How to Save Eggplant

Full Belly Farms makes the most delicious eggplants I've ever eaten. And so, I want to save as much as I can for eating year round! It's super easy to preserve eggplant in the freezer. Simply cut it into big slices.

I like to cut my slices in half, they could also be left whole or cut into quarters. If you cut it up too small you'll just end up with eggplant mush when you take it out of the freezer later...which is not necessarily a bad thing, just be aware of what you want to use eggplant for in the future. Big slices will be more versatile.

Spread out the slices in a single layer on a baking sheet and put them in the freezer. A Silpat is useful, but certainly not at all necessary.

When the slices are completely frozen they can be transferred to a plastic bag and kept in the freezer for roughly one year.

An Ode to Corn

Growing up in California, there were few ways to mark the seasons. Winter brought holidays and morning fog, spring and fall were too hot for sitting in classrooms without air conditioning, and summer was when we would grill, and eat, as much fresh corn as we possibly could.

I remember it like a ritual. Analogous to Summer Solstice - it wasn't really summer until I sank my teeth into the first grilled corn cob of the year. My dad always prepared the grill while I prepared the corn - pruning off excess husks/silk/stem. Then I would parade my pile of pruned corn out to the grill where we would grill it till the husks were good and black. As soon as it was barely cool enough to touch, we would peel off the burnt husks and silk to expose the steaming succulent kernels within. But before we ate the corn, we had to count the rows of kernels. Supposedly, as my dad would say, an odd number of rows was rare, and therefore lucky. Over the years I began to get suspicious about the frequency of odd-numbered ears of corn. Perhaps I'm just lucky.

I still get giddy at the thought of grilled summer corn. And now that we have a functioning grill, we can have corn all the time! 

I've heard several different methods for grilling corn: soak it in water and grill it with the husks on to make "steamed" corn, or remove the husks and grill it so some of the kernels themselves get charred. I'm still a fan of my dad's method: just put it on the grill (husks and all) and it's done when it's black. By allowing the husks to burn, a subtle smokey/roasty flavor gets imparted to the corn while keeping the kernels moist and delicious.

I feel slightly ashamed to admit that I don't count the rows on my corn cobs anymore. I'd much more rather sink my teeth in and get straight to savoring each and every kernel.

While summer is all about corn fresh from the grill, that doesn't mean the rest of the year is devoid of corn. Corn freezes fabulously, and for every corn cob I eat, I make a couple extra to freeze for the winter.

How to freeze corn (or almost any other vegetable)

1) Cook it.

2) Cut it off the cob, or otherwise cut it into usable sized pieces.

3) Spread it in on a cookie sheet and put it in the freezer. 

4) Once frozen, scrape everything into a bag and put it back in the freezer.

Heck yeah grilled corn year round!

Ready for Winter

Two years ago Alex and I decided that we were going to start shopping only at the farmers market for meat and produce. When winter came, we were horribly unprepared - kale and potatoes all winter long gets pretty rough. So last year I went nuts canning and freezing everything summer had to offer. Canning was a hugely involved process that didn't produce the best product, I thought. So this year, I've filled our freezer with corn, peppers, huckleberries, raspberries, ginger, broccoli, and chicken stock. Bring it on, La Nina Winter! We're ready:

One happy girl and her sauerkraut!

I'm on a sauerkraut kick again. I couldn't wait to get home this evening so I could have my daily bowl of cabbage and microbes! Perhaps I'm just connecting with my German roots, but sauerkraut sure is tasty and makes me feel great! On a trip to Hofbrauhaus in Pittsburgh over the holidays my dinner came with the most amazing hot sauerkraut I think I've ever had. It was milder, sweeter perhaps, and served hot made it oh-so-comforting. A few days ago I stopped by the German delicatessen near my work and was blown away by their sauerkraut collection. They have sauerkraut made with red or green cabbage, sauerkraut juice, and a wide variety of brands of regional flavors of plain 'ole traditional sauerkraut. I noticed the Bavarian style is made with white wine in addition to the usual cast of characters and bought it. It's my favorite. The sweetness from the wine adds a wonderful level of complexity and distracts from the possible bacterial harshness. According to Wikipedia, sauerkraut has high levels of vitamin C, lactobaccili, and other vital nutrients. It's credited as being the antidote to almost any ailment, prevents cancer, and may even be an aphrodisiac! Woohoo! In conclusion, I would like to extend a special thanks to Klebsiella, Enterobacter, Leuconostoc, and Lactobacillus for making sauerkraut possible!

Canning Part 2

Canning 20 pounds of peppers was a formidable task, but I did it! Here's the second part of the process, continued from my previous entry.

After roasting all the peppers and letting them cool in their plastic-wrapped bowls I peeled them and washed out all of there seeds. Here's about 10 pounds worth of cleaned peppers:

For the really spicy peppers, I quickly blanched them in boiling water and then put them in clean, hot cans and covered them with boiling water. For the roasted miscellaneous peppers, I just stuffed them in clean, hot jars and poured boiling water on top of them. Next, the filled cans went for a ride in my co-workers pressure caner! Here it is in action:

The cans stayed in the pressure caner for about an hour before taking them out and allowing them to cool on the counter top. At long last, here is the finished produduct; from left to right and top to bottom: habaneros, bulgarian carrot peppers, roasted medly, and chocolate cayennes. This winter will be flavorful for sure!

Saving Summer

Last year was the first year that I fully committed to doing all my grocery shopping at the farmer's market. I'll never go to a grocery store again if I can help it. However winter is pretty bleak here; only so much can be done with root vegetables and kale. So this year I have the foresight to preserve what I can while I can. This is a lot of firsts for me, growing up in California I though there was something incredibly wrong with any food that wasn't fresh from the ground. A few weeks ago I started out pickling the seeds from my nasturtiums, a.k.a. capers! These ones are still in the process of being pickled:


Next I began freezing raspberries and huckleberries by laying them out on a cookie sheet in the freezer and then bagging the frozen berries in gallon ziplock freezer bags. I also boiled about 15 ears of corn, cut off the corn kernels and froze them in the same method as the berries. The Silpat is an important piece of equipment for this. The corn especially wanted to stick to the pan when frozen, but the silicone sheet made it very easy to get the frozen corn off the pan and into the bag! Parchment paper would also work if a Silpat is not available.


I'm about to venture into the world of canning. I borrowed a pressure caner from a co-worker, and I'm camped out on my kitchen floor typing this while roasting 20 pounds of peppers in the broiler. Tonnemakers has an incredible display of peppers at the University farmers market. They grow about 150 different varieties and each week they have at least 40 different varieties for sale. I just grabbed a box and grabbed handfuls of as many different peppers as I could. Some are sweet, some are hot, some are somewhere in between and I have almost no idea which ones are which. The ones I do know are Anaheim, Scotch Bonnet, and Chocolate Cayenne (yum!!!). Some other names I remember but cant match to the pepper are Banana, Gypsy, Beaver Dam, Lipstick, Aji, Bulgarian Carrot... Anyway, this is what's goin' on:

The set up: peppers, tongs (for going in and out of the broiler), bowl with plastic wrap (to keep roasted peppers moist - easier for peeling), and Golden Glen chocolate milk (a key ingredient).