escabeche

Based on the way I've been spending my free time lately, you'd never guess Drew and I live in sunny, southern California. You'd never guess that we have access to fresh produce year round from the farmer's market. Rather, you'd think we lived in a cold weather state, by the way I've been busily putting up food. I guess I'll just be prepared for when we (hopefully) live in a cold weather state.

So far I've canned two kinds of salsa (a third is soon to come), mango chili butter, and now escabeche.

We have one jalapeno plant, which produces too many jalapenos for us to cook with, but not enough to can. But this week we're garden sitting for some friends who went out of town, and they told us to help ourselves to anything we'd like. So we picked their jalapenos and this is what happens when their peppers got together with ours: escabeche.

I thought escabeche was something made of fish, but I guess there could be more than one kind. Anyway, this one consists of pickled and seasoned veggies- onions, cauliflower, garlic, carrots, and of course, jalapenos. It was super easy to make, and tasted pretty good.

salsa!

We had a bit of a "heat" wave the past few days (meaning temperatures reached the high 80s, maybe even low 90s). Naturally, the best thing to do during a "heat wave" is turn on all the stove burners and can something, which is exactly what I did.

We had a bunch of jalapeno, green, and red peppers, and we needed to do something with them. I've been eating the red and green peppers with hummus, but obviously I just can't eat jalapenos in the same way. So I decided to make salsa even though our tomato plants aren't quite up to the task yet. But I'd had my eye on a recipe for peach salsa, and since we're not growing peaches anyway, I decided to head down to the farmer's market to pick some up. And I couldn't resist the fat romas and beefsteaks, so I got those too.

So Drew and I made peach salsa and a fresh tomato salsa earlier this week. They're a little spicy, namely because I got a little lazy with de-seeding the jalapenos and didn't do such a good job. But the salsas taste nice and fresh and way better than the store bought stuff.

marmalade and seedlings

Drew and I spent Easter last weekend visiting my Oceanside family. In addition to bringing home gardening tips, we also brought home some meyer lemons. I used most of them to make lemon rosemary bars, and I used the rest to make marmalade. I went to the farmers market to pick up a grapefruit and 2 oranges to round out my 3 citrus marmalade.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the marmalade, but I keep eating it and Drew enjoys it. When I was at the farmers market yesterday, I saw a vendor selling tomatoes, so salsa may be the next canning project.

The gardening is still, well, going. We went to water it today, and the first thing Drew said was "well, we didn't kill anything." Clearly, we have set a low bar here. Our tomato plant isn't looking too good, but our peppers are still alive. We planted sage, basil, and mint last weekend and snap beans today.

A couple weeks ago, I started sowing tomato seeds and eggplant seeds inside. It shouldn't be long until we can plant them outside.

canning!

Canning is probably not the best hobby to pick up when you are moving in a month, but I've take it up anyway. And, it's probably not the best idea to invest in a new hobby when you're next paycheck isn't until November. Oh well, too late.

I have decided to hop on the canning bandwagon, or, as the LA Times calls it, the canning movement. Over the past few years, after reading books like The Omnivores Dilemma or Food Matters and watching Food, Inc., I've been inspired to try to reduce my carbon footprint (going vegetarian really helped) and do my best to eat locally. So taking up canning and learning to preserve food seemed like the next logical step. Plus, for the same reasons that I try my best not to eat processed foods, canning is appealing because there are no artificial ingredients that I can't pronounce.

Armed with my brand new copy of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving and a couple books I checked out from the library, I spent the better part of the weekend putting up food (that's the canning lingo). This wasn't a chore though, it was actually fun and relaxing. The first thing I made was strawberry jam, which is amazing. Then I canned tomatoes, which is something that my mother did when I was a child. (As a kid, I hated the smell of tomatoes, but now I adore it. I wasn't a fan of tomatoes back then, and pizza sauce and marinara sauce didn't count). I found canning tomatoes to be delightfully messy. I also canned some quick pickled cucumber spears, which I am still waiting to try out. And earlier this afternoon, I put up some roasted red peppers. Drew said that if there was an award for most food canned one the first attempt, I would win it. Well, all this delicious food is enough of a reward. I can't wait to dig in!