I received some products in the mail from Ball and couldn’t wait to try them out! Here in Minnesota it’s canning season and there are lots of things to can. The peaches are in, corn is ready, green beans, tomatoes and pickling cucumbers are ready. We can and store food for a lot of reasons in Minnesota (some people need to for weather-related reasons) but mostly because we have such a short growing season. It’s nice to be able to open up a fresh jar of blueberry syrup in the dead of winter and be able to taste the sweetness that was preserved at the peak of the season.

Saturday, August 13th is National Can-It-Forward Day and during the remainder of August I am going to be giving away some things to help you preserve your favorite treats. Comment on this post to be entered to win a sampling of pectin, bread and butter pickle mix, salsa mix, a Blue Book Guide to Preserving and Ball product coupons. One winner will be chosen at random late Sunday night (August 14th, 2011). The contest is only open to U.S. residents as I will be paying for the shipping of these products myself. The products were mailed to me from Ball and I am sharing them with you. Now, onto the pictures and descriptions of what all I made while trying the new products from Ball!

Probably my favorite food of all time is the simple blueberry. I just love them. I love blueberry pancakes and muffins but nothing beats blueberry syrup, homemade and fresh without the high fructose corn syrup or artificial flavoring. This stuff is like liquid gold to me and it is well worth the time and effort of putting a batch together. The recipe can be found in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.  The book is very reasonably priced and has several, several recipes. I will also post the recipe below.

The first thing you need to do before you start canning is to wash all of your jars and get your gear ready. One of the scarier parts of the recipe is pouring the hot syrup into the glass jars. The old funnel I had wasn’t the sturdiest. Ball sent me a new one and it is awesome. It’s very sturdy and well made. I love it!

The other scary part about canning is pulling the hot jars out of the boiling water bath. I used to have some scary tongs that you needed two hands to operate and nine out of ten times the jar slipped out of the tongs and splashed scalding hot water all over my hands. Ball has a new jar lifter out on the market. They are spring-loaded and easy to operate with one hand. I am very impressed with them.

The finished product is my most prized possession and these jars of blueberry syrup will last me all year. I will probably have some to give as gifts too if I don’t get too greedy. I love to send blueberry syrup and wild rice to friends and family not living in Minnesota— they are my two favorite Minnesota foods!

Making cute labels is fun but sometimes I don’t have the time. A nice alternative are these dissolvable labels. I like to save my jars but I can’t stand standing there scrubbing a label off a jar for 15 minutes just to save a buck so these new labels make me very happy. I have been waiting for someone to come out with these for years.

Next I whipped up some salsa, a summertime necessity! If I were making a large batch I would “can” them using a water bath but if you are making a small batch and you plan on eating the salsa within 3 weeks you can make a small batch. Ball sent me a salsa packet and all I had to do was dice some tomatoes, add the mix, some vinegar and then boil it all for 5 minutes.

To be honest, I didn’t expect the packet of dehydrated seasoning to produce a very yummy salsa so I didn’t buy many tomatoes but this stuff is really good! I was surprised. And then disappointed that I only made 2 jars!

I’m not sure if you are a pickle fanatic like my kids and I are, but we love pickles. We love a certain kind of pickle too. Spears, cold-packed. And if you love them as much as we do you may have noticed they are usually about $3.50 a jar and last about 2 days. I got lucky when I went to the farmer’s market yesterday and found pickling cucumbers.

Andrew and I picked out about 30 cucumbers the size we wanted them and brought them home to marvel over.

All you do then depending on how you want your pickles is use the Ball Kosher Pickle Mix with some water and vinegar, boil it, and pour it over the pickles. You let them sit for about 30 minutes then you pack them into jars. If you want your pickles to sit on your shelf you can process them and they will last for a year. If you are like me and want them cold packed, you just pack them in jars and put them in the refrigerator. They will keep for 3 months.That is of course unless you eat them all by then.

