Pickled Veggies, Chicken Stock & More | Canning At The Cabin

Good morning everyone. We have a bunch of stuff planned for today and tomorrow. So we are just going to jump right in. Eric and I are first starting off this morning with making some chicken stock. So we've got a bunch of chicken carcasses in our pressure canner. That's how we're going to be making them. It's kind of like an expedited or quicker version than doing it slowly, you know, on a pot for several hours. This way we can get it done in about 90 minutes. So in this pot here I have some little roosters. These were roosters that we were not able to keep because we can't keep that many roosters. Earlier this year we had about 35 chickens hatch and half of them actually was 18 were boys. So we made our final cuts the other day and now they will be used for us for food and for chicken stock, which is just awesome. It turns out really good. I'm also going to be adding the feet this year. Usually we give these to the dogs. They absolutely love them. I give the heads all the organs except for the intestines to the dogs and the skin and the small intestines and the feathers actually go into our compost pile and those break down, go right back into our garden. So I'm excited to try the feet this year because I read that these have a lot of flavor. Other things we're going to be adding to the stock are some red onions that we have and little shallots. Got some garlic and we were going to add sage, thyme, oregano, and tarragon and all of this is going to basically be smithereens when we're done. We're going to strain it out. So anything you put in now like celery, carrots, all of that, it's just going to break down, but it would add some really good flavor if you want to do that. I want to show you guys these onions. This is Red Bull that we grew last year and they are small, but they lasted so long. I don't even know how old these are. I feel like these are solidly 10 month old onions and you can tell they are sprouting. And so when we cut them up, we just take out the outer skin because it is, um, or the outer layer, it does get a little bit squishy, but there's still really good onions. So if you're looking for a red onion that stores really well, this is it. Okay guys, because we are doing this in a pressure canner, you want to make sure to leave some space on the top. I believe ours says to do it about two thirds full. So that's what we're doing. We're going to get the top on here, get this going. And while this is cooking, we're going to head inside. Cause like Ariel said, we have a bunch of stuff to do today. Our pressure canner is finally up to temperature. It took a little while, but we're going to cook this for about an hour and a half at 14 pounds. Now that we're back in the kitchen, we are going to be cleaning some of the salmon roe that we have from the sockeye we harvested the other day. We're going to be turning it into caviar. We did it last year. Absolutely delicious. I can't quite say it's really worth the time. These are very difficult to clean the little individual eggs from the membrane. We're just going to go ahead and jump right in. It's probably going to take me some time. And when we feel like we've got enough for our consumption, we are going to be giving the rest of the chickens. I absolutely love it. So you can see these eggs are pretty tiny and there's a membrane that's holding them all together. That's what we're after that we want to remove. I don't have a very effective method, but the best I've found is to kind of lightly press down and to kind of sweep them off of that membrane. And you want to do it just gently, try not to break too many eggs and not get that skin with it. We finally finished getting some of this roe cleaned up and it is a total nightmare. We were reminded why we probably won't be doing this in the future. We're actually looking into maybe smoking them or curing them and smoking them for eating. So now that I have these cleaned, I'm going to go ahead and add them to some water. I have a third of a cup kosher salt mixed with one quart of water and we're going to let them brine for just two minutes. Last time we did four minutes and we found those to be a hair too salty. So it's been two minutes. We're going to strain this. I'm going to run some cold water over these and then I'm going to put them in our jar. I think I just got about one jars worth right now and we're going to be putting them in the fridge and eating them tomorrow and we will let you guys know how they taste. Okay guys, the chicken broth cooked for a hour and a half and it's done now. Just waiting for it to stop steaming and let it drop down all the way to zero before I pull the top off. We're going to bring it inside. We're going to pick out some of the bigger things and then we're going to strain it. It smells really good. It smells like a really good chicken soup. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to pull out big chunks that I can, you know, the bones, big chunks of meat, the feet, some of the stems of the herbs are in there. So we've got most of the chicken and the herbs out of here and we're going to go ahead and strain this. So these were young roosters that we made this chicken broth out of and generally you want to let this cool down until the fat kind of solidifies up top and you want to skim that off before you can it. There's really not a lot of fat in here, so we're just going to go ahead and can it just like this today. All right, we're going to be canning the chicken stock in quart size jars today. We're just wiping the lids with vinegar to get rid of any excess oil on the rim and then we're going to process them for 25 minutes at 11 pounds. So with the remainder of the chicken stock, we are actually going to be pulling out some of the breast meat for us. Eric and I are going to fry that up and eat that tonight and the rest of