Our BEST Garden Yet – Harvesting & Preserving for Winter | Ratatouille and Kimchi

Well, here we are, it is definitely the tail end of summer, a little bit sad, but that's just the way it is. It is the last call for a lot of things out here in the garden. We have got a lot of work to get done today. We're going to be doing some pruning, a bunch of harvesting, and at this time I'm also kind of collecting herbs and flower seeds. We had our first frost this year just a few nights ago. Thankfully, the celery was well-watered. It did nip our potatoes, but that's okay. Things are still growing at this point, but we just have to be realistic with our timeline and how much we can get harvested and put away before it does get too cold out here. Eric just told me that he saw the first geese fly south for the season. Usually that happens and then we won't see them for a few more weeks. They'll definitely start to fly over a lot more in September. And we're all bundled up today because it was only in the mid-40s yesterday, and I think it's the same today. The celery is getting harvested a little bit early because it does not tolerate the cold very well. As much as we would love to have this fresh in winter, the timing's just not good. You got to take it really late and you already have to have a chilled space, and our crawl space doesn't cool down this early in the year. That last frost did affect some of the outer stalks. You'll see they'll turn a little bit brown, but we'll just pull those ones off and we're pretty much just going to harvest all of it today. That's Red Mountain. Do you think all this celery will fit in here? This is lush right here. Whoa, that's a beauty. Yeah, she's a really pretty... She doesn't really soar very well, but she's really, really pretty. She doesn't look like she's really red on the inside either, but... No, she's like a... She's just never gotten that big. We decided that we were going to pull our onions and shallots today as well. That really just depends on the weather and what it's given to you. So ideally you dry them out in the field, but rarely do we get that opportunity. The onions did start to fold over certain varieties probably like two plus weeks back. And then if they don't, you can give them a little karate chop and usually they'll fall over. Sometimes they don't. And usually those onions don't store very well. But most of these, they did fold over. So their neck is going to kind of like cinch down and they'll start to dry. But because it's been wet and because we're coming into cooler temperatures, we're going to do the drying process inside the shop. Eric's already got some racks set up. I grew celeriac this year and it looks like I didn't keep it separate enough from the celery at planting time and they looked virtually the same. So some of these are celeriac, some of them are celery. You know, I can leave the celeriac grow longer because it's the bulb you eat. It doesn't get damaged in the frost, I don't think. Yeah, that's a good idea. This is celery. So you got a lot of green onion leaks over here. If I don't put that individual tag in each one, this is what happens. You know what I mean? You make mistakes. Oh, this is awesome. We're going to leave the Brussels sprouts in until the last minute. We want them to get hit with several frosts. I've already pruned them up and we also made sure to nip the top bud off or the little growing point. That way they can put a lot of their energy into these sprouts. In the onion bed, we are leaving our green onions and our leeks. Leeks again go for a long time and the green onions don't fold, so we just have to use those up. It has a twin. It's cold. It's really cold. We got a frost not too long ago and then it's 40 degrees today and that's cold. It is cold. I don't think it's warmer than it is here. I don't think I've ever seen this happen. I don't think I've ever had this happen before. This cauliflower had a little side shoot. Pretty cool. Two for one. I think I'll just put broccoli in the same thing. All right, we gleaned what we could from that bed. There was a few little broccolis left, little sprouts. So we finished those off quite a while back and we grew 17 broccolis and 22 cauliflowers, four of which were Veronica, so slightly different variety. I found since we grew several different varieties of cauliflower, they actually were pretty staggered which was pretty cool. We've already harvested about half of them previously. We did do a little trade with a neighbor for some rhubarb and I will say clementine was absolutely delicious when I was harvesting it for her. It was so sweet and so tender. Personally, I'm thrilled with the lavender because it's just like a really cool color. I'm sure you've seen purple cauliflower before, but I haven't