for them in The Untold Story of Milk, and an examination of them in greater (sometimes tedious) detail.  As an aside, if you have concerns about cholesterol, I would quite seriously entreat you to get the book and read it as a lifesaving measure.  

However, I will warn you – after you’ve read this, you will perhaps feel so ill you will never look at a glass of Darigold the same again, so only read it if you are prepared to make a milk revolution in your life.  If you aren't, save the link for another day (this assuming the atherosclerosis does not get you between now and then).  No, no this isn't a tear-jerking article about cows falling over dead at the milk stanchions or a gag-me narrative about pus being boiled into the milk, although both of these events happen (if you've consumed milk in plastic gallon jugs from the grocery store, I can guarantee you have consumed pus – but don’t worry, it’s pasteurized).  Imagine for a moment we don’t mind pus one whit, and it doesn't bother us if diseased, malnourished and over-used milk cows fall over dead producing for us with a lifetime a fifth that of cows that live outside of factories on real farms. 

I thought all milk was real!?  What!!  It's FDA approved so it
Must Be Good!  

Instead, let’s talk about the dangers of you falling over dead… Let’s talk about saturated fats and cholesterol, and it isn’t what you think.  

Let's talk about milk, because this is important.  

Mrs H
@_mrs_h
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Dinner Menu XIII

Wednesday
Enchiladas (from freezer)
Sour Cream
Sparkling Cider

Thursday
Shepherd's Pie (from freezer)

Friday
Baked chicken
Twice-baked potatoes
Grilled vegetables
and cream pie, all from Ms Jennifer

Saturday
Unstuffed Pork Loin with prunes and sweet potatoes
French Vanilla with Blueberries

Sunday
Pita Packed with tzatiki sauce, grilled vegetables and cheese
Lemon-Lime-Cola


Mrs H
@_mrs_h
Facebook

Time to run, rain or shine! 

Wake me up when dinner's done ... better yet, I'll wake you! 

Have cheeks will travel! 

Keeping Onions

To the shriveled and parched,

Onions keep quite well in cold storage, when they aren't sold in a grocery store at two years old.

However, you may have onions that need to be dealt with or used up quickly.  You may have no room for cold storage or, like us, you may be in a region with long, humid summers and can't really implement that spare room for cold storage.  In the Pacific Northwest, we just used a spare bedroom without the heat on - it was chilly in there ten months out of the year!  We kept onions in our cold storage for six months.  No such luck in Virginia, where the coolest recess of the house is still a soggy 85 degrees at best.

So, we turn to other methods of storage for now: frozen dice, onion flakes, and onion powder,

At the food auction, we got a half-bushel of onions for $7.  A half-bushel of onions - bushels are measured in volume, not weight - is about 25 pounds.

I reserved a few in skins for use with cooking over the next few weeks, but the rest we peeled.

My mom first came up with this idea, which I used on a bushel sack of onions a year or two ago:  We chopped them coarsely, and put through a food processor for a few seconds to achieve a fine dice.  If you have a larger food processor, this goes much more quickly!

We decided to store them in food-saver bags since I won't be using them until the dead of winter, several months hence.  We packed onion in measured cupfuls into the bags and labeled them, then put them in the freezer to freeze solid.  Once they were frozen, we sealed the bags and returned them to the freezer.  Hastily bringing together a big pot of soup is a snap with already-diced onions.

This foodsaver has an option so I can freeze items with liquid, but it still sucks
out some of the liquid so I decided to freeze first, then seal.

We had a watchful supervisor ... 

While we were chopping and dicing, we also cut a few onions into wide slices, about a half-inch thick.  We broke these up a little and spread them on a food dehydrator.  Drying time depends on your food dehydrator - this is an oldie, with weak fans, and took about 24 hours +.  It is also soakingly humid here, and so I needed to deal with them immediately after turning off the dehydrator, or they'd be soft again!

