Author: mjkisner

Dehydrating Beans Saves Space

A few days ago, I went to the local Amish farmer’s market to get some sweet corn. I noticed they still had quite a pile of green and yellow beans available. I usually don’t bother to can or freeze plain beans…I prefer them fresh or dehydrated. Dehydrated beans are great in the winter when I’m making vegetable soup. I can add just a handful of dried green beans…they rehydrate in the broth as the soup is cooking.

I thought I’d like to show you how much space (and weight) I save by dehydrating this batch of beans. I filled two sacks of green and yellow beans and brought them home. I snapped them and put them in the fridge while I got the dehydrator ready. The next day, I put each bag on the scales to see the weight I was starting with. The green beans weighed about 3 lbs. 4 oz. The yellow beans weighed about 2 1lb 12 oz…a total of about 6 lbs.

Next, I washed them, blanched them for 4 minutes in boiling water, cooled them in ice water, put them in a bag in the fridge while I did the next batch.

The manual says I should put them in the freezer for 30 minutes, but the fridge worked for me. They dehydrate quicker when they start out cold apparently.

The beans filled all 9 trays of my dehydrator.

The dehydrator sits outside the kitchen door in the garage. It makes noise, has to run for 10-12 hours and is too big to put in the kitchen.

To determine how long to dehydrate the beans, I checked the manual for my dehydrator.

This map shows the general percent of humidity in each region, by season. Pennsylvania is in the green zone in July. The day I dehydrated the beans was damp and rainy so I assumed the time of 11 hours might be more like 12 hours.

The manual describes how to test when the food is dry enough. Vegetables should be brittle.

During the 11 hours, I rotated the trays front to back and from upper levels to the middle several times. The fan is located in the back, so the back of the trays get dry faster than the front edge. After 11 hours, the beans look like this:

Once I determined they were dry enough…because they were brittle when I bent them…I put them in a zip bag and weighed them again. The 6 lbs. of beans now weighed about 9 1/2 oz…a little more than 1/2 lb.

I store dehydrated vegetables in my canning jars, with little packets of oxygen absorbers. They keep the jar sealed on the shelf.

The oxygen absorbers can be purchased at Amazon in several sizes…these are 300cc. I put several in each jar with the beans.

So that 6 lbs. of green and yellow beans are ready for my winter soup. I’ll put about 1/2 cup of dehydrated beans in a pot of soup to start and will add more if needed…depends on the amount of soup I’m making! They need about 30 minutes to reconstitute. Enjoy!

Garden Update August 22, 2023

By now, the third week of August, the garden is not only about the plants but also about the produce. The planters on the patio continue to look healthy as I harvest a crop of lettuce and plant a few more rows of radishes.

Baby Romaine lettuce and new radishes look good!

Black Seeded Simpson lettuce ready to pick:

Raised garden beds, just before harvesting stuff…squash and potato plants have died down; beet leaves had been chomped down by the deer a few weeks ago.

Beets before and after.

Delicata squash

Red potatoes that were growing on my kitchen table in the spring:

We dug up just a few:

Up in the garden on the hill, the Lavender is still making the bees happy.

I will let these stems dry for a while in the house:

Still quite a few green tomatoes. They should ripen over the next two weeks.

Although we still have a bunch in the house, ready to eat!

This is the second planting of green beans…no flowers yet!

Carrots are still growing. Should do better when the fall weather arrives.

With the Delicata squash plants gone, all we have left is a few weeds!

The Echinacea is not as pretty but the bees still love them!

We’ve managed to share a few tomatoes with the neighbors, and we’re blessed with some of their garden produce!

So far, we’ve kept the deer away from most of the garden, but they still like to clean up around the bird feeders…even in broad daylight! Enjoy!

Rediscovering Popcorn as a Snack

I have many fond memories of my dad with popcorn as a snack. I watched many baseball games on TV with a big bowl of buttered popcorn between us as he explained the strategies of the players. Popcorn has always been my snack of choice, even over chips and pretzels.

When we were first married (way back in the late 60s and early 70s), Bert and I had a huge garden with a section set aside to grow popcorn. The process is much like sweet corn but we needed to keep the sweet corn at the other end of the garden…they will cross pollinate and ruin both. Popcorn is taller than sweet corn and often had pink silk. Really pretty!

I will tell you…growing our own popcorn, drying it and popping it as soon as it was dry enough was a lot of work but the taste was amazing! A whole different taste from popcorn that had been sitting in a jar on the shelf for over a year!

