Keeping the Harvest: Preserving Your Fruits, Vegetables and Herbs

Blending your grandmother’s pickling know-how with today’s internet resources, Andrea Chesman shows you how easy it is to fill your pantry with tasty homemade sauerkraut, Salt-Cured Dilly Beans, and Rosemary Onion Confit. Explaining classic techniques in simple language, guiding you to helpful websites, and making you laugh with humorous stories, Chesman provides inspiration and encouragement for both first-time picklers and dedicated home canners. With tips on pickling everything from apples to zucchini, you’ll enjoy exploring the stunning variety of flavors that can fill a Mason jar.

From the Back Cover:
Why limit yourself to cucumbers when pickling out the best in so many vegetables and fruits? Andrea Chesman offers dozens of zesty possibilities in this comprehensive guide to pickling that features recipes for the crisp cucumbers you've always loved - dills, half-sours, bread and butters - plus delicious ideas for pickling everything from carrots to rhubarb, cabbage to pineapple.

It doesn't matter whether you have a few fresh-picked cucumbers or ten pounds of beets. Single-jar recipes, big-harvest ideas, relishes, chutneys, fermented pickles and krauts, and freezer and refrigerator variations provide pickling solutions for every situation. And once your pantry is fully stocked, Chesman provides recipes for 36 delicious ways to use your pickles in prepared dishes.

The authors of the best-selling Fermented Vegetables are back, and this time they’ve brought the heat with them. Whet your appetite with more than 60 recipes for hot sauces, mustards, pickles, chutneys, relishes, and kimchis from around the globe. Chiles take the spotlight, with recipes such as Thai Pepper Mint Cilantro Paste, Aleppo Za’atar Pomegranate Sauce, and Mango Plantain Habañero Ferment, but other traditional spices like horseradish, ginger, and peppercorns also make cameo appearances. Dozens of additional recipes for breakfast foods, snacks, entrées, and beverages highlight the many uses for hot ferments.

From the Back Cover:
From the best-selling authors of Fermented Vegetables comes a tongue-tingling array of condiments sure to heat up your table. These recipes combine probiotic goodness with spices and flavors inspired by cuisine from around the world.

Use the earth's naturally cool, stable temperature as an energy-saving way to store nearly 100 varieties of perishable fruits and vegetables all year long. Root Cellaring explains how to successfully use this natural storage approach. It's the first book devoted entirely to the subject, and it covers the subject with a thoroughness that makes it the only book you'll ever need on root cellaring.

Root cellaring need not be strictly a country concept. Though it's often thought of as an adjunct to a large garden, a root cellar can in fact considerably stretch the resources of a small garden, making it easy to grow late succession crops for storage instead of many rows for canning and freezing. Best of all, root cellars can easily fit anywhere. Not everyone can live in the country, but everyone can benefit from natural cold storage.

Root Cellaring will teach you:
- How to choose vegetable and fruit varieties that will store best
- Specific individual storage requirements for nearly 100 home garden crops
- How to use root cellars in the country, in the city, and in any environment
- How to build root cellars, indoors and out, big and small, plain and fancy
- Case histories — reports on the root cellaring techniques and experiences of many households all over North America

Admiring brightly colored jars of jams, jellies, marmalades, and other fruit spreads in your pantry is sure to bring a bit of summer sunshine into even the coldest, grayest days of winter. Combining centuries-old lore with state-of-the-art methods, this bulletin will teach you everything you need to know to transform fresh fruit into tempting preserves. Here you’ll find wonderful, flavorful recipes — even some that are low in sugar.

These are just a few:

Red Raspberry Preserves
Spiced Strawberry Jam
Ginger Jam
Apple Butter
Lemon Jelly
Carrot and Orange Marmalade

Preserving the harvest doesn't have to stop with jam and pickles. Many fruits, vegetables, and herbs can be made into delicious beverages to drink fresh or preserve for later - a healthy and inexpensive alternative to store-bought drinks. Drink the Harvest shows you how to create juices, ciders, wines, meads, teas, and syrups to savor any time of year. From strawberry juice to pear cider, dandelion wine to spiced apple mead, citrus peel tea to kombucha, you'll love these delicious recipes. You'll even discover how to create your own backyard beverage garden and how to harvest ingredients for maximum flavor and quantity.

From The Back Cover:
Peach Juice and Pear Cider, Rose Hop Tea & Watermelon-Mint Syrup, Dandelion Wine & Mixed Berry Mead. Skip the sugary commercial drinks and make these and many more fresh, delicious beverages in your own kitchen. Whether you're looking for new ways to enjoy your garden's bounty or want to experiment with pure concoctions made from farmer's market finds, these recipes and techniques - including harvesting, canning, fermenting, and pasteurizing - will introduce you to a whole new world of garden goodness.

Join the generations of cooks who have learned to can, freeze, cure and smoke meat, fish, and game with this book’s simple, safety-conscious instructions. Learn to make dozens of delicious recipes, including:

- Homemade Beef Jerky
- Pemmican
- Corned Beef
- Bacon
- Smoked Sausage
- Liverwurst
- Bologna
- Canadian Bacon
- Clam Chowder
- Cured Turkey
- A Variety of Hams
- And Much More!

You’ll also find complete descriptions of pickling methods for meat and fish; a discussion of the pros and cons of home preserving; and many tips and shortcuts. Whether you want to preserve meat at home to save money or to avoid the hormones and other additives in commercial products, this book is for you.

Even beginners can make their own fermented foods! This guide includes in-depth instruction for making kimchi, sauerkraut, and pickles and then offers more than 120 recipes, using those basic methods, for fermenting 64 different vegetables and herbs. You’ll discover how easy it is to make dozens of exciting dishes, including pickled Brussels sprouts, curried golden beets, carrot kraut, and pickled green coriander. The recipes are creative, delicious, and healthful, and many of them can be made in small batches — even just a single pint.

From the Back Cover:
Eat live foods! Make lacto-fermentation part of your kitchen. A classic preserving method, the process yields nutrient-dense live foods packed with vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and probiotic goodness. Master the techniques for making sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, and fermented condiments, and then explore how to apply those simpler skills to fermenting with more than 60 fresh vegetables, herbs, and even a few fruits. In addition to 140 recipes and suggestions for an intriguing array of ferments, you'll find delicious recipes that bring your creations to the table as part of any meal.

Home Sausage Making is the most comprehensive go-to reference on the subject — and the re-designed fourth edition is better than ever, with 60 percent new and updated recipes, the most current guidelines for popular charcuterie techniques such as dry curing and smoking, and more. Step-by-step photos make the process accessible for cooks of all levels, and 100 recipes range from breakfast sausage to global favorites like mortadella, liverwurst, chorizo, salami, kielbasa, and bratwurst. Recipes for using wild game, chicken, seafood, and vegetables ensure there’s something for every taste. An additional 100 recipes highlight creative ways to cook with sausage.

From the Back Cover:
Discover the world of flavor possibilities when you make sausage at home - from spicy andouille, linguica, and chorizo to down-home bangers, kosher salami, and satisfyingly sweet maple breakfast sausage.

Step-by-step directions teach you how to create fresh, smoked, and dry-cured sausage. Equipped with your new skills, you can then make links and patties that appeal to every palate, with 100 recipes for beer, poultry, pork, wild game, seafood, and even vegetarian sausages.