Green Onions! (again)

So I know I posted last year about drying wild onions, but this is kind of the updated version. Dad was rather wary of having an overpowering flavor if he just used dried wild onions as you would green onions, but those fears were groundless. We used the hell out of some wild onions over the past year.

Solution? Plant the whole two back rows of the garden with green onions (and lettuce, as well - makes for interesting cutting of food back there). My mom and I have been spending at least 1 day a weekend for the past 6 weeks or so cutting onions in the garden, chopping them up and sticking them in the dehydrator.

The only problem is one we encountered last year as well. Anything as lightweight as green onions chopped in itsy-bitsy pieces blows everywhere with the fan and makes a beautiful green mess. Solution? Well, we tried laying another sheet and rack on the one with the onions, but that seriously limits how many trays you can use, and only cuts back the blowing away problem by about 80%. All that hard work, you don't want to lose those onions.

Mom and I came up with the greatest idea (other people probably have as well). Sew a bag of thin cotton material and clothes-pin it shut. The onions won't blow away! It might take a bit longer to dry, but I can handle that. We can stuff about 4 or 5 bags of the onions in the dehydrator at a time, depending on how full they are. Just stick them on the racks like you would the regular sheets and walk away.

That's a gallon of dried onions. We have at least 10 times that much dried right now. The more green onions we have, the more we use, and the better it makes food taste. Even so - that's a helluva lot of onions. We give the fresh ones to anybody in the area that wants some, so if you live in or near Houma, let me know, and you too can have massive amounts of green onions! :)

Seed Starting Time!

First picking of last year. 

First of maaany pickings.

Since we had MLK day off school, it gave me some free time to start seeds. Peppers and tomatoes. I've never successfully grown tomatoes, from seed or plant, so hopefully these will work.

I was stuck at school this past weekend, and rather upset about it. I had to take an evil standardized test, PRAXIS 0113 (ie, a music content test to go be a teacher) Saturday at 7:30am, and was moping around the dorm the remainder of the time.

Sprouts!!!

In an effort to lighten my heart, Mom took pictures of some of the seeds sprouting and sent them to me via her phone. This explains the somewhat debatable quality of the pictures.

As you can see, we were short on things to plant in. I had 2 dozen and a half cardboard egg cartons and 3 single dozen cartons. For what I was planning on starting, that was plenty. My mom got seeds for my dad for his birthday, though, and that quickly ran out.

So I moved into plastic cups that were 10 years old. Then paper cone shaped cups of the same age. Then toilet paper rolls we found under the bathroom counter. Then the Christmas peppers, being last, got stuck in an old Rubbermaid I accidentally threw the lid away for a few weeks ago. 

We got the majority of our seeds from this wonderful dream book: The Pepper Gal. I want just about everything on her site/in her catalog. Mom got some salt peter(re? I can't spell.) On her site, she said if you soak the pepper seeds in it mixed with water, they sprout quicker, iirc. It wasn't expensive, we were shopping, so Mom got some.

Note to self: wet seeds are a pain in the posterior.

Christmas Pepper seeds coming up.

I had run out of individual containers by then.

Since we had such a bountiful pepper crop last year, it was decided we needed to do the same for this year. Well, not quite the same. All we grew last year was jalapenos, banana peppers, cayennes and Christmas peppers. And 3 tiny purple ornamental pepper plants my aunt gave us. They turn brown when pickled. :( I wanted them to keep the pretty purple.

Anyway. We use Zataran's dried bell pepper by the ton. When I had done enough batches of bread and butter banana peppers and we were tired out of stuffed ones, I started dehydrating the banana peppers. They work great in place of bell peppers.

The only thing was, it was the end of the season then. So we barely had any for long.

Mom's remedy - buy a ton of seeds this year. I think there were only 2 bell pepper packs among her purchase...yet that's what spurred the shopping spree.