It’s very easy and very inexpensive if you already have the jars which I did. I made about $30.00 worth of pickles for about $9.00. The Kosher Pickle Mix is about $5.99 and the cucumbers were $4.00 at the farmer’s market.

It was a great day of canning for me. I will be trying some other things later next week and sharing them with you. Don’t forget to comment below for a chance to win a selection of Ball products! Here is the recipe for the Blueberry Syrup:

Blueberry Syrup

You will need:

Directions:

The temperature dropped down into the 40′s last night and although we are back up into the mid 80′s this afternoon, I think it’s safe to say we are done with the garden. I’ve given away peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers galore yet it all still keeps on coming. It feels wrong that it still grows- wasteful even since we will never use it all. The compost container relieves some of the guilt.

The tomatoes were a success this year despite the incredible amount of weeds growing in the raised beds. Lat year’s blossom end rot fiasco was such a disappointment. This year made up for last.

I love having both spring and fall bearing raspberries.

We’ll pick a few more carrots and then that’s it!

This is our 3rd year gardening and I think we decided we are going to try and do just fruits (including tomatoes) but then join a CSA for the veggies. Luckily, we have a good one in the area.

I met my brother in Saint Cloud tonight for his birthday dinner since SC is halfway between our homes. I drove through campus since I haven’t really been there since graduating from college except for maybe one trivia marathon. Since we were so close to the Mississippi, I had to drive across the bridge and that led me to the Gardens. I hadn’t been there since first moving up north from Alabama almost 8 years ago. The gardens are really spectacular. Great for photohunting or a stroll with your significant other.

Walking through the gardens had me thinking about the WPA (which helped the gardens come to fruition) and how we could sure use the WPA now. During 1935 and 1943 the WPA was the country’s largest employer, providing more than 8 million jobs to people who also sometimes ended up learning a new skill as well as providing beauty, comfort, ease of transportation and necessity to people across the country.

With rumors in our town about one of if not the largest employer in the area closing its doors at the end of the year, I’m going into a mini panic mode. What will this do for the value of our house? With unemployment so high, will crime go up? Surely this in inevitable.  How will this effect my children’s school? Will there be increased behavioral issues? Malnourished kids crabby and as stressed-out as their parents?

I mentioned to my mom today the news story I read yesterday about Amazon announcing they now sell more kindle books than they do hardcover books. With panic my mom looked up. “What?!” She could hardly believe it. Then she predicted, “I bet we will see the end of the library in 10 years then.” Such a dark thought. I’m not sure if all libraries will end as we know them, but I can see them closing in city after city and then shipping the books to a “museum” of sorts for books. We need to be doing something to save our libraries now.

And while we are at it we can try to save a few trees as well as plant more through something such as a WPA. When I say “save trees” I’m not talking about printing unnecessary paperwork at one’s job, I’m talking about saving actual trees. Over the weekend, workers by our home cut down what in my estimate appears to be about 50 trees so they could widen a road. Yes, I realize the WPA also did a lot of road construction-type work but I consider it a design flaw if the city can’t figure out how to keep the trees that have been in place for hundreds of years. The look of the street in our town now is just awful. Sickening really. And even in this little conservative town, people are upset that the trees were removed. They realized the benefits the trees had along the street- the shade it provided to the homes along that street who will now have to use more energy to keep their homes as cool.

I didn’t really mean for this blog post to turn into a rant but I hate the feeling I get when I am in a place of beauty and then I drive a few blocks and am thrown back into the real world of strip malls, litter and treeless streets. Why is beauty only reserved for special places like parks- often places we must pay to visit (Munsinger is free btw)? Do people not care enough about their earth, country, state, city to make sure that wherever they look there are plenty of trees and/or foliage, minimal trash but most importantly to me, no abandoned buildings? Why we have empty shells of building lying around our town rotting away while new ones are being built is a mystery to me. There should be a law against it. Or at least a compromise. For every new building that goes up, they better be putting in a new (or investing in a current) park or giving my local library the support they need.

This was my sky on the way home from the gardens tonight. Can anyone honestly look at that and still want to throw their Taco Bell trash out their car window? How does this happen?

