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Sunday, October 2, 2011

Waste not, want not?

Despite being sick and having sick kids, I have a need to be busy, and a distaste for wasting things.  I actually don't like a packed fridge because I can't see everything in there and know that it will go bad if it's too full.  So, I spent some time this weekend working on using up things that would otherwise go bad. 
In order to use up the green tomatoes, I made a green tomato crisp.  It turned out surprisingly tasty.  I think it's the crisp-y part that makes it delicious.  It does not, however, go very well paired with violet ice cream.  Violet ice cream on its own is pretty darned tasty though.
How do you make violet ice cream?  First, you attempt to make violet jelly.  After picking quarts of violets in May, you pull up a violet jelly recipe online and then follow that, but don't add too much lemon juice, because it won't jell ever after trying to make it jell twice.  Instead, you get violet syrup, which I refused to discard because I felt I could make some use of it.  So I did.  And it's delicious.  After you've got violet syrup, there's already sugar in the attempted jelly, so you just add it to heavy cream and milk and put it in the ice cream maker for 20 minutes.
Continuing on the dessert theme, I still needed to use up the key limes from the Asian store.  I'd made a key lime pie and put it in the freezer for a pie social next week, so I decided to do something else with the limes.  I used these limes for a key lime cheesecake.  I put that in the freezer for the social too, but we'll see if it makes it there because Jaimie had his eye on it.  The remaining few key limes will go down the garbage disposal for freshening.  
There's not much to be harvested in the garden.  I pulled a lot of the garden already and am looking forward to relaxing without all gardening (and also looking forward to planning next year's garden - there's always something to add, change, or improve upon).  I cut the remaining pumpkins and put them on the porch.  These pumpkins are smaller and we have several pumpkins' worth of puree in the freezer so we don't need to cook down any further.
The ground cherries are still producing, but we never got enough to make a ground cherry pie (not because it didn't produce enough, but because they were so good that we always ate them before we saved enough).  We'd had an awesome ground cherry pie at a harvest party about a month ago, and it was amazing. 
The neighbor's tree is right on the property line and so our yard gets pelted with crab apples every year.  I haven't done anything with them in previous years but figured I'd give it a try.  I was not willing to put that much effort into skinning or coring them, so I found a recipe where I didn't have to - pickled crab apples.  I made only three pints (many of the crab apples were bruised so I didn't use those), but I'm looking forward to trying them out in a few weeks.  

2 comments:

  1. you can make candied crab apples ---call mom.

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  2. I found a couple of recipes. I think I'll try them canned. I can get more crab apples (that aren't bruised or run over by our lawn mower) from a tree right by work!

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