Part two of the Canning series!

For Christmas each year I sometimes struggle to come up with gift ideas for our family. Farming isn’t really a cheap hobby (Well it depends. Seeds are cheap. A really high quality broad fork to plant those seeds, is not). This past Christmas the clouds parted and the planets aligned. I wanted a spiralizer and it just so happens to make the perfect gift. Not too pricey, super useful and the exact right size for a wrapped box with a bow! Winning! My amazing grandparents hooked us up and we got our new kitchen toy.

I was serious about calling it a toy. All the kids want turns making veggies more awesome when ever I pull it out. Not that they are necessarily more inclined to eat said veggies…sigh.

Remember my bulk spices in my freezer? Well, since the closed freezer is often covered with stuff, and it’s a pain to clear it every time I need something from the freezer, I have these. My spice cupboard is filled with these little jars and they all make me smile. Especially the “Pumpkin Spice” jar.

Filled the jars with spices, and cooked the carrots a bit. (The carrots are still crisp when the jars are opened but the cooking helps with water control.) Then the carrots go in and get topped off with brine. After wiping the rims and putting on the lids, it’s into the canner or on the counter…

What weirdness is this? You’ve heard of sauerkraut, right? It’s fermented cabbage. Turns out you can ferment practically any vegetable…even carrots. The spiralizer left me with a whole bunch of ends and centers that didn’t make it into the actual end product. So I added some whey from yogurt making (inoculates it with good bacteria to do the fermenting) and put them in these nifty jars. The lids allow carbon dioxide out, without letting oxygen in thus allowing fermentation and not spoilage. After sitting at room temperature for a few days, they went into the fridge and I slowly savored them over the next few weeks. They were delicious.

Done and done. Into the attic pantry to await certain annihilation on a future salad.