Nana T’s Pickled Beets

I had all these wonderful plans for Sunday. Cut the grass, do some laundry, pick up some groceries and relax.

I decided to hit the grocery store first to get that out of the way but when I walked into my local grocery store, my eyes widened. Right inside there were stacks of 10lbs bags of Ontario potatoes, carrots, onions and beets. I was planning to walk by and go about my shopping, until I saw the price all these 10lb bags.. I blinked. I looked around to see if someone was playing a joke on me. I walked around the stacks to see if the other side had a different price. It didn’t. I could not resist this. I can never resist a bargain. I picked up the bag of beets and while putting it in my cart I watched all my best laid plans disappear. 10lbs bag of beets for only $1.88. I could almost taste grandma’s pickled beets already. I carried my bag of beets into my house and excitedly called out to D to come see what I got! I quickly started digging through Nana’s recipe folders and Eureka! I found the recipe and got to work.

Nana T’s Pickled Beets 

10 medium-large beets, about 3 1/2lbs (I did 5 lbs and increased the liquid amounts)

1 1/4 cups granulated sugar

1 1/4 cups water

1 cup white vinegar

1 tsp salt

Trim the leaves off the beets about 1 inch from the bulb. Scrub beets, place in a pot, cover with cold water and bring to boil. Cook covered, until tender enough to slip the skins off easily, about 45-60+ minutes (depending on size of beets).

Drain, skin, slice or quarter and pack into hot sterilized jars. 

Combine sugar, water, vinegar and salt;  bring to a boil and pour over hot beets. Seal and store.

5 lbs of beets makes 12 - 250ml jars. 

Note: Use rubber gloves when handling the beets and have your work surface covered really well to stop the red juice from staining everything. The juice stains everything. You will spend more time cleaning up after than anything else!

Apple Jelly - Part 1 - Extracting the Juice

I’m lucky enough to live in an area that has many different types of farms around that you can pick your own or purchase from a market, lovely seasonal foods. I’m a big advocate of supporting my local farmers. I try to buy most of the food I eat from Ontario farmers. It doesn’t always work out especially in the winter, but I certainly make the effort. And why not? A country drive on a sunny Saturday afternoon to the apple farm to pick my own apples to make jelly isn’t too terrible, in my humble opinion. 

Don’t let the length of this recipe scare you off. The most difficult part of the recipe is patience. If you don’t have a few hours to play around with this, split it up. Extract the juices one day and the next, make the jelly. Have some fun with it. Preserving the freshness of anything that you yourself picked from a local farm or from your own backyard is a beautiful thing.

Apple Jelly

3 lbs Firm Tart Apples

3 to 5 cups of water

Sugar

2 to 3 tablespoons lemon juice, if needed

Apples that ripen the latter part of August or early September are best for jelly. I chose “Wealthy” apples as they are tart, juicy and a good cooking apple. Choose only barely ripe fruit. Overripe fruit lacks sufficient pectin for good jellying.

Wash apples; remove and discard the stems and blossom ends; cut into quarters. Then slice the quarters and place skins, cores and all into a large saucepan. Add cold water to barely cover; the amount depends on how many apples you have and the shape of the pan. I didn’t weigh my apples when I started making this, so the 3lbs of firm tart apples is really for people who love following recipes to the t. 

Cover the pot, bring to a boil and simmer without stirring until the apples are soft, approx. 10 to 20 minutes depending on how many apple slice you crammed into your huge pot. 

Crush the apples with a potato masher and boil another 5 minutes uncovered. 

Place the apple goo into a jelly bag/t-towel and hang over a bowl for at least 15 minutes. I usually leave it at least 30 minutes as my jelly t-towel is pretty thick. Don’t squeeze the bag! Just leave it alone. Go do something else.

If you are like me and are too cheap to buy jelly bags (and have no idea where to get them anyway) you may have to do the hanging thing in batches. This is about the time where you should go make a drink. It’s 5pm somewhere. (Check out my Mojito recipe).

Once the entire process of extracting all the lovely rose coloured juice from the apples is complete, it’s time to make the apple jelly. You could of course skip this entire step and buy a $.99 can of apple juice and go straight to Part 2. I think, however, that you may need to add pectin if you use store bought juice. You would also need to add some red food colouring to make it that beautiful pink colour. 

Apple Jelly - Part 2 - Making Jelly

It’s very important that you measure the juice you put back into a saucepan. You will have to add 3/4 of sugar for every 1 cup of apple juice later. 

One you measure the apple juice into a saucepan/pot, bring the juice to a boil and cook rapidly for 5 minutes. Taste the juice and if the flavour is not very tart, add lemon juice. Then measure 3/4 cup of sugar for every 1 cup of juice measured add to the boiling concentrated juice and continue boiling rapidly until 2 drops run together to form a sheet when dropped from the edge of a metal spoon. 