For several years we did the work of picking the ears, husking them, laying the ears out on an old sheet in front of the wood burning stove until they dried enough to shell. We learned the hard way to wear gloves because the corn kernels had a sharp point and after a few ears our hands were shredded (at least mine were!).

We often had 5-6 gallons of shelled corn by Halloween and made sure to gift my dad a gallon of corn for Christmas! Most people thought we were nuts!

If you are interested in growing popcorn, there are many articles online about it. Here is one I thought was interesting: https://gardenerspath.com/plants/vegetables/grow-popcorn/

For the last 30+ years we haven’t grown popcorn but I’ve tried to find the best popcorn, and the best popcorn popper rather than growing our own. I’ve tried specialty and multicolor popcorn. The two main kinds of popcorn…white and yellow…seem to be the main choice. The white kernels are smaller and don’t leave a sharp piece of the hull. The big yellow kernels pop up much bigger and have more flavor, but often I’m left needing a toothpick or dental floss to get those sharp hulls that get stuck between my teeth.

Finding popcorn that is fresh with the right moisture content to pop well is tough. You have no way to know how long ago the popcorn was harvested and how it was stored. Sometimes, popcorn does better if it is stored in the refrigerator or freezer. Here are two brands that work pretty well for me. I always assume some of it will not pop and be left in the bottom of the bowl. I do miss the flavor of the popcorn we grew…but these will do:

The next challenge was finding the right popcorn popper. My dad used a popper similar to the one below and loved it so much he took it with him as he moved into assisted living.

This had a Teflon heat surface with a rotating arm that stirred the popcorn. I had a popper like this too for a while, but it was just too big and bulky and hard to store.

I seem to have quite a collection of popcorn poppers (I sold the air popper at a yard sale a long time age). At the moment I have 4 choices of poppers:

Popper #1

For many years, we used this popper. The handle crank and gears let us stir it as it popped, and frankly made the best popcorn. We still use it if we have company and have to make a lot of popcorn. I’m pretty sure I got this at Lehman’s of Ohio (from the catalog online). It’s solid and works fast.

Popper #2

For a while I was determined to find a popper that worked well in the microwave. I picked up this clay pot, made in Chile but sold by a company in the Midwest that sold popcorn. It does well but it gets hot and is kind of slippery. I’m always worried I’ll drop and break it. I’ve had it sitting on a shelf since that first try.

Popper #3

This clear glass popper is turning out to be my favorite because it has a handle I can grab with a hot pad and I can see how full it is as it pops.

Popper #4

Recently, I was enticed to pick up a small popper at the health food store that would make just one small serving:

Two minutes in the microwave…

This made a single serving of popcorn. I wish I could have seen through the container to see how full the cup was as it was popping but it did leave some of the corn unpopped.

So, my quest to find the best popper continues. I have tried the air popper but it put out so much air it blew the unpopped kernels right out before they had time to pop. It seems I often choose the white corn without sharp hulls and a popper that gets hot like #1 above.

I suggested to Bert that we try popcorn next year in the garden…and all I got was smirk and a reminder of how much work it was to shell. Guess I’ll just buy popcorn by the jar! Enjoy!

Tomatoes-Too Many or Not Enough

One of the joys of gardening is to be able to eat fresh produce we grew ourselves. I also like to grow enough extra so I can preserve my favorite foods for the winter. The three foods I like to have on my shelf include pizza sauce in 1/2 pint jars, sweet pickle relish in pints and the pickled 4-bean salad in pints. (see https://marykisner.com/revised-four-bean-salad-recipe-for-canning/ )

Each of those foods are things we use and if we don’t grow it, the farmer’s market usually has an abundance of tomatoes, cucumbers and green and yellow beans at some point in the summer.

I work around the available volume of produce to decide when it’s time to can. Right now, we have way too many tomatoes to just eat them…they would spoil even if we both eat 1-2 tomatoes every day! However, the pile is not quite enough to make a batch of pizza sauce to can.

So, we eat what we can work into our meals, and before the tomatoes rot on the counter, I cook and freeze the rest. When I have enough frozen to make a batch of pizza sauce, I thaw out the cooked tomatoes and continue on with the recipe. I now have about 11 pints of cooked tomatoes frozen.

