Category Archives: food preservation

Backpacking food preparation

dehydrating, food preservation

Ds10 got back at 10:30 last night, and at 8 this morning, dd14 set off for several days of backpacking with four other girls and one adult.  I sometimes long for when everyone was young and doing the same thing at the same time – things that used to be very easy, like eating meals together or enjoying a family read aloud, now require conscious effort and planning.  So it will be a few more days before we all are together at the same time!

But don’t think I’m complaining – I’m very glad dd has this opportunity since it’s just the kind of thing she enjoys.  She’ll be spending three days and two nights on the Appalachian Trail.  Each girl is carrying all her food and supplies for the trip with her, so they need to pack light.  Yesterday I asked dd what the plan for the meals was, and she said that each girl was bringing enough of something for everyone.  For example, dd packed 24 packets of grits for breakfast, someone else is packing an equal amount of instant oatmeal, yet another girl will bring macaroni and cheese packets for dinner. They’re going to have a pot to boil water and a filter to get water as they go along, so that is the only cooking capacity they’ll have.  As I was listening to her, I was thinking that it didn’t sound incredibly well balanced to me.  Fortunately, I have a good supply of nuts and home dehydrated fruit I was able to tell her to take from so I didn’t need to run out at the last minute to buy her special food items.  As she was packing, it occurred to me that she could take some dehydrated veggies also.  Then the idea flashed though my mind that we could make her dehydrated meals to take!

So this is what we did yesterday.  We made a quick menu plan for three breakfasts and three dinners (they won’t be stopping for lunch so she packed nuts and dried fruit that she’ll be able to eat as they hike).  We decided to include cheese chunks with grits for breakfast for two mornings, and made a homemade instant oatmeal mix for her using quick oats, organic milk powder, dried apples (that we picked ten days ago), and some cinnamon.  She doesn’t generally eat sugar but someone who wanted to could add sugar or sucanat.

Then we turned our attention to the dinners.  I had hamburger rocks that I made several weeks ago (dehydrated and canned ground meat) that I initially thought I could include.  But she said that they were planning dairy dinners, so I shifted away from meat ideas.  At first she thought she’d be gone for three nights so we prepared for three dinners, but in the end they’ll be back in the evening in time for dinner at home.

For the first dinner she’ll have fish, mashed potatoes, and cooked vegetables.  I had in my pantry some vacuum packed envelopes of salmon and tuna (bought for .50 each instead of 3.29), so she took one of those.  It’s about 4 ounces so it’s good for one portion.  She cooked mashed potatoes, making them watery so they’d be able to be spread thinly on a paraflexx sheet to dry.  Then she cooked up a couple of boxes of frozen mixed vegetable and spread them on another sheet to dry.  This is different from how I dehydrate vegetables for cooking use- what I’ve dried is intended to be rehydrated by cooking and hot water wouldn’t make them soft enough.  Apparently when making instant meal kinds of foods, the trick is to first cook the food, then dehydrate it, and then use hot water and ten minutes in a covered dish to rehydrate it for eating.

That was dinner one.  Then dinner two was chili with cheese.  She made the chili and dehydrated it.  Then she cooked up more veggies – she made a batch of peas and another batch of mixed vegetables – and dried those.  We also cooked and dehydrated brown rice for another meal (was supposed to be eaten with albacore steak and vegetables)- even though she won’t need the food for a third dinner, I suggested to her that she take it just in case.  I don’t like the idea of sending her out on a trail with exactly the amount of food she’ll need – it’s good to have a little extra to be better prepared for eventualities. Hopefully everything will rehydrate as planned and she’ll be able to have well balanced food on the trail.

We had fun preparing the foods.  Dd said she hopes that the other girls aren’t jealous of her!! (They won’t be, I’m sure – if she was loaded down with chocolate, that would be something else!)   I’m telling you, it’s so liberating to be able to make things like this at home!  Now we’re starting to prepare for our annual camping trip next week (we usually go the last week of May but this week we had a week old baby so the plan obviously was adapted :)), and we’re considering if there would be a value in doing something like this on a larger scale for our family.