grown it. There's another orange variety that we harvested today. It's called Flame Star by Territorial. Since we're out here, we're just cleaning up the whole bed. So we're taking down all of the plants and just leaving the roots in the grounds. Usually we'll give the greens to the chickens, but there's just so much and some of them are turning yellow. So we're going to be composting all of it. Eric got the garlic up. We waited a little bit late on that this year. They didn't do very well and I was hoping to let them get as big as they possibly could. When the leaves start turning yellow like that and once they get brown, you know that you definitely got to get them up. What can happen is they will split and separate the cloves from the bulb and they won't be as good for storage. Thankfully, that didn't really happen too badly. Some of them did rot, so this was just a really bad year for the garlic. But as a whole, this was our absolutely best garden ever up here in Alaska, maybe even our best garden in general in like eight years. Usually, we do have very productive gardens and Eric always makes fun of me. He says, you know, what are you going to do if everything does well one year ago? Because we all know that usually that's not the case. Actually, that's not the case ever. This year, almost everything was really phenomenal. I mean, truly a stellar year. There's a lot of stuff where I'm like, ah, this did so well. So really exciting, even though we only had a bleak garlic harvest. It's not quite time to dig up the potatoes. I have a feeling they did pretty well this year. It's usually the cold that, you know, beats them back every year. They don't usually like get brown and fall over on their own. We have learned to expect frost at any time in the summer. Right now, these plants are still fine. They're still kind of actively growing. You can tell by all the green. We've got to make sure that they're still well watered. I'm going to get started on harvesting some cabbage. Those have been a little late to form heads, but over half of them now have heads and we have to watch for splitting really closely at this time of the year. Because of the weather and just sometimes with age, they'll split. Eric's going to work on some harvesting of herbs and tying them up. It's decently heavy. Do you want to harvest that? Catmain? Yeah. I don't know. I'm going to see if she'll try it for anyone. She probably won't. I think this variety is Blairer Speck. I've only been doing that. I mean, it tastes just like the seed. That's for the chickens. Wow. Look at that Swiss chard. Watered my arm. Look how thick the stalk is on that. Yeah, that's what I was saying. Are you kidding me? Do you see that? Eric made us an espresso for all the work we still have to do. It's looking pretty good out here so far and I'm actually kind of really excited at this point. I think we both feel like a real sense of relief because not, you know, are we just excited about harvesting the produce? But to be real with you, it's like we know we're going to be shutting the garden down and that's such an awesome feeling because we put so much work into it that it's like, go to bed for a few months. I don't want to see you for a while. Kind of like when you're talking to your kids. I definitely wanted to show you how the fruit trees did this year, so let's head back there. These guys put on some really good growth this year. I was a little concerned with them. A lot of the leaves and the branches did actually come from new growing points on the tree, but they've gotten a lot bigger in their second year. So I definitely think that they're going to overwinter. I don't know really what it's going to look like when they grow next year. We'll see. The three varieties we have in the front are Prairie Sun, Higher 12, and Trailman. I think I have that order right. The one in the middle only survived beneath the grass, so we're not sure if we're going to keep that. The back are the Crab Apples, and those are doing really well. I did want to show you a few flowers that we have in the garden at this time of the year. Okay, well this one got a little bit hit by the frost. We had some really cool orange zinnias back there. Those usually take a while to flower, as well as the Rudbeckia. I don't really like Rudbeckia. I don't know if I'm going to continue to grow it in the future. And this is Wallflower. I've collected that for the first time this year for some tea. Pretty excited about that. Another flower worth mentioning is our Blanket Flower. Usually I just grow this one color, which is red with the yellow tips, but I had forgotten I grew a yellow kind, as well as this really cool like red, orange variety, rusty looking over with the Horseradish. I also collect those for