Saturday, August 14, 2010

canning corn and eating blooms

I keep hearing people say it's not worth your time to can corn. Freezing is better. Well, I've been freezing the corn as well as other garden goodies and I'm going to run out of room. As it turns out, canning corn is about the easiest canning out there! I haven't tasted it yet, but I can't see that the taste will make the difference.

You can cut the corn off the ear before or after it's been cooked (cold/raw or hot pack). Add 1t optional canning salt to each pint and process. Easy enough. Corn needs to be processed in a pressure canner for a good amount of time. My canner manual said 55 minutes at 10 pounds for pints.
I used both cooked and uncooked corn and the uncooked corn was much easier to cut off the ear. Much easier. I will be doing more corn next week.

Onto the blooms- I have heard that blossoms are delicious. Bee is growing a crazy vine that only flowers. It apparently does not bear fruit. We decided to pick the blossoms the other morning and try to cook them. We thought it was a cucumber plant, but it is a volunteer, so it really is just a mystery. We picked 8 or so. Bee took this picture while I was cooking.

I don't know the right way to fry them. I cleaned them and tore them open gently. I removed the stamen. It may be edible, I don't know. I treated them like a green tomato; dip in milk, dip in a dry mix (bread crumbs, seasoned salt, corn meal, spelt flour, wheat germ, flax seed meal) and pan fried in some olive oil.

They were pretty and pretty yummy. I don't know if it was that they were yummy or that it was just another vehicle for eating fried 'stuff.' Here they are with eggplant.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have eaten pumpkin blossoms and squash blossoms. Don't know what you ate but if it would produce food of some kind it might be the same. There are many edible flowers.

Ott, A. said...

I personally like the taste of canned corn better than frozen. As for the blossoms; my grandparents used to eat pumpkin blossoms and when I was little I thought that was so wierd. I am intrigued by it and should probably give it a try. I hear in other countries it is a delicacy.