Pickling green beans

I'm not sure how I wound up with so many green beans all at once. Okay, I do know. It was last week, in picking up my share from one of the two community supported agriculture farms I own a summer share in. The woman who I split the share with is currently off on vacation with her husband, so I got the entire thing.

At the bottom was a huge bag of green beans. All mine. Score!

A couple of years ago, I found myself swimming in even more beans, and late-August, early-September was spent furiously blanching and freezing beans and tomatoes. It was actually very fortuitous ... I got laid off about a month later, and the bagged tomatoes got me through the winter (pasta every week!).

The beans were a different story. They tended to develop freezer burn quickly, and got soggy too quickly for my liking.

At the same time, I'd decided that what I really wanted to do was to learn how to can them. Canning, I'm led to believe, opens up a great deal more options, like making your own spaghetti sauce and salsa ahead of time, without the worries of freezer burn. The problem? Alas, no canning supplies.

Last summer, the story was swapped on its head. I got ahold of some canning supplies from a now-ex-stepmother (bye, Bev!), but my garden plot was in a shady area and didn't produce a great deal.

To bring this story quickly to the present, I'm about to launch into my first ever-attempt to can vegetables. Actually, I'm pickling green beans. I don't know if there's a difference, but as far as I can discern, the processes are basically the same.

I'm assuming, based on what I've read and what seems to make sense, sterilizing everything is the most important step. At least, it's that way when you brew your own beer, and I can see why the same principles would apply. Something I read said it wasn't so important to pre-boil things, but the canning supplies I got my hands on (thanks, Bev!) were pretty dirty. In fact, a dead fly was lying in the bottom of a jar.

This is a three-boil process. I'm boiling water right now to sterilize jars and lid ring. Then, there's boiling the actual pickling agent (vinegar, salt, water). Finally, there's the final bath to seal the lids on.

I have eight jars that I can use. More to the point, I have eight lids to screw on, but lots and lots of jar rings and jars. (Updated here) After trimming the beans and washing them off, it looks like I'll only need five.

I've got five heads of garlic set aside, plus the three serrano peppers I've harvested from my garden and a green pepper that's been sitting around asking what it could do to help. Those will go into the jars of beans, along with some dill seed from the head I bought at the farmers market last week.

The water for sterilizing the jars is currently heating to a boil, then I'll move onto throwing the garlic, dill, peppers and beans into the jars while pickling agent heats. Add the pickling agent, screw on the lids, and bathe in boiling water for a few minutes to seal the jar lids. It's time consuming, getting all that water to boil, but we'll find out in a couple of weeks if things are nearly as easy as I thought.

The bass that binds us

(Quick note: I’ve actually gotten a few e-mails over the last couple of days asking me for more content here … didn’t think anyone was actually paying attention. There is indeed much to write about, from energy to food. Perhaps I can piece off a spare few moments and address some of the growing pile of unfinished business.)

The Two Hearted Ale was kind of warm when I finished it off. The bottle, coming out of the cup holder I’d built into the riverbank was covered with sand and grit. I’d just released a 20-inch smallmouth bass, the largest fish I’d ever caught in the Chippewa River, not so much throwing it back in as letting it slide off the sand. I had no net and the thing was frankly too big, and my head too full of beer, for me to lift it and look at it.

My first instinct was to keep it and filet it. The boy has been bugging me all summer to do precisely that – when we catch something big enough, to eat it. On the other hand, the sign at the entrance to this place had made clear that both beer and bikes were prohibited, even though I had both. I wasn’t sure if it’d mentioned fishing specifically, and violating game management restrictions seemed, to me, more important than prohibitions against bicycles and beer.

I know people who won’t eat the fish out of the river. There’s no good reason why not to. Aside from some agricultural run-off upstream, the river’s water is spring-fed and clean (that’s why trout do well upriver). I wish to eat fish from the river for a very simple reason … because I wish to depend on the river in some small way for my own survival.

My relationship with the Chippewa runs deep. I have canoed its length, and know its physical form. I have slept alongside its banks and drank its waters (after running it through a filter, of course). It provides water for my community, and I have used that water to grow food. I have recreated in it, and I have cooled myself in the summer. I have contemplated while on and alongside it. The only thing that I have yet to do is feed myself from it. The river is familiar to me; the waters are my home waters. I wish to make this relationship complete.

It seems strange that we have a river teeming with fish running through a community of 40,000 people afraid to eat fish from it for no good reason. I tell people that I fish its waters, and their first reaction is to look at me askance. They ask me if I eat the fish as if I am insane. When I tell them that the water is clean and the fish not at all a danger to health, most people look at me with a great deal of dubiousness.

These people have, in fact, given up on the river, if they ever felt connected to it. It is okay to drive past, and to look at, and to rest by, but when it comes to nourishing yourself from, they would prefer to have their fish trucked in from elsewhere. It is a very sad thing to me that this is the case.

I wish that people would not accept that they live near a river for which they have such deep-seated reservations about eating its resident fish. It is perhaps a sign of things that it is automatically assumed that fish from a nearby river are unfit for consumption. One wonders if people assume that pollution does not occur elsewhere, that fish from places you cannot see are somehow cleaner and more fit to eat.

To me, it is vastly superior to insist that the water in which I fish be clean enough that I can eat without worry. In fact, I don’t understand how people are willing to accept less.