Jananas

Over the weekend we made our first trip out to the T&T Supermarket on Cherry St. We had a blast looking at packaging and new foods. I ended up picking up a box of mangoes (something like 14 of them!) and some scotch bonnet peppers. I’d decided to make hot sauce.

I sort of winged the ingredient list/recipe, after having read a bunch of hot sauce recipes online. They were all pretty similar. So I just adjusted based on what I had.

Ingredient list:

• 14 mangos
• 3 bell peppers (red, orange, yellow)
• 14 scotch bonnet peppers
• 5 habaneros
• 2 onions
• lots of garlic (i went with pre-peeled because cutting the hot peppers and mangoes already took a whole whack of time)
• about 1-1.5cups of apple cider vinegar

First up I cut all the hot peppers. I wore nitrile gloves so that I didn’t get super spicy stuff in my eyes or on my skin. I also wore these when doing the washing up, transferring the hot sauce to jars, etc. Better safe than sorry. The fun part of cutting was the eye watering and coughing that accompanied it.

The peppers, onions, garlic, and vinegar all went on the stove to start cooking up while I chopped mangoes.

I know how to cut mangoes up properly. However, there’s a difference between cutting for eating and cutting 14 of them to cook with. I ended up peeling them as you see above, then cutting the meat off of either side of the seed. I put the seeds in the blue bowl. Once I was finished with the main part of the prep, I squished the last of the flesh off of the seeds. Probably not the best solution, but it worked for me and got the job done.

After this, I added the mango to the hot pepper mixture on the stove and let it simmer away until everything was soft and the flavors had had time to mingle. Then we blended it to get a nice smooth hot sauce. We had so much that we had to blend in three separate batches! Then it was time to transfer it to jars. We keep all our glass jars and reuse them, so it was a motley batch. But it works!

Normally, I would have heat sealed canned goods in a hot water bath. But hot sauce is normally kept in the fridge, plus most of the jars are already spoken for/will be gifted to friends.

I took a jar into work. It received rave reviews on taste and an omg that’s hot. I consider that a job well done.

Over the weekend I made cupcakes for my friend Robot’s birthday. Normally when I make vegan cupcakes, I whip out my copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I was lazy and the decision to bake was a last minute one, so I made easy vegan cupcakes.

Instructions for Easy Vegan Cupcakes

• buy a box of cake mix. check ingredients to ensure that its vegan (not all of them are).
• normally mixes call for adding some combination of milk/water, oil, and eggs. instead, replace these with an equal volume of A) sprite or some other ‘clear’ pop for white/lighter cakes, or B) coke or some other ‘darker’ pop for chocolate/darker cakes
• bake as you normally would

Done! Seriously, stupid easy and you don’t need to have any fancy ingredients in your pantry.

I made chocolate root beer cupcakes. The base is a chocolate cake mix and I used Dr. Pepper as the liquid. The icing your standard butter cream icing made with earth balance margarine (vegan of course), icing sugar, a touch of almond milk, and some root beer flavor.

My mom bought me a flat of strawberries on Friday. We weren’t able to get to their place to pick them up until yesterday when we went up for a family dinner. In the way of the strawberry, they had to be used pretty much immediately so when we got home at 7:30 last night we got to work.

Strawberry Jam Recipe:

1. 13 cups strawberries
2. 1/2 cup lemon juice
3. 6 cups sugar
4. boil jam for 30-60 minutes or until set
5. process in a hot water bath for 15 minutes

We washed and chopped. End result, something in the range of 14-15 cups of strawberries.

While we were chopping away, we had the big canning pot on the stove boiling water to sterilize the jars and lids. Heating up that much water takes forever!

After all the strawberries were chopped, I juiced 2 lemons to get 1/2 cup of juice. I poured it through a strainer to catch all the pulp and seeds and then poured the juice over the strawberries.

Normally you’d cook and cook and cook the berries down so that they are soft and then you can mash them with a potato masher so that you don’t have whole berries in your jam. We no longer have a masher, so we cheated a little and ran the berries through the food processor for a few seconds to chop them up. Then we boiled and boiled and boiled away.