Avivah

I’m back – for right now!

food preservation, homemaking

We got the new keyboard right after our phone lines went out due to some faulty wiring.  Hopefully dh will be able to fix it tonight or tomorrow but I decided to go to the library to use their computers so I wouldn’t be uptight about when the repair happens and can be a smiling and patient wife when he walked in the door.  I don’t have very positive thoughts about the internet usage at the library (since the library has a handful of people looking for books but the computers are always taken), but I’m grateful now for the ability to connect with all of you even though my home computer is down.  This isn’t very easy, though, since the person right next to me is using his time to look at very revealing pictures of plus sized large chested women and I’m really having to try hard not to use any peripheral vision.  It’s kind of distracting and very unpleasant.  I can’t believe people aren’t embarrassed to have others see what they’re watching.

On one hand it’s been challenging not having easy computer access for a week – the hardest thing has been not being able to post here since that’s something I love to do!  But on the other, it’s been liberating.  I’ve been more present emotionally for my family, gotten more done around the house, and most importantly, gone to sleep lots earlier!!  I’m going to hopefully use this as a reminder to be more careful to limit my online time and focus on doing what I really need to do.  It’s easy to get drawn into all the info out there, especially when there are so many things to learn about….

I have lots of things to post about but very limited time (31 minutes left), so I’ll catch you up on what’s going on in our house this week.

My oldest ds came home from camp yesterday afternoon.  Like dd14 a few weeks ago, he’s spent most of today sleeping.  She took at least a week of sleeping for hours later than usual to get back into her regular routing. This reminds me of the sleep needs of infants – I don’t think adults and infants are very different in this – we all need a certain amount of sleep and when we don’t get it, we need to either make it up or we get crankier and crankier. 

Ds16’s birthday was July 4 but we didn’t make much of a big deal about it, and then when dd13 had a birthday on Aug 4, we also didn’t do much.  Tonight we’re having a surprise birthday dinner for them both.  Dd is particularly difficult to surprise – she notices every single tiny thing that’s a little different.  She had a sleepover at my inlaws a couple of days ago so dd14 baked the brownies for her then and prepared the french fries – and of course dd13 came home and commented on a pan being in the freezer that wasn’t there before!  I bought a cheesecake for ds (he loves cheesecake) and we’ll have pizza, onion rings, french fries, and salad for dinner.  We’ve done what we can to keep dd from catching on, but we’ll see if tonight we actually manage it or not. 

Tonight would be the first dinner in almost 2 months that we would all be here for, except for the fact that ds10 is away.  He was invited on Sunday evening by a friend to go to Indiana with them first thing the next morning, and I shocked ds by immediately agreeing that he could go.  He’s having a great time. 

This week I’ve canned peaches (bought three cases of 24 lb each for 9.50 each on my shopping day last week) and peach fruit spread. I wasn’t happy with the fruit spread – I used frozen strawberries that I didn’t realize came from China and they were terrible.  I’ll have to check where the frozen fruits and vegetables come from, from now on.  The strawberries were tiny and a lot hardly had any color – I should have just composted them but I didn’t and I won’t make that mistake again.

Today I’m dehydrating pears that we picked last week.  They’re now very soft and ripe so they should be very sweet when dried.  I also have a basket of apples that the kids picked on Thursday when we out for our shopping day.  I have to decide what to do with those since they are rather tart.  They are HUGE – I was amused when I was told they are called Rambos.  They are very appropriately named – each apple is at least 1 – 2 pounds!