Jalapenos, Banana peppers, Bell peppers, Poblano peppers, Cayennes, Green Chiles, Habaneros and gods know what else. It's okay, because we'll use them all or give them away or something. I'm excited. Oh yeah, and Cajun Belle Peppers. After reading so much about them on this awesome blog (http://oldworldgardenfarms.com/) I decided we needed to try them. So I'm guilty on that one.

Mom also got 2 packs of cherry tomato seeds and 1 pack of beefsteak tomato seeds. I'm really, really hoping they do well. I want to can some salsa BADLY. It's my dream to can some homemade salsa. I know, I need a life, but I've wanted to for years. Assuming Dad doesn't eat all the tomatoes, I'll have some for canning hopefully.

Also, in an effort to aid my hideous memory, I downloaded/printed/actually filled in this awesome little calendar/datebook/garden log thing from Little House in the Suburbs. Find it here. 

Once it gets a little later, we'll stick the squash seeds in the ground, along with cucumbers and such. Dad wants to grow sweet potatoes this year, which would just make me the happiest little coonass in the world. Hopefully that works out as well, and we have enough garden space. Right now, we've got mustard greens and lettuce and green onions in the garden. It'll be pretty crowded this year in there.

My babies just growing away.

If you have any favorite pepper recipes - cooking, canning, sttuff to do with dried, anything - let me know. It looks like I'm going to have enough for some experiments. :)

Harvest Season

Pecans are ripening...citrus is ripening...okra is still going strong...I love autumn.

Pecans

I love pecans. We currently have 7 pecan trees I think. We used to have 10 or 11, but with hurricanes over the years we've lost some.

My parents went to Oklahoma on Saturday morning, so we've been picking pecans up for a few weeks so my mom has something to do in the truck. The pecans below in the bags (made from old t-shirts, mostly) are cracked. She cleaned them most of the 15 hour drive up. The rest (in the box) are for my dad to crack up there so she can work on those on the way home.

Since we have so many different types of pecans, and they come in a diversity of shapes/sizes, we learned years ago that the best thing to do is separate them out by tree. Then the ones that fit together can be cracked at the same time without altering the cracker. It helps and makes the whole task go much quicker.

We usually end up with a freezer full and enough left over to give to my grandparents and aunt/uncle. It makes life a whole lot more convenient in the cooking world.

I don't know what I'll do when I move up to Oklahoma. I won't have a million pecan trees. What to do? They have black walnut trees growing on the side of the road near our place. Will I just have to get used to walnuts until we can get pecan trees going? Ah well.

Citrus

Lemons. Satsumas. Oranges. Grapefruits. Kumquats. Tangerines. We have them all.

I've been doing a lot of canning of lemon juice, due to the poor lemon tree falling over. I was up to 22 quarts before, iirc. On Saturday, I did another 14. Lotsa lemon juice. Lotsa lotsa lotsa lemon juice. Mom and Dad brought a few bags to Oklahoma to make lemonade and give to anybody up there who wants some. And the tree still has fruit on it.

Anybody got suggestions on things to do with lemons? :P

The two pictures on the right are satsumas. Nathan (brother mine) cut half a bushel this past Friday night for Mom and Dad to bring with them. He found a bunch that fit together like grapes, which was really cool.

They've just now started turning full out orange, but they've been ripe for about two or three weeks now. They're not the biggest in the world, but they are tasty.

The grapefruits are getting ripe as well. I don't eat them, but everybody else does in the house. Mom and Dad said they weren't quite ripe, Nathan didn't care, he still ate the one he peeled.

Once everybody's eaten their fill of grapefruits and oranges, I'll juice and can the remains. My great-grandpa used to can satsuma juice to drink like orange juice. If we have those left over this year I might try that. Has anybody else done this, or something similar with tangerines or other citrus?

Also, does anybody have suggestions on what to do with kumquats aside from marmalade, fruit salad or just plain eating them? It's another that I don't eat, but everybody else in the house loves them. Suggestions on uses would be appreciated.

