Living rural in the city is great – you can do it, too.

Category: Food, Cooking, and Processing

A day to make red pepper jelly – Gelée de piments rouges

On Monday morning the weather was beautiful, so I planned out an awesome Homestead day. I was only lacking one person and one tool (a post-pounder, an auger, or a sharp-shooter) for finally replacing my rustic-unchic front fence. I wanted to put in a farm fence, minus the barbed wire. Instead, I’ve got a roll of welded wire, which should look something like this when done. I’ve got nice round cedar fence posts from the country, not square city fence posts.

Being one person too short (yes, I am one person and, at 5’4″, too short, but here I mean too few), I mucked about with what remained of putting the garden to bed for winter, and covered the rose bushes. (Yes, I have rose bushes. I barely deserve them. So rarely does one have what one deserves!)

In so doing, I got stung by a wasp on the fleshy part of my left hand. That put a stop to further garden work. It also put a stop to chopping, so I didn’t tackle the red pepper jelly until today.

These beautiful red “piments rouges” peppers — not pimentos, which are stumpier — came courtesy of the grocery store, which is so kind as to give me, the bunny lady, any produce destined for la poubelle. I gave a few peppers to the rabbits (they were not so spicy as to be a problem) before I thought to make jelly out of them. 

Red pepper jelly, in case you didn’t know, is a great addition to any cheese or cold cut sandwich.

Thoughts on recipes

L'encyclopedie de la Cuisine Canadienne by Jehanne Benoit and Mrs. Appleyard's Family Kitchen
Jehanne Benoit’s “l’Encyclopedie de la cuisine canadienne,” beside Mrs. Appleyard’s Family Kitchen.

I found the recipe easily enough in my collection of cookbooks from yesteryear, which are, bar none, the best cookbooks if you’re into the idea of local food. When I cannot find a pickle or preserve suggestion in my mother’s old stash, I go straight to Jehane Benoit’s Encyclopedie de la cuisine canadienne. Between this book and Mrs. Appleyard’s Family Kitchen, I have the historical stories and recipes of my entire region’s local food

– before the globalization glut that landed cantaloupe on every restaurant breakfast plate in the month of March, and the concomitant assumption that the food supply chain takes care of everything so that all we have to do is choose. Hobby horse ends here for now.

Red pepper jelly recipe in French – along with many others

The recipes are diverse and simple. On this page, you can see quince (coings), mint (menthe fraîche), parsley (persil), lemon verbena (vervaine), and sage (sauge) jelly. Most, if not all, of these will be eaten with cheese or meats, so it’s no surprise that they’re on the same page as red pepper jelly.

However, it also has a recipe for (swoon!) currant and elderflower jelly (groseilles aux fleurs du sureau). I’m half-Danish, and when I first had elderflower juice in Copenhagen (København) it struck me that I knew this and I’d had it before, though I could not say how or where.

As Swedish venture would have it, one can now get it at IKEA. You can also get elderflower or elderberry tea at the Polish bakery.

So I’m making the jelly today. The peppers are drying out, on the old side, so they were fabulously easy to de-string and seed, though more difficult to chop. The wasp-stung hand had some work to do. Presently I’m waiting for the four hours to elapse for the peppers to sit in salt.


Intermission on salt

Did you know that Windsor is next to Detroit, where they have a huge salt mine? It’s worth seeing the Time photo essay. Yet despite the Windsor mine being in Windsor, Windsor Salt‘s headquarters are near me, in Pointe Claire, QC. Sadly – and preventably!their building kills birds. I’ll still buy their salt but I want them to fix their windows and landscaping.


Now that the jelly’s done, here’s a belle photo: a Bernardin jar with pretty red contents, but which one belongs in a magazine?

Et voilà! 

Red pepper jelly in 250 mL Bernardin jars



Don’t use the oven for Just One Thing (recipes)!

I brought three pumpkins back from Ontario, and two evenings ago, I baked one of them. As the fastest way to process a pumpkin is by baking it, I just cut it in half, scooped out the seeds and pulp, and put it in the oven with a little water. But the baking takes an hour and a half, and The Most Important Rule For Cooking that I learned as a child – which it floors me that more people don’t know – is… well, the first rule is, don’t use the oven in summertime, but… When You Use The Oven, Bake More Than One Thing.

