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.