Preserving

I'm really a fan of preserving these days.  A couple of weeks ago I utilized a number of preservation techniques, including:

• pickling
• lacto fermentation
• freezing
• salt preserving

A couple weeks before that, I canned in a water bath 15 pints of crushed tomatoes.  I also made 2 pints of oven dried tomatoes.  The oven dried tomatoes are delicious!  Dried slowly at low heat for about 6 hours, flavored with thyme, salt, pepper, and olive oil, resulting in concentrated flavors.  They will be great this winter.  And I'll have some tasty olive oil after the tomatoes are gone.

The pickling involved petite green beans, flavored with jalepeno and onion, in a salt-vinegar brine.  They are spicy!  I fermented a jar of beets and radishes - they should be very flavorful (and perhaps a bit spicy, too) and go great with things like beans, grains, and roots this winter. 

I froze a bag of grated summer squash (for a future quickbread), and roll of parsley and basil (separate, not together).  What do I mean by a roll?  Basically the leaves are washed and dried and put into a freezer bag, compressed into a roll, wrapped up and frozen.  It compacts into quite a narrow roll, compared to what it was like on the stem. When I need any of these herbs for soup or whatever, I just take out the roll and cut off an end, which should yield a lot of herbs.

For the salt preserving, I layered kosher salt and rosemary leaves in a pint jar, compressing it all as I went along.  The benefit of this, aside from having rosemary all winter, is that I'll have rosemary salt, which I can use on roast chicken.

In this economy, it is a shame to let anything go to waste.  Thank you human history for developing all these preservation methods.