Experiments in Potatoes

I bought some frou-frou potatoes a couple months ago. The kind that come in the special burlap bag so that the spuds are fooled into thinking they've never left the ground. These were platinum-members-only potatoes. So I couldn't be surprised when they began to sprout before I had a chance to use them.

But instead of being annoyed at my wasteful spending and inefficient meal-planning, I decided to try to grow them.  I don't have room in the garden for the type of mounding that's recommended, but in my research I ran across the concept of potato grow bags. Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures from the very beginning, but here's a shot from a couple weeks ago:

 

I started out with 2 inches of dirt and laid the cut-up sprouted potatoes on top.  Then, as the plants grew a couple inches, I mounded more dirt on them until the plant was barely showing.  The bag pretty quickly filled up. And the picture this morning looks like this:

 

(Hand is for scale and to show-off a new OPI color I found)

I think now I need to wait until the flowers die off before opening the velcro flap on the backside of the bag and checking for my bounty.  The plants look pretty happy, but who knows what's happening in the dirt?  More to come....

First try at pressure canning

So I bought a pressure canner last Fall but hadn't had the gumption to use it until this past weekend.  I had cooked a stewing chicken bought from a local farm and decided to make and can some chicken broth.  The flavor for the broth was loosely based off of a recipe by Hutson's Herb Garden cookbook (she's the author that introduced 'salad burnet' to our gin & tonic repertoire.)

The broth isn't the most perfect broth/stock I've ever had, but it's good enough to flavor rice cooking anyway.  The big leap of confidence came in canning the stock. First, the canner had to come out of the box.

Nice and shiny, isn't it? : )

So the next step is to take the broth that had been simmering with herbs and onions for about an hour and a half and strain it.  (That 's how it ended up in the glass bowl. )  Then, after cleaning the pint jars and resting them in hot water, we ladelled the broth into the canning jars, leaving about an inch of head space.

We were able to fill about 8 pints, but there was only room for 7 in the canner.  (The other went straight to the fridge.)

We filled the canner with 3 inches of water before putting in the jars, but then felt like the canner was too full. So we scooped some out so that the jars weren't completely covered.

Then we shut the canner and started it up.  I don't have any pictures of this process, because I was too nervous with that thing hissing and spitting on the stovetop to get the camera.  Dan took a video of it for a little bit, but I was too busy being crabby and worrying.  You see, this canner was different than the canner that I had seen in my canning class.  And it wasn't doing the thing I was sure (through word of mouth and reading) that a canner was supposed to do. It wasn't making a soothing 'rocking' or clicking sound.  The pressure weight was spinning furiously at first and then barely moving if we turned down heat.

Dan thought it pretty funny a the time.  I think it's funny now, but I couldn't see the humor then. That's a shame, 'cause having a live tiger spitting at you from your stove top is pretty dang funny.

But moving on.  We lasted through 20 tense minutes and then cut the heat. We let the canner cool for about 40 minutes until the safety lock allowed us to open the lid.  We move the jars to a wooden cutting board to cool.

The jars continued to boil for a while.  (Being under 10 psi for 20 minutes made the contents pretty hot.) I also noticed that the all the jars had a residue of some kind of salt/lime.  Probably because the water here in central Texas is a little on the hard side. Next time, I'll put a little vinegar in the canning water to see if that cuts this down some.

All the seals took and I now have 7 pints of broth in the pantry.  We made fish soup last night with the straight-to-refrigerator pint and it tasted alright, so I have hopes that these seven pints will be useful. I deemed this canning escapade a success. But let me also say, I understand why broth in the store is packaged in opaque boxes or cans.  Broth is not pretty in a jar.  But it's a useful pantry staple and it feels good to have made some from local fixings.

First Hard Freeze

I hobbled out to the backyard to give the strawberry plants and the rest of the garden a good soaking before tonight's big freeze.  The lime tree also got a soaking and rinse, as that's what I remember the Florida farmers doing to keep the leaves of the tree at 32 degrees or more.  Hopefully, my yard's little micro-climate will stay out of the 20's tonight to give all my little plants a chance.

Time will tell!