Dehydrator

"The corn is as high as an elephant's eye..." Sorry, no corn. Okra, yes. And I couldn't reach the top of a lot of the plants to pick it. A lot is too big to use, just because my parents have been to busy to pick it a lot. There's plenty of small stuff still coming out though, so I went out Saturday morning at about 7 and picked. Nice and cool, I felt like I was in a rain forest. The plants towered above me, the dew hung on spiderwebs and caught the light. It was beautiful.

Fall in south Louisiana equals gumbo season. My dad isn't the soup-in-hot-weather kind of guy, so we don't do gumbo til it cools off. We usually boil, smother, dehydrate or give okra to my grandparents as we pick it. Since I was planning on running the dehydrator over the weekend anyway, I fixed up a few sheets of okra and stuck them in. My grandpa eats the dried okra just to munch on, the rest of us have never acquired that taste though. We put it in chicken and sausage gumbo or rehydrate it to smother. In the gumbo, it holds shape and texture more than fresh okra does. It behaves like most other dehydrated veggies versus their fresh/frozen counterparts.

While the dehydrator was running, and since Mom and Dad left them in the fridge, I stuck some tomatoes in there as well. Slice them up and stick them in there like any other veggie (~145* for as long as it takes to dry up).

I put them in the jars of soup mix I have on the shelf, along with corn, snap beans, carrots, peas and a few bay leaves. This makes soup-making a rather quick and painless task for Mom. :) And it means I get to eat tasty soup. Tasty food is always a good thing after eating UL Lafayette Sodexo cafeteria food for a few days...

This coming weekend will include the making of Pa (great-grandpa)'s Popcorn Balls, White Russian Cake Pops, shortbread cookies with Royal Icing stamped with Halloweeny things and Caramel Apples.

I made the dough for the cookies last weekend, along with the icing. I got all the ingredients for the rest except for the apples, frosting (cake pops), vodka (cake pops), and white almond bark (cake pops again) last weekend at the store, or just compiled what I had lying around the house.

This coming weekend will be a long one, but it'll be worth it.

Lemons and Hurricanes and Mrs. Fields Cookies

So...that lovely hurricane Isaac we had come through about a month ago took down some pecan branches...took down a plum tree that never made too many plums...and took down our lemon tree. :( The lemon tree was loaded with fruit this year. The mean old storm pushed it halfway over onto our fence in the dog pen.

Sigh.

So last weekend was my first "free" weekend home from school. I canned 11 quarts of juice then and didn't even make a dent on the tree. This weekend I did I did 9 more quarts. Yesterday, I picked and juiced them and stuck it in the fridge, as I had cookies to bake. :) 20 quarts of juice = 40 gallons of lemonade.

As I type this, I'm waiting for the lemon juice to come to a boil so I can jar and process it. Canning lemon juice is easy, and the recipe works for all citrus juices.

Canning Lemon (citrus) Juice
Juice your lemons.
Bring the juice to a low boil.
Once it's there, put it in your jars with 1/4" head space.
BWB pints and quarts 5 minutes.

It's that simple. There's lots of ways to juice lemons, but I'm partial to my mom's electric juicer thing. You put the lemon half on it, push down and the thing turns and juices the lemon. I've tried the peel-cook-down-in-a-pot thing, and it just didn't work as well for me.

This is our juicer. He's old, but I love him.

Lemonade
2 cups lemon juice
2 cups sugar (or up to 1 3/4 cups Splenda and 1/4 cup sugar)
Add water to make 1 gallon of lemonade.
Add more juice if you like it tarter or more sugar if you like it sweeter.