Asking for change,

Kristine

We have a nice crop of cucumbers this year. More than I know what to do with. I made these on accident actually, the intent was for regular refrigerator pickles but somebody filled the regular bulk container in the natural foods section with a spicy pickling spice mixture. I was disappointed when I got home but I made them anyway and decided I would give them away if they weren’t to my liking. They actually turned out far better than I expected. So much so I will probably make them this way next year as well.

To make these I simply sliced cucumbers and put them in jars until they came up to about a half an inch from the top. I dissolved 1/4 cup sugar in about 8 cups of water then added 2 teaspoons of salt and about 1/4 cup spicy pickling seasoning. I filled 3 jars 3/4 of the way up and topped each of the jars off with vinegar. The pickles will keep in the refrigerator for up to 6 weeks.

These are a great healthy snack and they were very easy to make. A great accompaniment to fresh corn on the cob and grilled chicken or burgers!

Flowers are like babies. Just like children, you can’t pick just one of your flower babies to be your favorite.

I found seeds for blue sweet peas at Bachman’s this year and they finally bloomed! I’m in love.

I wanted to do some colorized photos of some of the things in our garden. I think the different perspective can help one notice things about a plant they normally wouldn’t.

above: yarrow

above: painted daisy

above: cabbage

above: sweet peas

above: glimpse of a pansy in hanging basket

above: delphinium

above: the name of this one is on the tip of my tongue . . .

above: globe thistle

above: painted daisy

above: rainbow chard

above: raspberries

above: roma tomatoes just starting out

above: sweet peas

above: poppy (the gold speckles is the pollen dust!)

We had some things ripen and open on the first of June. The first delight was my iris. I bought some of these a few years ago and I really hope they spread. I think they are gorgeous! Next we had some radishes that looked ready to be pulled up . . . but nobody around here is really interested in actually eating them unfortunately so I’m not sure what we’ll do with them.

We also had a few strawberries ripen, but we were lazy about putting the netting over the top of the strawberry patch and today something had gotten to the reddest berry and took a few nibbles.

The lettuce is ready to be eaten. I had a nice salad yesterday for lunch.

Our daisies were one of the first things to bloom.

Hopefully July 1st brings us much more!

Last week, the kids and I packed up the car and took a trip 45 miles east to visit the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chanhassen. First we stopped in Waconia. What a beautiful little town! I sort of have a dream of living there now. The downtown sits up on a hill overlooking the gorgeous lake. And the lake actually looked clear when we got a close-up look!

At the arboretum, we walked from the cafe to the hedge maze and back. And that was pretty much it. It was about 95 degrees and humid as all get out. Plus the friends were meeting had this little one with them:

But we got to see some stuff. Here would be a nice little place for a game of uber lawn bowling. . .

The highlight of the trip (for Andrew and I anyway) was the Uff da Palace. The artist (Patrick Dougherty) sculpts these amazing structures out of willow.

I’ve been trying really hard this spring to get a nice shot of all the butterflies I’ve been seeing around. Sadly, I only own one lens for my camera and it’s not a zoom. . . this is the best I could do:

Now here’s a great concept for a dining room table!

I snapped a few shots of my beloved poppies:

These 2 were born a week apart. It’s fun to watch them grow together. Andrew looks so much taller because Maya is sitting back further on the bench. In reality he’s only about an inch taller.

In conclusion. . . The arboretum is nice but not on a hot day! Too much walking involved and a lot of it isn’t shaded. I think the perfect time to visit here would be a day in the 70′s. I will probably go back sometime in the Fall- it’s probably gorgeous then! They are actually open year round. I think they allow cross-country skiing in the winter which would be fun- it’s hilly there so you’d get some exercise, that’s for sure!

Phlox

Azalea

Unknown/Forgot

Found Mushroom

Hen and Chicks

Columbine

Cabbage

Lily of the Valley

Icelandic Poppy

Strawberry Patch

Gnome found a mushroom