Eggplant Salsa

Because sometimes your neighbor gives you several eggplant that you are so thankful to get but have no idea what to do with..
Phil won't touch it because one year I grew eggplant and it did produce and I made eggplant fries which we dipped in spaghetti sauce and Phil ate an absolute ton of the stuff and could not figure out why he had "problems" the next day....humm...it must be the eggplant!
So whatever I made had to be something I could can and would last until I could eat it. I went searching for recipes and found eggplant salsa. Everybody loves salsa.
I, of course, changed the recipe to suit what I had on hand. This is a two day process.
On the first day I diced up the 5 eggplant (some were quite small) as you can see in the picture so if you have all large eggplant adjust accordingly.

I used two of those small bell peppers, and one large onion that I had, all diced. I put them in a bowl last night with a 1/4 cup of pickling salt and let them set in the refrigerator all night and most of the day until I got home from work.

I then rinsed them really well and put them in a good sized pot. I added:

1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 1/2 tsp. chopped garlic
1/2 tsp cumin
1 1/2 cups white vinegar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp. pepper
1-28 oz. can crushed tomatoes
1-28 oz. can diced tomatoes
5 jalapeno peppers (I had 3 red ones and 2 green)

I brought the pot to a boil and then turned it down to simmer for 25 minutes. I then water bath canned it for 15 minutes. I got 6 pints exactly.

Hazelnut Creamer

I came on here to post this and then got all interested in everyone else's blogs and almost forgot. Anyway, hazelnut creamer is what I put in my coffee every day (unless I have honey). I love the stuff so I run out of it a lot. It was time to try making my own. The recipe I saw said one can of sweetened condensed milk, 1 cup of milk and hazelnuts. I didn't have sweetened condensed milk but I have evaporated milk and if you add a cup and a quarter of sugar to it, you have sweetened condensed milk (yes, that is a LOT of sugar). The recipe was a big vague. It said to take the hazelnuts (a half pound, I hate it when things are measured in pounds- so just used the as many as I felt like cracking) and put them in the milks and let it set for 6 hours. It did not say if the hazelnuts should be chopped so I didn't know but I chopped mine some. I also didn't have 6 hours to wait around. So I went on to the second step where you heat the milk and hazelnuts and keep it cooking for about a half hour without boiling it. It smells pretty good while you are cooking but not like hazelnuts.

So since it didn't get to soak for 6 hours, I though that since I didn't need it until morning that I would just cook it and let the hazelnuts sit in it until morning.

This morning came and I tried it in my coffee and while it tastes like a good creamer (how could it not with all that sugar in it?) it did not have any hazelnut flavor to it as far as I could tell. I will try it again tomorrow and see if it improves any. If not, I'll keep trying. I probably didn't have enough hazelnuts or it really does need to soak first and then get cooked. We'll see.

New Ducklings!

Here are the new ducklings finally. The last two had a hard time getting out of the shell. One of them was just plain too big and I don't know why the little black and yellow one had trouble.

The little black and yellow one has a small crest or sometimes called a "tuft" when they are that small. He is a mix of my cayuga hen and one of the pekins or the rouen drake. A couple of the yellow ones have brownish feathers when they are wet so probably from my chocolate colored hen. She is the one sitting on eggs in the duck house now.
Anyway there were only 5 duck eggs in the incubator so this was a pretty good hatch considering my incubator temperature fluctuated so much.
They are cute now but they will be stinky soon and I am already thinking about fixing up a pen for them outside.