There are ALWAYS TOO MANY....Here is How To Use Them Up!

hey everybody Welcome Back To Living Traditions Homestead my name is Kevin well we are in the middle of garden season and every year there is one thing that we end up with way too many of and that is cucumbers so today I'm going to show you three things to do with cucumbers two that are what some of my favorite things to eat and drink over the summer and then we're also going to talk about how to save seeds from your cucumbers so that you can have a never-ending supply of cucumbers for future Gardens so the very first thing that we're going to get started on today is a drink that I absolutely love and that is cucumber limeade Sarah's recently been posting on Instagram about the Cucumber limeade that I love to drink over the summer and a lot of you have been asking for the recipe and how to make it so I thought I'd show it to you today in my opinion it's one of the most satisfying drinks that you can have over the summer it's so good after you've been working outside in the heat to come in and just have it it's so refreshing so it's only going to use three cucumbers for the gallon that we're gonna make today but I think you're gonna absolutely love it we're going to start by just peeling our cucumbers and then we're going to get them into the blender all right we have all of those peeled now the peels we'll put in a bowl and actually something quite magical is going to happen to these peels they're going to turn into bacon because we're going to take these outside and we're going to give these to the pigs and they absolutely love them so nothing goes to waste around here even the peels eventually it will end up in the freezer in the form of some awesome pork all right so we've got all of our cucumbers peeled we're going to chop them into pieces and then we're going to get them into our Ninja blender and we're going to start making some cucumber juice now I don't worry about cutting these into very small pieces because our blender does a really good job so I just cut them into some chunks and we'll just throw them right in along with the Cucumbers we're going to fill this up with water and I go all the way up to the maximum Mark here for our blender I think it ends up being about six or eight cups of water something like that but you can play around with the recipe get it to the strength that you like but whatever one picture on your blender should be about right now in our case we have awesome well water out here in the Ozarks we have our water tested periodically so we know it's good water and I'll tell you there's nothing better than good clean well water so we're going to fill this up all the way to our full mark we're going to put this back on and then we are just going to start blending this up now we're going to just blend this up until basically there's no cucumber left at all all right that is done now we need to strain all of the pulp and whatever seeds didn't get ground up and everything so that we can get this into a container so like I said this is going to make a one gallon batch of cucumber limeade so we're going to use a gallon jar a strainer and we have these big funnels I'm going to use those together here and we're just going to pour this through there and we're going to let it all drain into our gallon jar [Music] [Music] now once this is completely drained this will be about a half gallon of cucumber juice so after that we're going to add the limeade portion of it to it and then we'll have an awesome drink all right so that has stopped draining we'll give all of this pulp and everything that's left to the pigs and now we're going to just fill the rest of this gallon jar up with water this is kind of a cucumber concentrate juice right now so we're going to fill this the rest of the way up with water and then we're gonna start adding the lime juice foreign [Music] so we've got our gallon jar filled up now and today we're just going to use store-bought lime juice if you have fresh limes go ahead and use fresh limes because that would be awesome but we don't have fresh limes this time of year so we're just going to use lime juice from the store so I'm going to use a third of a cup sometimes I end up adding a little more it depends kind of how strong the lot the Cucumber flavor is in your drink so you're just going to have to kind of learn what you like but about a third of a cup maybe a little bit more is about right now we're going to add some type of sweetener I like to use Stevia because Sarah and I try to do a low carb diet if you don't care about that or you prefer to use sugar instead of stevia I would use about a half cup of sugar maybe a little bit more but because we're using Stevia I like to use about a teaspoon of stevia so I'm going to measure that out it's somewhere if you're if you don't want to measure it it's somewhere around 50 drops of stevia if you have the liquid Stevia like this but again how sweet or tart you want something is really kind of an individual thing so you're gonna have to play around with the recipe and really figure out what you like for that so I'm going to mix this up isn't this an awesome color I just think that the color of this is really nice but the smell of it I wish you guys could smell because the smell of the Cucumber is so strong and that's what I really like about it I'm gonna pour a little bit of this and give it a try and we'll see if we need to make any adjustments actually I think that's about perfect I guess I've learned over time how to make it pretty good the first time but again it's going to take you a little bit of time to realize exactly how you like it and how you like it if if you like your limeade a little more sour or a little