Avivah

Drying squash and pears

dehydrating, food preservation

I love having the ability to preserve food!  It’s very fun to be able to find a way to use any amount of food that comes our way. 🙂  Yesterday I dried a load of yellow summer squash – we were given a box of them when the person who got them realized they were so perishable that they’d go bad before they could use them and didn’t want to wait for that point so they passed them to us; I still have enough to do another half load in the dehydrator.  We dried four trays as slices, since the kids like to snack on them, and six trays with chopped pieces, since that’s the way I use it most frequently for cooking.  I’ll do the rest of them chopped.  It will nice when the winter comes, to add a taste of summer to my dinners.  Right before the squash I dried the last of the peas and carrots I had in the freezer, to get them out of the way.

Today we went pear picking and got loads of delicious pears.  (Thanks, Alisa!  Your kids were a great help and a pleasure to spend time with!)  Fruit picking is a wonderful family activity, and I love being able to do it locally and for free rather than driving forty minutes away to pay for the experience.  I put a large wooden basket of them in the basement (where it’s cooler) for eating fresh, and will load the dehydrator with some before I go to sleep.   Last year when we got a lot of free pears we found that the kids really enjoyed them dried – it’s hard to dry them fast enough to keep up with their ability to eat them!  This time I’m not bothering with peeling them or deseeding them – we’ve sliced them thinly and put them on the trays at 135 degrees; they’ll be ready when I wake up in the morning.  As they ripen more I’ll probably want to can some, too.   Dh liked having them canned, so there’s something for everyone.  🙂

Tomorrow I’m taking the kids to a Hands On History Day at a historical museum.  I scheduled my monthly shopping trip to coincide, since the museum is somewhat in the area of where I’ll be going.  This museum day is the main reason I haven’t been in eight weeks (I didn’t want to go during the Three Weeks and it didn’t make sense to go right after Tisha B’Av and then to go again now for this trip).  After a few hours at the museum, we’ll do some shopping.  It will be nice to stock up again, and if I find some good produce bargains I’ll then have more dehydrating in my immediate future!

Avivah

Watermelon Candy

dehydrating, food preservation

Until recently, it never occured to me to dehydrate any of the juicy fruits, like melons.  But I someone online mentioned doing it, and figured I could try it, too!  This was very easy and the kids really like the results – we call it watermelon candy.

Basically, all you do is this: cut the watermelon away from the rind, then slice it about 1/4 inch thick.  Make sure you use seedless watermelon since the seeds don’t enhance anything in the final product!  Put it in the dehydrator at 145 degrees (that’s the fruit setting on the Excalibur).  It will take longer than most fruits because it has such a high percentage of water, somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours. 

When it’s done, it will be very thin and chewy, like a piece of fruit leather.  Because all the juice has been dehydrated, the flavor is strong and very sweet.

After slicing up the watermelon for dehydrating, I decided to use the rinds to make pickles with.  I wanted to make it today but dh took the van to the mechanic to check out why the starter fuse keeps blowing out before I could go to the store for more vinegar, so I’ll have to wait another day. Then I chopped up the final bit of rind and instructed ds10 to bury it deep in the part of the garden beds that are unplanted, where it can break down.  Not a bit of garbage left from the entire thing!  And I even maximized the electricity being used to run the full dehydrator – dd8 made paper yesterday, so I had her put her paper pulp on top of the dehydrator, where it dried very quickly with no extra expenditure of time or energy!

We still like fresh watermelon, and economically it’s a better buy to eat it fresh than dehydrated.  But it’s fun to experiment, especially when the experiments are successful!

Avivah

Recycling jars for canning

canning, food preservation, frugal strategies

Today I was soaking some empty food jars I had saved (peanut butter, mayonnaise) to get the labels off so I can reuse them for canning.  That’s the best kind of recycling, don’t you think? 🙂    Then I soaked several more that I was given last week – I got six dozen jars for free, and about six of them had labels on them.   When I glanced in the box and noticed that, there was a feeling of, ‘oh, not real canning jars, but they’ll come in handy anyway’.  But it was really interesting to see that after I soaked the labels off, they were literally identical to Atlas mason jars in every regard, including the name of the canning company on it!  Then I remembered reading something posted by a long term canner about this, who always buys the spaghetti sauce in a jar made by a particular company (wasn’t kosher) because she gets the sauce along with a free canning jar. So while these particular jars were about ten years old, it’s still possible to get canning jars after eating up the supermarket foods that they contain.

