Happy Easter
The last of the pumpkins are looking pretty bad these days.
But not bad enough that we can’t make a delicious pumpkin miso soup for Easter dinner.
Archives for category: Storage
The first bucket of cucumbers marks the start of a new pickling season.
Along with dill, garlic, mustard seed, salt and water, everything is stuffed in the jar for fermentation.
Lots of herbs to dry.
I made some test miso 2 years ago using chickpeas, and it turned out great. I must make more. I use the standard recipe for rice miso replacing soybeans with chickpeas that are boiled 2 hours instead of the 4 hours for soybeans.
Grind and mix everything.
Then into jars for 2 year fermentation.
Winter came all of a sudden with a storm – wind, rain and snow. The last fews days have been a mad scramble to winterize as much as possible before the big freeze.
The next ten days are supposed to be below freezing, so I’ve tried to get the remaining potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turips and beets out of the ground before it freezes solid. Lettuce, fenel, chard, cabbage, etc. must also be taken in to warmer climes.
The gothic greenhouse gets a protective covering too.
Of course it will probably get warm again and thaw out. I’ll be able to do my digging and other chores until the end of December.
The floor is in now too.
The main building is done – the foundation, frame, walls, roof and floor, but there’s still a bit left. Mostly the trimmings.
We harvested all the pumpkins on monday after a few frosty nights with more frost to come.
Today I remembered that I’d better get the volunteers still out on the compost piles.
Quite a harvest;
I don’t know where the seeds came from, because I’ve never grown the orange stripy kind. Must be from some hybrids. Usually I don’t care much for the compost volunteers because these wild ones don’t get as good a flavor as the hybrids. But these are so beautiful that I can sell them as great ornimentals – and food.
I made a pumpkin miso soup with one the other day and it was quite good.
I picked about a dozen rather tiny and ugly savoy cabbages yesterday.
And some really nice carrots, daikon, chilly pepper, along with garlic and ginger make for a good kimchi. The only ingredient not from my garden is the ginger.
Water and salt and 4 weeks lactic fermentation too of course.
In the jars;
This time there is a mix of home grown herbs thrown into the otherwise ordinary 2 year rice miso.
It’s really good!
This will be the third batch of kimchi in a week, and it will be chunky style.
All the regular ingredients and then some. 
Everything is cut into bite sized pieces. 
This time we’re using chinese cabbage.
Everything is stuffed into jars as usual.
And filled with 3% salt water. 
We usually make sauerkraut style kimchi where all the vegies are shredded, the cabbage is stamped, and everything is mixed with 1.5% salt.
This chunky style has bigger pieces, is not stamped, uses chinese cabbage instead of savoy cabbage and is covered in salt water (3% becomes close to 1.5% as the salt goes into the vegies).
The brine, after fermentation, becomes a delicacy of its own.