Once again under the watchful eye ... 

After they were crispy-dry, I put them through the food processor.  You can chop as fine or as coarse as you like.  I will use these in soups, dips, and when cooking meats during the deepest parts of winter when onions are unavailable for purchase, and any cold stores (if I am so lucky as to have any cold stores!) are depleted.

Eight trays of onions produced a tightly packed pint, plus a quarter-pint.  If your dried food has more than 70% of the moisture removed, you can store without refrigeration or freezing, without fear of mold.  Even though our freezer space is limited, I put these jars in the freezer for storage; since it took eight trays of onions to fill these jars, I am still consolidating and saving freezer space.  Previously, after drying onions I transferred them into foodsaver bags for freezer storage, because I only had a side-by-side fridge and freezer and needed everything to be narrow and thin!

You can put them through a coffee grinder, if you like, to make onion powder.  Of course, the coffee grinder must be clean and dry.

Just a few seconds will do the trick.

With any luck, there will be more onions at the next food auction and I can dry and freeze enough for the whole winter!  We also pickle a good quantity of onions and use them in potato salad, tuna salad, other cold dishes and as snacks.

How do you preserve and store onions?

Mrs H
@_mrs_h
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This post is linked up at Monday Mania and Real Food Wednesdays, two fabulous resources for you!

Feeding Chunky Monkey: Let's Talk Nursing

Dear mothers-to-be especially, but everybody else in particular,

I am not a breastfeeding expert.

I have not taken classes.  I am not a member of La Leche League.  I have not read breastfeeding books, or looked up websites or watched videos on YouTube.  I don't have a dozen successfully breastfed and weaned children praising me in the background.

All I have to my name is a nine-week-old baby with more rolls than a Dutch bakery shop!  I want to share my experience with this most marvelous of womanly arts, breastfeeding, because sometimes just hearing an experience from a non-pro perspective is beneficial.

The Mysterious Mrs S shared about her breasfteeding experience in an article called Nighttime Nursing, which I read two weeks before my own little boy was born.  I loved her article and benefited from hearing her experience - so I hope I can do the same for future moms!

As to others - I hope you enjoy hearing about it, as well, and that it inspires you to encourage and support moms feeding their babies.

I know some moms are anti-covering when nursing in public - I'm neutral
on the subject and don't really care either way.  My little man gets pretty excited
about any noise or movement and tries to check it out, so sometimes a cover is just
helpful for speed and efficiency when there are lots of distractions going on!  

Snack time at the garden store ... I've never received "dirty looks" or been told
to leave, and we have nursed in many places.  I am grateful that people are
understanding and helpful in this regard.  A store manager at Panera Bread
even brought us more soup for free one time, because he saw I inhaled mine so quickly!!

Before our little chunky monkey was born, we took a short birth class, taught by the wonderful midwife apprentice that later attended the birth.  We took a private, two-session version because I was already over eight months pregnant and we certainly didn't have time for the full-blown class!  It was great fun (you might say it was a "scream"), and we learned about comfort measures and positions to engage in during labor, things Mr H could do to assist me, what we would need to do to prepare for the home birth (not much - have extra towels on hand and blow up the birthing pool, essentially!).  The apprentice brought a little doll to the second session and showed me some nursing positions and gave a few tips.

That is, I think, the extent of my formal nursing education.

When our wee little man was just minutes old, I held him tightly to my chest as I got up from the living room floor and walked to the bedroom.  I snuggled (nay, I collapsed) on the bed with him and Mr H, and the minutes-old baby nosed around at my breast for a moment but didn't show much interest in eating.  It was probably two hours after birth when we were getting ready to go visit The Seamstress that the midwife helped me position him in my arms while I sat on the couch, and he latched on for his first nursing amidst the gratifying oohs and ahs of appreciation from the midwives.  I'd been watching my mom feed babies for almost my whole life and never once questioned that this was how I would nourish my own children, and it seemed like second nature to hold him in that familiar position and hear him snuffle around.  He didn't eat for long, and he was more eager to sleep than he was to sample the other side.  I was just producing colostrum at this point, of course - the "pre-milk" which is so rich in nutrients and necessary for his starter immune system.  Over the course of that day, he never did eat much but mostly slept, nibbling and then falling back asleep for hours.  The midwife assured me that he was just worn out from the labor and would eat plenty, soon enough.

