Raspberry Pancake Syrup:
Yesterday I pulled the raspberries out of the freezer that I had been gathering every other day for the past two weeks. They filled an 8 qt pot to overflowing while frozen and once thawed and mashed took up about 3/4 as much space. This was heated slowly for the better part of two hours while I did some much needed weeding and painted the cold frame. The hot raspberry mess was poured into a colander lined with a double layer of cheese cloth and allowed to drip till cool. Last night I stuck the whole contraption in the fridge and let it drip overnight. I ended up with about 12 cups of clear juice.
I used blackberry pancake syrup recipe, keeping the sugar @ 2/3 cup per cup of juice. I ended up canning 8 pints this morning. Most of these will be given away this Christmas.
Hot Poppers:
I love hot poppers aka jalapeno bites. Halved jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese. I grew 8 jalapeno plants this year just to have some to try my hand at making them up and freezing them. Right now I have about 2qts of the halved, seeded peppers soaking in water to mellow them out a little. I scoured the net and found a recipe I am going to tweak a bit and will make them up tonight.
12 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup grated cheddar or jack cheese
25 jalapeno peppers, seeded, cut in half
1 cup milk
1 cup flour
1-1/2 cups dried packaged breadcrumbs
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tps onion powder
Mix up the cheeses and spoon into jalapenos. Mix garlic and onion powder with bread crumbs. Drop in milk and coat with bread crumbs. Freeze on cookie sheets. Package. To eat, bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes until hot all the way through, golden brown, and crisp.
Cold Frame Planting:
The cold frame is painted, situated and half planted. Actually I probably didn’t need to put these things in the cold frame yet as they will all withstand a frost or two. I just wanted to plant something in there.
I dug a bag of manure/compost mix I had laying around into one half of the cold frame (4×4 area) . I sowed some spinach, cherry belle radish, daikon radish, green onions and raab broccoli. The onions as well as the cb radish and spinach were planted in wide rows as we will eat the thinnings. I have yet to make the covers but they really aren’t necessary yet. If anything I may make them and put screen on them to keep bugs out. If this is a typical fall it will be another month before our first frost and even then frosts are generally sporadic till late November. I’ve actually picked broccoli in December with no protection at all but that wasn’t a typical year. Generally “serious winter” takes about 6-8 weeks and usually fills January and February.
Your cold frame is so neat. Don’t green onions get really tall? Will they fit in the cold frame? Forgive my ignorance. I don’t grow veggies so I know nothing about them.
Lol yes I did consider that too. I thought about planting them at the back wall which is 12″ tall but opted for the middle as I have some raab broccoli in the back that will more than likely inhabit the space long after the onions have been eaten. I like to use green onions young and I can always snip off the tops if I have to. Like I said I really didn’t need to put these things in there at this point, they could have gone in the regular garden but my excitement got the better of me. For the most part my goal is to try to grow some spinach, greens, radishes and possibly chives throughout the winter. These veggies are just a ‘trial run’.
Another option I’ve been considering is to build a 2nd story using 2x6s or 2x8s to fit over what is there now. It would give additional height when things are larger but wouldn’t be in the way when they were small thereby not blocking much needed light. My veggie garden tends to be one huge ongoing experiment. I’m not afraid of failure. Many things I have tried have not worked but enough has gone well to always keep me looking for new things to try.
We are newbies in the blogging world, starting last week. Our blog is http://www.gardeneryardener.blogspot.com
I am learning stuff every day about blogging. I need to find out what track back is all about.
I look forward to reading your blog.
Jeff Ball
Welcome to Blogdom.
As I understand trackbacks, if you write a post on your blog referencing a post on my blog (using the trackback url for the post on my blog) and have trackbacks enabled, your post will show up not only as a post on your blog but as a comment to the post you referenced on my blog. I’m not sure about the Blogger.com setup but the same is true within my blog. Say I write a post in my blog referencing an earlier post in my blog. If I use the trackback url for the original post the second post will show up not only as a post but as a comment off the original post. It makes following updates on a given post much easier.
Kerry,
I have been a reader since mid-July and really enjoy your site. It’s fun to follow someone suffering with vegetables. As lovely as the flower gardener sites are, I’m not sure they feel my pain. You do.
I am watching your cold frame with interest … Thanks much for the lumber shopping list.
Leslie
Leslie,
Thanks for the kind words. Your blog looks great. Congrats on all the ribbons! I will definately stop by and read more.
Just the other day I was talking with a coworker about the difference in process for veggie gardeners vs flower gardeners. My flower garden tends to suffer as I don’t give it the attention it needs throughout the summer. I will brave heat, humidity, mosquitos, snakes and thorns to get into the veggie/fruit garden to harvest though. Starting to sound like a postal worker… Anyway my coworker has a beautiful flower garden so I hear. He had better with all the work he puts into it. He is always planting something, moving something, redoing a bed. My poor flower garden is lucky if I weed it a handful of times during the summer. Flowers are beautiful and have their place but my heart belongs to those plants that feed me.
FWIW the Jalapeno bites are awesome. Ever so slightly warm and the cheese mix with the crunchy coating is wonderful after being placed frozen in a 400F toaster oven for about 10-15 min. mmm
Boy am I glad I found this information. Keep it up!
Hi I was wondering if you could elaborate on the raspberry syrup process, like did you hot pack it and this may be a dumb question but why does it come out clear?
The sugar/juice/pectin mix is cooked till it starts to thicken. It is packed hot into hot jars and canned in a bwb.
The clear tendency is due to the fact that the bag of raspberry pulp was not sweezed after draining.
Hi! I just found this post and I think I’m going to try to make raspberry syrup to give away at Christmas. I was reading the comments and I got a little confused when you answered Damon’s question– you included pectin in the ingredients when you answered him. Did you put pectin in your syrup?