The Modern Victory Garden

This morning after our usual leisurely (and late) Sunday breakfast, I set my sights on wrapping up the planned weekend pickling projects.   If you recall from yesterday's post, the red cabbage was harvested on Friday evening, finely shredded, layered with salt, and then allowed to sit for 24 hours.   Late last night (Saturday), I rinsed all of it to remove the salt and then placed it on paper towel-lined trays to dry over night.   By Sunday morning it was ready for the final processing.                                  

Since I was going to have the water bath canner going for the spiced red cabbage relish and knowing that the green bean patch was due for another picking, I decided to do some pickled "dilly beans" as well.   I tackled the bean patch harvest right after breakfast.   The patch is definitely starting to slow down in production.   This is in part due to the cooler weather we experienced this past week, but is also a function of bush beans having large initial harvests that diminish over a period of weeks.   Not to worry though, the pole beans are now producing and the runner beans are loaded with little beans that will be ready soon.   I like to plant both bush and pole varieties for this reason.   The bush beans are harder to pick and (in my opinion) not as tasty as the pole beans, but they produce a large yield for the space utilized and come on earlier than the pole beans.   Because they tend to quit producing after a few weeks, they are complemented nicely by the later maturing pole beans.   It's a nice break for my back too when the pole beans get going because it is much easier to pick the vertically grown produce.   The bush beans started out with harvest of 6.5 pounds per picking and have reduced down to today's harvest of 2.5 pounds.         

I have been picking twice a week for several weeks now and have a good supply of frozen beans in the freezer.   While I will continue freezing beans, I will now also be doing some canning as well.   Today's harvest of beans was in part used for the evening meal prep, but most of it was destined to go into a batch of pickled "dilly beans".   The ends were snipped off and the beans rinsed so that they were ready for processing.   Once they were prepped, I then made the spiced pickle brine for the cabbage and got those jars packed and into the water bath canner for processing.   While they were in the canner, I then packed the jars with green beans and added the clove of garlic, cayenne pepper, and head of dill to each jar and filled them with the hot vinegar solution.   When the jars of spiced red cabbage relish were taken out of the canner, the dilly green beans were ready to go in.   I was done in a snap because most of the time consuming prep work had been done on Friday night with the cabbage shredding and brining.   I ended up with 6 pints of the spiced red cabbage relish and 4 pints of the dilly green beans.             

Here's the two recipes I used.                                  

Spiced Red Cabbage Relish

Yields about 6 pints

• 6 pounds red cabbage
• ¼ cup canning salt
• ½ cup brown sugar (packed)
• ¼ cup mustard seed
• 1/8 cup mace
• 1 quart good quality red wine vinegar
• 1/8 cup whole cloves
• 1/8 cup whole allspice
• 1/8 cup peppercorns
• 1/8 cup celery seed
• 1 stick cinnamon

Remove outer leaves of cabbage: core and shred. Shred finely for relish and more coarsely for a "slaw" texture.   Layer cabbage and salt in a large bowl.   Cover; let stand 24 hours.   Rinse.   Drain thoroughly on paper towel-lined trays, about 6 hours.   Combine sugar, mustard seed, mace and vinegar in a large saucepot.   Tie whole spices in a spice bag (I used a large empty tea bag); add spice bag to vinegar.   Boil 5 minutes.   Remove spice bag.   Pack cabbage into hot jars, leaving ¼-inch headspace.   Ladle hot liquid over cabbage, leaving ¼-inch headspace.   Remove air bubbles.   Adjust two-piece caps.   Process 20 minutes in a boiling-water bath canner.      

Dilly Green Beans

Yields about 4 pints

• 2 pounds green beans
• ¼ cup canning salt
• 2 ½ cups vinegar (I use Cider Vinegar)
• 2 ½ cups water
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper, divided
• 4 cloves garlic
• 4 heads dill

Trim ends off green beans.   Combine salt, vinegar and water in a large cooking pot.   Bring to a boil.   Pack beans lengthwise into hot jars, leaving ¼-inch headspace.   Add ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper, 1 peeled clove of garlic, and 1 head of dill to each pint jar.   Ladle hot liquid over beans, leaving ¼-inch headspace.   Remove air bubbles.   Adjust two-piece caps.   Process 10 minutes in a boiling-water bath canner.                          

Luckily for me, the canning projects were wrapped up by about 1:30 pm - just in time for the sun to come out!   While the jars cooled on the counter, my husband and I went for a beach hike at Shine Tidelands and enjoyed the gorgeous afternoon.