Mrs. Fields Cookies
2 C softened butter
2 C white sugar
2 C packed brown sugar
4 eggs
2 T vanilla extract
5 C rolled oats (measure, then pulverize)
2 C all purpose flour
1 t salt
2 t baking powder
2 t baking soda
8 oz Hershey milk chocolate bar, grated
24 oz semisweet chocolate chips
3 C chopped pecans

Preheat oven to 375*.
Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.
Cream butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla until very smooth and fluffy.
Add grated Hershey bar and mix well.
In separate, very large bowl, mix flour, ground oatmeal, salt, baking powder, baking soda.
Stir butter mixture into flour mixture. Blend well.
Add chocolate chips and pecans.
Stir until blended. Hands may work better than spatula/spoon.
Shape into golf-ball sized cookies and place 2" apart on greased sheets.
Bake 6-8 minutes. You do not want to over bake these.

This makes a large batch. Like, very, very large. I made a half batch yesterday (slightly smaller than golf ball sized) and had about 130 cookies.

Figs

We have figs. Lots of figs. Like 12 gallons every other day. One giant Celeste Fig tree, 2 LSU Purples, an LSU Gold, and 2 other unknown types of white figs. I don't eat figs unless they're dried and used like raisins or something. The taste and texture just throws me off. That does not, however, stop me from making stuff with them for mom/dad/brother. Most of this years have been dried so far.

Dehydrating Figs
This can be done a few ways. If you have the big white ones (LSU Gold/Purple or any other thick skinned kinds) then you'll probably want to skin and quarter them. For the little Celeste ones, we just cut off the stem and do them in half or whole. The ones we leave whole get poked a few times with a fork to let the moisture out. They're for my parents to munch on (Nathan doesn't eat them like that either). The cut ones get chopped up after drying for use as raisins. If you cut them up too much before drying then they run all over the place and make a mess. The colors on the tray are really pretty, no matter how figs taste. :)

The other main thing we do with figs is make preserves and conserve. We have preserves on the shelf still from last year, so the other day I did conserve.

Fig Preserves

2 qt chopped figs

3 C sugar

3 C brown sugar

¼ C lemon juice

Mix figs and sugar, slowly bring to boil, stirring occasionally til sugar dissolves.

Cook rapidly til thick, stirring frequently til thick.

Add lemon juice, cook 1 min longer.

Fill jars ¼” headspace.

BWB 15 min pints, 20 min quarts. (5 pints).

Can be doubled.

Fig Conserve
3 1/2 C chopped figs
1/2 C pecans
1 1/2 C white sugar
1 1/2 C brown sugar
1 1/2 C raisins
1 orange

Cut all except nuts in small pieces. Cut pecans into biggish pieces. Cook until thick and transparent (about 1 hour). Pack in pints and boiling water bath for 15 minutes. Makes about 3 pints. It's OK to double this recipe.

Fig Sores
If you have the misfortune of getting tender/sore/blistered fingers or other appendages when dealing with lots of figs (like my mom does) you have 2 options: wear good gloves to prevent it, or soak the sore parts in a solution of warm water and epsom salt. We tossed a few drops of tea tree oil in there too, but you don't have too. If you want to read more about it, look up figs, mallic acid, ficis dermatitis, any combonation should turn up something.

Shared on Little House Friday DIY Linky.

Jostaberries

They look a lot like Black Currants, but they're not. Jostaberries are a cross between Black Currants and Gooseberries and grow wonderfully in the damper spots of northwest Oklahoma. They're sweet, tasty and cook very nicely.

My mom and I picked a bunch of them to can, dry, make conserve with and make a pie. The conserve didn't make it to being canned, as it got eaten way too quickly. For dehydrating, I blanched them and just poured them on the trays and popped them in the dehydrator. They worked out nicely. We put them in some granola bars to eat on the way back from Oklahoma to Louisiana.

One thing that I couldn't find anywhere definitive was about those funny stem-like things from the flower end. I didn't worry about cutting them off. They don't mess with the texture or flavor in the food.