This is called a “jelly test”. I have yet to master the concept of this test. It seems to easy and yet, it never seems to work.. not that my jelly doesn’t jelly, its just I’ve never seen this “2 drops run together to form a sheet” work. My secret is to put a metal spoon into the freezer and periodically take it out and dip it into the boiling stuff and if the jelly coats the spoon in a nice sheet.. and is “jelly-like”, I then go ahead and jar it.

If your mixture passes the “jelly test”, skim the jelly (get rid of the bubbles) and pour into your hot, sterilized jars, put the lids on and allow to cool. Make sure that all the lids have popped.. (is that the right word? hmm.. ok make sure all the lids have been sucked down). Any lids that haven’t “popped”, put into the fridge immediately and enjoy right away. The other jars can be put into a pantry and given away as Christmas gifts or hostess gifts. Or eat them. 

In case your have no idea what to do with the apple jelly, here are a couple of ideas:

• spread on toast/crackers
• put on warm Brie.. Try this ASAP.
• If you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Please leave a comment.

An important note: The “wealthy” apples that I used above created perfect, beautiful juice for jelly. The concentrated juice that I got was so thick it was almost a jelly itself. There was so much pectin in this juice that it literally took minutes to become jelly. I will definitely use these apples again. I ended up with 5 extra apples. I plan to make apple cinnamon muffins tomorrow to bring to work with me. Yes, the recipe will follow. :)

Apple Jelly - Part 3 - Mint Jelly

Prepare the apple juice in Part 1 of apple jelly. 

Bring the juice to a boil and add 4+ drops of green food colouring (to desired colour).

Add 1/4 cup of bruised, fresh mint leaves tied in 2 thickness of cheesecloth. I use tea bags. 

Cook and add the 3/4 cups of sugar for every 1 cup of juice and lemon juice, if required as per part 2 of apple jelly. 

Do your jelly tests and jar as per the apple jelly part 2. 

I had thought that mint jelly was a universal ingredient, until a very good friend of mine asked me “What do you use mint jelly for?”. For those of you unfamiliar with mint jelly, I love it with lamb. I don’t really know what else to use it for. If you have any other suggestions please leave a comment and let me know.

Bread & Butter Pickles

I found some beautiful cukes at the apple farm yesterday and decided to try to make pickles. I went through my grandmother and great-grandmother’s cookbooks in order to find a recipe that would be easy to do for my first time. I choose to do Bread & Butter Pickles from the American Woman’s Cookbook (My great-grandmother's cookbook circa 1920’s-ish. The first few pages are missing so I don't have the publishing date). The recipe looks easy and doesn’t take weeks and weeks to make pickles. Here’s the recipe:

Bread & Butter Pickles

12 medium cucumbers

5 medium onions

1/4 cup salt

1 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons mustard seed

1 1/2 teaspoons celery seed

1/2 teaspoon curry powder

1 cup vinegar

1/2 cup water

Wash cucumbers, peel onions and cut until 1/4-inch rings. Arrange in layers sprinkling salt on each layering. Let stand 2 to 3 hours. Drain. Combine remaining ingredients and heat to boiling. Add cucumbers and onions and simmer 10 minutes. Pack in hot sterilized jars and seal. Makes about 4 pints.

I cut up the cukes and onions and started layering in a large Pyrex bowl (see picture). Although this recipe doesn’t tell you to do this, the other recipes I have read for Bread & Butter Pickles tell you to place a plate on top of the cukes and put a weight on them in order to help get out the water. So I placed a plate and a weight on them. I kept checking periodically to make sure that there was water actually coming out. I was paranoid that I didn’t put enough salt in between the layers. 

One thing I was worried about with this recipe was that you don’t boil the jars in the hot water bath after canning. I hate the boiling water bath part of canning, but I also understand it’s necessary. But why don’t you have to do it for this one? Well, fingers crossed this works out.

I let the pickles.. dewater (for lack of a better word), 2 hours and 40 minutes. I then mixed up the remaining ingredients and brought to boil. I drained the pickles and put them in the mixture to boil for 10 minutes. The cucumbers and onions were significantly softer than when i cut them. 

Boiling in the mixture, the cucumbers started to change colour and looked like.. bread and butter pickles. Best of all, they tasted like pickles. I was getting so excited. I stirred every few minutes to make sure that all the cucumbers were getting cooked evenly. I also taste tested to make sure they didn’t go too soft and they tasted soooo good. 10 minutes of simmering came and went and  the cucumbers were still pretty crunchy. Are they supposed to be crunchy still or will they soften in the jars? Why doesn’t the recipe tell you this stuff? 20 minutes later I decided to jar them anyway, hoping that they soften a bit more in the jars as they age. 

So, first ever bread and butter pickling complete and the pickles in the jars look fantastic. I can’t wait to give these away as gifts to my family this year.