tea. This is our Horseradish. We're going to be dividing up, or I guess, you know, troweling into it and, you know, taking off some of that root. Probably do that when we actually need it. And it did do really well this year. I planted all these flowers just to make sure we didn't get weeds in this bed and it worked. We don't have any weeds, but I'm going to go ahead and like prune them out pretty soon. I want this guy to overwinter. Shouldn't have a problem with that. Strawflower is still an all-time favorite of mine. It usually has this really awesome crunch, but they're wet and I like the texture and the smell as well. This is my favorite planter this year. It's one of those drums just cut in half and Eric wants to fill it up with a lot of compost. So we've got some Phlox. We have Bee Balm. That is my first time it has ever flowered. I don't know if it typically flowers on its first year. She's probably not going to survive out here. I am going to try to overwinter one. It was beautiful before the frost hit. And then we have some Hyssop, which has also never flowered in its first year. Pretty exciting. Looks like that's doing really well still. And we have Marshmallow. This is what you can actually make real marshmallows out of the root, I believe. I have quite a bit of it throughout the garden. And we have a new one called Pincushion. Pretty cool. I imagine it got its name because of how it looks. So it starts off with these little flowers and then it finally ends up as this super dry... Okay, maybe not that dry. I can't get that off. It looks a lot like a pincushion if you've seen those in sewing. So pretty cool. Are you going for big ones right now or are you going for smaller ones right now? Sometimes I try to thin them, but really, I would just try to pick different variety because then maybe the other ones will get a little bigger. That white one. Like, just random. Just pick a fish to you. How much do you want for kimchi? Look at that bad boy. That's a hot dog carrot right there. The rest are going to be like storage carrots. Look! That's pretty! Wow. I'm going to harvest some over here. There's different... Because you did like different varieties. Look at that fatty. He's real fat, huh? I'm not exaggerating. Oh, there we go. World's biggest turnip. That is huge! Okay. Me versus a turnip head. I'm not joking. That's bigger than your head. Well, it's rounder, probably. See, that's more like a softball. That makes sense to me. That's a massive turnip. Well, I'm sure the Alaska Fair Vegetables put these to shame, but I'm pretty excited about them. This is the biggest we've ever gotten turnips. And I was actually trying to grow them this big, honestly, because I saw they were getting big and I told Eric, don't touch those, you know what I mean, let them get as big as they can. No splitting. I mean, almost... I think I maybe saw one little worm mark on the other one. So pretty awesome, especially, you know, I thinned this bed, but I'm surprised that being that close, they got this big. Eric did a great job making these beds, though. They're super deep and rich compost. So I think that's why we're getting such good vegetables out of it. Look at these! Look at this! He's so much bigger. Those are our tree biggest. Hold those up, hon. Those are huge. I mean... They got too many leaves, honestly. The one next to it is huge, too. All right, it's time to head in the greenhouse. Much warmer in here. We did already get our coriander harvested for the year, went along, collected those, and we have the shop to dry that in. We also have our seed room, so a lot of the herbs are hanging in the seed room. These are our mesh drying racks, and you can utilize them for whatever you want. So I use them for herbs and also a lot of flower blends. I have yarrow right here. We've got a mix of a whole bunch of different flowers. If they're not that strong or their effects aren't that noticeable, I will mix them into a nice little blend that you can have in the morning, during the day, and at night. It's not going to keep you up. I have coreopsis or coreopsis down here at the bottom. That's my first time collecting that. I have read that it has some more medicinal benefits, so sometimes I'll keep them separate. Up top, we have nasturtium. Nasturtium has quite a bit of vitamin C. I've got marigold, chamomile, and calendula in there. I kind of like that mix for if you're feeling sick or just something soothing to go to bed. We have mint and lemon balm in here with some creeping thyme. So I harvested that, and I think I want to use it for tea, but we can also use it for culinary purposes, too. As these dry, I come along and collect them and just store them in jars, but if it gets moist in here, you know, or if it rains outside and I have the doors