Jostaberry Conserve
2 quarts jostaberries
1/2 pound raisins
1 C diced orange (no peel)
1/2 C chopped pecans
6 C white sugar

Cover berries with cold water and bring to a boil. Cook until berries are soft. Add sugar, orange, raisins and simmer until thick. Add nuts. Cook 5 more minutes.

(Josta)Berry Pie
Pastry for 2 crust pie
3 C jostaberries
1 C chopped pecans
2-4 T water
1 C sugar
3 T cornstarch
1T lemon juice
1/4-1/2 t cinnamon
1 1/2 T butter

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Line 9" pie plate with pastry. Combine sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice and cinnamon. Mix lightly through berries, pecans and water. Pour into pie plate. Dot with butter. Cover with crust top. Slit top. Bake until crust is nicely browned and juice bubbles through slits in crust (~35-45 minutes).

You can also use this recipe for mulberry pie, just switch out the jostaberries. If you don't have pecans, leave them out and add in another cup of berries.

Mulberries

Lots and lots of mulberries. Right by our driveway for our camp in Oklahoma we have a rather large tree of white mulberries. I'm not a big fan of them raw, I think they taste like nothing but sweet. Since we're not up here often, when we "picked" off the tree the first time, we just hit everything (literally) to knock off good, bad, dried old ones, etc, and give the rest of the young ones a chance.

We spread old bed sheets and visquene (can't spell that...) around the tree, held them down with rocks from the dirt road and started shaking. Nathan (my brother) was using that stick to shake outer branches while my mom and I picked up berries enough for him to walk around (that's what all those little dots on the sheets are). She also took the pictures for me.

My dad climbed the tree in order to get the taller branches. He used a ladder leaned against the tree to get in and just crawled around in the rest of it.

That's after they've all been washed and the bad ones pulled out. It came out to a scant 4 gallons. I raw packed a few quarts, made a few pints of jam, and dehydrated some. We stuck some of the dehydrated ones in a butternut squash souffle the other night. They worked out just like dried raisins and figs, the seeds softened up wonderfully and didn't crunch. We'll be picking some more this week sometime, as they've had about a week to grow some more and such, most of them will be dehydrated with possibly one pie for my dad's sake.

Cucumbers and Yellow Squash and Zucchini Oh My! (Updated w/Recipes)

(Edited to add in recipes for my sake, so even when I lose the book, I can find them.)

We have a garden. My dad has a theory that what we can't eat, I'll can or dehydrate or freeze or he'll give away. It works great, but it also means that my entire summer vacation that hasn't been screenprinting t-shirts (my parents are self employed and we print shirts) has been mostly spent in the kitchen canning, dehydrating or making soap.

So far, I've made 4 or 5 batches of pickles: Garlic, Kosher Dills and Sweet Pickles. My dad likes sweet pickles, but not too sweet, so the recipe I used for those called for 10 cups sugar, I only put 7. They're sweet enough, I hate to think about what 10 cups would be like. For the Kosher Dills, it called for mustard seed. I didn't want to go to the store and buy more, so I just took the 55 gallon drum of mustard green seed stalks we have drying on the porch and my mom and I spent 2 hours cleaning mustard seeds to use in pickles. They're tiny black ones, but the Kosher Dills are delicious. :) Not one to waste anything, I decided to use the ends of the cucumbers to puree and make cucumber soap the next day. I'll put up pictures of that soap and the other ones I made later. The top picture is some of the Kosher Dills, the second one is some of the Sweet Pickles. The easiest way to tell them apart is the dill floating in the Kosher ones versus nothing floating in the Sweet ones. :)

Kosher Dills (From So Easy to Preserve from the Cooperative Extension of University of Georgia)

(6-7 Pints)

30-36 cucumbers, 3-4" long

3 C vinegar

3 C water

6 T salt

Fresh or dried dill

Garlic

Mustard seed

Wash the cucumbers. Slice 1/16" from blossom end and discard. Leave 1/4" of stem attached. Make a brine of vinegar, water and salt. Bring to a boil. Place a generous layer of dill, 1/2 to 1 clove of garlic (sliced) and 1/2 teaspoon of mustard seed in the bottom of each pint jar. Pack cucumbers into hot jars. When the jars are half filled with cucumbers, add more dill and complete packing. Fill the jars 1/2" from the top with boiling brine. Remove air bubbles. Wipe jar rims. Adjust lids. Process 10 minutes in a Boiling Water Bath. Pickles will shrivel after processing. They will later plump in the jar.

