food preservation | goingplaceslivinglife

Not once did I consider it an April Fools joke but we have no idea how the photo showed up on Graham’s Facebook feed last night. Kentucky State University has a mobile fruit and vegetable processing truck that visits farms in season to help them preserve their harvest.

Finding no info to take me specifically to the person in charge, I emailed the head of the agricultural school at KSU, dropping The Wild Ramp market experience to give me local “street” cred (more like farm cred). And now we are setting up an appointment for me to go look-see!

Why the excitement? Two factors. In case you missed it, I am setting up a business here in Oregon to help small farmers preserve their surplus fruits and vegetables. AND we will be in Kentucky for Graham to do some forensic business in May, less than an hour from where the KSU research farm is located in Frankfurt!!

WOW! Life is good! Now, who can I get to help me write a grant application?

My raspberries are slowing down a bit so I have begun to get more thoughtful of how I plan to preserve them. While my first batch of jam ended up too watery, it made an absolutely wonderful raspberry sauce so I decided to repeat that. I discovered, though, that I had tossed the recipe since it had “failed” its intended goal. A bit of internet research later, I was busy simmering and, following my sister’s suggestion, filtered out the seeds. But I got to thinking. (Rousing chorus of “uh oh” now)

I started preparing my tried and true hot fudge sauce recipe from my Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream recipe book. It takes almost 2 hours to prepare and is worth every second.

So then I had a finished batch of raspberry syrup and a finished batch of hot fudge sauce. Checking a few recipes for proportions, I set up 5 bowls for Graham to taste test: 1:1, 1:2, 1:3, 1:4 and 1:5 with raspberry being the increasing proponent.