Friday, October 22, 2010

Well preserved

Even though I've declared the canning season over, I'm still preserving various foods. 

Local bell peppers were dirt cheap a couple of weeks ago.  The farmers market had them 3/$1.  I bought them like crazy, then getting home with my bounty... and scratching my head about what to do with them.

After hanging onto them for longer than was probably reasonable, I decided to fire-roast them, whir them in the food processor, and freeze in ice cube trays.

This winter I'll use these cubes of deliciousness in pasta sauce, pizza, breads, and soups.  Yum!

I also recently got a dehydrator over the summer.  It was $15 on craigslist in a nearby city called Buckley.  Unfortunately, there's no easy way to get there from here without going through stripmall hell.  I hadn't been there in years, so what the heck did I know?  It wound up being a pretty - and pretty long - drive on a late summer evening.

These little black cherry tomatoes were picked as little green orbs and ripened in a box on the floor of the dining room.  I didn't get a single ripe tomato straight from the yard.  Every single one was ripened in the house.

Same with these tomatoes.

The big box of tomatoes became just 2 pint jars of shriveled burgundy chips.  They're slated for many of the same uses as the bell peppers.  I dried them to a pretty tough state to avoid problems of spoilage due to moisture.  Some went into olive oil and the rest are just in jars.  Hubbie picked up a tub of dried tomatoes and wryly said, "this jar is really expensive".

Such a romantic, that man.

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