more sweet you're gonna have to make those adjustments yourself all right so that is complete you guys this is one of my favorite summertime treats now I know a lot of you ask whenever we do videos where we get our jars these gallon jars that we use mostly we use them when we milk our cow but these gallon jars come from Azure standard we order them by the case I think there's four in a case when you order them and uh they're just a great deal and they come in super handy so we're gonna put this in the fridge and then we're gonna move on to my next favorite thing that I like to do with cucumbers and that is a great cucumber salad or refrigerator pickle all right now that we're done with the Cucumber limeade we're going to start with the refrigerator pickles so for this I'm going to use three kind of average sized cucumbers uh once again we're going to start by peeling them and we're going to again put these in for the pigs so that we can have some good pig food now that the cucumbers are peeled we're gonna actually set those off to the side for just a minute and we're going to make our brine we're going to start with one cup of white vinegar you can use other types of vinegar if you want to but white vinegar I think is the best for this type of recipe we're also going to add one cup of water if you want to do a bigger batch you can definitely scale this up or down so equal parts of vinegar and water and then for this I actually am going to use sugar we use raw organic sugar and we're going to use a half a cup for this mixture here but again that is to your taste along with that I'm going to add a little bit of Dill now you don't have to add Dill to this recipe it can be more of just a vinegar and sugar recipe but because we grow awesome dill and we've had this drying in the house I'm going to actually just use some of this and put it right in to our mixture here I'm gonna put a lid on I'm going to shake this up really well and we're just going to let that all sit while we slice up the cucumbers we want that sugar and the dill to you know we want the sugar to dissolve and we want the dill to rehydrate within the mixture while it's sitting so we're going to set that off to the side now we're going to take our three cucumbers and we're going to slice them I like to use a mandolin for this you can definitely do it by hand I've done that plenty of times as well I just like the mandolin because it does get the pieces evenly sliced now with this recipe you can do this several different ways you can slice it on a mandolin like this you can cut thicker slices I've even done it where you cut them into chunks the reason that I like to do it on a mandolin where it's thinner slices honestly is because I'm impatient by doing it this way by tomorrow morning this will be ready to eat the thicker the slices the longer it takes for the Cucumber to soak up all of the Brine and really get the flavor throughout it and the longer it'll take and I'll be honest that's just not for me so I'm going to use the mandolin today now there is a guard that comes with the mandolin so you don't cut your fingers I'm not using that if you feel safer using that go ahead and do that I'm going to hold it kind of by the end and I'm going to stop way before I get to the point where I can cut my fingers so we're just gonna slide this through here we're going to slice these cucumbers up foreign slices don't end up in there we'll give to the pigs all right I've sliced up the first two cucumbers and to be honest I think these cucumbers were bigger than I thought so before I do the third one I'm gonna actually add these to the Brine and see how full our jar is all right so I guess the first jar ended up only needed about one and a half cucumbers sometimes the cucumbers are bigger than you think so we're gonna actually end up making two jars so I end up making a second jar of brine we're gonna add the second cucumber and a half to that jar the brine recipe is exactly the same as the first jar we are going to add one more ingredient to these before we put them in the refrigerator the last thing that we're going to add is an onion the onion just really seems to bring out the flavor of the cucumber and just really seems to give it an awesome flavor so we're going to just slice one small onion it's not going to be a very big onion but we're going to slice an onion we're going to split it between the two jars [Music] foreign both of those jars are done now because we cut these so nice and thin like I said these are only going to take about 12 hours in the refrigerator before they're ready to eat which is why I love this recipe because like I said earlier I'm impatient and uh that's just not one of the things that the lord gave me as a gift is being patient so I'm gonna put these in the fridge I'm gonna be able to have these tomorrow by lunchtime and I'm excited about that all right so we're going to put these in the refrigerator and then we're going to move on to the last thing which is how to save seeds from your cucumbers so that you can have a never-ending supply of awesome cucumbers to grow every single year now in order to save seeds from cucumbers they need to be extremely ripe which means you need to let them go way past their Prime you don't want to pick a green cucumber like you would for one that you want to eat you want to let it get pretty yellow almost orange and then you want to bring it in the house and you want to let it sit for at least a week before you harvest the seeds so this one has been in the house for at least a week you can see I have written on here that this is a Chicago pickling cucumber that we've let get extra big now the thing with cucumbers is they will cross pollinate this year we