As long as the glass jars fit the standard canning jar lids, you can use them for canning, in addition to storing anything that you find helpful.  In addition to using them for canning, I also like using glass jars for storing my dehydrated foods, grains, and other pantry items, so they come in handy.  

Some will say that you can only use jars that were specifically manufactured for canning, and that it’s unsafe to use other jars.   When I read this a few days ago in a local newspaper, I also noted a recommendation from the same writer to never reuse canning jar bands – because it’s not safe.  I don’t like when people feel they have to err on the side of caution to the point that everything becomes off limits and has warnings on it, even when it makes no sense.  The recommendation to throw away bands after one use unnecessarily brings up the cost of canning and is wasteful – I commented to my kids that anyone following that advice would at least be doing their part to stimulate the economy, since the ones to benefit from the suggestion are the companies that manufacture canning lids/bands.  And the writer also commented that canned goods have to be stored with the bands on them, which is exactly the opposite of what you’re supposed to do. sigh.gif

Is it actually unsafe to reuse jars that mayonnaise or peanut butter come in?  Though this is frequently cited as a safety issue, I don’t believe it is.  I’ve seen a number of people who have been canning for years post online about their experience with used canning jars.  All of them have said they haven’t noticed a difference between the breakage rate of used glass jars and specially made canning jars. Some have noted that the canning jars are in some instances thinner than the recycled jars.  Some have said that they’ve taken the precaution of only using those jars for water bath canning versus pressure canning, which makes sense to me, if you feel the mayonnaise jars are made of thinner glass and wouldn’t be able to stand up to the higher pressure. 

I’ve had jars break in the canner during processing, but all of those that broke were standard canning jars.  That happened in my early days of canning, and it was my inexperience in canning that lead to that, not a defect in the jars.  So far I haven’t made any attempt to treat the recycled jars differently than the canning jars, and haven’t had any breakage issues with them. 

I also like the ‘twofer’ aspect of buying food in glass jars and then being able to use the packaging the food came in.  Unfortunately, so many foods now come in plastic jars that it’s not as easy to find glass jars to recycle! (And the kosher companies don’t use standard sized jars for the most part – all those gefilte fish jars weren’t helpful when it came to canning.  But I did use them to give Chanuka gifts in, so they were still useful. :))   These particular jars came from a health version of mayo and the others from organic and sugar free peanut butter; I think that the healthier items tend to be packed in glass rather than plastic.

After soaking off the labels, I spent a very long time in the kitchen kashering used canning jars that I either purchased or was given.  The jars I bought several months ago were mostly still unkashered, so when I got this latest batch of six dozen, it was an incentive for me to get myself busy to clear the backlog.  I was getting tired after seven or eight dozen, and then noticed that my ds16 had kashered 4 dozen instead of the two dozen I thought he did (he marked the boxes a few months ago when he did them), and washed another couple of dozen in preparation for kashering (washing them is a chore since they have to be spotless and that’s not always easy).  Tonight when I write him a letter (since he’s in camp) you can be sure I’ll be thanking him for that! 

I still have another four dozen to go, but decided to have mercy on myself and call it quits for tonight.  Tomorrow I hope to toivel them, along with a bunch of new lids.  (Rav Heinemann told us we have to toivel the lids, even if using them one time – and since I’m going with his psak on kashering used jars, I have to go along with that, too! :))  Since I have at least twelve dozen to toivel, that will be an activity.  Good thing it’s not a busy time of year for this kind of thing; can you imagine the line I’d cause if I was doing this around Pesach time?!

If you’re wondering how many jars I have by now (Julie, you’re keeping track better than me!), I really have no idea.  It doesn’t seem like so many.  But I decided today that though a person can say that they never can have too many canning jars, I have an excess of the half pint size (some of you may remember last summer when I bought more than 30 dozen in that size, all brand new)- it’s not practical for my family at all since it’s so small; it’s like a one person serving!  I think I’ll sell them or take quart or pint sized jars in exchange. 