I will continue cooking tomatoes in smaller batches for another week or two. when I see tomatoes being sold at the farmer’s market by the box or bushel, I’ll decide if I want to save my frozen tomatoes for soup and other recipes, or clean out the freezer and use them to make the pizza sauce. I have choices! If you’d like to see how I make the pizza sauce I posted about it here in 2021: https://marykisner.com/time-to-make-pizza sauce/.

In case you don’t do projects like this, here are some pictures of how I cook the tomatoes to freeze.

First, the tomatoes are washed. Then I cut off the top of each tomato and score an X on the bottom.

I drop them gently into boiling water for about 1 minute to loosen the skin.

Then I move the tomatoes to a bowl of ice water. That stops the cooking action and really gets the skin to start peeling back.

Then I take each tomato, peel off the skin and chop the tomato into chunks. I place the chunks into a pot on the stove. Our tomatoes are pretty solid, so I add about 1 cup of water and let the tomatoes simmer and soften slowly. I the temperature is too hot at the beginning, the tomatoes will burn at first…ruins the whole batch! Ask me how I know!!

It takes about 2-3 hours on low to boil off some of the water and get the tomatoes cooked.

I scoop the cooked tomatoes into freezer boxes and put them in the freezer.

At least the tomatoes are safe in the freezer until I decide if I want to use them to make pizza sauce later. For now…it’s back to the garden to pick some more tomatoes! Enjoy!

Revised Four Bean Salad Recipe for Canning

Fresh green and yellow beans are abundant right now…at least at the Farmer’s Market! Since my poor bean plants were dried out and then drowned, if I wanted my four bean salad for the winter, I had to count on the Farmer’s Market to supply them. In one quick trip to the local market I was able to bring home 6 lbs. of green and yellow beans, onions and red peppers. I also had celery, kidney beans and chickpeas ready to go.

Here is the original recipe:

For this next batch of Four Bean Salad I doubled the recipe. I started with 6 lbs. of green and yellow beans, snapped and washed.

In this post, I’ll try to edit the recipe so you can see what I need to change the next time. I was hoping to make 19 pints, which would fill my canner. However, at 16 pints I ran out of the pickling solution. I decided to just put the extra blanched vegetables in jars and put them in the fridge. I’ll use the bean mixture in soup or over rice as is.

The original recipe called for chopped celery, red pepper and onion. I did not care for how the onions turned out last time (kind of stringy and slimy) so this time I chopped the onions like the peppers. (Picture below is from last year!)

I wanted more chickpeas in the mix, so I added three cans and 2 cans of kidney beans.

I did double the recipe for the pickling solution, but I was still short about 3 cups.

Bert got us into production mode with the propane tank and the canner!

Here are the finished 16 jars ready for the shelf. I’ll wait a month or so before I try this batch…give the pickling solution time to work!

The three extra jars are in the refrigerator ready to heat up and eat!

Here is the revised recipe:

Since I was short about 3 cups in the pickling solution, I added more vinegar, sugar and water to the recipe.

Next time should be better but I’ll sure enjoy these!

A Special Family Gathering and Exploring the Mall of America

Last week was mixture of sad and happy events. A few weeks ago, my Aunt Janice passed away. She was 92 years old and was my father’s youngest sister. Her passing was the end of an era; her generation is now gone. My cousins and I are now the oldest generation. Her memorial service in St. Paul, Minnesota was the event that enticed all the cousins to arrange travel to the Midwest.

Ted was anxious to meet folks at this gathering too, so he arranged his travel plans to join us. I traveled with Kathy and Anna so I wouldn’t get lost. I haven’t flown for over 10 years (more like 15) and it was helpful to be with them.

So, last Tuesday I drove to Kathy’s house outside of Pittsburgh. On Wednesday morning we drove to a service near the airport where she left her car and we were shuttled to the airport.

At the airport, everyone was on their phones so it was pretty quiet in the boarding area. I had never flown Southwest, so their boarding procedures were different for me. I’m glad I had Kathy and Anna nearby. I did discover that I probably should get hearing aids if I really wanted to hear/understand the announcements!

All the instructions and procedures for an emergency sounded familiar, but of course, since it was the first time in many years I thought I should at least listen to them at least once. The guy to my right was reading the drink menu! Nobody else even looked up from their phones.

In contrast, on the way home I was just as bad as everybody else!

Thursday, August 3

Ted joined us Thursday and we traveled together to the Memorial Service.

The service was in Janice’s home church. It was a lovely, meaningful service with reflections from her kids and grandkids. Very touching.

After the service we had a brief reception where we got to know each other better. Marilyn, the spouse of one of my cousins, kind of adopted Anna and I watched while she showed Anna how to fold a dollar bill into a heart.

