On Making Something From Nothing

In which a magic trick of sorts is performed and pictures are utilized after a brief hiatus.

Pop quiz, hotshot¹.  You've taken a vow of poverty and you only work a part-time job.  But you still want to eat a delicious, well-balanced meal that includes, among other things, fresh fruits and veggies.  What do you do?  What do you do?

No you don't shoot the hostage.  Silly Keanu, that's your answer to everything.  For a more peaceful solution I'd invite you to do what my friends at the Catholic Worker do.  They go around to grocery stores and get fruits and vegetables that the store is getting rid of².  My friend Carrie talked about it here.

Once you return from the store your kitchen table may look like this:

So you've got all this food that needs to be used rather quickly.  But even spread among four houses there are only so many apples that one man can eat.  Once solution is to bake a whole bunch of apple crisp (which was Carrie's solution) however, you still run the risk of it going bad.  Will suggested that we can a bunch of it so that it will keep on a more long term basis.  Genius.  So the next morning we got to work.

Our plan was to stew the tomatoes, make apple butter from the apples, and make a hot pepper jelly from the peppers.  Tim and I went to Will's house at about 9 in the morning to get started³.  Tim's job was to peel, core and slice the apples (I think we had like six pounds).  My job was to peel the tomatoes using the following process.  First I placed the tomatoes into a pot of boiling water.  Once the skin split I put them in ice water for a few minutes.  Then I simply peeled the skins right off.  Next I cored and quartered the tomatoes so that they could be put into cans.

After this the cans get lids and are boiled in water so that the lids seal and the tomatoes cook all the way through.

Tim's apples were cooked in pots with a little bit of water so that they softened up.  Then we through them in a food processor and back into the pot they went.  This time with cinnamon, nutmeg and a whole lot of sugar.  You bring the whole mess to a boil and just let it go until the apple butter thickens up.  Will said that it was on the stove from 10 until around 3:30 when he finally canned it, but it could have stayed on even longer.

As for the peppers, they were cored and quartered as well.  The green and red peppers had most of their seeds removed, the smaller ones kept their seeds.  After that it was a trip to the food process and then into a pot with some sugar.  After a few minutes you add some pectin so that the jelly will set.  Then boil it and can it.  If you have never had hot pepper jelly I highly recommend it.  It is great with cheese and crackers.

This was my first time canning vegetables and it was very fun, though it helped to be doing it with Will and Tim, and it was a great way to utilize the food we had gotten.  The total cost of the whole endeavor was around $13.  For that we came away with four quarts and a pint of tomatoes and something like 10 pints of apple butter⁴, unfortunately the pectin didn't set so the jelly didn't turn out right.  But hopefully we can still use it in stir fry.

So there you have it, something from nothing.  If you want to stop by for a little dab of D.A.B.⁵ come on by and I will throw a slice in the toaster for you⁶.

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¹ "I saw this movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode! I think it was called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down."
² Aka they go dumpster diving, which creeped me out at first, until I realized that these stores get rid of perfectly good fruit.
³ Hooray for snow days!
⁴ A quick google search has apple butter priced at $5 a pint, so we made $50 worth of apple butter alone.
⁵ Dumpster Apple Butter.
⁵ We got a bunch of Bakehouse bread from the Saharamart if you want to double up on your free stuff.