Avivah

Sprouting and dehydrating wheat

dehydrating, food preservation, nutrition

I did something new this week!  Okay, so that’s not so unusual, but it’s still the first time I did it! 

About two or three years ago, I soaked, sprouted, and then dehydrated the wheat in the oven.  Oh my gosh, that was so laborious and I wasn’t happy with the end product after all of that time and effort at all.  So much so that I still have some of that wheat that has yet to be used, and not because I haven’t used much wheat.  Actually, at the rate I use wheat, I’ve gone through a number of fifty pound bags since then.  Because I felt it was a lot of energy to spend on something that didn’t give me much satisfaction or seem worthwhile, I resolved to spend my scads of excess time doing something more useful.  Until this week.

Thanks to a comment made here regarding soaking nuts back when I said it hadn’t been successful for me, I tried it again at that time and then used the dehydrator to dehydrate them.  Well, that made all the difference –  the results were great and I’ve soaked and dehydrated nuts successfully a number of times since then.

Remembering that, I thought that maybe using the dehydrator to dry the sprouted wheat would work, since it was the dehydrating aspect that didn’t work well for me.  I soaked a large amount of wheat and within a day, thanks to the warm weather and my non air conditioned indoor climate, the sprouts were visible.  I was surprised at how much wheat I was able to fit on the nine trays of the dehydrator – everything I had soaked fit easily.  The wheat dried in much less time than I expected, too.  When I got the dehydrator, I never expected it to come in handy in all the ways that it has – and if I was willing to use it for meat or dairy foods, I’d really be able to expand on the possibilities!

My reason for soaking the wheat is this: there are two ways to use flour that neutralizes the phytic acid. One is by soaking the flour, the other is by sprouting the wheat.  Until now, I’ve been soaking the flour.  But sometimes I don’t remember to soak the flour for something the night before, and it would be very time efficient to be able to prepare a lot of sprouted wheat in advance, so that I’d have it ready when I needed it.  Then all I’d have to do is grind it up right when I wanted to use some.

In the past, the sprouted wheat had a different consistency than regular wheat, so I don’t think this is something that will give me the same results in baking that I’m used to.  However, for quick breads, muffins, pancakes – that’s mostly what I soak the flour for – I think it should work pretty well.  I’ll be trying it the next couple of weeks and seeing how it works out.

Avivah

Canning jam and cherries

canning, food preservation, frugal strategies

Yesterday I did some canning.  We were getting low on the homemade jam we made back in January, and since I recently found frozen strawberries on sale for $1 lb, it was a good time to make a batch to replenish our jam supplies!

We used ten pounds of strawberries and 2 cans of juice concentrate, which came out to 14 half pints and 4 pints of jam.  It looks a little runny, but last time I made it, it also looked like that and it then solidified over time.  Hopefully this will do the same – I’ve read that it takes about a week for jam to set.  If it doesn’t, we’ll use it as a thick syrup instead of a jam, and that will be fine, too.

Then I canned cherries.  I bought 20 pounds on Friday when I saw the organic cherries were cheaper than non organic sale priced cherries, but we ate some and took some to our hosts for Shabbos, so we didn’t end up canning more than 12 pounds.  We were recently enjoying the cherries I canned last summer and now’s a perfect time to replenish the pantry so we can continue to enjoy cherries when fresh prices aren’t at the seasonal low we’re enjoying right now.  Dh has been having them fairly regularly for breakfast, and I figured we must be just about finished with the cherries I canned last summer.

Today I was planning my next bulk order and in order to buy what I needed most, did an inventory of what I have on hand.  Usually I send the kids to the basement to bring up whatever I need, which is why I don’t have a good idea from seeing it regularly myself.   Imagine my surprise that we still have 14 quarts of canned cherries (plus one 1/2 pint)!  I don’t mind, it’s just that I would have expected that we finished them off!