it is going to go to the dogs and I get a lot of questions about cooked bones. Um, these are extremely cooked bones, so they disintegrate. They actually just crumble and that's how it's okay to feed them to our dogs because they're not going to splinter. They're just totally dust at this point. Um, and same thing with like the feet, they just totally break down. So I'm going to go through this and give the rest to them and they are also going to be getting a really good meal tonight. All right, so we are back in the kitchen. We have finished processing our chicken broth and it looks awesome. We're going to move on to making some kefir cheese. That's what I call it. I think it could be pronounced kefir. I'm not quite sure, but we have some kefir grains and milk that has turned over for about 24 hours so it's thickened up. If you're not familiar with it, it's like a sour drinkable fermented yogurt and it's really awesome. Eric and I have been drinking it for a few years and in fact we don't really drink the yogurt. We use it in a lot of other ways. Overnight oats, dressing. We don't buy a lot of dairy products, so this is kind of our dairy product for us. And recently we discovered making cheese with it and what you get is a really soft ricotta type cheese. It's awesome. So we're going to make it today. And I have a little silver bowl, a little strainer and some cheesecloth and what I'm going to do is just pour this yogurt since it's thickened now into the cheesecloth. And since I just emptied all the contents into this, now I have to go fishing for the little grains and I'm just going to wait until I scoop around here until I find some. So these are the grains. I'm going to put them in this jar for now and get them cleaned up and then we'll be putting them into a new batch of fresh milk. So this is what the grains look like. They kind of look like little tapioca. They are just soft and squishy and this is the yeast and the bacteria that is responsible for turning over the milk into the drink we know as keeper. And so I'm just going to plop them in there. Usually they drop down to the bottom and I usually rinse the top and put it back on and I just lightly screw the cap back on and I put it on our counter and it sits there for another 24 hours at room temperature. And so that's how you make keeper. But again, we are making the cheese today. If you guys aren't familiar with it, it's an awesome drink. I really like it. We use it, like I said, again, in so many different ways and it's really functional for us. So I'm going to put this aside and we're going to wrap up our cheesecloth. So I'm taking the cheesecloth and I'm just going to kind of twist it and I'm going to hang this somewhere. We hang it over on our counter and then I leave a bowl underneath it because it's going to drip. And so it usually takes probably a good 12 hours to turn into the cheese and that's it. You've got your cheese. It's so simple. It's awesome. It can be, you know, spreadable. It's a little bit crumbly. We're going to add some salt and herbs tomorrow to it and most likely be eating it with the caviar. I'm going to bring this over to where I hang it up and we're going to check on it tomorrow. We're out in the garden collecting some herbs for a vinegar I'm going to make and we are also grabbing some flowers and a few leaves for some dried tea that we're also making. So while we're out here, I want to show you guys how the potatoes are doing. This is how big they've gotten to this point. And last year what happened is they eventually flopped over and just like took up this massive amount of space, which I can tell they're going to do again this year. So this is my little drying rack. It's just a window screen. We're going to be making some fresh tea tonight, but I'm also working on drying a mix for the winter. Last year I would do one ingredient or one plant and separate them, but I really like to mix them over the winter. So I'm just kind of doing mixes for how I want them to be. That stuff's been drying for a few days. So we're going to add this stuff over here and we've got nasturtium, nasturtium leaves. I meant to grab, I forgot. We've got some yarrow and fireweed. We have forage catnip and we have some chamomile as well. One other thing I grabbed while we were outside is some mint. I believe this is apple mint and it actually is a lot more potent once dried, but we have so much of it right now. I just figured I'd want to put it in. It's one of our favorite things to have in tea. While our water is boiling, we are going to make our infused vinegar and it's really simple. In fact, I've never done it before. Um, I really like white wine vinegar. You can use apple cider vinegar, red wine vinegar. I think you can even use normal vinegar, but most people recommend not using that kind. Um, so again, we're going to use white wine vinegar. I just have a bottle here and we're going to be adding thyme, uh, some banana peppers. These are garlic scapes we had that we picked earlier and we have chives. So we make a lot of homemade dressings and that is how we're planning on using this. Um, we're big vinegar fans and I saw this online and just thought it was a really cool idea. So the idea with it is that you're going to let this sit for about four weeks on a counter and preferably out of sunlight and just at room temperature and all of this stuff is going to infuse into that vinegar. So you're going to end up with a really flavorful vinegar in a few weeks. So our tea is boiling. I'm going to get the water in right to finish off this vinegar. We're just going to pour the white wine vinegar in. It smells awesome. It smells like summer. I'm really excited for this. In fact, summer will be over by the time this is done. So we'll probably just end up using it on other things in the kitchen, but that's okay. Um, so I'm gonna get this cap pop down and I'm just going to be letting