Yummy, easy shredded brussels sprouts

Possibly the most dreaded winter vegetable on earth, and one of my favorites. My friend Emily brought over some devastatingly delicious brussels sprouts last week, and this was my attempt at re-creating her dish. It turned out totally different, but fabulous!

1 lb Brussels Sprouts
2 slices bacon
1/4 cup almonds
1/4 white onion
2 cloves garlic
1 TBSP butter
1/2 tsp wine vinegar or lemon juice
Salt and pepper

Slice the brussels sprouts into 1/4" circles

Slice the onion thinly

Chop the garlic

Sliver the almonds

Heat a skillet over medium heat and cook the bacon until crispy. Remove and set aside. Add the butter (if your bacon was lean, otherwise, if you have a lot of grease, you might want to skip it) and the almonds and garlic. Sautee until they start to turn a bit golden, then add the onions and brussels sprouts. Cook until just translucent and limp, and add vinegar or lemon juice, and salt and pepper to taste. Chop the bacon into small pieces and stir in. Many easy and much yum, very wow!

A trip to the farm

I don't think I've mentioned the farm, yet. Farms, really, but this season I'm going to focus on just one.

One of the things I have the great fortune to be about 40 minutes from by car is a wonderful little farming community on an island in the Columbia river, Sauvie Island. The farms on Sauvie are the origins of much of our locally-grown produce, and several of the farms have farm stores, open early summer through October, where they sell their produce much, much cheaper than grocery stores do. Staggeringly cheaper. They cater to the home canner, the DIY food preserver, as well as to urban adventurers who just want to grab a jar of local honey and call it a day. At the farm I tend to frequent, October is their boom month; they have a corn maze, a pumpkin patch, hayrides and a petting zoo. It's the whole nine yards.

My friend Breezy and I went a few weeks ago, and I bought pickling cucumbers, green beans, apples, broccoli, and squashes. SO many squashes! The cart was full. Packed. The ultimate price tag? About $65 for an amount of produce that would have cost at least $300 in a grocery store.

As I posted previously, I got the pickles started immediately, making 16 jars of vinegar pickles and giving a shot at my first-ever lactic acid pickles, which turned out beautifully and which I just canned up this weekend:

So, bolstered by my success with lactic-acid fermentation, it was back to the island this Sunday for a morning walk on the beach (gratuitous beach shot):

Followed by a stop at the farm store on the way back, to pick up one of their sauerkraut cabbages, monsters that they sell for 20 cents a pound. I selected one that looked reasonably small and easy to carry.

That cabbage weighs about 21 and a half pounds. That's a WHOLE lot of cabbage! Here it is on my counter, dwarfing the quarts of pickles behind it:

That's not an optical illusion, it really is that big. After dropping it off at home, it was back to a nearby river beach to look for smooth flat stones to put on top of my pickled goods, to keep them below the surface of the brine while fermenting.

Success! I am rich with pickle stones. I will share more about how the sauerkraut goes as I get on with it.

Now, here's the thing. I'm trying to feed five people on a pretty limited budget. I'm a full-time student now, and I picked up an extra teenager along the way, so I'm broke AND I have very little free time. Looking at my blog, it would be easy to get the impression that I have endless free time and money for this wild Susie Homemaker stuff, but I don't. This stuff I do, the canning and cooking, is stuff that can't take up a lot of my time, because I have homework and kids and friends and occasionally even paying customers who buy stuff from my foundering bead business that I no longer have time to tend to. So if you're reading this and you're thinking "Whatever, lady, are you F'in' serious? Who has time for that?" I don't want you to feel discouraged because you don't live near a farm and have no interest in pickling things. It's one way for me to stretch my budget, but maybe you don't even LIKE pickles.

Furthermore, not everybody has a car with which to drive to nearby farms. But, I wanted to talk about the farm, because a lot of people DO live within an hour of local farms, and don't even realize it. And if you do, and especially if you can find a friend or two to carpool with, you can go one morning a month during the season and stock up on fresh, local vegetables for a fraction of what you would pay in a grocery store. The farms near me take EBT. If you can reach them, it is an opportunity to really stretch your food budget, and if you have a freezer or learn basic canning techniques, you can stretch it year-round.

A footnote: after Halloween, most of the farms will close for the season. Many of them, at this point, put all of their unsold squashes out in piles on the side of the road, free for all takers. Hard-shelled winter squash will keep for months, through the whole winter in most cases.

Easy one-dish chicken legs, potatoes, and corn

So the new grocery store down the street seems to be trying  to woo me with super deals on certain things, like family packs of chicken legs for only 79 cents a pound. I am easily enough wooed, so it's been chicken two nights in a row.

