Cultivating Conscience :: Blog

Found ourselves in a Pickle

A few weeks ago, Justine worked her butt off making tons of pickles.

At first, I was dead-set against having all the crockpots in our garage, smelling of brine for three weeks.
Once the pickles were ready for canning, I dutifully helped her finish the process by creating new brine (the standing brine looked a bit dodgy), cleaning the jars, and completing the canning process.

The other night, we decided to crack open a jar and test her handiwork (notice I use "her handiwork" and not "our handiwork").

I have to tell you, I've never tasted anything more salty in my life!
As soon as my mouth began processing the salty pickle, I could feel my face grow sallow; my hair began to whiten as all the moisture in my body was removed.

In short - the Worst. Pickle. Ever!

No foul on Justine for all her hard work - we just overdid the salt. We forgot that, since the pickles had sat in a salted brine for three weeks, we wouldn't need to add NEW salt to a fresh brine mix before canning.

Our mistake, and while Justine is hesitant to try again, I'm confident if we just re-use the standing brine, or eliminate the new salt altogether we'll have a nice batch of edible pickles for the winter.

Consider this a lesson learned. A salty, painful lesson learned.

Posted in: Farming on 2009-09-01 05:21:04

Peaches, Strawberries, Granola Bars and More!

This past weekend, Justine and I collected some amazing supplies: 20lbs of fresh peaches, some strawberries and raspberries from a u-pick farm, two rounds of fresh cheese, and a whole lot more.
I'll leave it up to Justine to publish a source list of our supplies. For now, I'm going to add some video so you can see what we were up to on Sunday night.

Preserving the Harvest (Amazon.com)

Posted in: Cooking on 2009-08-03 00:00:00

From Your Garden Homestead - On Inches, Yards, or Acres (1977 Thomas Powell)

The recent recession, of course, gave gardening much of it's new impetus. With reduced incomes, and forced by the oil crisis to stay close to home, people turned to improving their own properties. And they discovered they could save quite a bit of money by growing their own food. More lawns and flower beds were torn up and converted into vegetable plots in the mid-1970's than in the Victory Garden years of the '40s.

Doesn't it just blow your mind how much we've come around again to a book printed in 1977?

Posted in: Books on 2009-08-01 00:00:00

What is Cultivating Conscience?

I'd be better serving you if I let my wife answer this question.

In the simplest form, Cultivating Conscience is a blog about two young-ish Ballard residents (Chad and Justine Edge), trying their damndest to to a little bit better in their food consumption than they were yesterday.
What that means to me (Chad) is we're trying to lower our food-miles¹ by buying more locally-grown food as well as canning, dehydrating and/or growing whatever we can in order to reduce the distance our food supply has to travel before it hits our bellies.

1. Food-miles, what a great statement. I'll write a definition and put up some links to our reason for using this term a little later

Posted in: Generic on 2009-07-31 08:52:22