harvest « Amy Pollien

Posts Tagged ‘harvest’

Grape juice

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

Grapes grow very well in the poor soil and harsh climate of coastal Maine. Our season is too short to ripen some of the classics, like the real Concord grape that made huge hedgerows of fragrant fruit at my parent’s home in Connecticut. Fortunately, there’s Beta. From the Fedco catalog:

Originated by Louis Suelter (pronounced Sool-ter) in Minn, 1881. Beta was named after his wife and is pronounced Bett-uh not Bay-tuh. Old standby, excellent for juice, jelly and jam. Decent eating off the vine when completely ripe. Medium-sized black berries in moderately compact to loose clusters. Early to bloom, early to ripen. Vigorous healthy productive vines extremely hardy to zone 3.

Our Beta vine is almost 20 years old and the multiple trunks are as big around as my wrist at the base. Last year I bought two more Beta and a Somerset seedless with “medium-sized loose clusters with small sweet ruddy reddish-golden fruit” for variety. I’ve been making grape jelly all these years, but the vines produced so much fruit in 2010 that I made a dozen quart jars of juice for variety. (As a bonus, the juice is much easier to can.) We broke it out for the first time last night and that’s it for me – all future grape harvests are going to juice. It’s AMAZING.

From the Blue Book:

Wash, crush and measure grapes. Add 1 C water* to each gallon of grape mash. Heat mixture 10 minutes at 190 degrees – do not boil. Strain through a jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth. For a greater yield (if you don’t mind a little cloudiness or sediment) twist the bag to squeeze all the juice out.

Now the BB instructs you to let the juice stand 24 hours in the refrigerator, ladle it out into another pan (being careful not to disturb the sediment) and strain it again. If you, like me, are short on refrigerator space, big pans, and patience during harvest season you can skip this step. The juice will still be incredible and probably have even more nutrients. On the other hand, if you’re looking to enter your flawless grape juice at the Blue Hill Fair, by all means strain away.

Measure juice. Add 1 – 2 C sugar to each gallon. Reheat to 190. Ladle hot juice into hot jars leaving 1/4″ headspace. Adjust two piece caps. Process pints and quarts 15 minutes in a boiling water canner.

This makes a concentrated juice and we cut it half and half with seltzer.

* The BB always assumes you have clean fresh well water available. If you’re using chlorinated water you may get a better result if you let the water stand in an open pitcher for a day before using.

Tags: garden, harvest, orchard fruit
Posted in condiment, gardening, horticulture, orchard, recipe | No Comments »

Winter dinner – Hubbard squash

Saturday, December 18th, 2010

Put on a sweater and go down cellar. Choose a squash for dinner and, on your way back upstairs, grab a hacksaw.

Wash the squash and saw into manageable chunks – a lot will depend on the size of your oven and your cookie sheets. Scoop out the fibrous innards and save the seeds for roasting or next year’s crop. The flesh of the Hubbard squash is typically very dry, so rinse the cut pieces briefly in cold water. Oil a foil-covered cookie sheet and pile the pieces of squash artistically, so that they still fit in the oven. Bake at 375 for about an hour.

Scoop out the cooked squash from the rind into a saucepan over low heat. Add a few tablespoons of butter, sea salt, and perhaps 1/4 C of unsulphered molasses. When the squash is heated through and the butter has melted, mash with a potato masher until well mixed. Serve as a side dish to corn tortillas (for our vegetarian household), or braised beef, or add eggs and evaporated milk and use as pie filling.

Rinse the seeds in a colander until clear of the orange squash fibers. Spread on a dishtowel to dry. You can bake these in the oven on a cookie sheet, but I prefer an ungreased skillet over medium heat. Stir often, and when they start to puff up and sweat, sprinkle liberally with sea salt and just a tiny bit of raw sugar.

See? Winter isn’t quite so bad after all.

Tags: garden, harvest, Maine, recipe, winter
Posted in Cooking, horticulture, main dish, recipe, vegetable garden | No Comments »

Minestra

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

The winter garden has been very generous this year, so tonight we made soup.

Bean and Kale Minestra

1/4 lb kale, about 2 C chopped. I like to tear the soft, leafy part away from the tough stem and then chop finely. If you have the time, soak the chopped kale in cold water for half an hour or so. The cut leaves will soak up a lot of water and soften.

