Gazing Directly into the Gift Horse's Mouth

My ex works at a food bank once a month. Sometimes she takes home a lot of the stuff because they can't get rid of all the food donated and the fresh stuff will go bad before the next week's giveaway.

All that as background, today I am the proud owner of 2 bushels of organic nectarines, a bushel of green beans, and a bushel of Anaheim peppers. A major score. I can't be happier with the green beans, they will be canned tomorrow.

Green Beans a la Fatboy

• Wash the beans, cut of the nasty bits.
• Wash quart jars in the dishwasher.
• Into each quart jar add 1.5 teaspoons of canning salt, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1 tablespoon dried bell peppers, 1 tablespoon dried onion, and 1 teaspoon dried garlic.
• Fill up the jar with beans. If you can keep all the big, straight, nice ones aside and pack them into jars with the beans standing on end (presents for folks around the holidays) . All the strangely curved or otherwise ugly beans cut into 1.5 inch or so chunks and pack into the bottles. Don't go above 1.5 inches of the top of the bottle.
  
• Fill the bottles up to 1.25 inches of the bottle top with boiling water.
  
• Put on a lid and screw down firmly.
• Put into a pressure cooker. bring the water in the pressure cooker to a boil, as soon as it is boiling, put on the pressure cooker lid and process at 11 PSI for 25 minute.

Anaheim Peppers

Fire up the barby and load on the peppers. Roast until they turn black. Throw roasted peppers into paper sacks and let the cool. Peel them and cut out seeds and stems. Put a pound into plastic bags and vacuum seal them, freeze em and you are going ro have some tasty chili.

Now come the bitching. The organic nectarines came up from California. They suck. They were obviously picked green and boxed for shipment. The pits and impossible to remove and they stuck at least two of those stupid little produce stickers on. The stickers were permanent and had to be cut off of each fruit. This is what I mean by the stupidity of out truck farm system. Why they hell would anyone pay for crap fruit like this from California when you can get great fruit off the trees over in Yakima. But the price was right, I can't waste.

I gave up on these. I cut the fruit off the pit, gave them a ascorbic acid dip, and dried them. These will be pies for the winter.