this sit on our back counter. That's well shaded. Eric and I are going to have dinner and then we're going to pick back up tomorrow in the garden. We have quite a bit more canning to do. We're picking back up this morning. We harvested a bunch of greens and we're going to be blanching them and freezing them. We've got lots of kales and Swiss chard blanching them. If you're not familiar with that name is just putting the greens in water, really hot water for, you know, a minute or so. And then you take them out and drain them. The reason you're doing it is because you want to preserve these and they'll preserve so much better that way. Not only does it clean it, but it stops any sort of enzyme activity on the plant and it will make it so your kale holds up better during the freezing process. Okay, so these are already done. So real quick thing, you can tell they're nice, bright, vivid green. We're getting our next batch in and Eric and I canned greens last year for the first time. They were awesome in the winter with some soups and things like that, but we also blanched kale and we found that we eat kale a lot more or the greens a lot more like that. We prefer them that way frozen. So we don't have a lot of freezer space. We have to be really mindful of what we're freezing, but we just like this way better. It works for us. All right, we finished harvesting from the garden. We also blanched some collard greens and beet greens and they are ready now to be moved to the freezer. All right guys, we got our veggies all cleaned up and we're going to be making three different things today. We are going to be making a kohlrabi relish. We're going to make some pickled veggies, just a mix of veggies. And then we're also going to make some fermented veggies. Some of the things we have out here is we have the kohlrabi. We have turnips, a bunch of peas. We have some small beets. And then these are the ribs from Swiss chard. And then these are the ribs from some beet greens. We have some zucchini, green onions, a few different herbs and some cauliflower heads. I'm going to put these kohlrabi aside along with a few turnips that we're going to use for the relish. And then I'm going to start chopping these veggies up. Arrow's going to jump in here. She's going to start packing our jars for us. Do you think these will be good pickled? I hope so. I think they will. We did some thyme, parsley, and some dill. And then I'm just going to add a little bit of salt to each one of these jars. We're going to pause on the pickled and fermented veggies and we're going to be switching gears to the kohlrabi and turnip relish. Someone sent us this recipe and it's actually radish relish, but our radishes this year, a lot of them bolted and we just happened to have a lot of kohlrabi. So I figured it'd be a good substitute. Eric and I usually eat kohlrabi raw. In fact, we were just having a discussion about it. Everything here is just entirely different. The season is so condensed and all our food is just ready at once. And believe it or not, summer is going to be over. Practically is already almost over. So this is a really awesome vegetable to can because it holds up really well to the heat treatment and the pickling. It stays really crispy and so does cauliflower. Those are really good, um, you know, vegetable items that hold up well to that. See, I was, I'm more efficient, huh? I'm not as efficient, but I was cutting more thoroughly. All of our kohlrabi and our turnips are chopped up. We're going to be adding some garlic scapes. Uh, the recipe calls for garlic, but we only have garlic scapes and we are adding five small red onions. All right, I'm going to get started on the brine. For this kohlrabi relish, I'm going to use four cups of apple cider vinegar and I'm going to put a little over a cup of sugar in there. Close to that. You're, you're close to beautiful, but you're just not close. So that's good enough, right? It was a close a, but it was actually just a B plus. All right, we've got our apple cider vinegar and our sugar in the pot. We're going to add two tablespoons of cumin seed. We're going to do coriander, salt, mustard seed, and then we're going to add about half a tablespoon of black pepper. I'm getting the herbs chopped up that we're going to be using today. I've got a bunch of cilantro. We did a little bit of parsley, and then we have winter savory. We're going to be putting in there. This brine just got to a boil. So what we're going to do is we're going to add all of our ingredients that we haven't put in there yet, which is our onion, garlic scape, our herbs, kohlrabi and the turnip. We're going to put it in there, give it a stir, and then we're going to let it boil for 10 minutes. And at that point, we're going to be ready to put it in our jars. Our relish is all done and boiled for 10 minutes. We're going to put it into some pint jars and we're going to be water bathing this for 15 minutes. We're getting started on the pickled brine for the pickled veggies. And I'm going to add two cups of water. I'm going to do a little under a cup of sugar and then we're going to do five cups of just regular white vinegar. I'm going to get this to a boil and then we're going to add it to our jars. I think we've got 19 jars to do. I just pulled the radish relish out of the water bath canner. It looks like it turned out pretty good. I'm going to put these aside and our brine is boiling, which means it's ready to be poured over our pickled veggies. All right, so that did exactly half of what we needed to do. So I'm going to have to mix up one more batch of brine, but we got enough to start water bathing. So we're going to get the lids on these, get them in. I'm going to get another batch of brine boiling. This one turns so red. All right, we finished water bathing our last batch of pickled vegetables and the last thing we have to do is make the brine for