I also noticed we still have eight + quarts of the pears we picked for free last year.  That’s especially nice since we’ve been keeping an eye on the same neighbor’s pear trees and there’s no sign of any fruit this year.  It just illustrates that you can’t assume what you have one year is what you will have another, and there’s a value in setting aside or preserving during the abundant times so it will tide you over during the lean times!

Avivah

Kefir soda

food preservation, frugal strategies, lacto fermentation, nutrition, recipes

>>What do you guys drink? Just water, or do you make other drinks? What drinks do you make, and how? <<

This was a very timely question, since I was planning to post about our newest adventure in culturing. 🙂 

Generally, we drink only water.  That doesn’t include milk or kefir for breakfast, and we have herbal teas in the winter, but basically that’s it.  I very rarely buy juice – maybe twice a year at the most.  I never buy soda – never.  This past winter, I got some juice concentrate, thinking it would be the most efficient way to mix the vitamin C powder the kids take when they’re starting to feel under the weather; rather than buying and wasting a large prepared container of juice, I could just take out a spoonful at a time.  But BH, it was a healthy winter and we didn’t need to take vitamin C often so the concentrate has stayed in the freezer and I was wondering what to do with it, except use it to make juice sweetened jam.

It occurred to me that I could transform a very low quality food (the juice concentrate) into something of nutritional value if I cultured it.  Before Pesach, a friend offered me water kefir grains but it wasn’t until a few days ago that I got them.  Water grains are used for culturing juices or a water/sweetener/fruit mix.  I mixed up the grains with a can of concentrate and a quart or so of water, and let it sit on the counter for a day.  As it cultures, the sugar is ‘eaten’ by the kefir bacteria. Then we strained out the grains and drank it – couldn’t be easier!

This is a new project so I can’t give you lots of different recipes I’ve tried.  So far I’ve made it three times with orange juice concentrate, and the kids really like the results.  It becomes fizzy and less sweet as it cultures and turns into kefir soda (though you don’t want to leave it too long because it can become alcoholic).  How long you culture it will depend on the temperature in your home –  our house is pretty warm in the summer since we don’t use air conditioning so it cultures very quickly.  

 When I run out of concentrate, I’ll use the following recipe: 

  • 1-2 tablespoons water kefir grains
  • Filtered water (I didn’t use filtered water but it doesn’t seem like I killed my kefir grains; I’ll try to remember to next time)
  • 1/4 cup sucanat or sugar
  • 1 teaspoon molasses (only if you’re using white sugar)
  • Piece of an egg shell, rinsed (half of the egg shell will do)
  • 1/4 c. fresh or frozen fruit, whatever flavor or combination you like – there are lots of possibilities

    • There are a couple of ways to do this:  1) Some people like to mix all of the ingredients at once and do a one time ferment.  This means putting everything together in a glass jar and leaving it on your counter until it tastes ready to you.

    2) Others prefer to do two separate ferments.  That means first culturing all the ingredients except the fruit, straining out the grains and then using the fermented water together with the fruit for a second ferment.  Supposedly this keeps the kefir grains pure. 

    After the kefir soda is ready, I put it into a glass jar in the fridge.  If you want to be fancy you can get glass bottles that you can fill individually.  This is a good juice or soda substitute because it’s filled with good probiotics, so not only does it taste great but it’s good for you!  And it’s very inexpensive, too!

    Avivah 

    Canning and kashrus questions

    canning, food preservation

    I’ve gotten this question several times; since I posted the answer in a comment a while back, I think most people haven’t seen it. So I’ll put it up as  a post to make it easier for everyone.

    >>so, i have a few preliminary questions for you, when you have time to answer. first, how do you deal with kashrus with used mason jars? i will ask our rav, but i am wondering how you hold on kashering, etc. <<

    We kasher used jars – you need to make sure they’re spotlessly clean and then completely submerge them in boiling water.  It doesn’t matter what they were used for before.  This was what we were told by Rav Moshe Heinemann, who is head of the Star-K kashrus agency.