open, they will kind of absorb some of the moisture back. So I think I'll be able to pull them in a few days. This greenhouse has been so amazing this year. The showpiece in here is most likely the sunflowers. Those always seem to be commented on when people come over. I personally think the marigolds are quite fantastic. The sunflowers did, as I previously mentioned, get a little bit out of control. We actually had a super tall one that took a crash a few weeks back. Our tallest sunflower fell yesterday. It came into the greenhouse about 10 p.m. and saw it on the ground. So these are supported by some twine, and I guess it wasn't enough for how heavy this stalk is. This guy was probably like 12 feet. It's the tallest we've ever grown a sunflower. That's including, you know, being in this bed that's up off the ground, but he was going to touch the top of the greenhouse this season. Minimal damage on the way down. It did just like straight up snap. It snapped the twine too as well, but it's not a problem because there's a lot of other sunflowers still. Gotta do some major pruning and harvesting in here today. Right now, this area is protected from the outside elements, but it's only a matter of time because we don't have the stove hooked up. So it's not much warmer in here than it is outside. Eric's going to get started on harvesting us peppers. We're going to be doing some pepperoncinis soon, and then also some green beans. How tall do you think that one is over there? The tallest one's that one back there. I'm estimating 12, 13 feet at least. With the bed? No, without the bed. Oh, I'd say 12 to 13 with the bed, yeah, without it. That's beautiful. I'm not going to cut the nasturtiums down. We'll just let those fades out. Look at those colors. Those are true pepperoncinis. Oh, man. This plant is loaded. Do you see how many? This is one plant. There's about 30 peppers on here. It's so cool they turn red. That's like a hot plant. It's crazy that they turn red. I can't believe that. I didn't see these ones because there were so many bushes around them. There's so much more space that those marigolds don't. They were very big. Only two on that one. You got another pepperoncini over there. It looks pretty cool. Yeah, what is this one right here? This one is cold. It ain't cold nothing because there's no tag. So it must be the same as the one next to it. The peppers had a rough start this year with the aphid infestation in the seed room. But this is one of the pepper plants that Errol did start from seed. And it was affected by the aphids. It made a recovery. And we actually got some nice size peppers off of it. What's this one called? Lola? Lola. And there's another one right here. This is a hybrid banana pepper. Look at this one. There's a bunch in there, hun. No, there's just one on that one. Gotta make sure not to like prune off an actual squash. Wouldn't that be sad? I could be traumatized. This yellow crookneck only gave us those two squash. I mean... Can I have the spicy one? Like for Cabo Canyon stuff? They're not yet ready. We need to wait. Which is great. Because that means we don't have to harvest them yet. Yeah, that's great. We don't need the leaves at this point. So we are getting rid of them. Most of the squash or the pumpkins that we have on here pretty much have ripened. So I don't have to worry about them. But I don't really want them putting energy into their leaves anymore. I also am a little concerned about, you know, rot. Because it's a little wet and cooler in here. It's sad that some of them didn't get on the last train. We had some squash making these little beautiful little squash. But there's just absolutely no time for that at this point anymore. I'm not yet to my one squash per plant ratio. That's definitely a noble goal for me to aspire to. But we did definitely get some squash. And there's one back here that I'm really proud of. This one is a banana. We've never grown this guy. So I'm really excited that he... He's huge. Kind of looks like a banana, I guess. And then this over here is a Hubbard. And he's just massive. I don't want to break him, but... Oh my gosh, he's so heavy. I'm pretty proud of this one. And I cannot wait to eat it. There's a corner over here still. Not only did we get the huge harvest of peppers, which is awesome. And this is just the pepperoncinis. We still got all the hot ones we're going to pick. We did awesome on the green beans. We previously came through and harvested about two gallons. Blanched them, froze them, chamber sealed them. Those are in the freezer. One of the coolest things about the green beans is... You don't have to start it like in the seed room. So you just come out here, you put your little seed in, and it grows. And that's one of my favorite things about