Apple leather and nuts

 Apple leather 

We had purchased some eating apples from costco that tasted like crap, so I decided to use them instead to make some apple leather.  The idea was to mix the new apples with some of the old canned applesauce that I had up at the farm.  I really like fruit leather in that it is convenient to take as a snack to work and greatly shrinks the space needed to preserve the fruit. 

I did a number of estimates to get an idea of the caloric value of apple leather.  My best estimate is about 83 Cal/oz.  This is a bit higher than what is referenced in some databases.  I am considering mixing the apples with pumpkin or squash to lower the calorie count but keep the flavor non-squashy!

Here are some pictures of the apple-leather process.

This leather took a while to dry.  I set it to 125F for 23 hours.  I think I added some time though.

I read this label and realized that the canned applesauce from 2014 had a batch that I had burned!  We will see how this turns out!  Hopefully it won't be too bad.  Mising weird tasting new apples with burned applesauce.  Yeah, that sounds promising!

More hickory shelling

I worked on shelling more hickory nuts while the apple-leather dehydrated.

Last Strawberries for the year

Last of the strawberries this year?

I have found that using parchment paper is better than the silpat stuff!  It holds more too.

Kale crackers,

Kale Crackers!

I haven't gotten around to harvesting much kale this year and I felt bad about it.  So I went out to the raised bed and managed to salvage enough to make some Kale crackers!  The recipe is somewhere else on the blog here.  It's something like 3 cups of Kale puree, 1 C almonds, and 1/4 C nutritive yeast powder, salt, pepper, various spices to taste.  These turned out quite nicely!  There is always some variance in the moisture content of the Kale so there may be some tweaking involved to get the consistency correct.  I just spread this on silpat and dry/bake in oven at something like 250F - 300F.  Your choice of when to take them out depending on how crisp you like them.

Kale crackers bagged and ready to munch on!  

Canning more peaches

I picked these peaches off of the "packed" tree last week - it had more peaches than leaves I think! Anyway, I got around to canning them.  They were a little bit unripe - but good for canning.  Looks like 15 pints canned here.

Looks like about 15 pints canned here!

Not bad for one little tree!  This is the first real harvest from this tree too!

Squash, tomatoes, strawberries, and elderberries are still producing

The tomatoes were a bit of a disappointment this year, but that's ok.  I have plenty canned and freeze dried in storage!  In fact, I did not plant these for storage/preservation since we had so many.

Everbearing strawberries are still putting out some fruit!

Not a lot of them, but enough to flavor some fruit leather!

Grape harvest - whats left anyway

The deer and the racoons left me only about 6 lbs of grapes.  That's in total, all varieties included!  Buggers!  Next year there is going to be a fence around the grapes.  Maybe electric header too.  We will see.  Anyway, I picked what I had and mixed them all together to make about 1/2 gallon of wine.   It will probably be awful, but these grapes aren't much good for eating (they taste funky).

Total grape harvest for 2017!  All picked off them stems and ready to squish to make some wine.

Squished and in for the primary fermenting

Air-lock in place.  Now just wait for the grapes to render a bit more juice.  I believe I added some pectinase, but I can't remember.

Apples

I processed some of the Gala apples (and a few of the other apples from varieties that didnt produce many apples)  into applesauce and apple leather.

Didn't make a lot of applesauce, which is ok since I evidently don't eat a lot of applesauce (I still have over 12 quarts left over from canning it in previous years)

The Raspberry/apple leather may actually have some elderberry in it too, if I recall.

Hmm, I guess I didn't get any pictures of the blackberries (not raspberries, despite the label)

Fruit preservation continues, final peaches picked and CORN!

Fruit leather

I believe I have already mentioned that I love fruit leather and have committed myself to making a bunch of it as a way of preserving my fruit.  This stuff is great.  I can take it to work easily, its very compact, and is fairly easy processing work compared to canning.  I did several batch this weekend.  Elderberry, peaches and pears and I think maybe some apples made it in.

Corn harvest

I had no need for corn this year, I just planted the old seed I had just to get rid of it.  Didn't do much to take care of it either (although Katherine did pull a few weeds in one section, the bulk of the corn patch was never weeded or cared for).  Nonetheless, we got a fairly impressive harvest of corn!

Katherine did most of the hard work on this.  I simply picked, helped shuck, and put the loose corn into the freezer bags and vacuum sealed them.  All told we got 46 pints!!!

Canning Pears

It's a bit embarrassing, but I have gotten so far behind in these blog updates that I don't know which of the varieties of pear I am canning here!    I believe these are still the "top of the hill" variety of pear, but I can't find any picture records of the other variety.  Quite disturbing.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the canned pears:

I am not even sure how many pints I canned!  Holy Moly, I have to do better!

Gala Apples Picked

I went ahead and picked the rest of (the bulk of) the Gala apples.  We got a decent number of them.  Using these mostly as eating apples since they are in pretty good shape and should keep for a few weeks.

Well, the bottom container apples aren't in great shape - these will be used for leather or apple crisp!

These are "eating" apples!

Picked the last of the peaches

The peaches on the smaller tree started falling so I decided to go ahead and pick them all.  We got quite a crop from just one small tree!  By the way, there are a couple of those "Korean Giant" pears on top of the peaches there - evidently, the only picture I have of these pears this year!

See the two pears?

Amazing amount of peaches off of one little tree!