Making Soup & Harvesting Carrots (are THOSE carrots?!)

I finally took a day to make a vat of chicken noodle soup. Our chicken, collards, parsley, and onions. The carrots were from some Michigan farmer that I'd had in the fridge for a couple months now. I needed to use those up before digging up ours. The egg noodles were from an Amish family at the farmer's market. I got a dozen quarts of chicken soup lined up on a shelf in the basement and it feels good. For one thing, I used one of the many chickens hogging space in the deep freezer. Secondly, it's so much nicer to have my family open a jar of lovingly made, nutritious soup as opposed to spending $40 on a pizza when I'm away at a birth.

Speaking of basement, holy cow! We cleaned ours out! It's a "Michigan basement". For those of you who don't know, that's a basement that's half dug out years after a house is built. Our house was built in 1860, I have no idea when the basement was dug out. It does make a perfect root cellar (I'm hoping) for the cold and damp down there. The actual little closet we're using as a root cellar previously held tools and about 30-some old cans of paint from various projects. I cleaned all that away (buying loads of kitty litter to absorb the old paint before the garbage men would take it). We have some shelves in that little closet, but that's where the "crawl space" begins too. So it's actual earth. Can't get much colder than that in the winter.
I also consolidated a bunch of crap to one area so that I would have on big section of shelves for all our canning stuff. My inner Control Freak heaved a sigh of relief last Sunday after all that was done.
Of course, spending 8 hours in a moldy, dusty basement made me cough and sputter for two days as my body worked up strange colors of phlegm to counteract all the funk. My lungs ached as if I chain smoked a pack of moldy cigarettes in a very short amount of time. But at least it's all organized down there now.

I harvested our carrots! I actually have more growing now. The current ones are Daikon carrots and they're young enough that I just thinned them yesterday. I can't remember the varieties I planted, except that they were all supposed to be good for long storage. A lot of them came out of the ground perfectly. Big, straight, tapered carrots that pulled up with no problems. Then I had a separate bunch that were not thinned so well. Those were interesting. It was like 20 or so bunches of 3-4 carrots that grew around each other in this crazy trick-puzzle type of way. You could actually separate the gnarled carrots and fit them back into place again if you were careful not to break any piece. They're like the Jim Henson version of carrots.

At any rate, I've stored them in a wooden box, layered in moist sand as the book, Root Cellaring describes. They're down in the root cellar with the ever-decreasing supply of early summer potatoes (will have to buy more from local farmer to see us through winter) and onions.

Speaking of onions, learn from my mistakes, novice urban farmers. I planted around 60 or so yellow storage onions from sets, not seed. They took beautifully and looked very promising. Apparently though, one must take care to not let the green tops get knocked over. That sends the signal for the onions to halt! And they do. Most of our "onions" got toppled by a heavy garden hose weeks ago, leaving us with 60 or so yellow storage shallots.
I suppose I can harvest those today. Sigh.

I gave a friend of mine 20 sets of those same yellow onions and she brought me a couple of her newly harvested beauties. And guess what? They were the size of a healthy medium apple. That's to say, they were onion-sized. So now I, and you, know what to do next summer.

I've also been drying little yellow pear tomatoes a lot lately in my fabu Excalibur Food Dehydrator.
They smell lovely when they're done, and take up far less space than canned tomatoes.I used to freeze them, but didn't like how watery they were when thawed out. My dream is to use them to make gorgeous dried tomato cream sauce this winter and to use them in soups and casseroles.

Just wanted to say, pardon the blurry pictures. I've been noticing this happening more often with my wee camera. I think years of letting the kids wander around with it, taking pictures of stuffed animals in the backyard has resulted in little, greasy fingers touching the lens and leaving me with blurry pictures.

All right, I'm off to can some salsa and pears. (My husband's co-worker gave us a good size bag of pears last week! I'd love to make some yummy chutney to go with Indian food.)