Of course, the required photo of the assembled cousins was taken. What a smiley bunch we are!

We ended the evening with all 25+ of us at an Italian Restaurant nearby. Always tough for me with Italian food and trying to avoid dairy products. I think I had a piece of chicken and some green beans. Anything else would have made me sick. Oh well, I came back to the hotel and had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

Friday, August 4

Friday was our day at the Mall of America! Kathy pulled out a list of all the stores in the Mall. She got us organized, first by going down the list and asking if we were interested in shopping there. By the time we left for the Mall, she had everything organized by floor and area, like North or West.

When we arrived at the Mall, Kathy checked the directions and we found the Guest Services counter. I was a proud driver of a scooter! It really helped me survive 8 hours of shopping with my two girls!

I actually didn’t hit anything. Luckily the Mall wasn’t crowded.

The Mall of America is four floors of stores! It is one mile around each floor, with an occasional repeat of stores, like the ones selling Minnesota t-shirts and coffee cups. It is an impressive collection of shopping venues.

Some stores were familiar, like North Face and Old Navy.

Most stores were new to me. Anna had scoped out the toy stores so they were on our list to visit!

Of course, this soft “grilled cheese sandwich” is going to come home with us!

Some store names were obvious:

This one was interesting:

Many kids stopped by this store…only to realize all these “confections” were SOAP or bath bubbles, etc. Very clever!

We had lunch at the Rainforest Cafe. It certainly looked like a jungle with giant elephants and gorillas around the perimeter and jungle vines hanging down. Lots of screeching and chest pounding. Every 10 minutes we experienced thunder and lightning as a “storm” passed by. A bit over the top, but the food was actually very good!

At the end of the day, Anna had a chance to check out the amusement park in the middle of the mall. She loved the rides!

Saturday, August 5

We checked out and made our way to the airport. Luckily, we ran into one of the cousins and had a chance to really visit over lunch. That was nice. Of course, Kathy and Anna had one more picture they just needed to take at the airport!

Based on all this, if you are in the area of the Mall of America, check it out. You might find something you can’t live without!

Blog Update August 1, 2023

I’m headed out of town today to Minneapolis for a Memorial Service for my last Aunt, my Dad’s youngest sister. It will be good to visit with all my cousins who are convening from around the country. Ted and Kathy (and 10 yr. old Anna) will be joining me in this quick trip. We hope to take time to check out the Mall of America, so I may have some pictures of that when we get back next week.

This is just a reminder that you can download a pdf of all my postings at the link below (also found on my Welcome page). That list has hot links to get to each post. Enjoy browsing all the crazy things I’ve written about over the last two years! More next week!

https://marykisner.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Blog-Entries-1_275-marykisner.pdf

Garden Update July 31,2023

Every year the garden is different. This year we started season in a drought so watering every day was necessary. Now, in July, we’ve had over 8 inches of rain! Basically, the lettuce and radishes in the raised planters did well. They were easy to water when it was dry and drained well when it was very wet. The Romaine lettuce is starting to make heads.

The sweet potato in a pot has survived having most of the leaves chomped off several weeks ago by the deer. It has recovered well and is now sending out runners…not sure if the roaming bunnies will find it yummy.

In the next week or so, we’ll dig up the beets. The tops were a nice snack for the deer a few weeks ago that slowed down their growth.

Forgot to take a picture of the potatoes to the left of the beets…you can sort of see a little piece of that bed in the picture above. They are starting to die off but that’s normal. Bert said he could see a few potatoes above ground so he added some potting soil to cover them up. When the plants are dead we’ll dig up the potatoes.

The garden up on the hill mostly survived a wandering deer…the footprints in the wet soil gave them away. Bert has started spraying the plants with a nasty-smelling concoction that is meant to keep deer away. We’ll see!

The lavender is filling out and the bees love it. I’ll wait a little while before I cut too much.

We have lots of green tomatoes, but they are ripening fast. I expect in the next week I’ll have trays on the kitchen table with almost ripe tomatoes.

The carrots are finally looking good. We’ll leave them in the ground until November or December and dig up just what we need.

This empty section had green and yellow beans. After the last picking, I pulled the plants and replanted green beans. The dry/wet contrast was pretty hard on the plants.

The Delicata squash seemed to spread out all over…but it looks like we might get a few squash.

Even a “double” squash!

And of course, my favorite…Echinacea flowers!!