our vegetables that we're going to be fermenting. For the brine, we're going to be using two tablespoons of kosher salt to four cups of water. You can actually use a little bit more salt depending upon your preference, but we generally like to do the two tablespoons to the four cups of water ratio. Now I'm just going to give this a quick stir and get two more cups of water to add to this jar. And it's just as simple as pouring it over. And our brine didn't cover the vegetables. So I need to make a little bit more of the brine to cover the vegetables. That's the crucial step to fermenting them is we need them to stay submerged underneath the liquid. So I'm going to add about one more cup of water and I'm going to do one tablespoon again of kosher salt. I know you may be thinking that's not the right ratio. The truth is one to three tablespoons of salt per quart of water is really the right ratio. So you can use a little bit less and you can use a little bit more because there's quite a bit of vegetables in here. I'm just going to err on the side of having it a little bit saltier. That's kind of crucial to keeping that the bad bacteria away when you're doing the fermenting. Now all I have to do is close this lid and let this sit at room temperature for a few weeks. We usually like to let it sit for a minimum of a week. It really takes a few days for the fermenting to start and it just continues the longer you let it sit. Some people like to let it sit for even a few months. And since I have a lid that actually is sealing, I will need to just open it up every once in a while to release the air. You're going to see some bubbling and things like that. That's all normal. We just don't want it to expand too much and not have anywhere for it to release the air. And again, one of the most important things when you're fermenting is just to make sure everything stays beneath the brine because you don't want it to get above the brine. You'll start to see some mold develop on anything that comes above that brine and you can pretty much ferment anything you want as far as the vegetables go. We just have a random mixture of, I think we have zucchini, the turnips, the swiss chard and cauliflower. Lots of different things in there and some herbs, but anything you find good. We've done this with carrots, beets. It all turns out really awesome and we generally just eat through it while it's fermenting and if you find that you're not eating through it fast enough and it's getting a little too tangy for you, you can just put it in a colder place and that's going to slow down the process and make it last a little longer to eat. We're going to head outside and put those greens that we froze earlier away. So we like to store our greens in just a bag. It works really well. A paper bag. We did this last year and it was really easy for us to come in here and just grab them out of the bag as we wanted. You could definitely use, you know, plastic too. We're just trying to stay away from that because of the disposable aspect of it. So this works really well for us and the kale has frozen, you know, not all together, but we're able to get each leaf kind of apart from each other. And usually the way I like to do it is to have a bag that's big enough to fold over. I don't have one right now. I'm going to have to go searching for another one to see if I have more for this. But this way it works really well. Uh, we really like it. One thing I forgot to mention was that we did try drying greens last season and although it was okay, it definitely worked. We, we air dried them. We didn't really eat them as much as we ate the frozen one. So we just found that frozen for us was the best compared to canned and dried. All right guys, it's the next morning and we did not forget about our keeper cheese. In fact, I went ahead and made another batch. This is the keeper cheese from the other day, but I wanted to show you guys what it looks like once it's done, you know, straining and it can take anywhere from like six to 12 hours and you can let it go longer. And what's just going to happen is you're going to get a thicker, thicker cheese. And so you can see it's a lot like ricotta. So I'm going to be adding it to our other cheese and we're going to add some dill chives and salt to it because it's very mild. It doesn't even taste sour. It's just a really mild light cheese. So I've got about all I can get out of here and I'm going to rinse this and put this aside and save it for next time. All right, it's time to do a taste test. So we salted this less this time and I kind of pre-tried it. I think it's about where we like it. Tastes like seaweed, like really good salty seaweed. Really good. The dill's good on there. Okay. So this time around, do you like how salty it is? Salt level on this is pretty much spot on. I think we'll definitely do it for two minutes next time. And I think my overall review of caviar is it's pretty good. It's really hard to make. Um, but like I said, I could just have one little jar like this a season would probably be enough for me. As far as the keeper cheese is great. I love the keeper cheese. I think we've been eating it. Like we've pretty much just been making cheese out of our keeper now. It's really awesome to have cheese again. Absolutely. The keeper cheese is like a substitute for so many other things for us and the caviar is more like a novelty food. It's really good to try. I mean, I do really like it. Pink salmon that we're going to be fishing for later, have a lot bigger eggs, easier to work with. So we're looking forward to that. Thank you guys as always for watching what we've been up to the last few days. And if you try to do any of these recipes yourself, let us know how they turn out for you. We'll see you next time. All of our kohlrabi all of our kohlrabi.. Okay. Kohl rabie. All of our kohlrabi all of our kohlrabi, all of our kohlrabi.