Boy, was she ever right!

I believe it was only the next day that my milk came in.  The little guy had finished pumping out all the meconium in his system and had some nice, newborn poo that day.  He started up eating, just little bits, but soon more and more frequently.

Not surprisingly, my breasts were somewhat tender and I wasn't too anxious to have him latch on each time.  "I think he's hungry," Mr H would say when the baby started squirming around.  "Are you sure?" I would hesitate.  Maybe he would just fall asleep ... but usually, he wanted to eat!  Once he got going, though, the sensitivity and tingling sensation would fade away.  My body was learning how much he needed to eat and was producing a lot of milk in the beginning, with a let-down reflex like a fire hose that was sometimes so strong he couldn't keep up and would draw back, sputtering, coughing, and usually crying.  I learned to keep a rag or diaper pad handy and to express some of that rushing first flow into the cloth, even though he would sometimes scream hungrily for the moment it took me to do so.  However, doing this helped him to keep from gulping down air, which in turn cut down on the large amounts of puke that he kept flooding our bed with in the beginning.

I hope ya'll know I won't wait long for this-here milk!

My breasts adjusted to nursing within a few weeks - the soreness faded faster than I was expecting, although in the beginning I kept dabbing them with salve, occasionally applying cool ice packs after nursing, and letting them dry in the air as much as possible.  In the bath, I would slap on warm washcloths which felt deliciously soothing and were great just before nursing him.  Milk quantities leveled out in a few weeks, too, so they weren't hard and full all the time - I never experienced a truly hot, painful engorgement during the first weeks, fortunately.

The little man knew his job, too, with that natural instinct that babies are born with.  We just applied patience and confidence.  He was 8 lb 4 ounces at birth, and by six weeks he was fourteen pounds.  I'd say he's a professional eater!

I ate way ... too ... much ...

I can't believe it's not butter!!!! 

My dad called it the Milk Truck when the babies were nursing, growing up ...
This is what I call getting hit by the milk truck!  

Before he was born, I read lots of birth stories and enjoyed reading about the empowerment and strength women felt during birth.  I reveled in that at his birth, too; yet in my memory that was not my most outstanding, shining moment.  Birth alone is not what made me feel like a birth mama, a goddess, a powerful being.

What made me feel powerful and stronger beyond anything else I had done in my life was nursing my child.

Some women feel that surge of strength and glory when they are pushing; some feel it when they see their belly swell with the new life within; some feel it when they see their baby open his or her eyes for the first time.  I felt it when my child came close and nursed. Felt powerful.  Felt unstoppable.

Felt it when I provided the precious nourishment that no other person on this earth could provide so completely as I.

Felt it when I healed my own body, and grew his, by the power of nursing.

Felt it when his legs grew fat and his eyes brighter and ever more alert and mature as he ate, many times throughout the day and night.

Felt it when his little blue eyes gazed up at me trustingly while he drank and drank of the best nectar creation could offer him.  When my milk would soothe his cries and satisfy his hunger when nothing else could.  When he would pull away with a drowsy, milky smile and beam up at me, then latch on and nurse furiously, clutching at my shirt and skin with his tiny fingers in eager haste.

Felt it when I nursed with confidence, trusting that when he turned away to sleep he needed that more than calories, and that when he cried when it seemed I had just fed him, he knew it was time for calories again and I had no reason to stop him.

This was my moment!  Let nothing stand in our way.


Mrs H
@_mrs_h
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