Enjoy!

Success With the Retro 1952 Dress

Just a quick update in case you’ve been following the last two posts about my attempt to make a dress for my granddaughter (age 17). Her interest in trying to find a vintage dress from the 1950s led us to finding a retro pattern at JoAnn’s to make such a dress. The previous posts included understanding the difference between vintage and retro, and the steps I went through to actually make the dress. (See: https://marykisner.com/understanding-antique-vintage-and-retro-clothing/ and https://marykisner.com/making-a-retro-1952-dress/)

I mailed the dress to my granddaughter in California and held my breath. Would it fit? Would it require major adjustments? Would she like it?

Yesterday I received pictures and a heartfelt message that it was “wonderful” and “Thank you so much!” Very rewarding to connect with my granddaughter this way! Made my day!

This grandma is very pleased! I just might have to try some more Retro clothing.

Making a Retro 1952 Dress

On the request of my 17 yr. old granddaughter, who was visiting a few weeks ago, I volunteered to make her a dress, in the style of the 1950s. She had been trying to find “vintage” and “retro” clothing in thrift shops, but around here they were hard to find. (to see the difference between “vintage” and “retro” check out my last post, https://marykisner.com/understanding-antique-vintage-and-retro-clothing/.

Luckily, we found a pattern at JoAnn’s labeled “Retro ’52”, so we picked out fabric, buttons, zipper and thread for the project.

This is the pattern we chose:

I was convinced I could just read the pattern, follow the directions, and whip out a dress! HA! This project brought back so many memories of my high school Home Economics classes…my teachers would be so proud that I actually did it! (Thank you, Mrs. Shaffer and Mrs. Krause!)

I think it turned out pretty well…hopefully it will fit when it gets to California! Here is the final dress (looks kind of flat without a body in it!).

Some very basic differences in sewing a dress in the style of the 1950s compared to today:

Fabric choices…suggested fabrics were light to medium weight woven fabrics like broadcloth, linen and taffeta. This means no extra stretch and the final dress will definitely need a hot iron! Does my granddaughter even know how to iron?

Side zipper…I had forgotten about the zipper tucked under the armpit! The pattern had pretty good instructions but it still took me two tries to get it right! (Gee, I hate to rip out stuff!)

Fitted sleeves…just looking at the shape of the sleeve pattern told me it would be a restrictive sleeve. We are so spoiled with soft stretchy t-shirts!

Full skirt…making the hem a tedious half-day task by hand.

Complexity of the pattern itself…this pattern had 5 sizes in one, from size 6 to 14. To do that every pattern piece had 5 cutting lines, 5 sets of circles, etc.

Cutting Out the Dress

I cut out the dress on a day when I had no distractions. The suggested layout was intimidating:

This layout had me cutting out each piece in a single twice and after stewing about this, I went back to JoAnn’s and bought another yard of fabric so I could do it my way. I just knew I would forget to flip each piece.

I folded the full width fabric in half and cut two of each piece at once so I was sure to have matching pieces. The extra yard I used to cut out all the little pieces, like the collar, cuffs, facings and sleeves. The length and shapes of the skirt pieces limited my choices of placement on the fabric.

Once I had all the pattern pieces cut correctly, I kept them pinned together until I was ready to use the piece. Then I transferred the various markings (like darts and circles) with pins or a pencil. All the skirt pieces looked alike without the patterns, so I think that was a wise move.

Making the Dress

Step 1: Iron (fuse) the interfacing to neck facings and cuffs

Step 2: Assemble the Bodice

Step 3: Cuffs and Sleeves

Step 4: Sew skirt pieces together and add to bodice.

Step 5: Sew in side zipper.

NO NO NO!!!

Now I remember that’s not how to hide the zipper! Rip it out!

I only had to rip out one side of the zipper!

Much better!!

Step 6: Hem the skirt.

Instructions say to sew the edge 1/4″ with a long stitch. I didn’t make it long enough so I couldn’t pull the thread and ease the fullness. I had to make a basting stitch by hand along the 1/4″ stitching to lightly gather the edge to fit. Boo Hiss! Took hours to hem the skirt!

Step 7: Finally, add the decorative buttons down the front of the dress.

I carefully folded the dress up and put it in the mail to my granddaughter in California! I have no idea if it will fit! We agreed that this first dress was an experiment. Alterations may involve her sending the dress back to me. Or…it might make a good Halloween costume for someone!?!

I’ll have an update in the next week or two! Enjoy!