My Changes

I cut larger cucumbers up into chunks instead of whole little ones. I used black mustard seed from our garden instead of the yellow one I'd normally buy at the store. The flavor is good though, so I'm not complaining. I used quart jars, just tacked on 5 extra minutes of time in the BWB.

Sweet Cucumber Pickles (From So Easy to Preserve from the Cooperative Extension of University of Georgia)

(4-5 pints)

3 pounds cucumbers, medium sized

1 quart vinegar

2 t salt

5 C sugar

Wash cucumbers. Slice 1/16" off blossom ends and discard. Pour boiling water over the cucumbers and let stand 5-10 minutes. Drain off the hot water and pour cold water over the cucumbers. Use running water or change water until cucumbers are cooled. Mix vinegar, salt and sugar. Bring to a boil. Place cucumbers into the boiling liquid. Return to a boil. Pack hot pickles into hot canning jars, leaving 1/2" head space. Fill jars to 1/2" from top with boiling liquid. Remove air bubbles. Wipe rims. Adjust lids. Process 10 minutes in a Boiling Water Bath.

My Changes

I used chunks of bigger cucumbers again instead of little ones, only 3 1/2 C of sugar instead of 5 since my dad wanted not too sweet pickles. I made these in quarts so I tacked on 5 minutes to the BWB time.

________________________________________________________________

Since we also have an exorbant amount of zucchini and yellow squash, we cut them up and dehydrate them. This is great if you like zucchini Parmesan but hate the wetness of squash in food. Simply layer your pan's bottom with dried summer squash, lightly spray some water on it, pour spaghetti sauce, put squash, pour sauce, etc. Let it sit about 20 - 30 minutes before putting it in the oven to give it time to soften some.

For drying, cut them up in chunks.

Lay them out on the tray, it doesn't really matter if they touch.

 Dry them at 145 Degrees until they snap when you break them in half. For reference, the dried zucchini below is what came from that loaded tray above.

Any suggestions on other pickle types or things to do with squash would be great. We've tried a ton of things, love a bunch of them, but after 3-4 years of squash, I'm running out of ideas... :P

Garlic Pickles

So Monday was the first my second full day out of school for the summer, so naturally that means begin preserving anything that came out of the garden recently. This case was pickles. I used a recipe that my grandma gave me that my dad loves (and loved when he was a kid too). It came from a friend of my grandma's from West Texas named Mrs. Totsie Hines. It's a rather...sparse...set of instructions, but they serve well. It didn't have a processing time for boing water bath, so I do them for 10 minutes just because. It's the prevailing time that I came across from other pickle recipes.

Mrs. Totsie's Garlic Pickles

6 cups vinegar
13 cups water
1 cup salt (I used pickling salt)

Bring to a boil. To each jar of spears, add 2 cloves garlic, 2 peppers. Let stand 6 weeks. (I BWB for 10 mins.)

In this batch, instead of doing spears, I did thick slices and chose not to put peppers. Mainly because our pepper plants haven't a thing on them but flowers right now. But the recipe tastes great without peppers as well. Just don't eat a clove of garlic thinking it's a pickle. It doesn't say if it's for quarts or pints, but every time I've done them, I make pints and 2 cloves of garlic/2 peppers works for me in that size. I made 12 pints and ended up with a little under 2 quarts of liquid left over to make some more later.

