The Lazy Locavores

In the spirit of the season, we’re putting up our food from our harvest and from the harvests of our local farmer friends.  As part of our Lazy Locavores services, we’ve been teaching canning classes in our client’s homes and the joy of putting up high quality food for the winter season is showing through like we’ve never experienced before.

In the past, we’ve had some people show an interest in putting up food but it seemed like more of a curiosity than actually wanting to jump into the kitchen.  This year however, it’s a whole new ball game.  People are making the smart choice to extend their harvest and keep their food focus on eating local by putting up food themselves.  But where to begin…

That’s where we come in!  Our canning classes focus on basic skills that ensure a safe, healthy and delicious canning experience.

We will be posting our seasonal food preservation recipes and techniques here as well as on our Shibaguyz site.  If you have come here after attending one of our classes… Welcome!  If you’ve stumbled across us out of curiosity… Welcome!  Either way, enjoy the recipes and be sure to contact us if you have any questions or if you want to schedule a class for you and your friends or your community group.

We’ll start off with our standard salsa.  This one finds its way into a few meals and snacks a week.  When we’re needing a pick me up in the middle of a busy day, we pop open a jar of this gorgeous stuff and munch away with some homemade tortilla chips. YUMM!!  We also cook with it and use it for toppings for more traditional settings like taco salad and quesadillas or my personal favorite… baked potatoes!  Good grief… now I’m hungry…

The Shibaguyz House Salsa

The Shibaguyz House Salsa

10 cups of chopped, cored, peeled tomatoes (see blanching instructions below)

5 cups of chopped seeded green bell peppers

5 cups chopped onions

2,1/2 cups chopped, seeded chili peppers.  We use whatever types of chilis our local farmer has to offer that particular week.  They are salsa experts and always throw a few more peppers into our canvas bag than we needed to encourage us to make more than we intended… smart farmers!

1,1/4 cups cider vinegar

3 cloves of garlic chopped very fine

2 tablespoons very fresh, finely chopped cilantro (don’t use the dried stuff here… just don’t)

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon of hot pepper sauce (if you need to heat it up more than the peppers you already have)

First, prep your water bath canner, jars and lids.  As always, we recommend the Ball Blue Book as our everlasting guide to all things canning.

Next, in a large stainless steel saucepan, combine tomatoes, green peppers, onions, chili peppers, vinegar, garlic, cilantro, salt and hot pepper sauce (if you are going to use it at all).  Bring the entire yummy concoction to a boil over medium-high heat.  Be sure to stir just about constantly at this point to prevent any sticking or burning and to ensure even heating throughout.  Reduce the heat and boil gently while giving it a good stir every once in a while until your salsa thickens up a bit.  Depending on the types of tomatoes you used, your time will vary but it usually takes us about 10 minutes for the meatier tomatoes or 20 minutes for the juicier ones.

The key here is to obtain your desired thickness without cooking all the color out of your onions and peppers.  Take your time and be patient while stirring and heed the directions to “boil gently” or you’ll end up with a tomato/veggie mush… it will still taste good (sometimes eating your mistakes is the most fun part!) but you want some eye candy appeal when you are finished.  This salsa looks so beautiful on the shelf in the jars and even better in a blue, fiesta serving bowl. *ahem* but I digress…

After obtaining a thickness you are happy with (whatever looks good on a spoon will look good on a chip!), ladle the hot salsa into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch of headspace.  Remove all air bubbles then you can adjust the head space again by adding more of the hot salsa.  Wipe the rim clean (remember: no nasty bacteria growth!!). Center your lids on the jar and screw the band down to finger-tip tight.  No he-man stuff here… just “finger-tip” tight will do.

Finally, place your already stunning jars in the water bath canner… make sure they are completely covered with water.  This recipe makes about twelve 8-ounce jars or about six pint jars.  With either of these sizes, bring the water to a boil and process for 15 minutes.  We’re usually working on two or three projects at the same time to set a timer to alert you at the end of the 15 minutes of boiling time.  Remember, don’t start the timer until the water comes to a boil.  After your timer goes off, turn off the heat, remove the lid from your canner (careful, it’s HOT HOT HOT and the steam rising from the canner is even hotter!!)  Wait 5 more minutes, then remove the jars (you must get one of those handy dandy kits that comes with the jar lifters).  Make sure you already have a surface for these hot jars to cool down on.  We usually just put down a couple of kitchen towels to protect both our counters and the jars then place the jars out overnight.

At this point, you should be met with the happy “PING” that accompanies the tight seal on your new creations.  We usually count the pings while we are cooking up the next batch.  If in doubt, after the jars have cooled a bit, lightly press your finger on the center of the lid.  If the lid pops back and forth, you have a jar that, of one reason or another, did not seal.  The bad news is, you can’t put this one away for safe keeping on your shelf.  The GREAT news is: IT’S SALSA TIME!!  *insert Tito Puente here*  That’s right, either open the jar up right then and there, grab a bag of chips and start munching, or just place the cooled jar in your fridge and use it first.  That seal MUST MUST MUST be good or your creation will go bad on the shelf.  Bacteria bad, fresh salsa good.  Remember that!

Again, for a great reference, and overall first-timer learner book on canning we recommend the Ball Blue Book.  You can not be too careful with home preserving.  Sterile equipment and clean hands are very important to ensure the health and safety of your future salsa consumers.  Moving on…

OMG Peach Salsa

(one taste and you’ll get the name)

This recipe makes about eight, 8-ounce jars… we usually get a little more (snacks!!)

