Canning

I made a sauce with multiple veggies from my garden.  The sauce includes parsley, oregano, and basil from my herb garden.  The vegetables are Roma Tomatoes, mariachi pepper, yellow peppers, onions, yellow squash, and eggplants.  The eggplants are my favorite next to pumpkins to watch grow.

I cooked everything down.........

Then bottled them using my pressure cooker.  It smelled so good!
I've also made.......

Cinnamon apples.......and..

Salsa...super spicy.  This year was not very productive when it came to tomatoes, but peppers were a different story.  As of now I still have habaneros which are turning a lovely orange, jalapenos, and two types of sweet peppers.  Growing peppers is so much fun and there are so many different varieties.  For this recipe I only used Jalapenos but to keep that nice spicy kick I left the seeds in.

The smell coming from these chopped up jalapenos was amazingly fresh!  As you can see one of my jalapenos had turned red.....I am letting the rest on the plant turn red but for the purpose of salsa I wanted them green so there would be a contrast in color with the tomatoes.

Since I did not have much success with tomatoes I used all of the tomatoes I could gather from my garden rather then use just one variety.  In this salsa there are Roma, Zebra stripped, and yellow pear tomatoes.  Before adding the tomatoes to my Salsa I needed to take the skin off.  This is easily done by blanching.  I put the tomatoes in boiling water for 30-60 seconds, or until the skin starts to split.  Then the Tomatoes are quickly dumped into an ice bath so they stop cooking.

I was then able to easily slip the skin off of each tomato.  Some of the tomato's skin had not split so I just lightly punctured the skin with a knife and then was able to easily slip off the skin.  I added all of the ingredients into a huge sauce pan and let it boil down for about 30 minutes.  While that was cooking I prepared my half pints for bottling by cleaning them and pouring hot water in them.  I did this so that the boiling hot salsa would not crack the glass when I poured it in.  When the salsa was done I filled the bottles with salsa leaving about an inch of head space (when stuff is heated up it expands).  Then I placed them in my canner, and filled it with water until the bottles were completely covered.  Once the water started to boil I processed the salsa for about 20 minutes.  The first thing I used my salsa on was a breakfast burrito mmm...... so good!

Zucchini improved....

I made more zucchini bread but cut the baking soda by 25%.  Now my bread is not sunken but beautifully raised.....amazing what a little chemistry will do!

Zucchini bread

The other day I was walking around my garden when I noticed a zucchini which had grown to the size of a small baseball bat. I couldn't believe that I had let this zucchini get so big! Because the zucchini was so big the only thing I could really do with it was make bread out of it. As a zucchini grows it starts to develop seeds. As the seeds become more mature the fruit becomes more watery and tasteless. The best time to harvest zucchini is when it is small because that is when you will have the best flavor. Of course if you would like to make lots and lots of bread let your zucchini grow! The only bad thing about this is that you wont get as much zucchini because the plant is putting forth all of its effort to grow this one zucchini.
First you need to grate the zucchini. I cut the zucchini into four sections so that I could handle it better.


Peel the tough skin off of the zucchini first and the grate it. Because the zucchini had grown so big, it had developed this spongy inside around the seeds. I only used the outer tough part of the zucchini and threw the inner pithy part with the seeds in my compost bin. I did this because first of all, you don't want seeds in your bread and second of all, the inner part was not appetizing at all (another reason not to let your zucchini get this big).




I then put aside 4 cups of the grated zucchini and moved on to my dry ingredients. I doubled this recipe because I had so much zucchini, I actually only used half of the zucchini with this doubled recipe, so much zucchini! Anyways the recipe really only calls for 2 cups. For now on I will write what the recipe calls for but in the pictures everything is doubled.

I put my dry ingredients in a big bowl and mixed them with a medal spoon. I chose not to use an automatic mixer because it would have made a huge mess. The dry ingredinets consist of: 3 1/4 cups of flour, 1 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp nutmeg, 2 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp cinnamon, and 3 cups of sugar. You may notice that this recipe calls for a lot of nutmeg, and your bread will have a slight but noticeable taste of nutmeg. I love the spicy taste of nutmeg so this recipe was awesome but if you happen to not like the taste then you could get away with putting 1/2 tsp of nutmeg. On the other hand, DON'T BE AFRAID OF NUTMEG! Everyone who has tried this bread has loved it, I haven't heard any complaints about the taste of nutmeg.

After I finished mixing the dry ingredients I grabbed another bowl and mixed all of the wet ingredients together. This consisted of: 1 cup vegetable oil, 4 eggs, 1/3 cup water, 1 tsp lemon juice, and the zucchini.

I created a hole in the middle of my dry ingredients and then poured all of the wet ingredients in. I then mixed the whole thing by folding the dry ingredients over the wet with a wooden spoon. When the mixture was half way mixed I added 1 cup of walnuts (but you can also use pecans if you prefer). Using a wooden spoon or spatula as opposed to an electrical beater insures that your mixture wont become over mixed. You can stop mixing once you no longer see any dry flour.

When all of the ingredients are mixed spray 2 loaf pans with non-stick spray or cover them in butter. Divide the mixture evenly into each pan. Of course in this picture there are four because like I said earlier I doubled the recipe.

Put the pans in a preheated oven of 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 45 minutes. I baked mine at 370 degrees because of the high altitude. Also if you look at the picture of the bread at the top you can see that it has sunk a bit. At high altitudes there is less air pressure which causes leavening agents (baking powder in this case) to work too quickly. By the time your bread is cooked, gasses have escaped causing the bread to sink. In order to prevent this you decrease the amount of baking powder by about 25%. So in this recipe you would only put 1 1/2 tsp. Another trick, if your bread is starting to brown to much on the top but is no where near being done you can put tin foil on the top so that the bread is not being cooked to fast on top.

After you pull them out of the oven let them cool before trying to take them out of the pan otherwise it will fall apart.