I decided to keep the ends of the cucumbers and used them on Tuesday to make cucumber soap. Right now it's a nice green. I'll post that later once I get some pictures.

Wild Onions!

So a few weeks ago, I decided to make use of the copious amount of wild onions growing in our yard. I started digging them up, but was rather slow. My dad came out and started going crazy with the shovel and got me over two 5 gallon buckets full of beautiful smelling greens and bulbs. Between my mom and I, we spent the entire day cleaning and cutting onions. In the end, we got I don't know how many greens, but ended up with a whole gallon of bulbs.

Since I couldn't find much by way of recipes specifically for pickling wild onions (read as nothing), I decided to substitute them into recipes calling for pearl onions. I didn't have enough onions to make a whole batch of all three types I wanted to try doing, so I made 3 small small batches. We'll be tasting them this weekend, so I'll let ya'll know how that goes when the time comes. In order to use both the tops and bottoms, I dehydrated the greens. My mom said the one thing they cooked them with, they worked great. I'll have more info on both subjects after the weekend.

The first batch is the one I did the biggest group of. It's from here. For some ridiculous reason, one of the jars decided to crack in half right below the threads of the jar. I don't know how it happened, or why, but I was putting jars in the water bath canner, turned around, looked back and saw onions floating. Kind of strange experience there. Anyway, here's a picture of some of them.

The second batch was done with this recipe. They're the yellowish golden ones. The third batch, I did one 3/4 pint jar of because we weren't sure how it would taste. The recipe for that is here. It's in the jar in the back right corner with the silver band on it.

So far, my dad and brother both love the first batch of them. I wasn't too fond of it, but then again, I don't really like pickled onions. They haven't tried the second and third yet. I gave some of the first two batches to my grandpa to try. I'm still waiting on a response there.

Canning Beets, Grapefruit Juice, and Japan Plum/Kumquat ?'s...

So first off, we have a ton of fruit, etc trees/plants in our yard. Plum, pecan, grapefruit, orange, satsuma, tangerine, 2 kinds of kumquats, 3 or 4 kinds of figs, 2 kinds of persimmons, Japan plums (aka loquats), blackberries, 2 kinds of muscadines, you get the idea. For the most part, I can come up with multiple things to do with all these. I'm stumped on a few though. I love to eat Japan plums right off the tree, but there's got to be other stuff to do with them. I've looked online and come across a few recipes for cooking with them, and a good bit on jam/preserves. I even saw one with packing them in salt for 10 years before you eat them.

Has anyone ever tried these? Do you have any other/better suggestions? Can I just hot/raw pack them and put them in fruit salad? Run them through the dehydrator for a snack?

I have a similar question with kumquats. We have 2 kinds of these - one sweet, one sour. I don't eat them, but I do make kumquat/orange marmalade for my parents and brother to eat. I've dehydrated them once, and they made a crunchy snack my brother and dad liked. Got any other suggestions for canning? Think I could slice them up, hot/raw pack them and use them in fruit salad year round? I hate having food go to waste in the yard, but I'm stumped.

Now, to share what I actually did can a few weekends ago.

19 quarts of grapefruit juice. I don't drink it, I hate grapefruits, but my brother loves it. The tree is huge, and I barely touched it to get the 15-20 gallons of grapefruits we used.

I also did a batch of pickled beets that same weekend. I didn't have any fresh ones, so I used store bought canned stuff (sigh) but they work just as well. Santa brought a ton of the Tattler canning lids for the holidays this past year, so now I can stick them on just about everything I can this year. :)

And just cause my daddy took a picture of it for me to put up here: I present the rack of canned/dried food. It's not as packed as it was before Christmas, but it's getting filled up again. I didn't have room for the ~100 quarts of pears I hot packed last year on there, so they have floor space. The majority of the remaining junk on/near the floor is plarn (plastic yarn) that I crochet with, or the bags to make it with. Sigh...I need to clean house. ;)