Canning Local Food With Relish!

If you’re going to can, you may as well do it with relish! I kicked off my weekend with a trip on Friday out to Riverbend Farm to get peaches and corn. Every year I go and get their distressed, or “seconds” peaches for half price. Then I can feel better about getting a couple of big boxes full. The corn was for making corn relish, a favorite canned treat in my house, and since we didn’t grow wild amounts of corn with the cold June we had, I wanted to save what we had for eating on the cob. Then, while I was picking up my kids at school, I happened to mention to my neighbor that I needed peppers for the relish, and she told me to come on over to her little farm and get a bag full. So, I came home with peaches, corn, and a whole paper bag of beautiful peppers. I was set for canning adventures!

Here are some of those “distressed” peaches. The thing I love about Riverbend Farm is that these aren’t all that distressed in my opinion. They’re just peachy!

The variety I ended up with came right off the pit with ease, and the peels came right off with my fingertips. None of that business of blanching peaches for me. I try to simplify my canning experiences as much as possible. I did a cold pack method this year where you fill the jar and the pour on the hot syrup of water and raw honey. I had some jars break when I was getting started, but I got in a good jar heating groove before too long, and canned 16 quarts of peaches.

With the peach set-up already going, I decided to can the windfall pears our neighbor gave us the other evening as well. I quickly sliced and cored them and did a cold pack with peels on (all about the ease) and a cinnamon stick and star anise in each before pouring on the hot honey syrup. I ended up with a bonus six jars of canned pears I hadn’t been planning on. None of them broke either!

Corn relish needs onions and cabbage as well, and it was a good thing we had planted all those onions and cabbages out in the garden. It was time to harvest a lot of the onions anyway, so we laid out a screen on top of some plastic gallon pots and put the onions on top to dry out in the sun. The plan is to use these as storage onions, so hopefully they cure enough for that to work out. I pulled aside the few I needed for relish, and picked a couple of good, small cabbages.

While I was working out in the garden, our neighbor showed up on his tractor to plow our crimson clover cover crop under in the field. The kids had a good time watching heavy farm machinery at work, and now we have a nice blank slate for all our agricultural pursuits. We’re going to do a fall cover crop on it, and then the fun will begin in the spring. There will definitely be lavender and pumpkins involved.

Now it was time to do something with all that corn. My husband took a break from screening in our back porch and cleaning the chimney to shuck and boil 20 ears of corn. We had to boil it all in our big canning pot, it was so much corn! While the corn was boiling, I made a quick trip to a farm down the road to get some raw honey. I had used up all we had on the peaches and pairs, and needed more for the relish and jelly. Why am I using honey instead of sugar for all my canning, you may wonder? It is not due to any bad feelings about sugar, but more due to good feelings about raw, local honey. Since I’m using fresh, seasonal, organic produce (IPM in the case of the peaches) for canning, it felt like the sweetener should go along the same lines. When I was out at Morning Glory Farm buying the honey, I met the farmers and shared my relish recipe with them. They were really nice folks. So, with my two quarts of beautiful, dark wildflower honey from the coastal mountains, I headed back to the kitchen to make this wonderful corn relish from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving:

Corn Relish

2 quarts cooked corn cut off the cob (18-20 ears)

1 quart chopped cabbage

1 cup chopped onion

2 cups chopped sweet red peppers

2 cups chopped sweet green peppers

2 cups honey

2 Tbsp. dry mustard powder

1 Tbsp. celery seed

1 Tbsp. mustard seed

1 Tbsp. salt

1 Tbsp. turmeric

1 quart apple cider vinegar

1 cup water

Combine all ingredients in a large saucepot. Bring to a boil, then simmer 20 minutes. Pack hot relish in hot jars leaving 1/4 ” head space. Adjust 2 piece caps. Process in boiling water bath 15 minutes.

Makes 6-12 pints.

The corn relish canned beautifully, and I ended up with 12 pints! Then I began dicing peppers, onions and crabapples to make a pepper jelly. By this time, I was tired of being in the kitchen, so I just made a recipe up by the seat of my pants. I couldn’t even tell you what I did if I tried. But, at this point it is half-way done cooling, and mostly jelled up, so I hope it was a success. I ended up with 12 half-pints of beautifully colored pepper jelly.

As if this wasn’t all enough fun, we got a call from a neighbor down the road with raw milk who I had been playing phone tag with for a few days. After dinner, our whole family went over to the Ellsworth’s place. Mr. Ellsworth, or Dr. Ellsworth, I should say, is an old-timer Psychologist who works from home and keeps a beloved pet Jersey dairy cow, Daisy and her calf, Dolly. Daisy and Dolly live on three acres of green pasture and get all kinds of pampering from their owners. We were very fortunate to come at milking time, and the kids got to help milk Daisy. Her stall was immaculately clean, she munched happily on sweet smelling alfalfa while she was milked, and then went back out to the pasture with her calf. Then we got to watch the milk being poured and strained in the most sanitary garage set-up I could ever imagine. It was very impressive. We went home with our gallon of fresh, raw milk, a quart of homemade feta cheese, and an old stew hen for Monday night supper. I could have never hoped to get milk from a better place than this, and it’s just a few minutes away from home.

All in all, it was a very full weekend. I canned a lot of food, and had a lot of good local-food experiences. I had great conversations with several farmers over the course of the last three days, and I came away from each interaction with food for my family grown right here, close to home. Some of it came from right down the road, and some of it came from our own garden. All of it ended up in canning jars lining the shelves of my pantry, promising good things to eat this winter.

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