I have followed the #everybitcounts challenge on YouTube and Instagram for a while now. Generally lurking and being jealous of what everyone has been preserving from their gardens. Many of the folks I watch are preserving to see themselves through the winter on their homesteads with plenty of acreage and hats off to them they put in the work…this is obviously not me and my life with my small kitchen garden in urban UK. But, this year, I decided to take part, in my own modified way. I am not preserving every single day for the month of august – I simply don’t have enough produce coming out of the garden at the moment.

Everything is a bit stunted with all of the rain we have had. BUT I am preserving as much as possible whether it is a small bunch of herbs to be hung to dry or a full on day of canning salsa. Anything that comes out of the garden is either being eaten fresh, or if I’m not going to get to eat it in its prime it is being saved for later.

So far this month I have completed quite a few projects, which I am really happy about. Hopefully I will look back on this post in years to come and be pleased with where I started. My food shelves are beginning to fill up nicely, the dehydrator is constantly whirring in the background, and my house smells yummy! So far this month I have ‘put up’:

• Tomato Sauce (9x pints and 7x 1/2 pints)
• Tomato Juice (2x pints)
• Tomato Powder (1/4 pint)
• Salsa Verde (14x 1/2 pints)
• Peach Salsa (5x 1/2 pints)
• Garlic
  • Dehydrated (1x pint)
  • Frozen (3x bags)
• Courgette (1x pint)
• Calendula Oil (1x pint)
• Pears (2x pints)
• Herbs (bunches)
  • Celery Leaf
  • Parsley
  • Oregano

…not too bad if I do say so myself!

Tomato Sauce

I have dreams of shelves stocked with tomato sauce made from my own homegrown tomatoes. I don’t know why, but for me that’s an actual ‘thing’. The taste of a homegrown tomato is a universe away from a shop bought one, in my opinion. Those little pale things you find in the shops can be so bitter – if they have any flavour at all!

But alas, that dream will have to wait until next year… I planted so many tomato plants and they all got the dreaded blight. So, no sweet and juicy toms for me this year.

I did, however, find a little farm shop that was selling some lovely looking San Marzano tomatoes so I bought what they had to make a small batch of chopped tomatoes. I like them on buttered toast in the winter so this will be a real treat when the cold weather comes around.

My local Lidl also had a discount on their vine ripened tomatoes so I bought a bag each week and popped them in the freezer until I had enough for a big old batch of tomato sauce to jar up and process. For this, I defrosted the tomatoes, peeled the skins (the skins peel straight off when they have been frozen), roughly chopped and set in the ninja to simmer for a couple of hours. I whizzed them up with a hand blender, popped in jars with a tablespoon of lemon juice, and followed the Ball Book instructions for water bath canning (35 minutes processing time for pint jars).

There’s probably not enough to see me through the year but I’ll do another batch if they come on offer again.

Tomato Juice and Powder

Nothing goes to waste from these canning projects. I was left with a bowl full of tomato juice that had drained off the tomatoes as I peeled and chopped them. I decided to strain it through a sieve to get the seeds out and jarred that up too and processed as per the book’s instructions for tomato juice. Ill be able to add it to soups or rice for an extra burst of flavour!

The skins of the tomatoes can be used too. I dehydrate them and make powder out of them. You can then just add a little water rehydrate and you have a nice thick tomato paste to use in recipes. After scouring the internet for instructions, many of which said to just stick the dried skins in a blender, I can confirm this doesn’t really work. The blender doesn’t chop fine enough. I’m sure a coffee grinder would do the job but I don’t have one of those and I’m not about to buy yet another appliance for my teeny tiny kitchen. A good old pestle and mortar did the job though. My arm ached but it was just a free workout really!

Salsas

As I said earlier, my tomatoes suffered from the dreaded blight this year which was absolutely gutting considering the work it took to grow from seed and nurture to fruit. I was so excited as the plants were brimming with green fruits…absolutely loads of them. I couldn’t bear to lose them all then I remembered I made Salsa Verde last year with the few tomatoes that hadn’t ripened by the end of the season. We went through those Couple of jars in super quick time so it was an opportunity to make something I knew we had enjoyed.