them. And then I just harvested another two gallons about right here. We both agree it's just super rewarding and awesome to have fresh green beans that we can eat and also put away. We have all different kinds that we grew. One of our favorites though is... Yeah, these ones right here. Kind of a yellowish white colored one. Sweet, crisp, real good bean. Well, they may not be mighty, but we got corn and it pollinated. And this particular variety, it does really well in shorter climates. I don't know if it's called Early Sunglow. I think that's the name. And we have waited too long to harvest it. And when it gets a little more milky inside the kernels, that's too long. So this is perfect. So we're going to harvest these small little ears today. Oh no, no, he did not all the way. But half of them is good. How do you blanch them? So you can blanch them whole or you can just... You either cut them in half, blanch them, and freeze them. Or whole and blanch and freeze. You got to take the husk off. Okay, okay. Yeah. This is sunflower. Well, I saved a particularly challenging task for the later part of the day. I think Eric informed me it's past eight. He's in there cooking dinner. I'm getting rid of all the leaves on the tomatoes. It's the final push now to get them to ripen. We do have the ability to ripen them inside, but I would just prefer it happened out here. And I think it's going to. There's not all that many tomatoes on each particular plant. I was kind of experimenting with liters this year. And I think in the future, I would leave less tomato liters. We also had the setback of just starting everything too early and not having the greenhouse done in time. So going forward, I think the tomatoes will do better. And unfortunately, we did have some issues with blossom end rot. If you're familiar with blossom end rot on tomatoes, it's where they get this little rotten spot on the bottom of the tomato. And sometimes they fall off. Sometimes they just continue to ripen and you just have to cut that off when processing them. That's been the case with most of ours. And you can treat it immediately. That's what we did. But in general, you want to try to prevent it. So it's a calcium uptake issue with the plants. The real reasoning behind it is usually inconsistent watering or not watering deep enough, which I think I was definitely guilty of. Once we saw it, I ordered some calcium carbonate, so lime. I didn't have any on hand, but we did have oyster shell and wood ash. And Eric was nice enough to spread that all over, watered them deeply. And it pretty much resolved the issue almost immediately. The newer tomatoes, they don't have any of them on it. I've also got to prune the tops of our tomateos because they're just not really filling out. And I think that should help make that happen. Pepper, you can not eat birds. No. Right now, opening up the freezer is like playing a game of Tetris. So we can't really complain. This is the most produce we've ever been able to put away in terms of freezing. So we've just been blanching vegetables and then chamber sealing them and getting them in here. Peas, broccoli, fennel. This isn't our only freezer. We have another one right here that's primarily bait. And it actually does have quite a bit of our meat mixed in it. And we had to get another small freezer because we're just so full. Eric fired it up. We have some stuff in there. We're primarily putting the tomatoes as they ripen in that one. When we moved to Alaska, we had one medium freezer. And we quickly realized that we needed a much larger one. So we got this big one back here. And we sold that one. I don't know what we were thinking. So I think it was a year ago, Eric surprised me with this other little freezer. And it just seems like we always need more space. I guess that's a pretty good problem to have. It took us forever yesterday. But we got all of that celery cut up, blanched. We got it, put it in the vacuum bags. We got it in the freezer. We ended up with like over 20 packets of that. We got all the cauliflowers done. The corn and the green beans as well. As much as we love canning, we tend to gravitate towards our vegetables frozen or as fresh as possible. Canning is much more preferred for recipes. Kind of like we're going to be doing today. So we've got a lot of chopping and we're going to get to work. Our relish mixture is done. We are going to draw some of the moisture out now. We're going to be using some kosher salt. We'll let it sit for a little while. So we have two red onions in here. One sweet onion. A bunch of colorful peppers. And a bunch of garlic. Just a little bit. We're going to be adding basil, parsley, and dill to the mix. Eric got the pepperoncinis and banana peppers done. He also added some sweet onions