2 large cloves of garlic, minced, 2 Tbs olive oil, 1 can white beans or cannellini (or use any variety of cooked dried beans), 4 C of bean water, vegetable stock or chicken stock if you don’t mind it, 1 Tbs tomato paste or 1/2 tomato sauce, 1/2 tsp dried sage, salt and pepper

Lemon wedges and Parmesan cheese for serving.

In a saucepan, make a batch of tiny pasta – ditalini or orzo – and drain. Or, you can use leftover pasta.

In a soup pot, saute the garlic in the olive oil for a few seconds. Add about half the beans and part of the water or stock and the tomato paste. Now you have a choice. Either use a stick blender to puree the beans, stock and paste in the cooking pot, or process the remaining beans and stock in a food processor and then add it to the pot. Either way, you’re creating a nice thick base for the soup.

Drain the kale and add it to the simmering pot for 15 minutes – 1/2 hour, depending on how fresh, hydrated and finely cut the leaves. Right before serving stir in the pasta, or you can add leftover roasted vegetables, a scrambled egg or pieces of leftover chicken. Bring to the table with lemon wedges for a squeeze of flavor and grated cheese.

Mmmmm, soup.

Tags: garden, harvest, recipe, winter
Posted in Cooking, ethnic, main dish, recipe | No Comments »

Pre-game

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

The menu for Thanksgiving Dinner 2010 stands as follows:

Martha Stewart’s Gruyere Thyme refrigerator crackers, made with Seal Cove mixed milk aged cheese “Olga” instead of Gruyere. Thank you for the delicious sample, Betsy! The crackers are incredibly simple to make but do need to chill overnight, so I’m making them in between blog posts. They will be our appetizer, with. . .

Fruit: Forelle pears (here on Peanut Butter Etoufee – welcome, pull up a fork!), Red Globe grapes and Courtland apple slices.

We will have turkey. R received a beautiful-but-deadly Wusthof 4″ boning knife for his birthday, so we’ll have a rolled, boneless turkey a la Julia Child – pan roasted in butter, and then finished in the oven in a remarkably short period of time. It will share oven space with sweet potatoes in maple syrup and turnips, par-boiled and then roasted with sea salt. Oh, and stuffing! This year the Morning Glory Bakery in the village provided 15 cup bags of their assorted breads cubed and baked – both savory and efficient. I added butter (duh), chopped onions, shallots and celery, vegetable stock, Black Mission figs and Northern Spy apples. R. will roll some up with the turkey and we’ll serve the rest on the side for the vegetarians in the audience.

We’ll have Savoy cabbage, carrot and apple slaw in the big wooden bowl with Susan’s favorite dressing for which I promise I will find and record the recipe (sorry, Susan!). There may be rolls.There will be cranberry sauce with local berries, sweetened with pomegranate molasses, which makes the sauce explosively tart and gives it a wonderful dark color.

Then there will be pie! Just two this year: Fannie Farmer pumpkin made with the New England pie pumpkins we grew over the incredibly balmy summer of 2010, and Martha Stewart’s (again) Maple Bourbon Pecan Pie, because it is just so good.

Recipes for what makes the grade to follow over the weekend. Keep warm, everybody.

Tags: autumn, dessert, family, harvest, heritage, kitchen, rememberance
Posted in Cooking, family, Holida, the neighborhood | No Comments »

Pumpkin pie

Sunday, October 17th, 2010

First, get a pumpkin. What you really want is a New England Pie Pumpkin: dark orange, sweet and beautifully sized – one pumpkin, one pie. Those prize-winning giants at the fair are actually gourds and their watery flesh doesn’t cook well, but those big ones from the grocery store that you’re going to carve into Jack O’Lanterns make a decent pie.

Split the pumpkin in half between the stem and blossom end. If it’s very hard, put a sharp knife in all the way to the hilt repeatedly all around and then use a blunt edge (small crowbar, a screwdriver – but not your knife) to lever it open. Scoop out the fibrous insides and separate the seeds to roast with your pie in the oven. Run some water into the scooped halves and then dump it out. Put the halves cut side down on a foil lined baking sheet and roast at 375 for 45 minutes to an hour. The time will vary widely on the size and freshness of the pumpkin. You should be able to puncture the skin easily with a fork when done.

Scoop the flesh out of the skin. A NE Pie pumpkin will make about 1 1/2 C of pulp. Whisk together 3/4 C sugar, 2 eggs* and 1 can of evaporated milk and add to the pumpkin with 1 tsp ginger, 1 tsp cinnamon and 1/2 tsp salt. Whisk gently till blended and pour into an unbaked pie shell. Bake at 375 for 10 minutes, then 345 for 45 minutes or until the middle of the pie is set. Any extra filling mix can be ladled into small pyrex dishes as custard.

