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Quote of the Day: Melissa Coleman

September 1st, 2013

Fall arrived with its honey light and cool evenings, and the maple leaves brightened to match the reds and yellow of ripe apples. It was time to put away the bounty of the warm months for fortitude during the cold ones, as humans had done for centuries.

Melissa Coleman (This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone)

I don’t do a lot of canning, but I do love to ferment things. Over the coming weeks I’ll be making batches of fermented cucumber pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi and other fermented goodies.
Cucumber harvest (1)
These will help augment the root vegetables in the cellar and the bitter winter greens from under the hoop house in the garden throughout the winter. The full-sour dill pickles are probably my favorite fermented food, we gobble them up quickly, eating them at every meal if we have them.

What’s your favorite kind of pickled food?

7 Comments to “Quote of the Day: Melissa Coleman”
  1. Joan on September 1, 2013 at 7:42 am

    I love bread and butter pickles, and zucchini relish and zucchini pickles. Yum! My husband loves kimchi and I’ve grown chinese cabbage to try to make it this year.

    Reply to Joan's comment

  2. Nebraska Dave on September 1, 2013 at 8:11 am

    Yeah, well, I haven’t tried fermenting any thing yet but this is the year to give it a go. I will might a stab at pickles and sauerkraut. I waited just a bit too long to use my cabbages that I grew and the rabbits had a great feast so I will have to buy a couple heads to make a gallon as a test. From my research fermenting seems to be easy and quite forgiving if mistakes are made. The liquid level is the only critical element of the process. Right 0. I should get at it then.

    Have a great fermenting day in the kitchen.

    Reply to Nebraska Dave's comment

  3. Misti on September 1, 2013 at 10:22 am

    I have so many canned pickles still from a year ago that I’m not touching the act of making pickles again for awhile. However, I think I will try fermenting them when I do get around to it once again. I planted two vines of cukes for fall, for eating raw, but that’s all I’m going to handle for awhile.

    Reply to Misti's comment

  4. Trish on September 1, 2013 at 5:32 pm

    I have a dill pickle recipe that I use to make as many quarts as I can manage – this year I made 120, but in last yrs drought, only 55. The recipe is is dill with a couple garlic cloves and dried hot peppers. The pickles have a lovely smoky salty heat and we eat them at lunch and dinner. They are quite easy to make – all the ingredients go into the jars and the hot vinegar/salt/water is poured over. No additional processing is needed. As long as everything is hot the jars will seal. If they don’t I put the jar in the fridge.

    I loved Melissa Coleman’s book. We visited Scott and Helen Nearing’s place in Maine a few years ago, and snuck next door to see Eliot Coleman’s place. He came out and talked to us for a while. Really interesting to learn of his early homesteading life and the toll it took on his family.

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  5. Bill on September 1, 2013 at 8:26 pm

    I vote for “refrigerator pickles” (I know that’s probably cheating). The problem with them is that they don’t last. Whenever I open a jar I can’t resist eating the whole thing!

    Reply to Bill's comment

  6. Lisa Sewell on September 2, 2013 at 7:21 am

    Pickled beets are my favorite!

    Reply to Lisa Sewell's comment

  7. Colleen on September 3, 2013 at 2:22 pm

    Bread and butter pickles, they bring back childhood memories of my grandmother teaching me how to make them. Also, garlic dill pickles are a favorite in our house.

    Reply to Colleen's comment

About

This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.

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