Tomatoes are the super star of many gardens, including mine. They are one of those vegetables that are SO much better grown in a home garden, compared to store bought. Eating garden tomatoes kind of ruined store bought tomatoes for me. So, I try to grow enough tomatoes to eat year round and to cover off most of our tomato product needs. 

Generally in my garden, you will find about 4 cherry tomato plants and about 30ish regular tomato plants. I buy the cherry tomato plants as seedlings so that I can have 4 different varieties. I have a separate article on my top uses for cherry tomatoes - it's easy to get overwhelmed by them as peak times!

In terms of regular tomato plants, I used to plant a few different kinds but lately I only plant one kind of paste tomato. I find that they are great to use for everyday tomatoes too so I don't bother planting a "slicing tomato" anymore. The advantage of paste tomatoes is that they are very fleshy - they don't have a lot of water/seed chambers, which means that you don't "lose" as much when you can them, and you don't have to reduce tomato sauce too much on the stove before canning it. My tomato of choice is the Roma. I usually order new Roma seeds every year from Vesey's. Unfortunately, tomatoes cross-pollinate, so I haven't been able to save seeds from year to year (I would get hybrid roma/cherry tomato plants if I did, as is often demonstrated by the "volunteer" seedlings that pop up everywhere around the garden). This year I tried San Marzano instead, but I think I'll go back to Roma. San Marzanos need a bit more time to grow, and I found I had a lower yield and smaller fruits than when I grow Roma. It may just have been an off year for tomatoes, but since I was always happy with Roma, I'll go back to them.

A neat tip that I learned is that you can pick up tomatoes as soon as they "blush", that is, lose their shininess and start to have a hint of pink. There is no advantage to letting them ripen all the way on the plant - they won't be tastier. That's a common myth. You can ripen them indoors and they don't need any light to ripen. The advantage of doing that is that they are less likely to be attacked by a pest. I have noticed that ever since I started doing this, I have much less pest proliferation within my garden. Once a week I pick up all the tomatoes that have started to turn, regardless of what stage they are at. I can them in batches as they ripen in the house. 

Every year I prioritize what I make with my tomatoes. From highest priority to lowest priority, here is what I make with my tomatoes:

1. Canned whole tomatoes.  We use these mostly for cooking (for example chili or stew), but also in place of fresh tomatoes for example in sandwiches and canapés. I can these in quarts and we always have one in the fridge. 
2. Marinara style sauce. We use this as pasta sauce, for pizza, and for chili.
3. Bruschetta. Great for appetizers and snacks (serve on baguette or crackers). I also love bringing a half pint for an appetizer when camping, or giving it as a gift. 
4. Tomato juice (great as a snack or appetizer).

If I ever have more than needed for these four priorities, I would love to also make:

1. Tomato paste
2. BBQ sauce
3. Taco sauce

But usually I don't have enough.

When frost starts to threaten the garden, I pick up all the green tomatoes and can those. I love canning:

1. Green tomato salsa
2. Green tomato slices (for fried green tomatoes). I had to look around quite a bit to find a procedure for canning green tomato slices - it's not widespread. However, I tend to trust University extension offices so I personally am okay following this recipe. 

Water bath or steam canning can only be used for high acidity foods such as pickles, jellies, salsa, and tomato based products (see my summary of modern canning methods). For anything else, such as meat, fish, seafood, and low-acid vegetables, a pressure canner is the only safety tested way to can. I am sure that the ability to can meat ups the value proposition for any meat eating household - but my husband is vegetarian and I am mostly vegetarian (I occasionally, but increasingly rarely eat fish and seafood), so I wasn't very sure that a pressure canner was worth it for us. After all, most low-acid foods, although they cannot be water bath canned, can be preserved in other ways, for example freezing, drying or cellaring.

