We had a bunch of beautiful orange and purple carrots—about a pound and a half each. As usual, our recipe is based on one from the NCHFP. We wanted a lot of spices to play against the natural carrot sweetness, so we used mustard and coriander seeds, along with some heat from the Peruvian purple peppers we grow. But the real kicker were the fresh umbels from our garden.

No, it’s nothing to do with Uriah Heep. Umbels are a kind of inflorescence, common to lots of plants in Apiaceae. In fact, umbels are so common in that family that it’s also called “umbel-bearing”, Umbelliferae. We had dill and fennel umbels to split up among the jars.

Here are the notes—almost a recipe, if you squint. We definitely cooked them only briefly, less than the 10 minutes suggested by the NCHFP.

1lb 9.3oz orange
1lb 7oz purple

5.5C cider vinegar
1C water
2C sugar
2t Morton’s kosher salt
7g (~2t) mustard seed
9g (~4t) coriander seed
3 peruvian purple peppers

fennel and dill blossoms in the jars
fennel gets 3 bonus peppers

added 1.5x of vinegar, water, sugar, and salt for purple carrots with about 3C of leftover brine
+ 1t each fennel and corianer seeds, refresh 3 peppers
5 extra peppers in each jar

made 2qts orange, 1.75qt purple (?! probably more tightly packed)

These are tart pickles, not too sweet, with lots of great flavor from the seeds, especially the umbels. I imagine these would cut right through fatty braised brisket or hot pastrami, roasted pork belly, or seared duck breasts.

This was a long, cucumber-y ordeal. Broadly: cut cucumbers, assemble spices, sterlize jars, cook the pickles as necessary, can. With two (determined) people, a lot can be done in parallel, especially when you’re cooking more than one recipe. And parallelism is even more important when one of the two of you is anal enough to check that the mandoline is cutting the 3/16″ demanded. (Hint: it was me, not Hannah.)

The NCHFP recipe for the bread-and-butter pickles suggested using calcium hydroxide a/k/a pickling lime for firmer pickles. Sliced pickles tend to get soft, so we went for it. (A mistake, I think—see below.) Calcium hydroxide is also used for nixtamalization, the process for softening corn for making tortillas and tamales; it’s called cal in Spanish. The large Hispanic population here in Philadelphia means that cal is easily available even though the ‘mainstream’ markets—whatever the hell that means—don’t have it.

And so: into the fridge’s bottom drawer for a nice long spa session. This is my favorite way to brine larger quantities—I’ve done hams and turkeys this way. Make sure you clean the drawer well first! All told, these bulk purchases can play hell with fridge space—it may be time for us to get a reach-in for the basement.

The relish recipe on offer at the NCHFP is quite simple and came out well. My notes say we followed their recipe to the letter, with the addition of 13g of yellow mustard seed.

The final product came out fairly wet—one jar didn’t seal, and we’ve been using a fork to strain the relish at serving time. But the flavor is excellent—salting and draining the sliced or chopped cucumbers before cooking and packing them may help next time.

The bread-and-butter pickle recipe produces an enormous quantity raw, especially when you consider the chalky stiffness of the limed cukes. We had to use two pots! My notes show that we departed a bit from the recipe:

6 lbs of 4- to 5-inch pickling cucumbers
1 cup pickling lime (=111g cal)

8 cups thinly sliced onions (about 3 pounds) = 1.060kg sliced onions
1/2 cup canning or pickling salt = 150g Morton’s
4 cups vinegar (5 percent) = 3C cider + 1C rice
4-1/2 cups sugar = 4C / 750t
2 tbsp mustard seed = 21g
1-1/2 tbsp celery seed = 12g
1 tbsp ground turmeric = 13g fresh grated

Some batches we added chili flakes. The cal definitely gave the pickles an alkaline flavor and slightly chalky texture.

Recording weights as you go is a nice way to compensate for the American cook’s unhealthy obsession with volume measures. I can only assume that we use volume out of some libertarian ethic of freedom, or perhaps as a form of puritanical self-flagellation. It’s certainly not because volume is convenient—have you ever measured 1T of honey?—or accurate—what about flour?

Even before canning, I noticed that the pickles were chalkily crunchy. Five weeks later—the recommended aging time—the chalkiness persists, though the alkaline flavor is mostly gone. I’d skip the cal next time.

In my eternal pursuit of crunchiness, we opted for the “low-temperature pasteurization treatment”. The main idea is to trade time for heat, which keeps more juicy pickle structure intact.

When you don’t have a big water canner, doing two thirty minute batches isn’t the most fun thing in the world. But the reward is pretty great, even if they’re not perfect. Next time we’ll be changing the spices a bit, since the celery seed is a little overpowering. We’ll definitely skip the cal and its chalky crispness.

I apparently neglected to photograph Smitten Kitchen’s fridge dill pickles, but I do remember this: they came out impossibly salty at first. We had to rinse them before serving them at a party. They were tasty and we’ll make something similar again—but if only she had measured by weight….

10lb of blueberries is, it turns out, a lot of blueberries and less blueberries than you would think. About 2lb of them, like most things in our house, got [eaten] out of hand. We made two large batches of jam, froze one or two pounds, and then jarred the rest whole in a light simple syrup (what the NHCFP calls medium, augmented with the bits of jam left in the pan).

The first step is sorting and cleaning. Mushy berries are just fine for jam; moldy berries less so. I wasn’t entirely impressed with the quality—the berries were above average for what you might find in a supermarket, but definitely inferior to farmer’s market berries at their peak. Still, at about $3/lb, it was tough to complain.

If there is a single most important piece of advice when it comes to canning and preservation, it is: take notes. We used two different recipes, and I copied them down with the salient changes.

We made two batches of blueberry jam, which we referred to by number as BJ #1 and BJ #2. We wanted two different jams because variety is the spice of life—and also to compare powdered and liquid pectin.

BJ #1 followed a recipe from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which has an extremely useful if un-glitzy website. We ended up getting 4 pints out of their recipe, using 1.1kg of sugar instead of the full 5.5C they asked for. I probably went heavy on the nutmeg.

Here’s what my notes say:

2-1/2 pints ripe blueberries
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg or cinnamon
5-1/2 cups sugar (used 1.1kg)
3/4 cup water
1 box (1-3/4 oz) powdered pectin

Canned 5 minutes. Made about 4 pints.

BJ #2 followed a random, spicier recipe. It produced 5 pints’ worth.

8 cups fresh blueberries
6 cups sugar
3 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons grated lemon peel
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 pouches (3 ounces each) liquid fruit pectin

Made about 5 pints. (?!)

My confusion surely comes from the different amounts: 4 pints of blueberries made 5 pints of BJ #2, but 2.5 pints of blueberries made 4 pints of BJ #1? I truly don’t understand. We should have marked down the weights we used—I’d wager that each batch just used 3lb of the blues. Looking at the final product, the liquid pectin didn’t seem to set as well as the powdered. Since liquid is so much more expensive, powdered definitely seems the way to go.

Both jams are tasty, with BJ #2’s spicing coming through quite nicely. Having these put away feels powerful—these jams will adorn breakfasts, fill layers in cakes and pies, and enhance the larders of friends and neighbors for some time to come.