In fact, bake three: 

  • Meat loaf or chicken or quiche, scalloped potatoes, and custard
  • Squash, a casserole, and a cake
  • Pot roast, baked potatoes, and pie

With Pizza…

… well, that takes only 12-16 minutes to bake (in a hot oven!), but make a batch of cookie dough to have on hand for times like this. Cut the dough into portions you’d make at any one time and freeze the portions (i.e. if the recipe is for three dozen, cut it into sixths for six cookies each. You could also shape the cookies and freeze them on a tray, then keep them in a tupperware in the freezer ready to go). Thaw and shape the cookies and put them in with the pizza (but watch them; pizza heat is hotter than cookie heat; it’s better to undercook them and then put them in again to finish them off. Which is why they’re called biscuits: cooked twice). You could also add tarts, or store-bought rolls of any kind.

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Adventures in picking, pickling, and homemade sauerkraut

Two weeks ago, I went to Ontario for a little family/business/pleasure roadtrip. About 3 kilometers east of Fenelon Falls, I went to a farm where they had a table selling produce. I’m the special kind of stupid that forgets I’m a blogger, so I forgot to take pictures of the farm stand and the turkeys making a ruckus at the farm gate. So let me interrupt this blog post with an appreciation of turkeys and ducks:

A family of wild turkeys passes by the Discovery Shack at Gami’ing Nature Centre. They’re heading over into the farmer’s soybeans.

I managed to take pictures of the one lonesome Muscovy duck, Mamma, who belongs to the people I stayed with down the road. Mamma used to look after the chickens, and at nine years old, if she survives over the winter, she’ll do so again in the spring. She apparently likes to kick the hens off the eggs so she can hatch and look after the chicks. Though I wonder, with broody hens, if they’ll give up that easily.

They had to spend about an hour a day out in the garden, vacuuming the squash bugs off the leaves. They let me harvest purple beans from their box garden full of them. And even though obviously I’d found my camera, I forgot to take pictures of that, too. So instead, I can to show you the giant zucchini, the dozen corn, some tomatoes, and the cabbage I bought, with the basket of beans right here on my kitchen counter (look up: it’s the header image).

So, pickling!

Two nights ago, I took the last of the corn and transformed it into corn relish. The recipe was not the same as last year’s; it called for too much flour in the sauce, so I am afraid it’s too creamy. Still, corn relish is better than the green relish you get at the store. It’s homemade by me, which beats your random corn relish.

Yesterday’s efforts began with slicing cucumbers, peppers, and onions to make a batch of bread-and-butter pickles (7 jars). Cucumbers are surprisingly hard on your knives! I have a sharpening stone, for which the traditional lubricant is spit. I sharpened the big butcher knife twice, once with the stone and once with the pestle (ceramic also sharpens blades) from my mortar-and-pestle. Here they are, pre-salting.

And then I got ambitious enough to make a batch of sauerkraut with the very large head of cabbage featured above. I chopped up the whole head and salted it in this pickle crock.

A 3 gallon crock from Medicine Hat, Alberta

I used the instructions from Boing Boing, whose creator sounds like the kind of guy I’d get along with — he wrote a book about making everything. You can read all about it at the bottom of the “How to make sauerkraut” instructions.

But I had a problem: I have no 9-¾” wooden disk to push down or cover the contents of the crock. So I phoned Dad to ask him to cut me one, “and not out of plywood.” The old man actually sounded happy to have something to do, which is surprising because it was a favour for me and usually he’s like “I’ve got enough to do, make it yourself.” But in this case, I can’t. It requires a band saw or at least a jig saw, and a belt sander to smooth the edges.

So I tried to weigh down the cabbage with a plastic bag filled with water, but the bag leaked. Now I have more watery contents in the crock pot, but that’s OK because it helps keep the environment anaerobic. I added more salt. The plate I inverted keeps most stuff from floating. I have no “bloom” on my stuff yet, and that’s a good sign.

One week later, my sauerkraut-in-the-making still looks like this:  

And short of jarring it, I’m all done. Unless some something like an excess of green tomatoes happens, the pickling is over for the year.