That being said, it's now been about 3 years of using a pressure canner, and I am very glad I have it. I do think it is a little bit less essential for a vegetarian household but it is still very useful. Every year, my freezer is totally full, so it is quite helpful to have an alternative when it comes to storing vegetables. Otherwise I wouldn't have enough space. It also allows for a few shortcuts in terms of food prep since pressure canned vegetables are already diced and cooked in the jar. 

Here are the main ways in which our mostly vegetarian household uses pressure canning:

• Canning carrot cubes and potato cubes, for use in recipes all winter long. The main way in which I store these vegetables is in bins of sand, however that method only lasts until late spring, so canning allows me to keep these veggies longer. It's also a shortcut when throwing suppers together - it's helpful to have already peeled, cubed and cooked cubes ready to go. 
• A half/half mixture of carrot and potato cubes, which I use mostly to make samosa-inspired puffs in the toaster oven or pie irons. I just drain the cubes, add seasoning, and stuff it in pillsbury crescent dough. Super quick recipe when the potatoes and carrots are already prepared. I could also use the half/half mixture in other recipes of course.
• Canned pumpkin cubes, for use in recipes especially pumpkin bread. It's not safe to can pumpkin puree (it's too thick for heat penetration) but cubes can be canned. They are very mushy so they can be pureed easily out when you dump out the jar contents. We also use this in homemade cat food. In my experience, pumpkins don't keep that long so it's great to be able to can them. 
• Canned butternut squash, for use in cooking, especially butternut squash soup. Similar to pumpkin, this can be canned in cubes but not puréed. Butternut squash keeps a long time on the counter (at least 4 months), but if I get a bumper crop it's handy to be able to can it. It also saves prep time. 
• French onion soup. To be honest, knowing that I could can French onion soup tipped the balance when I decided to buy a pressure canner... I love French onion soup, but caramelizing the onions takes a significant amount of time. Knowing that I could caramelize a big batch (I usually do 4 pans at a time on my stove) and have delicious soup ready to be heated up has changed French onion soup from an "event" to a frequent treat in the winter time. I can it in quarts (2 portions) and pints (1 portion). I just dump it in a bowl, add a piece of bread and slice of cheese, and pop in the oven. 
  
• Diced sweet pepper - I had a huge pepper turnout this year and it's the first time a pressure can some. I am not sure if it will be worth it compared to frozen. Pepper is one of the only vegetables you don't need to blanch before freezing, so it's pretty convenient to freeze. I will report back!
• Celery "slurry" for cream of celery - another new recipe this year, we'll see how that goes.

In the future I might can corn (if I ever get more than we can eat fresh), sweet potato (it's hard to get slips here but they grow quite well), and kidney beans (for convenience - they store dry quite easily though). 

Some water bath recipes can also be done with the pressure canner and may take less time, but I haven't found that to be worth it. Once you count the pressurizing/depressurizing time it's not always worth it (especially now that I've replaced my water bath canner with a steam canner, which heats up much quicker). Usually, foods done in the pressure canner will be more mushy than those done in the steam canner, which can be a disadvantage (for example with whole tomatoes). 

There are also some people in Quebec who have described a method for using a pressure canner as a steam canner - if you follow that train of thought, I would say a pressure canner would be totally worth it since you would only need that one vessel in order to do all types of canning. But I have a small hesitation in terms of whether I feel like the method was sufficiently demonstrated to be equivalent. It is not accepted by US canning experts as far as I know.

So, all in all, I've found pressure canning pretty useful especially in the soup department, to free up some freezer space, and for food prep convenience (having veggies already diced and cooked). All this is probably not as life changing as for someone who consumes meat, but it's been worth it for us.

Shortly after we moved here, I planted a few fruit trees. I remember how far away the the estimated 3-5 years to maturity sounded, but before I knew it, we started getting lots of fruit. Not all the trees I planted made it...some could blame the harsh winters, others might be more precise and blame snowplowing incidents. I'm still waiting to see if the pear trees ever bear fruit, but we get lots of apples - this year we got so many that we couldn't pick all of them. ​

It was a big job picking all of them, and a big day of processing. Here are the steps we followed.
​1. Early harvest: Ray got a little impatient and harvest a first crop sometime in September, and made it into Hard apple cider. It fermented quickly and we've been having it as bubbly, relatively low alcohol cider. 

