When the turnips are ripe and juicy, we cut them to french fry size and sweet sour pickle them as snacks for the winter. Together with pickled cucumbers, carrots, boiler onions, green beans, babycorns, they make a great holiday party platter for guests, if they havent been snacked already.#GlobalApron

February-March is when we pick and enjoy our fresh giant meyer Improved Lemons and pickle them for the rest of the year.

Time to pickle! We use pint jars. Other than the spices for each vegetable, the method for preserving our farm veggies is identical for all of them. They stay sweet and sour, fresh, crispy, and are tasty for nine months. Once opened, they stay fresh in the fridge for 6 more weeks. All I do is write the year on the cap and put them in the pantry. There are two methods, Dutch and American.

This is my version of cookpad member Ulrikes’ pickled sour fish rolls made from japanese eggplant instead of fish filets. She calls them rollmops, I love the word. I am using Taiwanese lavender eggplants from the city of Ping Tung, they grow well here.I made two jars, one is following her recipe, the other uses the sweet and sour recipe I have been using for pickled trout and pollock. After a few days of pickling, both japanese and taiwanese eggplant slices are delicious, but softer than fish, so I will make another batch with a thicker egg plant slice. Stays fresh up to 2 weeks in the fridge.Pick young eggplants with soft skin when they are 1/3 the size of fully grown eggplants. We harvest weekly from July to September.

Unripe grapes are sour and make a very special mild vinegar substitute called verjus.The bottom grapes on a cluster of red or white grapes are the last to ripen, and one and the same cluster quite often holds sweet grapes on top and sour grapes on the bottom.You can press these sour grapes into grape juice. You can make a wonderful vinegar substitute with this tart, sour, grape juice. We use it to make Dijon mustard.To buy sour grapes in the store, taste the bottom grape, buy the cluster, and separate the sour grapes from the sweet ones, usually a dozen or so. You can also ask your friendly farmers market seller to bring you 2 pounds of unripe grapes to make a pint of verjus.

This is a foolproof farm method to make green as well as black preserved olives, not salty, from the same fresh green local Sevillano olives, grown right here. We make five buckets of five lbs. each, taste one olive once a month till they develop their flavor over the time span of a year till next October harvest. You can use tall plastic food containers with lids, keep the proportions the same, to make smaller quantities.

When the winter carrots are at their juiciest, we pickle them for use throughout the year till the next harvest. Here is the family recipe.

Our favorite mushroom pickling is spring mushrooms in taragon with fennel herb vinegar and then preserving in lemon grass oil. They taste delicious all year with cheese and crackers, and avocado sandwiches. This recipe explains how we make this herbal vinegar and lemon grass oil at home. Takes one hour. The vinegar and oil stay beautiful all year if you keep them in green glass bottles in the dark.Mushrooms are sprouting six weeks after the first winter rains. You pick them in the woods, grow them in the window or buy them in the store. To grow them at home, see my mushroom growing kit recipes in here.

When garden vegetables are abundant we mix them and pickle them in turmeric. This is an indonesian recipe called Atjar Tjampoer, an annual recipe. Bean sprouts are the basis, you can grow those year round. Atjars are kept in the fridge. We dispose of old atjar once a year, if it hasnt been eaten already. We eat four jars a year.

These are Italian red peppers, also called Carmen peppers, or “bullshorn” peppers. They are as long as my hand, look like a bulls horn. Mild peppers, kids love to snack on them fresh or pickled. Great on salads and in soups. Stays crunchy till next harvest when pickled.

We make wine and jam from our own grapes: spanish tempranillo, french mourvedre, and french grenache noir grapes. Lots of seeds. I make one quart jar of jam from 4 pounds of grapes, add agave syrup nectar. Here is how we remove the seeds, which reduces the jam to 3 cups of jam from 4 pounds of grape clusters. Year round summer sweetness for sandwiches.

Rolling a thin fresh fish filet around a pickle spear, secured with a toothpick, preserved in spiced vinegar, cured in the jar, ready for a delicious lunch with home baked bread after pickling. Improperly Fermented fish is a source of botulism in Alaska. Here is the safe method: keep in fridge, use in less than two weeks.