For all our homesteading ideals, we don’t strictly adhere to the “eat your mistakes” rule. We aren’t starving. We have no problem throwing out inedible food. This post summarizes some of our failed food projects that were recently cleared from the cupboard.

Dandelion Wine

I have a bad track record with wine so far. Beer is more straightforward: brew, ferment for two weeks, age for two weeks, drink. Wine, on the other hand, requires fermentation, then monthly racking, and then aging for a year or more. In May 2009 I made dandelion wine. I racked it once in July 2009. Since then the 1 gallon carboy has sat on top of the fridge undisturbed. Originally it sat on the dorm fridge, and later it moved to the full size fridge. The house was virtually gutted and reframed around it. Occasionally we would eye the bottle suspiciously. What are the conditions for botulism again?

Last week we finally pulled out the air lock. (Hardly functional, given that the water had quietly evaporated from it.) I tentatively poured a sample and took a taste. Hmm. Not bad. Actually, much better than I expected. There were only a few off flavors from the accumulated yeast cake and no hint of vinegar. On the other hand, it wasn’t especially good: cloy sweet with no balancing fruit character. Perhaps Robin and I just don’t like sweet country-style wines. I drink mostly etch-your-teeth hoppy northwest beers and Robin drinks dry red wine. Neither of us wanted to drink 4500 calories of hypersweet slightly-off wine.

I’ve heard that with a distilling rig and a bit of disrespect for the U.S. government’s ridiculous stance on home distilling you can turn the most abysimal fermentation projects into quite drinkable vodka. Maybe some other year. The wine went down the drain.

Pickles

Robin did quite a bit of pickling with 2011′s garden harvest. The fermented pickles went awry, but she also made zucchini pickles, dilly beans, tarragon cucumber pickles, pickled cauliflower and zuccchini relish. The dilly beans turned out delicious. We’ve also eaten several jars of the pickled cauliflower and enjoyed them. We will make both recipes again next summer. We haven’t tried the zucchini relish yet, but there are hotdogs in the freezer for that purpose. The tarragon pickles looked pretty:

But tarragon pickles taste pretty awful. Robin’s extensive description of the flavor is thus: gross. (Robin is not someone who discovers notes of currants, leather, and earth in her red wine either.)

Robin made zucchini pickles from a recipe on page 159 of the book Canning for a New Generation. She shared a jar with one of our neighbors and the two of them cross referenced their opinions.

The conclusion was that someone somewhere would like this pickled zucchini recipe. We were not those people. Flavors of vinegar and cumin dominated. Zucchini was nowhere to be found.

Dried Zucchini Chips

In theory, zucchini chips sound like a great idea. You take an abundant summer resource (runaway zuchini production) and turn it into a crunchy snack food. It’s like healthy homemade potato chips!

In practice, these are no substitute for proper snack foods (like popcorn). Our attempts at zucchini chips turned out bland and tasteless. Perhaps the secret is in the flavorings. We tried both salt & pepper and ranch dressing spices, but nothing was sufficiently zesty to hide the fact that these are the vegetable equivalent of cardboard. This past week, bags of zucchini chips went into the chicken pen. The chickens quickly ate all of them, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. No animal which will dig through poop looking for worms should be relied upon for culinary advice.

Don’t you just hate those after-dinner dessert cravings? I had some pumpkins sitting around clogging up valuable real estate space on my table, so it was time to eat them!

I peeled the skins off the pumpkins.

Scooped out their guts.

Saved the seeds.

Boiled the seeds in salt water.

Toasted the seeds in some olive oil. Yummy, yum, yum!

Cut the pumpkins into chunks.

Boiled the chunks with butter and a little water, drained, and smashed them.

I made up a crust, used the smashed pumpkin to make the pie filling, and then baked it. Oh, I do love me some hot pumpkin pie!

All the pumpkin scraps went out to the chickens where it disappeared quite fast. I suppose technically the stem went to waste. Maybe there is a crafting opportunity there, but I will pass on that one.