When the apples were truly ready, we harvested the rest. It works best to do this as a two person job - one person on the ladder and one person on the ground. We are careful not to bruise the apples during this process.  I then sorted the apples into categories and processed them appropriately

​Perfect apples (no blemishes, no bruises) were set aside for storage. I wrapped them individually in newspaper. I filled up the two fridge crisper drawers with apples (one drawer of red apples and one of yellow apples). All the overflow (two crates) went into my parents'  basement fridge so that the rest of the family can have as many as they like, and for future processing possibly.

Apples with some blemishes or bruises were peeled and sliced, with the blemishes removed. The resulting apple slices get canned and I'll use them for cooking and baking. For example for fruit crumble or apple pie.

Very small / irregular shaped apples became apple juice. I used the steam juicer for this, and canned the resulting juice. I process it for 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes, since you don't have to sterilize the jars ahead of time if you process for 10 minutes. It's possible to make the leftover pulp into fruit rollups, too, but I didn't take the time.

I also couldn't resist making a special category of the five best looking apples, they are really picture-perfect and they are on my desk so I can admire them for a little while before eating them for snacks as I work! I find that having apples (or other fruits) right on my desk makes it less likely that I'll get up and get a less healthy snack from the kitchen when I get hungry and I don't have much time to get up between meetings. 

I have a couple of tools that are really helpful to process apples. I use a handcrank peeler. It speeds up peeling by a factor of two. I like the kind with the suction cup on the bottom (instead of a clamp) - I suction it to a cookie sheet and the cookie sheet catches most of the debris. I also have a slicing gadget that slices the apple into six pieces plus the core. My steam juicer is very helpful for juicing the apples.  Finally I use my steam canner to put everything into shelf stable jars.

Some days when I'm feeling more philosophical, I think about how bigger sustainability concepts connect to our little homestead. For example, the circular economy is a big concept in sustainability. A circular economy is a production and consumption model within which all things are reused, recycled, repurposed as much as possible. Here are a bunch of real life case studies of circular economy.

Closer to home, I couldn't help but think that our recent grape harvest was like a little model of a circular economy.  When we harvested grapes this year, we made very good use of everything we harvested... anything that was a byproduct of an operation became something else that was useful. Nothing went into the garbage. Here's a little diagram of how it played out.

This is the tastiest kind of circular economy! Flip through to see some of the products we got from our delicious Concord grapes.

Fruit leather (fruit roll-ups) is a great snack or dessert that makes good use of the pulp that is leftover from processing fruit for various recipes such as jelly, juice, etc. It satisfies a sweet craving. It's a snack we like to bring on biking or kayaking trips and when camping. 

A couple of days ago I made grape fruit leather. I started off with the pulp that was leftover from steam juicing grapes for grape juice - basically it was grapes that had popped and had most of the juice drain out. You can of course start with whole fruit too. 

The first step once you have your fruit or leftover pulp is to purée it. I use a handcrank food mill for that operation, which has the advantage of removing the fruit's skin and any seeds. Alternatively, you can just put everything in a blender. Ideally you are looking for applesauce consistency or dryer. If there seems to be excess liquid in it at this point, I would recommend straining it. Personally I would use the liquid I strain out for something like flavoring sparkling water from our sodastream or adding flavor to homemade ice cream.

Once you have your purée, you spread it on parchment paper and put it in the dehydrator. I have a nice Excalibur dehydrator (it comes on sale on amazon once in a while). If you don't have a dehydrator, you can also dehydrate using an oven with the door ajar - I haven't tried that myself but it seems like many people do it that way. Your dehydrator will likely indicate the temperature to use (mine says 135F). Dehydrating fruit leather can take anywhere from 6 to 12 hours depending on your dehydrator, the consistency of the pulp, and the thickness (I recommend between 1/8 to 1/4 inch for the thickness of the layer of pulp). If you have a more basic dehydrator, you may have to rotate the trays during the process. It's best to monitor the process the first few times to get an idea of the timing that works for your setup. I like to start mine just before bedtime as it takes at least overnight. After waking up, if the process isn't done, I can keep an eye on things.

