Cucumbers and Yellow Squash and Zucchini Oh My! (Updated w/Recipes)

(Edited to add in recipes for my sake, so even when I lose the book, I can find them.)

We have a garden. My dad has a theory that what we can't eat, I'll can or dehydrate or freeze or he'll give away. It works great, but it also means that my entire summer vacation that hasn't been screenprinting t-shirts (my parents are self employed and we print shirts) has been mostly spent in the kitchen canning, dehydrating or making soap.

So far, I've made 4 or 5 batches of pickles: Garlic, Kosher Dills and Sweet Pickles. My dad likes sweet pickles, but not too sweet, so the recipe I used for those called for 10 cups sugar, I only put 7. They're sweet enough, I hate to think about what 10 cups would be like. For the Kosher Dills, it called for mustard seed. I didn't want to go to the store and buy more, so I just took the 55 gallon drum of mustard green seed stalks we have drying on the porch and my mom and I spent 2 hours cleaning mustard seeds to use in pickles. They're tiny black ones, but the Kosher Dills are delicious. :) Not one to waste anything, I decided to use the ends of the cucumbers to puree and make cucumber soap the next day. I'll put up pictures of that soap and the other ones I made later. The top picture is some of the Kosher Dills, the second one is some of the Sweet Pickles. The easiest way to tell them apart is the dill floating in the Kosher ones versus nothing floating in the Sweet ones. :)

Kosher Dills (From So Easy to Preserve from the Cooperative Extension of University of Georgia)

(6-7 Pints)

30-36 cucumbers, 3-4" long

3 C vinegar

3 C water

6 T salt

Fresh or dried dill

Garlic

Mustard seed

Wash the cucumbers. Slice 1/16" from blossom end and discard. Leave 1/4" of stem attached. Make a brine of vinegar, water and salt. Bring to a boil. Place a generous layer of dill, 1/2 to 1 clove of garlic (sliced) and 1/2 teaspoon of mustard seed in the bottom of each pint jar. Pack cucumbers into hot jars. When the jars are half filled with cucumbers, add more dill and complete packing. Fill the jars 1/2" from the top with boiling brine. Remove air bubbles. Wipe jar rims. Adjust lids. Process 10 minutes in a Boiling Water Bath. Pickles will shrivel after processing. They will later plump in the jar.

My Changes

I cut larger cucumbers up into chunks instead of whole little ones. I used black mustard seed from our garden instead of the yellow one I'd normally buy at the store. The flavor is good though, so I'm not complaining. I used quart jars, just tacked on 5 extra minutes of time in the BWB.

Sweet Cucumber Pickles (From So Easy to Preserve from the Cooperative Extension of University of Georgia)

(4-5 pints)

3 pounds cucumbers, medium sized

1 quart vinegar

2 t salt

5 C sugar

Wash cucumbers. Slice 1/16" off blossom ends and discard. Pour boiling water over the cucumbers and let stand 5-10 minutes. Drain off the hot water and pour cold water over the cucumbers. Use running water or change water until cucumbers are cooled. Mix vinegar, salt and sugar. Bring to a boil. Place cucumbers into the boiling liquid. Return to a boil. Pack hot pickles into hot canning jars, leaving 1/2" head space. Fill jars to 1/2" from top with boiling liquid. Remove air bubbles. Wipe rims. Adjust lids. Process 10 minutes in a Boiling Water Bath.

My Changes

I used chunks of bigger cucumbers again instead of little ones, only 3 1/2 C of sugar instead of 5 since my dad wanted not too sweet pickles. I made these in quarts so I tacked on 5 minutes to the BWB time.

________________________________________________________________

Since we also have an exorbant amount of zucchini and yellow squash, we cut them up and dehydrate them. This is great if you like zucchini Parmesan but hate the wetness of squash in food. Simply layer your pan's bottom with dried summer squash, lightly spray some water on it, pour spaghetti sauce, put squash, pour sauce, etc. Let it sit about 20 - 30 minutes before putting it in the oven to give it time to soften some.

For drying, cut them up in chunks.

Lay them out on the tray, it doesn't really matter if they touch.

 Dry them at 145 Degrees until they snap when you break them in half. For reference, the dried zucchini below is what came from that loaded tray above.

Any suggestions on other pickle types or things to do with squash would be great. We've tried a ton of things, love a bunch of them, but after 3-4 years of squash, I'm running out of ideas... :P

Garlic Pickles

So Monday was the first my second full day out of school for the summer, so naturally that means begin preserving anything that came out of the garden recently. This case was pickles. I used a recipe that my grandma gave me that my dad loves (and loved when he was a kid too). It came from a friend of my grandma's from West Texas named Mrs. Totsie Hines. It's a rather...sparse...set of instructions, but they serve well. It didn't have a processing time for boing water bath, so I do them for 10 minutes just because. It's the prevailing time that I came across from other pickle recipes.

Mrs. Totsie's Garlic Pickles

6 cups vinegar
13 cups water
1 cup salt (I used pickling salt)

Bring to a boil. To each jar of spears, add 2 cloves garlic, 2 peppers. Let stand 6 weeks. (I BWB for 10 mins.)

In this batch, instead of doing spears, I did thick slices and chose not to put peppers. Mainly because our pepper plants haven't a thing on them but flowers right now. But the recipe tastes great without peppers as well. Just don't eat a clove of garlic thinking it's a pickle. It doesn't say if it's for quarts or pints, but every time I've done them, I make pints and 2 cloves of garlic/2 peppers works for me in that size. I made 12 pints and ended up with a little under 2 quarts of liquid left over to make some more later.

I decided to keep the ends of the cucumbers and used them on Tuesday to make cucumber soap. Right now it's a nice green. I'll post that later once I get some pictures.

Wild Onions!

