Friday, March 9, 2012

Canning Beets, Grapefruit Juice, and Japan Plum/Kumquat ?'s...

So first off, we have a ton of fruit, etc trees/plants in our yard. Plum, pecan, grapefruit, orange, satsuma, tangerine, 2 kinds of kumquats, 3 or 4 kinds of figs, 2 kinds of persimmons, Japan plums (aka loquats), blackberries, 2 kinds of muscadines, you get the idea. For the most part, I can come up with multiple things to do with all these. I'm stumped on a few though. I love to eat Japan plums right off the tree, but there's got to be other stuff to do with them. I've looked online and come across a few recipes for cooking with them, and a good bit on jam/preserves. I even saw one with packing them in salt for 10 years before you eat them.

Has anyone ever tried these? Do you have any other/better suggestions? Can I just hot/raw pack them and put them in fruit salad? Run them through the dehydrator for a snack?

I have a similar question with kumquats. We have 2 kinds of these - one sweet, one sour. I don't eat them, but I do make kumquat/orange marmalade for my parents and brother to eat. I've dehydrated them once, and they made a crunchy snack my brother and dad liked. Got any other suggestions for canning? Think I could slice them up, hot/raw pack them and use them in fruit salad year round? I hate having food go to waste in the yard, but I'm stumped.

Now, to share what I actually did can a few weekends ago.

19 quarts of grapefruit juice. I don't drink it, I hate grapefruits, but my brother loves it. The tree is huge, and I barely touched it to get the 15-20 gallons of grapefruits we used.




I also did a batch of pickled beets that same weekend. I didn't have any fresh ones, so I used store bought canned stuff (sigh) but they work just as well. Santa brought a ton of the Tattler canning lids for the holidays this past year, so now I can stick them on just about everything I can this year. :)


And just cause my daddy took a picture of it for me to put up here: I present the rack of canned/dried food. It's not as packed as it was before Christmas, but it's getting filled up again. I didn't have room for the ~100 quarts of pears I hot packed last year on there, so they have floor space. The majority of the remaining junk on/near the floor is plarn (plastic yarn) that I crochet with, or the bags to make it with. Sigh...I need to clean house. ;)


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