Preserving an Excess of Cabbage and Carrots

We have an overabundance of cabbage and carrots in the outdoor fridge due to bumper crops from the garden.  We've been cooking Cabbage and Sausage jambalaya, Egg rolls, steamed cabbage, roasted cabbage, coleslaw, Cream of Carrot soup, raw carrots, roasted carrots and on and on.  There's still a lot left, but we have a plan.

We've got a couple of recipes for lacto-fermenting cabbage and carrots that we always do, so we got busy.  First we are going to make a Korean sauerkraut (Kimchi).  It involves shredding cabbage, carrots, radishes, garlic, green onions and grated jalapenos.  We doubled the recipe to make four quarts.

We like to use a big wooden masher tool to bruise the cabbage and carrots and get the juices flowing.  You would think that an enormous stainless steel bowl would keep the contents inside, but we made quite a mess in the kitchen with bits of vegetables flying all over the place.

We tightly pack the kimchi into wide mouth quart-sized Mason jars.  The juices from the crushed cabbage and carrots coat the kimchi.  We also add salt.

Finally, we add 2 tablespoons of whey to each jar.  The whey is a by-product of making yogurt or cheese, and it is a preservative.  

Kimchi is put together.  Now we'll do Ginger Carrots.  We began to shred carrots and a bunch of ginger.

We've got loads of carrots to shred.  Our food processor got a work-out today.

All the carrots and ginger was dumped in the big bowl, and I once again got busy with the potato masher, working and working to crush the carrots and release the flavorful juices.

We spooned the gingered carrots in 2 quart sized Mason jars and added 2 tablespoons of whey in each jar.  For both the kimchi and the gingered carrots, it's real important that your vegetables stay beneath the liquid.  We purchased some glass weights that work perfectly for keeping the kimchi and the carrots below the level of the liquid.

We'll leave these on the kitchen counter at room temperature for about 3 days and then we'll transfer to the fridge.  It'll keep there for months and months and, believe it or not, gets better with age.

Very tangy, fizzy, and flavorful.  Very healthy for you, too!  We still have more cabbage and carrots.  I told Tricia that she should make a carrot cake!

Finished with the Fall Carrots

It's March 7th, and it is warming up.  It feels like summer already with mid-day temps hitting 83 already.  What that means is I have to get moving!  Warmer temps means the cabbage all needs to be harvested.  If you don't, the snails will wreak havoc on the heads - nasty critters, I tell you.  I harvested all of the heads, except for three.  I have one big bin of cabbage heads in the outdoor fridge.  I see coleslaw, homemade egg rolls, cabbage/sausage jambalaya (yum - I call it deconstructed cabbage rolls), cooked cabbage and yes, jars of sauerkraut in the near future.

Then there is yet another row of carrots.  We harvested the first row a couple of weeks back.  We've been roasting them in the oven and using them to dip into homemade radish dip (finely chopped radish, cream cheese, garlic and other seasonings.  This second row of carrots must come up today.  They're already too big.  The soil is soft and they are easy to pull, so let's get this show on the road.

Halfway through and I filled up a plastic bin.  All of the beautiful tops were thrown over the fence to hungry cows and goats that greedily gobble the greens down.  See those carrots?  They are mighty dirty.  This is a perfect time to try out the garden sink.  I spent the morning working on the sink.  Unfortunately, the hard freeze in late January - early July played a number on the plumbing to the garden sink, breaking the head to the sprayer.  We'll try out the sink to see if it works once we get that second row of carrots pulled.

I filled both sinks with water and everything seems to be working nicely.  I'll let the carrots sink in order to clean them up and wash off all the topsoil.  I'm catching it all in a tub beneath the drain.  I'll also use a vegetable scrubber to get the carrots super clean before bringing them inside.

And here we go: Two tubs of terrific tubers.  How's that for alliteration?  These will be stored in the outdoor fridge as well.  I plan on putting these up, blanching and freezing them, canning them, and making Ginger Carrots (sort of a carrot sauerkraut - cool and tangy)!

It's good to have the carrots and cabbage harvested.  That frees up room to plant sweet corn and okra as well as the tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings that I'll be transplanting from our seed starting trays in about another week.

Roasted Root Vegetables for the Win

We are not vegans.  Not by a long shot.  We love beef, chicken... all sorts of meat.  In fact, as soon as our bull, Nick, breeds the cows this spring, he's off to the processor.  We're even talking about butchering some of our goats this year.  Our herd is growing, and there's only so much grass to go around.  Bottom-line is, we like meat.

But that doesn't mean that we don't immensely enjoy some vegetables.  Often, we'll eat meals that don't contain any meat.  Lately, it's the time of year where we're harvesting a lot of root vegetables.  On the left in the photo below is an example.  It's a Bull's Blood Beet.  On the right is an Italian beet variety called the Chioggia.  More on that in a minute.

We like to cut up carrots and beets and (I know it's not a root vegetable) cauliflower to the mix.  We toss it all in olive oil and minced garlic, put it on a stoneware tray and roast in the oven.  So tasty!