1/2cup white vinegar

6 cups chopped, pitted, peeled peaches (again, blanching tips to follow)

1,1/4 cups chopped red onion

4 jalapeno peppers finely chopped (if you want more flavor from the pepper than heat, be sure to remove all seeds and, especially, those white “ribs” running up the inside of the pepper)

1 red bell pepper, seeded and chopped (make sure to remove the seeds and the white ribs from your bell peppers as these are what makes them bitter)

1/2 cup loosely packed, finely chopped cilantro

2 tablespoons liquid honey (Jason always warms ours in the microwave)

1 clove of finely chopped garlic

1,1/2 teaspoons ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

First, prep your canner, jars and lids (see Ball Blue Book)

Next, in a large, stainless steel saucepan, combine the vinegar, peaches, onion, jalapeno and red peppers, cilantro, honey, garlic, cumin and cayenne.  Stir constantly as you bring this to a boil over medium-high heat… if your mouth isn’t watering at this point, there’s something wrong with you!  LOL  As the ingredients come to a boil, all the sweetness, heat and warm spices mingle together in a conspiracy to seriously tempt you to go get a spoon… but don’t!  Wait for it…  Once you reach a boil, reduce the heat and boil gently and patiently until the salsa thickens slightly.  This should only take about five minutes.  Remove from the heat right away or you’ll have peach paste.

Ladle the hot salsa into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace.  Remove all air bubbles and adjust the headspace if you need to by adding more of the hot salsa.  Wipe down the rims to ensure no errant stickiness makes its way between the lids and a solid seal.  Remember: bacteria bad!!  Center the lid (grandma always called them flats) on the clean rim, then screw the band down to fingertip tight.  Again, please refer to the Ball Blue Book for a more in depth explanation of the ins and outs of canning techniques if this is your first time.

Finally, place the jars in your water bath canner making sure they are completely covered in water.  Bring to a boil and process for 15 minutes.  Remove from heat and remove the canner lid.  Wait five more minutes then remove the jars to your protected counter top or pass through surface to cool.  TAADAAA!!

If you are lucky, you’ll have a little of this OMG Peach Salsa left over that just won’t quite fit in the jars.  If you are so fortunate, either grab the chips and chow down or save it for dinner.  This stuff tastes great on all kinds of grilled meats and veggies.  The flavor is sweet and savory all at once so if you are a vegetarian or a carnivore, you’ll love how this enhances the flavor of your favorite foods.

One of our favorite uses so far is to mix the salsa with a little fromage blanc and use it to spread on fresh bread, scones, fritters or just eat with a spoon!!  LOL

Please make sure to follow these recipes TO THE LETTER if you are going to be canning them as we did.  Otherwise, you can just go all hog wild and doctor ‘em up any ol’ way you like.  Again, if you are canning them, they MUST be done to these EXACT proportions or you will not have happy results and the resulting bacterial growth in your jars is very harmful.

On blanching:

Heat up a pot of water to a rolling boil.  We use a spider (wok tool) to gently place our tomatoes or peaches into the boiling water to prevent burning splashes.  Once you have the boiling pot loaded, set out your compost bin (ours is one of those white, ceramic ones that looks like a garden pail… sits right on the counter top for easy access and still looks great) next to a bath of cold water (probably a bowl of ice water sitting in your sink).  Watch your boiling produce carefully for signs of readiness.  Remember, you aren’t trying to cook them, you just want to loosen the collagen bonds between the fruit and the skin (well that just sounds gross, doesn’t it??).

Anyway… you’ll only need to boil the fruit for a couple of minutes to loosen up the skins.  Using your spider (you gotta get one of these if you’re going to do much of this… it’s GREAT!), scoop out the fruit from the boiling water and plop (gently) into the ice water.  The rule of thumb is equal time boiling to time chilling.  With the tomatoes, this seems to hold pretty true, with the peaches, not so much… we’ll explain…

After your tomatoes hit the icy water, you’ll notice they start to “crack.”  This is the skins letting go of the fruit because of the whole heating-cooling-expansion-contraction thingy… Jason is better at explaining the science of while all this stuff works… but, since I’m typing and he’s just editing from the background, I’m not going to blah blah about it.  Okay?  Good… moving on…

Once you notice the tomato skins cracking just start peeling them with your fingers.  Usually, the skins will slide right off but you might need to coax them a little with a small knife.  If that’s the case, no biggie, just takes a little more time and your patience will be rewarded.  As each piece of fruit is defrocked (nekkid fruit!!) we return it to the cold water to keep it from cooking further.

Peaches are a different story.  Do not leave these in the water as long as you do the tomatoes.  You will notice them start to peal away or even puff up a bit after only a minute or two in the boiling water.  Plunge them into the ice water and then follow this little trick.  You know the seam that runs down the side of a peach?  Hold the warm-ish peach between the palms of both hands.  Starting at the top of that seam next to the stem end of the fruit, use your thumbs to pull the skin apart using the seam as a starting point.  Most of the time, the skin separates neatly down the line of the seam and slides right away in one easy piece.  Again, return the nekkid fruit to the cold water to stop any further cooking.  This is especially important if you are making a chunky salsa or jam recipe but not so important if you are going to be boiling them down to a pulp consistency anyway.

So there you have it!  Cookin’ With The Shibaguyz installment one.  Your outcry has ben heard and we will happily oblige with more recipes in the future.  And, as always, we use ingredients that come from as close as our back yard but never more than 100 miles from our door.

Be sure to let us now how you like the salsas and also tell us how you have been using them.  Enjoy!

talk to you soon…

The Shibaguyz