Once the berry mixture was boiling, I add 6 cups of sugar. I probably should have added a little bit more as the recipe I was basing mine off was 13 cups of berries to 6 cups of sugar.

We had friends over to hang out while we were making jam, so each of the five of us took 10 minutes turns at stirring while the jam was boiling. It made the work much easier and more enjoyable.

After 30 minutes, I tested to see if the jam was set. When I start boiling, I place a small plate in the freezer. I then spoon a little onto the cold plate and leave it for a minute. If the jam is no longer runny, then its set and you can start filling jars. Its an easy way to test your jam. Ours didn’t set right away, so we boiled for 10 more minutes & tested (repeated again).

After 50 minutes (and a little last minute pectin to get it to thicken a little more), we started filling jars. We got pretty much exactly 12 x 250mL jars of jam.

Having an assembly line makes this step go so much faster. I filled, Jason wiped edges and fitted lids. Quick and easy. These then went into the hot water bath and were processed for 15 minutes.

We’re glad to say that they all sealed (those pops are like music to my ears) and that our friends took home a selection of canned goods for helping out.

We’re planning a trip in two weeks to pick our berries. I’m thinking that we’re going to freeze some, dehydrate others, and can the rest. I can’t wait for my pantry this year!

Our garden has changed so much in the last month. From a veritable wasteland of poor soil and gravel to view of lush green plants. We’re not there by a long shot, but the progress that’s been made is heartening.

We hired someone to do all the real, hard work. He dug something like 20+ bags of manure into our teeny tiny yard and got things prepped so that we could plant. He and Jason built a raised bed for veggies, over top of a giant pile of gravel/rocks that rendered the space unusable.

We planted quite a bit (and took several trips to the garden centre) and transplanted some stuff from my parents’ yard. The never ending rain in April/May helped out quite a bit as well, saving us from having to water and helping the little plants grow. We have some food planted, although our choices are limited as the yard doesn’t get a lot of sunlight (due to big trees and lots of houses).

We have boston lettuce and collard greens in our raised bed, along with chives, parsley, and onions. We have garlic along the fence that was planted last fall and all came up. We have mint and chamomile in planters. We have sage, rosemary, lavender, and lemon verbana out in the front yard. We transplanted violets and ferns from my parents. We also bought lots and lots of ground cover, and even then it’ll still be a year or two until the soil is totally covered.

We even have three little wild strawberry plants that were accidentally transplanted last year and somehow survived. We repotted them and they are doing so well that we may need to separate them out into their own pots. One of the plants had 6-7 flowers earlier this month, so we’re looking forward to our very own haul of urban strawberries.

What do you have in your garden? What green things are you excited for?

Today I had a long list of ‘to do’s’ and managed to get through most of them (and then some!). One of the big things is playing with our dehydrator and trying out some raw foods. Right now I’m playing with recipes found online, but I have a couple of raw food cook books coming in the mail – I’m excited to try more stuff out!

Today’s adventures were apple chips and raw bread. First picture is the apple chips. Its most of a bag of organic Macintosh apples we picked up over the weekend, peeled and cored and cut into little pieces. These apples weren’t structurally sound, so when I tried to core them they just fell apart into sections. The end result was that I didn’t end up with perfect little apple rings. Rather I have a bunch of smaller pieces. Good news? They all fit into this jar!

Next up is some raw bread – I used this recipe as a baseline. I’m terrible at following recipes, so mine wasn’t totally the same. I ground up golden flax seeds myself instead of using ground flax (didn’t have any around). I substituted a banana for the apple, as I accidentally used all of mine in the above apple chip experiment. Things didn’t grind up as easily as I thought they would – although that’s probably just more about learning how to use our food processor more effectively.

I made myself a sandwich this afternoon using this bread – organic ham (hey, I’m not vegan!), spinach, and dijon mustard. This bread has an awesome wholesome taste and a dry enough texture that it easily passes for what we would normally think of as bread. Although that may be partly because over the last few years I’ve made the switch to organic, whole grain-type breads (you know, the extra small loaf kinds) and this bread is more in line with those.

I’ll definitely be making more of this!