The Craftiest Workshop

I started my week still working on using up more apples. I also decided to use some of the stuff I had in the freezer to make some more room.
I had two large ziplocks bags of veggie scraps that I had been saving to make broth. I put the scraps in the steam juicer and added a head of garlic and a few stalks of celery. There was already a lot of onion and carrot scraps in the bags. This broth tasted wonderful and we had some with the frozen Costco wontons for supper the same day. I put the rest in the fridge knowing we would have soup sometime in the next week.

I made some more spicy apple juice but added a bag of frozen Saskatoons to the apples. I am drinking some warm as I write this and it is a nice treat on a fall day.

On Wednesday morning we had a good frost. Our coldest temperatures happen around 6am right now. I went out around 8am and saw that the zucchini and pumpkin leaves had mostly all turned black in the night. I picked the two zucchini that were left on the plants. I also picked my one pumpkin; it was almost fully orange anyhow. The corn appeared ok so I left it.

The first photo was taken on Sept. 7 and the second at the end of the day on the 12th after the frost.

I went out again just before supper and noticed that the corn was wilting now all the way up. I decided to pick it. I filled our plastic tub with ears of corn and left it on the garage side deck planning to shuck it after supper. We picked every cob even if it was small. It took me about an hour to peel the 30-35 cobs. Next I went to work boiling some water to blanch the cobs.

After 4 min of blanching them in batches of five or six, I laid them on the counter on a towel.

I cut off the kernels that I could and saved the tips that were not quite ready thinking that I will use them in a stir fry. The corn went into the freezer on parchment lined baking sheets for the night and then into baggies the next morning. I ended up with 10 meals worth of corn for us to enjoy over the winter.

I am starting to always be in the mindset of what else can I do with the peels, scraps or, in this case, the cobs. I found a video of Martha Stewart making corn broth from the cobs. If she promotes a recipe, I feel like it will always turn out.

I tossed the cobs, cut in pieces into the fridge for the night and then boiled them with an onion the next day for 45 min to make corn broth. The broth will be frozen in tall yogurt containers for future soups. I got five containers worth of broth.

Even though the corn didn’t get as full as I would have liked, younger corn has a more tender cob that is then edible at the end and has more flavour for broth. I don’t enjoy eating over ripe tough corn so maybe it is best for me to pick corn early.

I am glad we got some corn to eat. I used to try to plant corn in Ontario but the earwigs always got to it first.

The only things left in the garden now are carrots and fall bearing raspberries. There are a few potted tomato plants and kohlrabi in the greenhouse. I am glad that I can almost be done with watering and harvesting. I can now set my sights on some brush clearing and working inside on some wood burning projects.