I picked all of the green fruits from the plants, discarded any that had brown marks or bruising, gave them a good old wash, and set about making the salsa. I use the Salsa Verde recipe from the Ball canning website, if anyone finds themselves in the same boat as me! As it turned out I had enough for three times what the recipe called for in green tomatoes. So that’s what I did, I made three lots. Thank goodness for my massive casserole dish/pan. We ended up with 14 half pint jars of gorgeous spicy salsa. I think I’ll be giving it away for Christmas at this rate, but it’s better than wasting all that food.

By this point I was on a bit of a Salsa ‘roll’. Id made a small batch of Peach Salsa earlier in the year just to see what it was like. We loved it. Somehow it tastes more like salsa than a tomato one. How does that work? We think it is the perfect mix of fiery heat and sweetness. Again, this is a Ball recipe from the ‘Book of Home Preserving’. I’m not a rebel canner. I don’t want to die of Botulism. So I opt for safely tested recipes.

I ended up with 5 half pint jars of this. the recipe says it should yield 8 but it was miles off. Next time I’ll double it so I have a full canner run.

Dehydrating anything and everything

I’ve also been dehydrating pretty much constantly. If there’s some produce that’s been harvested but I’m not going to get a chance to use it I’m likely going to be freezing or dehydrating it. It really does amaze my how much it adds up. A couple of courgettes here, a pear or two there…little and often really does make an impact here. Since my lovely Mum gifted me the Ninja that has a dehydrating function I have tried out loads of veggies. I do not like dehydrated celery – yack, and double yack. But other than that everything else has been a success. My favourite has to be dehydrated onion, It reminds me of cooking with my Nan when I was little. She never had a fresh onion in the house, it was always dehydrated and let me tell you her soups and pies were always phenomenal!

Calendula Oil

My last project so far preserving garden produce was to make some calendula oil. I have been reading about the potential skin soothing benefits of calendula and decided that since I have it growing in abundance I would give it a whirl. I suffer form an inflammatory skin condition that has been somewhat controlled with medications but it can still be painful at times.

So in a bid to give anything a go at least once I picked a load of flowers from the garden, dehydrated them until they were super duper dry (don’t want mouldy oils!). I am steeping the flowers in a mix of apricot kernel oil and rapeseed oil as that is what I had in my little beauty supplies store. They need to sit for around 6 weeks before straining out. My intention is to make a simple balm with the oil, shea butter and beeswax. If it works, or even if it doesn’t I’ll post the results of that when I do it.

Bonus: Pizza Bases

The premise of the #everybitcounts challenge is to preserve your harvests and get a stockpile of food. A lot of the people I watch doing this challenge have homesteads and acreage…I have neither! So my interpretation of the challenge (whilst not doing it every day) is a bit wider. I have taken it to mean spending some time, even if you don’t want to, to make ‘future you’ happier and a bit less stressed. Its about taking the pressure off yourself in the future.

So, with that in mind, I’ll be heading back to work ‘proper’ in September. I’m a lecturer at a NE university so all the students descend in September and teaching starts up again. When life becomes busier and I find myself working later and later it is all too easy to get home hungry and unwilling to cook anything from scratch. I find that’s when I head to the shops and buy naughty food or just order in – neither of which is great for my waistline or my purse.

So, I decided to make little pizza bases for the freezer so that I could have healthier homemade pizza, on tap, without having to order in. As a bonus they fit in the Ninja so I don’t have to wait for the big oven to heat up to cook them…ding, ding, ding!! I’m on to a winner here!!

I followed a recipe from King Arthur Flour website for frozen pizza bases. I cut out circles of greaseproof paper the same size as the pan that sits in the Ninja to make sure that after all my effort they do actually fit. Once the dough was shaped I part baked then for about 6 minutes before packing them all up and popping them in the freezer.

I have tried one out (for research reasons, of course) and it was soooooo good. I normally have tomato sauce that I can convert into pizza sauce and a block of cheese in the fridge, so emergency pizza should be easy enough to do. However, upon considering this a bit more I think in future I will part bake, add sauce to all bases, and top with cheese so all I have to do is add any veggies fresh from the fridge. That would make life even easier in my opinion.