and garlic. And we're going to be adding just dill and basil to that mix. Next up, we're starting on our brine. I don't know if it's going to be more than eight. Alright, well that made more than we were thinking. We have 15 jars here. I forgot to put the herbs in, so I'm going to have to do that. And Eric's doubling up on that brine. You can really do the brine any way you want. For these, we kind of wanted a little more mild. Whereas for the relish, we're definitely going to up the sugar and up the vinegar. A super important ingredient, we are adding some bay leaves. We're going to do half a leaf in each jar. And I kind of smash things down in there because this is a raw pack. So once you add the hot brine, the pepperoncinis, they float to the top. But they will kind of condense as they cook a little bit. They're almost ready to go in the water bather. And they go for 15 minutes. Two batches? Yeah, two batches. We're working on a French Sorel cream sauce. I was pretty excited when I saw this because we have a bunch of French Sorel. And I don't really quite know how to use it. So this is going to be like a creamy dressing sauce. You can use it on meat, fish, pasta, things like that. We're not going to be canning it. I'm just going to be freezing it. We've got about 3 tablespoons of unsalted butter, 2 shallots, a whole head of garlic, a bay leaf, some peppercorns. In just a second, I'm going to be adding some chicken stock, some white wine vinegar. You can use white wine if you have that. We don't have any on hand. And then a little bit of olive oil. Okay, this is cooked just enough. I don't know if you caught that. We actually have some oric in there too. And it stays that really vibrant green. Whereas the Sorel turns a little bit of a darker green. There we go. And I am improvising this a bit. We have I think 7 cups of chicken stock. Whoa, that's a lot of liquid in there. We're going to be adding some kefir yogurt, some mustard, and some heavy cream to this. Blenders scare me really badly. Looks like there's a storm that is just skipping us. And I am working on some Herbs de Provence while I have our blender out because I'm going to be making some compound butter again. And this is rosemary, tarragon, marjoram, lavender, and thyme. So we're going to be doing one that is French inspired and the other is going to be Italian inspired butter. This one's really good. Fire cider is classified as an oxymelon so it's half vinegar, half honey and it has a slew of ingredients. We've got herbs, we've got onions, we have citrus, we've got cinnamon, peppercorns, cloves. We're going to be using rose hips. You can definitely use cranberries if you have those. And I believe this is probably where it got its name from. You can use hot peppers, we've got serranos and jalapenos, ginger, garlic, and horseradish. And let's not forget about turmeric. We didn't find the fresh root on hand but I do have turmeric powder. We're going to be using this receptacle and we're just going to layer everything in. All of the ingredients are covered. We're going to let this sit inside for a few weeks before we dare to actually get in there and try it. And we are making a salmon wedge salad for tonight. It's the last salad of the season. Alright, I'm in here in the greenhouse this morning and I'm harvesting some squash and zucchini for a very special dish that we're having tonight. And we're going to kind of be celebrating the eggplants that we harvested the other day. We don't normally get to harvest eggplants like that. I think we got like 15 all together which is pretty amazing considering those plants had the major setback with the aphids this year. We've got more French and Italian food on the menu. This particular squash has a really interesting little deformation. You can see the seeds. I'm going to grab a few other varieties and then we have to do some major chopping. We are starting with kimchi first. I finally did get all the pruning done out here. It may seem a little extreme but I'm happy that I did it because the tomatoes are starting to ripen. So at this point we come out here and we just pick them off the soil if they fell or as we see them, you know, ripening on the vines. We'll get those over to the freezer. We did enjoy a green tomato pie the other night and our secret is that we don't use just green tomatoes. We're done in here at this point. We've got sunflower heads, the ones that have already filled out. We've got those drying in the seed room. Eric strung a bunch of stuff over there. We're utilizing that room for drying. If you're curious at all about our tropical adventures, the Cuban oregano is doing awesome in here. The pineapple sage has like quadrupled in size. Our lemon verbena looks pretty good. The ginger is taking its sweet