Last week Lee got me a convection toaster oven–basically a miniature oven. We haven’t been so excited about a small appliance in years! Finally, baking was an option for me again.

The first thing I did was make a cherry pie from scratch. Yup, that is one happy pie!

After so many years of not having an oven I had forgotten all the things I used to make. Suddenly, I’m realizing I can bake bread, buy a frozen pizza, make a quiche, whip up some muffins, bake some biscuits, make a lasagna, broil fish, roast a small chicken, etc. The possibilities are endless.

I’m so happy I can bake again. It’s such a small thing but it’s amazing how much you miss it when it’s gone.

This year I really wanted some blackberry jam so I talked myself into walking out to our field to assess the blackberry state. The weather was cool, no mosquitoes in sight, and the blackberries were big. I picked berries until I filled my pot.

This was my first jam making experience. All 10 half pints of blackberry-peach jam jelled up which made me quite pleased. What I am going to do with 10 half pints I don’t know, as that is an awful lot of jam. I’ve already given one away and have similar plans for a few more of them.

After making the jam I still had half of my berries left so I decided to make some blackberry syrup. Six pints of syrup later (and some left over in a jar) a brilliant idea occurred to me. Blackberry mojitos! They were fabulous! Now all I need to do is make some pancakes to go with my mojito.

I layered the veggies and spices in the crock.

I added the weights and the brine and thought it all smelled quite divine.

I filled the water seal in the crock and then put a two week timer in my head for when they should be done.

This is where everything goes dreadfully wrong. Somehow my head decided that the deadline was permanently two weeks away. I realized with dawning horror that I was three weeks into this forgotten project on the counter, so I tentatively opened the crock and took out a pickle for a taste test. It wasn’t awful but it didn’t taste the best either. The mold floating on the surface was rather disconcerting too. With a glum face I decided to toss the pickles and try again later. Next time, I will write the estimated finish time on my calendar. And I’ll check on them more often. And I’ll try not to make fermented veggies during a heat wave (which didn’t help matters either).

I had a new recipe I was considering trying, but once Lee heard that he begged for me to make candied jalapeños instead. This is from a guy who doesn’t like spicy food.

I went to the garden and picked over my pepper plants (note to self: plant three times as many peppers next year). Then I snapped on my rubber gloves and went to work slicing, and mixing, and stirring, and…well you know, all those things you do when you can.

The recipe for these awesome, use-on-everything-you-can-think-of peppers, is found here. You are going to want to make a batch. Then you won’t want to share. You’ll find yourself hogging the jar, pretending you can’t hear the pleas for more candied peppers from those around you.

The first one I tried out was a tarragon refrigerator pickle (page 134). I’ve never had a tarragon pickle before so I felt intrigued. The pickles will have to stay in the fridge for four weeks before I can start snacking on them. I also had to slice my cucumbers as I tend to grow them short and fat.

The second recipe I tried was one for dilly beans (page 135). I’ve never canned beans before and actually had my first taste of a dilly bean a week ago. I’m thinking that this recipe I used may be less salty then the one I tried as it uses a lot of vinegar and less salt. I actually want to try out several dilly bean recipes this year so I can compare which recipe I like the best.

My tomatoes are mostly green still, so I am stuck making exotic canned goods other then the boring but oh-so-yummy salsas and what not. I’m still using canned tomatoes from two years ago so at least I am good on that front. I guess if my tomatoes never ripen this summer I can always try canning some sweet green tomato pickles.

As I was already in the kitchen making relish, I decided to try another recipe from the pickling book. I had spare cauliflower in the garden so of course I had to try my hand at making some pickled cauliflower.

I love recipes that use the raw pack method. It doesn’t even seem like canning because there is so little fuss.

When all was said and done I had 3 pints of zucchini relish and 4 pints of pickled cauliflower.

I also had a mess. Why is it even small canning jobs seems to make big kitchen messes? 53 loads of hand-washed dishes later, I called it a day.