I Got A Wild Hair, Sun Mar 19

I've recently been reading two books on preserving food. One is "Asian Pickles" by Karen Solomon, the other is "Beyond Canning" by Autumn Giles. A have a few others along the same lines, but those are the two I was reading last night. A couple of the recipes caught my eye, so  on the way home from church, we stopped at the grocery store so I could pick up some mushrooms, carrots, daikon, & garlic. 

Then once we were home, I got a bit of a wild hair and decided to use up some stuff we had in the pantry and some of my non-standard glass jars - meaning jars I can't use for canning because they're from stuff like honey, spaghetti sauce, etc, and so my two-piece canning lids don't fit them. The USDA recommends not using those jars for home canning, so I use them for other things. (For example, I store my raw sesame seeds in the fridge in an old Ragu jar.)

So, here's what I made:

 

• Pears in port with Rosemary. I saw the pears at the grocery store and so I bought a couple of them. We've had this bottle of port for a while and never seem to want to drink it, so I figure I'd use it for this. I cut the pears into wedges and put them into a large honey jar, then added some rosemary I'd been keeping in the freezer, then poured the port over top of it all. 
• I had port leftover, so I cut some whole (seedless) dates in half and put them into a medium honey jar and covered them in port. 
• Still had some port leftover, so I put some craisins into another medium honey jar and covered them in port. 

Here's the port I used:

 

After that, I still had dates and craisins leftover, so I made:

 

• Dates and Craisins in Moa "Breakfast ale" from New Zealand that's been in my fridge for a long time, with a dollop of honey. I think the beer was left over from a party we threw and we've never been brave enough to try it!
• I found some flat ginger ale in the fridge. It had been made with our SodaStream device and went flat before we could drink it. So I sliced up some nectarines, added a dollop of honey, and covered them with ginger ale. 

I figure those will either be awesome or awful. I'm not really emotionally vested in them, so if they're horrible, I'll just put them into the compost bin! 🤷‍♀️

Here's the label of the beer:

 

 

Then I decided to actually make one of the recipes from the books! Both books had recipes for Pickled mushrooms. The one in "Asian Pickles" has a recipe from Korea that includes chili pepper flakes and ginger, neither of which I like (and I'm allergic to most vegetable peppers). The "Beyond Canning" recipe was similar but didn't have the pepper flakes or the ginger, and did have konbu seaweed, which I happen to have on hand. So that's the one I made:

 

I tried one after they were finished and they are really good! 😄

I had a lot of the konbu dashi pickling liquid leftover, so I put it into jars, too, and will use it when making things that I would flavor with vinegar and soy or ponzu sauce. 

 

Bonus: I used up a couple more non-canning jars too! 👍

The seaweed gets picked out of the pickled mushrooms before the mushrooms go into the fridge, but I didn't want to just throw it away - it seems so wasteful! So I spread it out onto a cookie sheet and stuck it in the freezer. Once it's frozen, I'll put it into a container and feed it a piece at a time to my pet Mangrove Tree Crabs. 🦀 I've done this with salmon skin that I trimmed off of some salmon fillets we had a few months ago and my crabs (and crayfish, and fish) love it. 

Oh, and before I forget: 

• Breakfast was a smoothie, as usual
• For lunch, we stopped at Freddy's Steakburgers, where I had a double cheeseburger with no bun, wrapped in lettuce. Instead of French fries, I had fried pickles, which were really good! They were breaded, of course, which is not great for the diet, but I had limited choices. 
• I did have one chocolate brownie today, too, from our church bell choir's bake sale. 

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