It’s been a very, very busy 6 months in my life. I have traveled to Scotland, England, Atlanta, Phoenix, Richmond, Salt Lake City and more. I have launched new programs at work and stayed as busy at ever at home. We’ve had a busy spring and taken a few pleasure trips already – made it to Eigensinn Farm, twice to Prince Edward County and up to the hunt camp in Huntsville.
We also started a blog. 
Thank you to those who have been reading – today is the 6-month anniversary and we had out 10,000th visit this weekend. We have posted more than 200 articles, learned more about food than we thought we knew previously, debated what the purpose of this whole experience is about and met some amazing friends. We still have no ideas where all of this goes – it went from concept to launch in a few hours (while I slept) and we have updated it every day since December 28th. It’s been a lot of fun.
I expected we would have been preserving far earlier than now – life happens and we’re a bit behind where I’d like but there’s lots of time left to preserve our local goodness (while we got to eat fiddleheads, we weren’t able to pickle any this year).
Pickled asparagus was on the menu today. The young lady at the St. Lawrence Market snapped her neck back when I informed her I had selected 25 bundles of Ontario Asparagus ($25). While it was fresh (it had been harvested on Thursday and I bought it on Saturday), we we gave it a big long sweet-water bath to bring it back to succulence. The flavor difference was easy to discern.
We then began the process – cutting the asparagus down to size, measuring out mustard, dill, chillies, dill seed, garlic, onion and broth was followed by sterilizing the jars, packing them tight and a quick run through the pressure cooker.
Our yield was 5 jars (750 ml) and more than 200 stalks of pickled goodness. These will be best near Christmas (a jar will definitely be served at our annual fete) and we are most excited to hear the popping of lids. Enjoy a photo-journey of our afternoon (the process took about 3 hours as I’m a bit out of practice):
Full details of how to make this have since been posted – check out our pickled asparagus recipe here.
What a terrific web site! A pleasure to read, great content and style.
thank you!
likewise – hearing comments (especially ones of encouragement) are so lovely and excite us to keep trying – thanks so much for taking the time – your kind words mean lots!
[...] apparent in her posts). She kindly pointed out that we made it difficult to learn how to make the pickled asparagus mentioned yesterday. This has really got us talking and thinking and we’re working on [...]
Thanks for the step by step visuals…we are off to the farm this morning….and then pickling this afternoon….oh and a trip to our local Canadian Tire for a pressure canner (our first experience)…go big or go home!
cheers,
Kelly
Awesome Kelly – best of luck and excited to hear about the results.