I'm not a big fan of turnips.  I do like turnip greens, but primarily we grow them for the cows, BUT we diced up some smaller turnips an roasted them using the same recipe as above, and I think these were really good.

At the very beginning of the post, I talked about chioggia beets, an Italian variety that we get from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  You can find them at www.rareseeds.com.  Pictured on the cutting board below is the mature chioggia beet.  They seem to get a little larger than the Bull's Blood Beet or the Detroit Dark Red beet.

With the chioggia, you've got to brace yourself for a surprise when you slice into it.  It's not red.  Instead it is a beautiful pinkish-red and white.  I always say it looks like a Brach's Starlight Mint.

What a pretty sight to see the chioggia beets all cut up and on the roasting pan!

You may be asking, "Why don't you show the finished product like you did in the second photo in this post?"  The answer might surprise you.  It's because when you pull them OUT of the oven, they're quite ugly.  They're nothing like the beautiful photo above.  No sir, when you pull them out, they are a solid dull-white color.  They don't look appetizing.  But that doesn't bother us.  They certainly do taste good!

A Hurried Harvest of Carrots

With the winter weather approaching with quickness, we frantically covered most of the garden.  Note to self:  Purchase additional tarps.  You cannot have too many tarps to cover plants, fruit trees and hay.  I remembered from previous freezes that carrots will make it just fine in a freeze.  However, the cows were standing by the fence, and I knew that severe cold weather was coming.  If I could feed them all the carrot tops from our three rows, that would give them a belly-full and a good head start on the cold.  Why not just harvest all of the carrots?  I had plenty of nervous energy, so I went and got the digging forks to aid in the job.

I generally plant 3 rows of carrots, with a different variety on each row.  The first variety is Cosmic Purple.  The outside "wrapper" of the carrot is purple.  However, the inside of the carrot is orange.

Here is a new variety for us.  I used to plant Atomic Red Carrots.  They were no longer available, so I opted for Kyoto Red Carrots.  They produced really well.  Lots of carrots and they were the biggest of the three varieties.

Finally, we have our traditional orange carrot - Danvers is the name of the variety.

I put them in a bin and left them on the back patio overnight.  Well, by the time we woke up the next morning, this is what the carrots looked like!  I got a big Rubbermaid-type tub and put several gallons of warm water in it.  I stood on the back patio and hand-washed every carrot, working fast before the warm water turned to frigid water.

Here are the Cosmic purple carrots all washed up:

Here are the Kyoto Red Carrots:

And finally the Danvers carrots.  This was not a good year for the Danvers variety.  They are usually very consistent.  This year, for whatever reason, the size was smaller than in previous years for this variety.

This cold weather is "soup weather."  After Chicken and sausage gumbo and potato soup, the next soup on the agenda was Cream of Carrot soup.  Then we've been eating oven-roasted carrots as a side dish.  So good!  We'd better be careful, though.  It is fact, not fiction, that if you eat too many carrots, the high level of beta-carotene will cause your skin to turn orange!

What To Do With a Bunch of Carrots

We harvested yet another row of carrots.  We had already pulled the Cosmic Purple variety, the Kyoto Red variety and now it was time for the Danvers variety.  These are the normal (boring) orange carrot that we're all familiar with.  Some of these carrots aren't so boring after all.  Like these for example.  I call them the love carrots.  They're snuggling.

I scrubbed them all up real good with a vegetable brush and washed them.  They were loaded into bowls and brought inside.

The tops were cut off, but we don't peel them.  There are a lot of nutrients in the skins.  As long as they are clean, we leave them on.

We shredded a number of them in the food processor.  This reminds me of the carrot salad with raisins that you used to see in cafeterias like Piccadilly or Luby's.  (But we're not making carrot salad.)

Today, we're making Ginger Carrots.  It's a favorite recipe of ours from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook.  This is made using lacto-fermentation.  Here is the recipe:

We grated up some ginger...

And we got out some whey that we had in the fridge from the last time we made kefir...

This was all combined in a large stainless steel bowl and now the fun part occurs.  We get out a meat tenderizer, which for all practical purposes is a stainless steel hammer. and we beat the carrots while stirring, this releases all the carrot juice that mixes with the whey, salt, shredded carrots and ginger.

We pack this very tightly into quart-sized mason jars, ensuring that the carrot mixture is submerged beneath the liquid.  We left this out on the counter for two days.  I opened the jars to check on them and they were fermenting.  The bubbles were coming up through the liquid in the jar and it overflowed on the counter.  After two days, we put the jars into the fridge.

We'll forget about them in the back of the fridge for a couple of months.  Then we'll pull them out and eat as a side dish.  It is tangy, refreshing, cool and tasty.  To top it off, Ginger Carrots are good for you!

Seeing Red

Most mornings we try to get up and pour a mug of coffee and sit in the sun room before the sun rises.  We'll read a chapter or two in the Bible and the commentary notes to aid in context and understanding.  We're in the book of Micah now about to finish up.  It is a peaceful way to start the morning.  The sun room is aptly named.  It has a big window that faces east and we look out and watch the day begin, slowly and then in earnest.  On this particular morning, God was painting a masterpiece in the eastern sky, using blazing red, bright orange and muted pink and rounded out on top with columbia blue hues on His palette.  The red, specifically, was something to see!  "Red sky in morning, sailors take warning," I think the old Navy warning said.