The leather should be pliable and be easy to peel off of the parchment paper without falling apart. Once it's ready, I use scissors to cut it into strips and I roll up the strips. I store them in a mason jar in the fridge. They do okay at room temperature for a while which makes them a good camping or biking snack.

Originally I did all my juicing with an electric juicer. A couple years ago though, after our apple trees really came onto their own, my electric juicer died (the motor burned up). After doing some online research into what a more robust model might be, I realized that a steam juicer might be better suited to the homesteading lifestyle. Electric juicers seem to be better suited for making a couple glasses of juice here and there, whereas a steam juicer seems better equipped for handling large quantities of fruit. There is a third option which is a juicing press but I haven't looked into it seriously (I am not sure I want to dedicate the space to it). 

This is my first year using my steam juicer, and so far, so good. 

A steam juicer is made to run on the stovetop and it has three components: 

• ​The bottom is a pan that holds water to boil
• The top is a colander that holds the fruit
• The middle is a collection pan - it has a chimney that lets the steam go up from the boiling water into the colander,, and it collects the juice that drips down from the colander. It also has a spout to drain off the juice as it accumulates

It takes a couple of hours to extract the juice from the fruit. It's not a labour intensive process, but you do have to be around to occasionally drain off the juice and refill the bottom pan. It's most convenient to run a batch on a day where you are doing something else in the kitchen (not a problem at this time of year).

So far, we made grape juice from our concord grapes, which I canned in quart jars. It is concentrated, we'll dilute it what we drink it. We also made apple juice which Ray is preparing for hard cider as I type. 

A steam juicer is really nice when paired up with a dehydrator. Once the juice is extracted from the fruit, you'll be left with pulp in the colander. We ran the pulp through a food mill (to purée it) and spread the purée onto dehydrator trays. This made delicious fruit leather. ​

Every year I try a few new varieties or seeds. This year one of my new veggies is Turkish orange eggplant. It's a very small, round eggplant - about the size of a peach or small apple. I started them from seed and had a 100% transplant rate. The plants have proven to be very resilient and prolific. I am also loving that the fruits are ready gradually - we've been eating them regularly for several weeks and there is no end in site. Their small size makes it easy to make a small side dish - it doesn't have to be an eggplant centric meal. They taste similar to other types of eggplants I've tried - each variety being a little different. 

It's definitely a winner and I will be growing it again. So far my favorite way to cook it is to slice it on the mandolin, drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper, and put it in the oven, or toaster oven, until golden. Delicious!

It's mid August and I have an abundance of hot peppers. Due to Peppergate 2023, they aren't exactly the peppers I expected... I have a lot of hot banana peppers and a good amount of jalapenos too. It's a great excuse to write up a post about my favorite ways to preserve hot peppers.

Pickled hot peppers are my highest priority. We always have a jar in the fridge, they replace those little "old el paso" jalapeno jars we used to buy a lot. I use them whenever I need to add a "fresh" hot pepper in a recipe, including chilli rellenos casserole which is a favorite here.  The NCHFP, which is my source for most straightforward canning recipes, has a decent recipe here. I usually favor jalapeno peppers for this recipe but any type works.

The easiest way to put up hot peppers is to simply dry them. Using a needle, I thread them onto sewing thread and hang them in my kitchen. It's easy to tear one off and crumble it in a recipe for extra kick. I usually use small red chili peppers for this. It's great for smaller quantities of peppers, when there isn't quite enough to can.