    >>second, do you know if a pressure canner can be used for both meat and dairy? again, i will ask our rav, but am wondering what you do.<<

    I don’t use it for both, only for meat, because the jars don’t seal until after they’re out of the canner.  Until then, juices leak out and make the pot very definitely meat.  There’s very little that most people would can which is dairy, so only using a canner for meat doesn’t present much of an obstacle.  The only dairy thing I’ve canned is butter, and that doesn’t need a pressure cooker, just a standard large pot for water bathing. 

    >>third, have you found a use for the screw on lids for the mason jars? when i buy new round things that seal the jars, they always come with the screw on parts too, so i am getting an increasingly large pile of gold bracelet things. do you do anything creative with them?<<

    Oh, good, now I can help you save some money. thumb.gif  Stop buying the packages of lids that come with rings!  You only need to do that in the very beginning, since the rings are resusable.  More of them just creates clutter, and who needs that?  What you need to look for instead are the boxes that have only lids – they contain 12 lids each and average in price at about $1.50 – $2; they look like this (this is an affordable online source – I bought a case from them last year).  Since it sounds like you’re aquiring a large collection of bands, put most of them away in storage, and bring them out when the ones you’re currently using start to get rusty and need to be replaced.

    Avivah

    Curried Carrot Sauerkraut

    food preservation, lacto fermentation, recipes

    Here’s the recipe for my latest fermented vegetable experiment which I slightly adapted from Baden:

    Curried Carrot Sauerkraut

    • 1/2 head green cabbage, finely chopped or shredded
    • 1/2 head purple cabbage, finely chopped or shredded
    • 6 – 7 carrots, shredded
    • 1 small onion, finely chopped
    • 1 – 2 cloves garlic, minced
    • 1 1/2 – 2 T. curry
    • 2 t. salt (I use coarse Celtic)

    Mix all of the vegetables together, and then mix in the curry.  Pack the mixture into glass jars. Add filtered water until the combined vegetable juices (if any) and water just cover the vegetables; add sea salt to the top.  Make sure that all of the vegetables are covered with liquid.  When there isn’t enough liquid, the vegetables on top will get moldy instead of fermenting.  Leave about an inch between the top of the liquid and the jar to allow room for the juices to expand.

    Cover with a tight lid or a cheesecloth and rubber band/ canning jar ring – the second option allows the gasses that build up to be released so you don’t find liquid leaking out all over your counter the next morning.  Sally Fallon of Nourishing Traditions says that because lacto fermentation is an anaerobic process, once the fermentation has started the presence of oxygen will ruin the final product, but I’ve tried it both ways (with tightly fitting lids and with cheesecloth) and haven’t found that to be the case.  Leave it on your counter to ferment for a few days or as long as it takes until the vegetables are all soft.  If the cabbage kind of squeaks in your teeth when you eat it, it needs to ferment more.

    There are a couple of things to be aware of in the summer.  The first is that because of the heat, the liquid will evaporate more quickly from the jar, so if you don’t use a tightly fitting lid you need to check it daily to be sure that the vegetables are still covered.  The other thing is that things ferment much more rapidly in the heat.  The faster something ferments, the stronger the flavor will be.  Cabbage needs to ferment longer than some vegetables;  I like to let it ferment for 4 – 5 days on the counter, and then transfer it to the fridge to continue the fermenting.  Since it continues fermenting in the fridge, but more slowly, it has a more mellow flavor.  If you ferment it at room temperature in hot weather, the flavor will be stronger.

    You don’t have to use a mixture of green and purple cabbage, but I think it looks pretty so that’s why I did it.  It has a nice medium purplish color when it’s done.  This is meant to be eaten as a relish or condiment to your meals; I enjoy it in small amounts but find the flavor gets to be too much if I have a large serving.

    Avivah