But we weren't done with things red on this beautiful day.  We had already harvested the Cosmic Purple carrots last week, but before the upcoming rains, we needed to get all the Kyoto Red carrots pulled.  Tricia and I teamed up on the task, pulling, washing, clipping the tops off and feeding the carrot tops to the cows.  

While the cosmic purple carrots have purple skins and an orange interior, Kyoto Red carrots are red through and through.  In the past some of our carrots grew into weird shapes with multiple roots.  Not this year.  The Kyoto reds grew long and straight.

We brought them inside, scrubbed them with a vegetable brush and used a sharp knife to cut them into manageable pieces to cube into the vegetable chopper.  This photo shows how the carrots are a red tint all throughout.

They are quickly all cubed up and ready for processing.  The other day, with the cosmic purple carrots, we blanched and froze 10 quarts.  I think we'll pressure can most of these carrots.  When two people are inseparable, there's an old saying that goes, "They go together like peas and carrots."  These cubed up Kyoto red carrots remind me of that.  We would eat Swanson Hungry Man TV dinners sometimes when I was a kid.  I haven't eaten a TV dinner in a coon's age.  But these carrots cubed up remind me of the side dish of peas and carrots in those dinners in aluminum trays.

We began filling the jars hot pack and load into the pressure canner.  The canner will hold 10 at a time.  We'll have several batches to go until we get the job done.

Once we have the red carrots processed, we'll begin with the (boring) orange carrots.  We still have a row of those to harvest.

Cosmic Purple Carrot Harvest

We've always planted a number of colorful vegetables - partly for the novelty, partly for the variety, and partly because we've always read that brightly colored vegetables are healthier for you.  Cosmic Purple Carrots are one of those vegetables that we harvested this weekend.  They were big and beautiful.  They probably could have been harvested a couple of weeks ago, but that's okay.  This basket was picked and put in a basket for a photo op from Mr. McGregor's garden before Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter found them.

We gave some of these to a friend at church and he thought that the carrots had crossed with my beets.  Nope, I told him.  That's just the natural color of this variety.

I pulled all the greens off and fed them to the animals waiting on the opposite side of the fence.  They were ecstatic.  The 'green-less' carrots went into a basket after washing the topsoil off of the roots, and we brought the HEAVY basket inside.

We started a big pot of water boiling.  Our goal was to cube and blanch about 3/4 of the basket and save the remaining 1/4 for eating and giving away.  The carrots are too big to chop in our chopper without first cutting into manageable chunks, so that's what I started doing.  That process exposes the big secret of Cosmic Purple Carrots:  They aren't purple through and through.  It's just the purple wrapper that is purple.  The interior is orange like any other 'normal' carrot.

Those chunks were put onto the rack of our handy chopper and POW!  The chunks are quickly transformed into little cubes.  Tricia wears ear plugs when chopping as it gets quite loud.

It doesn't take long.  In three shakes of a cottontail rabbit's tail, the first batch of carrots is cubed and ready to be blanched.  Each batch is put into boiling water.  When the water returns to a boil, we set the timer for 2 minutes.  When the timer goes off, we transfer the cubed carrots into a sink of ice water to stop the cooking process.

When the carrots have cooled, we load into quart-sized zip loc bags.  When complete, we had 10 quart bags full of carrots that will go in the freezer.

These are perfect for thawing out and steaming with fresh parsley, or putting on a baking pan and roasting or making a Cream of Carrot soup with some of LuLu's fresh milk.

Carrots - From One Crop and Into the Next

A few weeks ago I got the fall/winter crop of carrots in the ground.  The germination was pretty good except for some old carrot seed that I had saved from 2012.  I was rotating my seed stock and planted the old seed and it didn't come up.  No worries.  I got some new seed planted.  We have a lot of carrots coming up.  This photo was taken last week and the plants are about 3 times as large.  This weekend I'll thin them out.  Actually, what I'll do is dig every other plant up and replant them in another row.

As I thought about the carrots, it reminded me that we're still eating on last year's crop.  We pressure canned a bunch of quarts and froze a bunch, too.  With the onset of colder weather, Tricia was talking about making Cream of Carrot soup.  Delicious!

Another thing that we do is make Fermented Ginger Carrots.  We shred carrots in a food processor and put into a large bowl.  Then we add grated fresh ginger into the bowl with the carrots.  Then we add a third cup of whey.  We use a meat tenderizing mallet to mash the carrots, making the juices come out.  We use a spoon to fill quart sized canning jars with the carrots, pressing them into the jar so that they are packed tightly.  Pour the liquid so that it covers the carrots and put a lid on the jar, loose.  We leave out on the counter for 3 days and then put in the fridge.  We find the longer you leave it, the better the flavor.

Here is a jar we pulled out of the back of the refrigerator that has been there since June 15.

Cold.  Tangy.  Delicious!

We like to plant and preserve so that we never run out.  As soon as the last frozen, canned, or lacto-fermented produce is consumed, it'll be harvest time again!