*Preferrably fresh, local eggs. Thank you, Carrie’s chickens!

Tags: autumn, dessert, garden, harvest, pie, recipe
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Work in progress

Monday, October 4th, 2010

The autumn studio is home to still life set-ups featuring pumpkins,poppies and pink, angled October light – fodder for big paintings during the long, cold winter ahead.

Tags: autumn, harvest, pastel
Posted in art, meta, still life | No Comments »

Battened down

Friday, October 1st, 2010

I’ve tied the hoop house doors together using thin hemp twine that will swell and tighten as it soaks up the rain, moved the house plants that summer out of doors inside, gathered up all the Tyvek so that floating row covers don’t whip around the neighborhood and put big rocks on the plastic Adirondack chairs. Tonight we’re under an areal flood and high wind watch for 4 to 5 inches of rain and 40 mph sustained winds with 68 mph gusts. There’s a storm warning for the Gulf of Maine with 5′ seas and the locals have been beaching boats all day. We’re fully stocked with flashlights and toilet paper because the big storms are never the hurricanes – the worst weather is always associated with the unnamed storms that come with warnings but don’t make history.

I toured the garden with the camera one last time before the storm wipes everything straight to winter. This year the sweet peas bloomed all summer long but I don’t expect they will survive the wind and rain tonight.

Thanks to the bees, the melon vines are starting fruit they won’t finish – cute though, and maybe destined to be a still life composition.

The vines look thin, but the pumpkins and hubbard squash are still maturing and will stay out till November, growing thick hides and increasing their sugar content.

Tags: autumn, garden, harvest, weather
Posted in gardening, horticulture, vegetable garden | No Comments »

At the altar of the Harvest Moon

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Time to inventory the Summer:

2 Gal grape juice (4 quart jars and assorted pints – most of this is in pints)

2 Gal tomato sauce (plain)

3 pints catsup (tomatoes, honey,peaches, onions, tamari, sea salt)

6 pints peach jam

10 pints brandied peaches (Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!)

6 pints grape jelly/jam, assorted

4 pints raspberry jam

4 pints elderberry tonic

Plus green beans, sliced peaches in syrup, blueberries and pumpkin puree in the freezer. The seckel pears will be in soon with pear butter. Oh, and some quart bags of frozen tomato sauce from when it was 98 degrees and I couldn’t bear to use the steam canner. I’m still a lousy farmer, because we couldn’t make it through the winter on this amount of food, but it will feel good when the potatoes come in, and there will be a big box of carrots and canvas bags of onions stored carefully at the other end of the cellar.There are canning jars of seeds, too: pumpkin, beans, sweet peas and hubbard squash.

This year was easy. Pretty soon (in gardening time) we’ll see what 2011 will bring.

Tags: autumn, garden, harvest, orchard fruit
Posted in Cooking, gardening | 1 Comment »

After Apple Picking

Monday, September 20th, 2010

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human dream.

Robert Frost

Tags: autumn, dessert, harvest, orchard fruit, poem
Posted in Cooking, gardening, horticulture, orchard | 2 Comments »

Equipment post – Victorio food mill

Friday, September 10th, 2010

Tonight I made 10 pints of tomato sauce. I started with two full stew pots of plum tomatoes (one after the other because who has two pots that size?), cooked down to pulp and drained. Tonight I put the cooled mess through the food strainer. I like the Victorio mill – the hopper is big enough to accommodate half the pot at once and the mechanism is smooth and easy to turn. It’s a little messy but I think that’s the nature of the process – turning fruit into puree – rather than the machine.

The clamp is narrow and won’t fit on just any surface. You need a sturdy table or, in this case, the tin edge of the Hoosier cabinet. I put a section of newspaper on the floor and clear everything out of the sink in preparation. The parts fit together and come apart easily – which is nice when you’re processing peaches and find you’ve missed a pit and everything grinds (literally) to a halt until you fish it out.

Now the steam canner is full of pints of bright red tomato sauce, and the kitchen table is crowded with last night’s crop of grape juice and food mill parts. There’s no better way to spend the first cool nights of September.

Tags: garden, harvest, kitchen, summer
Posted in Cooking, gardening, vegetable garden | No Comments »

Amy Pollien