time still. It is going again but I really set it back last year when it got frozen and then I had to divide it up so it is going and I think maybe next year if I'm lucky we'll be able to harvest again from it. Eric already moved those over to the seed room but our citrus plant is doing absolutely phenomenal. I actually put him out here right at the beginning of spring and he's loved it out here. We're gonna move him back now but I'll show you there's a bunch of fruit on it. We didn't really know when the fruit is ripe because some of these little guys have been on here for a long time but I think this is ripe. So they get dark green. They get like a softer, squishier texture. I think this one's ripe. I think that's where they max out. Not very big at all. And this is a calamondin. Is that what it's called? I'm not sure how you would utilize these. Maybe if you were making like tacos or something. Pretty sweet. They're orange on the inside and they taste just like a lime and a mandarin in my opinion. We've got dozens more on the plant so we'll have to figure out a way to utilize them. We're surely making a winter's worth of kimchi and we always pretty much use turnips for this since I don't have any daikon radishes and I cannot grow napa cabbage so we're just going to be using our normal cabbage. We decided we're going to dust the green onions that were off in the garden and Eric's grabbing a few more carrots. Eric started salting our cabbage chunks. I'm trying to leave them as big as I can. We're going to add a pretty good amount of salt to about seven heads of cabbage. We're going to cover it with brine so more water and salt and let that sit for about two hours before we can move on to the next step. I don't even know how to chop an eggplant Eric. That's how many times I've eaten one. We are making antipasto. Not just any antipasto this is eggplant antipasto and these eggplants are so beautiful I honestly feel like crying because they're just gorgeous and like I said we never get to harvest that many. And we are adding some hawkswing mushrooms. These are dried from like two seasons ago hopefully we get to pick some more of those this year and I'm also going to be using some store bought tomatoes because I don't feel like pulling from ours. So we're going to get all of this with some olive oil and some salt and pepper into the oven. We're going to whip up the paste that we're going to be using to make the kimchi and it's going to use something called sweet rice flour. We've actually never used this before but it is used as a thickener. We have three and a half cups of water. We're going to add seven tablespoons of the flour. To our paste mixture we have added two onions and about two heads of garlic. We've got it all blended up. We're going to take about half of it out real quick. We're going to be using this big tote to mix our kimchi since we're making so much. So I'm going to pour about half of this in here and we're going to mix some more ingredients in the blender. A few of the things we're going to be adding are fish sauce. This stuff's pretty good. It's like fermented anchovies. We're going to do ginger powder on this one. We have Korean chili flakes, a little bit of crunchy garlic chili sauce, and the gochurang paste is a key ingredient and I think, I think that's about it. Definitely has like peppers in there, huh? Tastes like a spicy Top Ramen soup. We've got our roasted veggies in a pot. They look delicious. This recipe quite literally translates to before the meal and you can serve it that way as like an appetizer or you can just eat it on its own. We've made it in Oregon and it was amazing. You definitely could can this. I just didn't find anything that I'm comfortable with and I didn't want to get out our pressure canner today. So we're going to be freezing it. We're now adding in a bunch of olives. We've got green olives. Can't remember the name. Some kalamatas. We're going to add a little bit of red wine vinegar. Probably a hair more olive oil and basil, oregano, and thyme. We ended up adding a little bit of tarragon and I forgot to mention we need to add some sugar. Maybe just like an eighth of a cup. We also made sure to roast some onions and garlic when the other vegetables had already got cooked and we added a little bit of tomato sauce too. We're going to add some salt and some sugar. The reason we're going to add salt is we're using regular cabbage, not Napa cabbage so we're thinking it didn't really absorb the salt as much as a Napa cabbage would which is a little softer. Less dense. So we'll just sprinkle some on top. We'll taste it at the end and see what it's tasting like. This is a lot of kimchi and we're just going to mix the sauces on the bottom with everything in here. How much sugar are we