Homemade Lemon Zest - a nice $$ saver!

I made some strawberry lemonade concentrate the other day (3 quarts!), and was left with quite a pile of lemon rinds after they were juiced.  I didn't want to throw them away, but after using some to clean the garbage disposal, wasn't sure what else I could do with them.  Then I remembered, lemon zest!

I cut, using a paring knife, the zest (the lemon part only, not the thick white membranee) off of each lemon rind.  I lined my dehydrator trays with parchment paper (and one with the fruit roll tray that came with it) and spread the zest evenly across the trays.  I set it to 130 degrees, per my dehydrator instructions for fruit and let it dry over night.  The next morning I had nicely dried lemon zest.

I used a coffee grinder to grind them all up.  I would suggest you use a new one, or one that is only used for spices and not coffee, or you risk having coffee flavored lemon zest.  I ground mine up rather finely with the coffee grinder.  There were a few larger chunks that didn't grind down, but I wasn't too worried about them because the zest is most often sprinkled over salmon in our house. 

In the end, I ended up with a half pint jar of lemon zest!  The last time I bought lemon zest at the store, it was about $7 for a small bottle.  I ended up with half a pint jar out of something I was going to put in the trash!

"BOILED" EGGS IN THE OVEN
So sorry I haven't posted in ages!  I've been a busy little beaver, though, and have a few things to share.  First up isn't canning, but it's my new favorite thing!  "Boiled" eggs in the oven!  They taste amazing and are easier to peel!

I like to put mine in a muffin pan so that they don't roll around.  Just stick one egg in each muffing hole and place in your oven, pre heated to 325 degrees.  Bake 25-35 minutes.  I have found that 27 minutes is the magic number with my oven.  I let them cool on the counter, and then put them in a bowl in the fridge.

DEHYDRATING CELERY

Another little thing I have accomplished recently is drying my own celery.  Now I know you're asking me what in the world one does with dried celery, well, I'll tell you!  You use it like normal celery.  I am the worst about remembering to buy celery or using it before it goes bad, and I love the stuff!  So over the years I have always kept dried celery in my spice cupboard.  I ran out last weekend and went to buy more at the store.  I was SHOCKED to see that it is priced at nearly $16 per OUNCE!  I bought a large bunch of celery for $1.99 and headed home to my dehydrator.  I cut only the bottom 1-2" of the bunch, and washed everything (leaves, center, stalks etc.).  Then I ran it through my food processor to chop it up.  I lined my dehydrator trays with parchment paper, or if you have fruit roll trays, you can use those instead.  Something to keep the small pieces of celery from falling through the spaces in the trays.  I spread the celery evening across the trays and let 'er rip!

I dried my celery at 130 degrees, because that's what my dehydrator said to use for vegetables.  I have a Nesco American Harvester dehydrator.  I rotated the trays every few hours, and overall, it took about 7 hours for all trays to dry completely.  When finished, I ended up with a pint size jar full of dried celery.  It cost me a total of $1.99 to  make this much celery!  Much cheaper than buying it and there are no chemicals added. 

CANNED RHUBARB

It is quickly becoming spring time here in Alaska, and that can mean only one thing:  It's time to clean out the freezer to make room for this year's bounty!  We've been having hodge podge dinners (tacos with pot stickers, for example!) to get rid of the odds and ends, but there is really no good way to "use up" rhubarb.  I found I had about two dozen bags in my freezer from various years and I needed to clean them out, but I couldn't bring myself to throw them away, so I decided to give canning them a go.  I have always been curious about canning rhubarb.  Mostly I worried that it might turn it to mush, but then I realized, most recipes it's used in, the rhubarb gets cooked through and turns mushy anyway!

I freeze my rhubarb chopped (usually with the food processor) and frozen in four cup increments in Ziploc bags.  I do four cup increments because most of my rhubarb recipes call for four cups, so it makes life easy.  For this little experiment, I pulled seven, four cup bags out of the freezer and dumped them (minus the Ziplocs, of course) into a large pot and turned the heat on.  I covered them and the rhubarb simmer until it was defrosted throughout and boiling. 

I ladled the rhubarb (and liquid that it created) into sterilized pint jars.  Since I only water bath canned these, it's imperative that your jars and flats be sterilized.  I wiped the rims clean, added flats and rings (only finger tight) and stacked them in my water bath canner.  I lucked out and ended up with 7 pint jars, which means I averaged about 4 cups of rhubarb per pint jar - perfect for recipes!  Process in hot water bath for 15 minutes.



So... what can you do with 15 pints of syrup? How to fix a canning blunder.

It's happened to the best of us.  Your jam is more syrup-like than jam-like.  While I like strawberry syrup as much as the next girl, I prefer it as jam and have figured out how to fix those runny little mistakes.  Read on...

I know it's a bit hard to tell in this photo, but that jam is syrup.  It all sloshed to the side when I turned it over. 

1.  Be sure you give your jam/jelly at least 72 hours before you determine it's syrup.  Some jams take quite awhile to set up.  I'll even stick it in the fridge for a day or two to see if that helps.  If you've still got syrup...

