Getting Ready For Winter: Organizing Preserves
In winter the houses of both my parents and my grandparents were always full of pickled cucumbers, mushrooms, homemade jams and juices. Beautifully stocked on the shelves and with nice handwritten labels on them they instantly created such a warm and homely feel. To be honest, I never myself in my adult life was thinking about preserving food (quite difficult to do it living somewhere in Maldives), however in Riga, when you visit local market full of beautiful vegetables, berries and fruits, you just can’t pass by and overcome the temptation to buy several kilos of them. Besides, this weekend we went for a forest walk and have gathered two large buckets of wild mushrooms.
Meanwhile my husband on his blog will share all the recipies of jams and marinated mushrooms that we’ve made, in this post I will tell which equipment we used for preserving, as well as how we organised and stored the jars.
Equipment for Preserving:
- Copper pot (it conducts heat very well and the jam boils more quickly)
- Couple of long wooden spoons
- Digital Scale & measuring cup
- Citrus press & citrus zest grater
- Cherry/olive pitter
- Creamer & skimmer
- Sieves & cheesecloth
- Juicer & mixer
- Jars
- Labels (instead of them I used white paint marker which is able to write on the glass)
- Colourful napkins and string
- Sugar thermometer
- The Jam and Marmalade Bible (book)
Before you put your pickles or jam in the jars, you need to make sure that you have sterilized them. This is very important, otherwise you preserves might get spoiled or start to yeast and mold.
The two easiest ways of sterilizing jars that we use is putting them with the lids  in preheat to 100 C oven for 10 minutes (they need to be newly rinsed) or placing them in the boiling water for about 5 seconds.
When all our preserves were ready, I needed to label them. As I mentioned I used a  white paint marker and I wrote the name of jam or pickles and different flavours and spices that we’ve put inside. If you plan to stock them for more than one year it is also a good idea to mark a year of preservation. I also bought colourful napkins  and covered with them the lids (this will prevent from dust and dirt and with them the jars look so much nicer). That’s all! I’ve put our preserves in dry cool place (one of the cupboards) and soon we will start to open and eat our stock!
