You can hear the chicks peeping from outside the barn, pretty loudly, but they stop as soon as you slide the door open. Then they start back up slowly as you peek over the stall door at them. Still so cute that I can hardly stand it. I’m inviting everyone I know with kids to come up and see them in the next couple of weeks.
So far so good, all 50 are still alive. Of course I only think there are 50 as I forgot to count them as I unloaded them yesterday. A couple of quick counts put me at 54 and 56 including the Welsummers, which should mean there are actually 50. Guess we’ll find out when we start cutting heads…
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I froze 4.5 pounds of green beans (bush varieties) today in 2 person servings. There’s no science to my serving sizes so it worked out to be 13 vacuum packed packages. I also froze 1.5 pounds of peas that I don’t think we’ll get to since I had the water going anyway. I froze those into 4 packages - 3 of about 1/3 pound each and one that was a 1/2 pound.
I think I’ve finally found a blanching, ice water, packaging process that really works for me. I bought myself a really big strainer and made use of it to blanch each batch of about a pound. I put the beans / peas in it, then submerged the whole thing in the water. Made it A LOT easier to get the veggies out of the water in a timely manner, and made it easy to dump them into the ice water bath. Then I air dried everything for a couple of hours on cooking racks set over dish towels inside of cookie sheets. Made it easy to get rid of the excess water and to move them around.
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We’re eating green beans by the fistful (I love them) but there’s no way we can consume them all fresh.
We likely don’t need that many more packages of green beans in the freezer for winter - 20 should be enough - so any extra beans above that will be made into dilly beans. I’m actually looking forward to making and eating them.
Tomorrow I’m going to make onion & cucumber salad with the first of the pickling cukes. I might even make a quart of fridge pickles as well since we’re not yet getting enough cukes to justify setting up for dill pickles.
Along the same lines I think I’m going to take all of the red / sweet onions that bolted and make pickled onions with them. They sound good and could be a nice addition for sandwiches, eggs, etc. Anyone ever made them before?
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Ooooooo! I love pickled onions!! Save some for me!!
Your mom and I went to the Farmers market early this morning and picked up dill, some extra cucumbers (ours are ready, but, not enough…..we are going to Montana and she wanted to get them done before we leave).
I have asked her to use the recipe that you used last year. They were sooooo good!!!
Wow, you’ve got a lot going on there! I’m so jealous of all your wonderful veggies.
I don’t have a pickled onion recipe, but did recently make a caramelized onion jam that was awesome from the Epicurious site (and Walla Wallas caramelize amazingly). Onions, butter, brown sugar, golden raisins and rice vinegar. Really good with blue cheese or a bunch of other things. You could tweak the seasonings to your taste. If you do the acid calculations right you should be able to can some for the long wet sweet onionless winter ahead methinks, that or pressure can it.
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/TOASTED-BLUE-CHEESE-AND-CARAMELIZED-ONION-SANDWICHES-107686