Last night was pretty simple, just chicken legs seasoned with a 99-cent "tuscan" seasoning packet laid on a baking sheet in the oven for an hour at 375, and acorn squash halves (acquired on Sauvie Island for 50 cents a squash!) brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper on another cookie sheet on the other oven shelf at the same time. I also served broccoli, also snagged on the farm for less than a buck a pound. That was a crazy cheap meal, less than $5 for a ton of food. Drawback: the kids don't like squash, so I ended up having it for breakfast and lunch today.

Tonight was even simpler, and may be one of my favorite recent meals.

Fingerling potatoes were on sale, but any type of potato would work fine. Small potatoes can be left whole, medium and large potatoes should be halved or quartered. I put about a pound and a half of potatoes and two pounds of frozen corn in the bottom of a 9x13" casserole with 1/4 cup of water and a couple of teaspoons of olive oil, and sprinkled it all liberally with taco seasoning. Then I put ten chicken legs on top, and sprinkled them with more taco seasoning. I baked it in a preheated oven at 375 for one hour, turned the legs over, and baked for 20 more minutes.

The kids loved it, there are leftovers, and the whole meal cost about $8. Plus, the labor was minimal and I did homework while it was cooking. :)

Pickle Time

Yesterday, I went to Sauvie Island and bought 25 lbs of pickling cucumbers and a big bundle of dill, among other things.

Yep, it's pickle time!

To begin with, I dumped all the pickles in the sink and washed them.

Then I put my big canning pot on the stove with some water, and when it was boiling I started sterilizing my jars. My canner fits 8 1-quart jars at a time, so I worked in batches of 8.

I also started my brine. The brine recipe I used for my vinegar-cured pickles is simple:

2 quarts water
2 quarts white vinegar
1 cup salt
1/2 cup sugar

Bring  the brine to a boil, turn down to low and cover while you prep the jars. Once sterilized (about 10 minutes boiling in the canner) I pulled them out with a jar-lifter and put them on a towel on the counter.

Add to each jar:

2 cloves of garlic (sliced in half)
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
6-10 whole peppercorns
1 dried red chili
5-6 whole coriander seeds
1-2 heads of fresh dill and some dill fronds

Pack with clean cucumbers (I leave them whole if  they're small, and slice larger ones into quarters lengthwise) and top with one or two grape, cherry, or oak leaves (the tannic acid keeps the pickles crisp). Then ladle hot brine over the top. Fill to about 1/2" from the rim, put the 2-part lids on, just lightly finger-tighten the rings, and place in the canner to process for 15 minutes. Remove and let cool, then tighten the rings and place them in your pantry. These will keep at least 2 years.

For the remaining pickles, I planned on lactic-acid fermentation, so I used this brine recipe:

4 quarts water
1 cup salt
1/2 cup vinegar

In addition to sterilizing the jars, wash and sterilize an equal number of stones (granite, quartz, or basalt, avoid limestone) just small enough to fit in the mouths of the jars.

Prepare the jars with seasonings and pack with cucumbers exactly as with the vinegar pickles, but rather than boiling the brine, just stir the salt in at room-temperature until it dissolves. Fill the jars with brine and place a stone on top of each, to weight down the pickles and keep them below the level of the brine. This is crucial, otherwise your pickles will mold!

Place a clean towel on a shelf in a cool, dry cabinet, put your jars on it (in case they overflow a little during fermentation) and cover them with a very clean lightweight kitchen cloth. Check them every couple of days and if any scum forms on the brine, remove the scum and top the jar off with fresh brine (you can keep some in a jar in the fridge for this purpose).

You really only want to try lactic-acid fermented pickles in the fall when the weather is cool. 70-ish degree temperatures are perfect. If it's over 80, they'll go squishy and gross, and if it's under 60 it will still work but they'll take forever. However, a nice cool lower cabinet in your kitchen in late September is probably a perfect place to ferment pickles.

After 3 days,  your pickles will probably start tasting pickle-y. After 3-4 weeks, they will be fully fermented. At this point, you can either place them in the refrigerator, where they will keep happily for several months, or you can heat-process them for longer storage. To do this, get your canner ready! Drain all the brine into a clean pot and heat it to a simmer, then ladle it back into the jars with your pickles, put lids on (again, loosely finger-tightening the rings for now) and process in the canner for 15 minutes. Remove, cool, and store just as with the vinegar-cured pickles.

Enjoy!

P.S. I paid $19.95 for 25 pounds of cucumbers. Even adding the cost of the salt, vinegar, and spices, I ended up with 26 quarts of pickles (there were enough for 28 but I wanted a salad) at less than a dollar a quart. I don't count the cost of the jars, as I use the same jars again year after year, but jars are about $10/dozen.