grew two types of cucumbers we grew one called the Chicago pickling cucumber and we also grew one called Market more cucumbers in order for cucumbers to not cross pollinate they're going they need to be at least a half mile apart obviously we didn't grow our two varieties a half mile apart so chances are these seeds next year will be a combination of those two types I don't really care both of these types are great cucumbers and I absolutely love them so these are seeds that we will save for our own garden next year we also sell plant starts in the spring at our local farmers market the seeds that we save today will not be used for that purpose these will be for our own garden the plants that we sell at the farmers market will come from seeds that we purchase so that we know there are true variety but the ones that we grow in our own garden again if they're a cross I don't really care what I care is that we can save our own seeds and we can have plenty of good cucumbers in coming years so we're going to take this cucumber again this is an over ripe cucumber and we're going to start by just cutting this in half foreign how many seeds are inside of a cucumber like this this will be enough for a lot of gardens in future years now cucumber seeds kind of like tomato seeds are encapsulated in kind of a gelatinous kind of covering that you need to get off of the seeds so what we're going to do is we're going to scoop all of these seeds out into a bowl now once we have all of those seeds scooped out which you can see there are I mean probably a hundred or more seeds in this bowl we're going to add enough water to just kind of cover all of the seeds and add some extra liquid to the Bowl it doesn't need to be a lot of water just enough to cover those seeds and we're actually going to let these ferment for about the next day or two days it really depends on the temperature of your house the warmer the temperature the faster this process will go the the cooler the temperature the slower it'll go but we're going to we're going to just basically leave these now in this bowl about twice a day we're going to come and we're just going to stir them up over the next day you will see that this will start to ferment to the point where the seeds will sink to the bottom and everything else will kind of float to the top you might even see a little bit of mold on top of the water that's perfectly normal and it might even smell a little bit bad but that's okay as soon as that happens and you can see that the seeds have separated from that gelatinous coating that they have that is when you want to drain all of that off and then you can let the seeds on a paper towel or something to dry and then you'll have all of your seeds for your next Garden so what I'm going to do is I'm going to cover this with a paper towel with a rubber band around it because you do want air to be able to get to it but you don't want a lot of other stuff to be able to get in there so we're just going to cover this we want to set this in a location where it's not in direct sunlight if you have a cabinet or somewhere where it can go and stay kind of dark that's fine otherwise just as long as it's not right next to a window it should also be fine we're going to set this off to the side and again we're going to stir this about every 12 hours until the seeds are separated from the coating so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to put our seeds on top of the refrigerator it's away from the windows it stays pretty warm up there and it will help this process happen pretty quickly now you guys I know there's a lot of questions about saving seeds not just from cucumbers from but from all of the plants that you have throughout your garden I want to show you a great resource that we have found several years ago we actually raised seeds for Baker Creek heirloom seed company and one of the books that they recommended to us was this book right here called seed to seed it is an amazing book it basically walks you through every type of vegetable that you can think of growing in your garden and it'll take you through not only growing those vegetables but how to save the seeds as well it talks about how far apart you need to plant if you want if you don't want cross pollination it'll tell you just a ton of information we have a link to this book in our Amazon shop if you want to take a look at it but again it's called seed to seed and it is just an amazing resource to have I suggest anybody who is going to save seeds from their own Farm to have this book because we can't remember remember everything every year for a lot of us we only do this once a year so to have something that you can flip through and find the information when you need it is a really invaluable resource so there you go you guys three things to do with cucumbers when you have way too many you can make cucumber limeade which is an awesome drink for the summer time you can make some refrigerator pickles which not only are a great treat right now but they will last quite a long time in the refrigerator and you can save seeds so next year you can do it all over again I hope you enjoyed this video if you're enjoying our Channel enjoy the types of videos that we put out I hope that you'll hit the Subscribe button I hope you'll give this video a thumbs up and most of all I hope that you will share this video on all of your social media that's always the best way that you can help our Channel until next time thank you so much for stopping by our Homestead take care and God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 143,726

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: AQAGW_PaABQ

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021