doing? I'd say at least a cup. This is three quarters of a cup. Let's just add that. I don't know. Well you're right. It didn't taste salty when I washed it. But we haven't got the sauce on it. There's the sauce right there. Okay we grabbed some baked leaves from the cabbage to put on the top. These are going to be the containers that these are staying in just for now. For a few days they're going to be in our cabin where it's warmer to let that fermentation begin. You know I've never done it without a brine so it'll be interesting to see as this one starts to ferment if it bubbles at all. I know we'll definitely be able to tell once it's fermented because you can just taste that tang. And once it gets to the point that we want and we want to slow the process down we will transfer them to some other containers that we have for fermenting. More long term. We'll move them down to the crawl space. Hopefully it's cool enough down there. And these are definitely going to reduce in size. My guess is they will be maybe only like two, three gallons when everything's done. I have one lid. But if you want to, I mean any lid's fine. So I just really want to smash that in. So just hopefully nothing. Do you want to do a weight on top too? Yeah. A weight I would. It's probably going to get pink or red. I would close it all the way so like dust and stuff doesn't get in it. Last but most certainly not least, we are making ratatouille for dinner. We've got some marinara that we made. Lots of ingredients in there. And some bechamel sauce. So a little bit of a cream sauce. I know that's not traditional but it sounded really good. So we're adding that. Going to have a quick snack before dinner and I wanted to follow up on these lacto-fermented pickles that we made a few weeks back. They quite literally turned out to be our best pickles ever and I'm seriously sure it's because of the bay leaves. They have like such a good crunch. I'd probably have to show you by eating it but like there's major crunch. We ended up with over a gallon and now we're down to just a quart. I wish we had more cucumbers so we could have some of those over the winter. And I did forget to put some lemon balm in our fire cider yesterday so I'm going to add that. You can see that the honey has all incorporated already in there so it's all smelted and infused. We just have to wait until dinner comes out of the oven. Really wildly potent. So I'm not going to lie, I've wanted to cook this ever since I saw the movie Ratatouille. And normally this wouldn't really be something that I'd want to make. I don't know why it's just all vegetables but it does look... We made those celery meatballs that one time. Celery meatless meatballs. Those were good. I haven't had eggplants since years. It's very it's like very not sophisticated. There's a lot of flavors in the sauces. I'm not getting too much of that cream sauce. When we made it I put nutmeg and cayenne in it. It was really good. I can't tell the difference between two eggplants. It definitely has like a softer, not spongy, but eggplant texture. I'm not sure what my obsession is with trying to grow eggplants. I don't know if we actually love them as much as I think we do. I really like their color and everything. Did you like the eggplant? I think it's good. I would put some sort of cheese on here. Like ricotta, parmesan, and then some meat. And it would be even better. I do agree with Eric. I think that if I were to change this dish, I would definitely cheese would be helpful, meat would be helpful, but honestly I'm missing some sort of toasted crunch. That's just something I find really desirable in these casserole. Especially like the French. We've done the potatoes and I remember just thinking, oh it didn't turn out as good as I had thought all that time and effort went into it. But it is exciting to have all of the harvest and preserving done. We've been working for a few days and it's nice to have that behind us. Even though there's more to do. It is, I could have priced. It's not missing salt, it's just, it's missing something. I remember when we made the potato dish and it was missing something as well. Well it's meant to be a basic dish. It's not like this crazy extravagant like thing. No it's not. It's meant to be made out of what you had in the fridge. Leftover food I think. No, he makes the dish because the lady's coming and she's going to judge him. It's a guy. The judge. And it brings him back to his childhood when he was poor and it was like his mom made it and it reminded him of it and it was like this whole thing. You've got a better memory than I do. I don't know if you had any. It would be good with a nice crusty roasted piece of sourdough. Okay so this wasn't the best meal we've ever made but it's good so.