2.  Put 1 cup of your jam into a sauce pan.  Bring to a boil.  A full rolling boil.

3.  Stir in 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice, 3 tablespoons sugar, and 1 1/2 teaspoons liquid pectin (I prefer Certo brand).  Bring to a boil again.  I suggest boiling hard for one minute.

4.  Pour into prepared jars and cover.  Let sit for 24 hours. 

5.  Store partial pectin packet in the fridge.

6.  If this worked, and your jam is no longer syrup, go at it with the rest of your batch.  A word of caution though -  NEVER try to "fix"  more than 8 cups of jam at a time. Process in hot water bath as normal.   

Baked Apples

My family loves what we call baked apples.  I'm a cheater, though, and never have the time to actually bake an apple.  Instead, I cook them in the skillet with a little bit of water, a dash of sugar and some cinnamon until they are soft.  My kids will eat even the ickiest of dinners with the promise of "baked" apples for dessert.  Of course I had to figure out how to make this even easier, and with a twenty pound box of apples, I gave it a whirl! 

First step, give your apples a little rinse in cool water and remove the stickers.  Then I used my apple peeler, corer, slicer to peel them.  It doesn't do a great job of getting the peels off of the tops and bottoms of the apples, so I had to do those parts by hand, but it goes very quickly.  This picture is a granny smith, which I don't usually use for baked apples, but it's the only apple peeler/corer/slicer picture I had readily available, so imagine it's a juicy red apple!

Next I used my handy-dandy Pampered Chef Apple Wedger to core and slice the apple into eighths.  You need to watch when you do this because the cores aren't always in the center of the apples.  I try to compensate for this by putting the stem area in the middle of the wedger - even if it isn't the center of the apple. 

Here's where you have two choices - and I've done both, but have decided I prefer the second method. 

The first method is called HOT PACK.  To hot pack your apples make yourself a simple syrup (water and sugar, and I like to add cinnamon for the apples).  For about fifteen cups of water, I added four cups of sugar, but I like a VERY light syrup.  Stir the sugar in until dissolved and bring to a boil.  Put your apple wedges into the syrup for approximatley two minutes and the ladel into sterilized jars and process pints for 20 minutes, quarts for 25 in a hot water bath canner.  I did this method earlier this summer, and while the apples tasted yummy, they were more mushy, which I don't care for. 

This go around I did the second option - COLD PACK.  After wedging the apples, I packed them into warm, sterilized jars.  I packed those suckers in there as tight as I could, but left head space (about 1/2").  I cooked my syrup on the stove, and after the sugar dissolved fully and the syrup boiled for about one minute, I ladeled it over the apples in the jars, added clean flats and rings and processed in a hot water bath canner for 20 minutes for pints, 25 for quarts.  I think these turned out better because the apples are more crisp on the outside, but soft on the inside. 

From the twenty pound box of apples, I got 27 jars of baked apples and 13 jars of apple butter.  Not bad for $10!

Apple Butter

I stumbled upon a twenty pound box of apples a few weeks ago for only $10.  For us Alaskan folks, that's a helluva deal!  Of course I bought two.  But knowing my husband well enough to know that he'd flip his lid if I rolled up with forty pounds of apples, I gave one of the two boxes to one of my favorite domestic divas because I know she'd make magic with them!  As for me and my apples, we hurried home and got rinsed with nice cool water.

I chunked about a third of them up, peels, stems, cores, stickers, and all and threw them into a large pot with about an inch of water.  I covered the pot and let them simmer until they were soft when pricked with a fork.  Sorry I don't have more pictures of this process, I'm not used to this blogging, yet...

I ran the soft apples, juice and all, through my grinder/mill attachment on my Kitchen Aid.  I had a hand food mill that I used to use, but it would have taken about thirty minutes of hand cranking for a batch this size.  The Kitchen Aid attachment ran through them all in about ten minutes and my forearms didn't turn to Jell-O! 

At this point you have some choices, can it as applesauce, or keep going.  This time I kept going, but had I wanted applesauce, I would have put the still warm sauce into sterilized jars and processed in a water bath for about twenty minutes.  I decided to walk on the wild side...

I put the applesauce in the crock pot with about two cups of sugar and some cinammon, turned it on low and let 'er go for about twelve hours.

You're probably asking yourself, "what's up with the sticks, Bridget?"  I'm glad you asked.  I like a clean kitchen, and I like to keep it simple.  In order for the applesauce to cook down and thicken up, the condensation has to escape from the crockpot.  If you leave the lid off you'll have an applesauce splattered mess of a kitchen.  Instead, I put a couple of bamboo skewers across the crock and put the lid on top of those.  It contained all the mess, but let the moisture escape. 

Let your applesauce cook down 10-12 hours (I usually leave it overnight).  When you return you'll find there is about half as much as there was and it's a darker color.  At this point, I add enough applesauce to fill the crock back up to about an inch of the top, another cup of sugar, some more cinnamon and a teaspoon or two of vanilla.  Put the lid back on the skewers and let it cook for a few more hours.

While still warm, ladle into sterilized jars.  Process in hot water for twenty minutes for pints, 25 for quarts.  This batch yielded about 13 half pints!