Cowboy candy is a recipe that seems very popular in the US. It's sweet, spicy, and pickled all at the same time. Given the amount of sugar in it, it's a treat we eat in moderation - a tablespoon of cowboy candy on the side sure perks up wintertime meals. For special occasions, it's a great cracker topping and goes well with cheese, too. I heard some people eat it on ice cream but I'm not too sure about that. It's definitely a recipe worth trying once, it's unusual. I like to mix up the peppers I use in it, if I can have a mix of red, green and yellow, it makes a really attractive gift jar. There are lots of recipes online; here is one from Ball which is another source I trust for safe canning recipes.

Jalapeno poppers (or this, year banana poppers) are a great side dish. The cheese stuffing balances out the heat of the peppers. There are tons of recipes online, here is a simple vegetarian one I have been using this year. I usually make a big batch, we have a couple with our supper and I freeze the rest of the batch in food saver bags for special occasions. By packing them in a long skinny food saver bag, I can take out a couple and reseal the bag. 

Over the last year I have been experimenting more with fermenting vegetables, and I just made my first fermented hot sauce using hot banana peppers and jalapenos. Fermentation is very low effort compared to canning so I am very keen to practice it more. Here is the basic recipe I used for my first hot sauce fermentation. I am looking forward to experimenting with it more but I really love the results. 

It's also great to have peppers on hand because they are a common ingredient in all kinds of other canning recipes that I make in late summer and early fall - pasta sauce and salsa in particular. On the salsa side of things, I love to use our peppers in my ground cherry salsa or green tomato salsa. 

A few years ago Ray planted a couple of grape vines. The birds tend to steal them, so last year I had an idea and I covered the grapes with nylon stockings. I had a bunch of dollar store pantyhose and I cut it in sections, and knotted one end of each piece and slipped them over grape bunches. It worked great but was a little time consuming. This year, someone shared a brilliant idea on a gardening Facebook group- covering grapes with little organza drawstring bags commonly used for wedding favors or jewelry sales. I chose the 4 by 6 inch size which is perfect for most of my grape bunches. It was about $12 for a hundred bags which I will be able to reuse every year. It didn't take long to cover up my grapes and the birds will have to snack on wild grapes only once again.

This also made me realize that we have so many grapes this year... I ran out of bags quickly. I am looking forward to harvesting them, they were delicious last year. In addition to eating them fresh off the vine, I will grape juice with my steam juicer. I might also preserve some grape vines leaves for Ray to make dolma. I've been using them in my pickles too.

Today's post is about something that I really want to learn more about - wild mushroom foraging. A few years ago I noticed that we have so many varieties of mushrooms growing on our property. I would love to know more about mushroom identification and in particular, edible mushroom foraging. Ideally, I would love to find local classes or a local mentor, but that hasn't come to fruition yet. This week though, while camping in the wonderful Charlevoix region of Québec, we had the opportunity to do a mushroom foraging activity. The SEPAQ does not usually allow foraging in its parks, however, an exception was made in this educational context. 

First, in a classroom setting, we learned the basics of mushroom identification and biology. We focused on one mushroom in particular - the lobster mushroom.  The lobster mushroom is a mushroom that is colonized by a fungus, giving it an orange color. I learned after the fact that the infected mushroom contains mostly DNA of the parasitic fungus, which I find fascinating.

Then, we did a short hike to find lobster mushrooms. It was a wonderful hike in a taiga environment. Once every participant found and harvested a lobster mushroom, we cleaned it with a brush and knife and carried it back. The naturalist then showed us how to cook the lobster mushroom. He sliced very thin slices and pan fried it to a "potato chip" consistency. It was delicious. Back at our campsite we cooked our own lobster mushrooms for supper. 

I am looking forward to learning more over the coming years about mushrooms, and in particular, about which mushrooms we can forage around our property. The naturalist suggested that a good goal is to learn one new mushroom a year, and to know it well. I know that on our property, we have Coprin Chevelu (shaggy mane) which is pretty distinctive and is edible. I think my goal for this year will be to harvest some Coprin Chevelu from our property, and go from there.