So a few weeks ago, I decided to make use of the copious amount of wild onions growing in our yard. I started digging them up, but was rather slow. My dad came out and started going crazy with the shovel and got me over two 5 gallon buckets full of beautiful smelling greens and bulbs. Between my mom and I, we spent the entire day cleaning and cutting onions. In the end, we got I don't know how many greens, but ended up with a whole gallon of bulbs.

Since I couldn't find much by way of recipes specifically for pickling wild onions (read as nothing), I decided to substitute them into recipes calling for pearl onions. I didn't have enough onions to make a whole batch of all three types I wanted to try doing, so I made 3 small small batches. We'll be tasting them this weekend, so I'll let ya'll know how that goes when the time comes. In order to use both the tops and bottoms, I dehydrated the greens. My mom said the one thing they cooked them with, they worked great. I'll have more info on both subjects after the weekend.

The first batch is the one I did the biggest group of. It's from here. For some ridiculous reason, one of the jars decided to crack in half right below the threads of the jar. I don't know how it happened, or why, but I was putting jars in the water bath canner, turned around, looked back and saw onions floating. Kind of strange experience there. Anyway, here's a picture of some of them.

The second batch was done with this recipe. They're the yellowish golden ones. The third batch, I did one 3/4 pint jar of because we weren't sure how it would taste. The recipe for that is here. It's in the jar in the back right corner with the silver band on it.

So far, my dad and brother both love the first batch of them. I wasn't too fond of it, but then again, I don't really like pickled onions. They haven't tried the second and third yet. I gave some of the first two batches to my grandpa to try. I'm still waiting on a response there.

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. ;)

New Soaps and a New Mold!

So I've been wanting a big 5lb loaf mold for soaping, but the prices are outrageous. Rather than break down and buy one, I convinced my dad to help me make one from scrap wood and a few nuts/bolts from the hardware store. The result works great! I got the basics from Keith Brown's wonderful tutorials on youtube. Go check them out if you're interested in making your own mold. My dad and I edited a few things, stuck washers on the bolts before the wing nuts, etc, but basically kept the same idea. SO without further rambling, pictures!









Both ends are removable. I drilled the holes wrong on one side, so I had to put me an up arrow to know which set of holes to put on the bolt. I spent about $4 to make this between the bolts and screws. All the wood was scrap. I recommend making it the 18" suggested in the videos. That's the perfect length to put Reynolds freezer paper in and not have to cut anything. I just stuck seperate little squares on the end pieces, screwed it down tight and taped down the big middle piece. It worked great, no leaks or anything.

So, the soaps that were made (a few weeks ago now, haven't had time to post this...). I did 3 types: goats milk, shaving soap, and the loaf one. The descriptions are in this post.

Goats Milk:

Still not too fond of the look of this one, but here's the Shaving Soap:

And my favorite of all the one's I've made so far, done in the fancy new loaf mold is the Peppermint Chocolate Swirl:

What do you think, world? :P My picture taking skills haven't improved - these were done by my dad with his  fancy camera he uses to take pictures of deer and stuff when he's hunting.

New Soaps!

Pictures to come over the weekend...but...on Sunday I made some new soaps!

Batch 3: One of them turned out really beautifully. It's coconut oil, deer tallow and olive oil. The coloring is done with cocoa powder and turmeric, swirled together and sprinkled on top with poppy seeds because I wanted to see what it looked like. I scented it with some peppermint essential oil. That was the last batch I made, and it was done in a brand new mold my dad helped me build. I made a 5lb loaf in it, but you can block it up at whatever point to make less if you want.

Batch 2: Right before Christmas, I ordered from Camden Grey Essential Oils, and they had free gifts sent out with everything. I got some bentonite clay, which I had never used before. Everything I read talked about how good it was in shaving soap, so I replaced the water in my second batch with some mint tea and added in bentonite clay. It's got beef tallow, coconut oil and olive oil in it. I used silicone cupcake molds, since my dad and brother both use the little shaving soap cups with brushes and wanted soap to fit in that. When last I checked, it was very green, rather soft and extremely minty.

Batch 1: This batch was my first attempt at goats milk soap. Apparently my grandpa has sensitive skin (didn't realize this previously), so I used this as an excuse to try goats milk soap. I used the canned stuff that's evaporated you get at the grocery store near the condensed milk. The soap came out a pretty creamy color, but I cut it with an unfriendly knife, so I had to go back over the edges with a potato peeler to smooth it out some. The shavings will eventually rebatch to become something. This soap is done with deer tallow, coconut oil and olive oil. I gave my grandpa a bar 2 days after I made it (once it had cured enough to not burn him) to see how he liked it, his response, "It feels like real soap, not the stuff you buy at the store." If I didn't know he was rather, ah, a smart aleck, I would have been hurt that he missed my explanation of how I made it. :P But he loved it.

I can't wait to try them myself, and hopefully the pictures will appear magically over the weekend. :)

Teriyaki Jerky

Last night I made some teriyaki jerky, as per my mother's request. It's not quite as seasoned as we wanted, so next time I'll either use only 4 pounds of meat with this much or add in some extra seasoning. As it's a good flavor, I decided to put it here for me to find again, and for any others interested.

5lbs of ground venison
1T salt
1C soy sauce
1/2C brown sugar
2t garlic powder
2t ground ginger
1t black pepper

Mix it all together with your hands in a big bowl. Shoot it with a jerky cannon, mold it with your hands or whatever way works for you. Then either use an oven or a dehydrator or a smoker to dry it out. I used my dehydrator for 8 hours at about 140 degrees. My dehydrator doesn't have the best temperature dial in the world, but I think that's the temperature it was.

This was made in Oklahoma, where humidity is nonexistent. If I were to do this in south Louisiana at home, well...8 hours just turned into about 12 or 14... :)