The Inventory of the Cellar

As the harvest/preserving season wraps up for the 2013 season, I organized the cellar and freezer and took stock of how much food we’ve produced and put by for the year. I was a little more detailed in my record keeping this year than I have been in the past, as I work to figure out how much food we actually need, how much it costs and how much I save, etc. 

These records are purely for my own information, but I’m posting them in case anyone is interested (and also, because if they are on the blog, I won’t lose them.)

In the cellar:

246 jars of food (fruit, vegetables, jams, sauces/salsas/condiments, syrups, soups.)

16 delicata squash (each will provide one meal)

6 large pie pumpkins (will equal approx 20 cans of pumpkin)

22 lbs fresh-stored carrots (with more to harvest)

12 lbs fresh-stored beets (I canned half the beet harvest as pickled beets)

17 lbs potatoes (with more to harvest)

? dried beans (haven’t shelled them yet. Maybe 5 lbs? Not much.)

62 heads of garlic (enough for planting this fall, too.)

75 onions

several bunches of dried herbs (dill, parsley, basil, thyme, oregano, lavender)

8 quarts of dried fruit and tomatoes

24 sheets of fruit leather (equals about 96 “fruit roll-ups”)

 

In the freezer:

5 lbs carrots

2 lbs broccoli

5 gallons of soups

4 quarts of chopped green onions

2 lbs chopped bell peppers

7 cups of spaghetti sauce

14 cups of pesto

I chose to can most of our food this year when it was possible, since freezer space is limited.

These totals don’t include the fresh veggies we’ve eaten through the summer, beginning in May and lasting about 5 months. Most meals were planned around what was coming out of the garden.

Meat:

16 chickens

3 turkeys (yet to be butchered)

1 goat (yet to be butchered.)

(hoping this will total about 40 meals’ worth of food, plus broth for soups.)

(There is also hope still for one -or two- elk this year, which would provide a full year's worth of meat, and enough to share.)

Dairy (year totals)

About 50 gallons of milk (I don’t keep daily records. This is a close estimate.)

About 45 dozen eggs (again, this is an estimate. They slow down in the winter, but produce 3-4 dozen per week during the summer.)

I wish I had the numbers to put a value to all of the food in this house right now, but I’m not that organized yet.

But the total cost of all of it?

$175 in locally, farm-purchased fruits and vegetables that I didn’t/couldn’t raise myself.

$60 in garden seeds

$60 in meat birds

Approx $120 in meat chicken feed

Another $120 in egg hen feed (not including the feed cost of the show birds.)

$240 in grain for goats

Not sure of the cost of jar lids, bought about $24 of canning jars this year, plus spices, sugar, etc. that I didn’t keep records of. Estimating about $75 in those supplies.

So total cost for the above listed foods? $824

Also, figure at least 250 hours of work. At least. Honestly, it’s probably a whole lot more, but sometimes it’s hard to decipher work from play around here.

The amount seems enormous, but when it's spread over 6 months or so, it's not terrible... and if I make the effort, I could cut our monthly grocery bill down to about $100 for 5 or 6 months.  That puts us at roughly $233 per month, eating healthy, organically grown vegetables, pastured meat, raw milk and fresh eggs. I realize some folks live on plenty less than this each month, but seriously y'all, we eat really good food!

 

So is it worth it? Absolutely.

 Raising meat chickens is utterly uneconomical, between the cost of the birds and feed, the amount of work required in the raising and butchering of them… if we could find a way to hatch our own meat chicks and raise our own feed, it would make more sense. (I’ve heard you can raise chickens almost entirely on clabbered cow’s milk. I’m not opposed to trying this when our cow is in milk) Turkeys are a much bigger bang for your buck, even when raised from poults. Goats can be expensive, since grain is a requirement, but the milk they provide for drinking, cooking, plus yogurt, cheese, etc. is so worth it… and goats provide a lot of fun, too. (Most people pay more for a monthly cable bill than we do for our goats, and goats are far more entertaining!) We also raise all the hay our animals will use, and they graze pasture during the spring, summer, and fall. This cuts down significantly on the cost of meat and milk production. It’s hard for me to estimate the value of the egg chickens vs. the cost of their feed, since most of our chickens are show-breed bantams that The Oldest raises for fun (and are therefore worthless when it comes to laying.)

The garden is amazing, though. The sheer number of pounds of food produced with just $60 worth of seeds in incredible. Fresh vegetables all through the summer months and well into the fall and winter. The fertilizer is provided by the menagerie in the barns, the water comes from our irrigation, and the man-power is provided by Two Little Girls and myself. (Bonus: gardening and other farm chores also provide a great daily workout, omitting what some folks pay in gym memberships.)What doesn’t get eaten provides extra feed for the animals. 

Are we anywhere close to self-sufficient? Not at all. Until I can grown my own wheat and oats, we'll still be making monthly trips to the grocery store. Though I have started looking into the details of raising sugar beets, just as an experiment...

When I sent Littlest One down-cellar the other day for a jar of pears, she came up with them and said, “Do you know what I thought when I went into the cellar? I thought, ‘I’m so proud of my mom for putting all this food in here for us to eat.’”

So is it worth it? Yep, you betcha. And it's even kinda fun, too. :-)

The Urgency of Fall

I don't whine very often. Or, well, I try not to. I love having a blog filled with cheerfulness and stories of happy and satisfying things. Because really, my life is filled with happiness and satisfying things. And I know I don't have a right to complain. But once in awhile...

Honestly, I don't think it's complaining. It's just stress! There is SO much to do, and so much I want to be doing, and I don't know which way to turn, I don't know which way is forward or which way is backward.

I think feeling the fall in the air is making me feel like I'm under pressure to get everything done. The land around me is sending out it's warning, "You only have a month left to prepare yourself before the ground is frozen solid and it's too cold to go outside!" I hate how gleeful it is in this threat - all those bright, beautiful leaves of flaming red and golden amber, happily announcing that winter is, in fact, just around the corner.

Don't get me wrong, I love fall. I love that the sweltering heat of summer is finally gone, that the air is crisp and we can play outside without risking heat exhaustion. I think my problem is that I love fall so much that I just want to sit outside and enjoy it, instead of all this work I'm doing inside.

I'm to the point where I don't care if I see another ripe tomato as long as I live. Or at least until next July. Pints and quarts of salsa, soup, dried tomatoes, diced tomatoes, pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce... it's all in there, stored up to keep us nourished this winter. And I still have one more box to go. A month ago all I wanted was to be eating raw, sliced tomatoes with a bit of salt and pepper. Well, I'm over that.

School is (somehow) back in full swing. We manage about four hours a day on a good day... which means more like two hours a day on average days. Somehow, getting tomatoes in jars before they rot seems a lot more pressing than learning why Franklin Pierce was a fairly worthless president. Aw, who am I kidding? Even riding the horses or chasing the goats seems more important than Pierce.

The garden is nearing it's end, and I'm encouraging it by failing to water it - ever - and hoping it'll just hurry up and die off. It's done its job, we have veggies in the freezer. Now, I would like a break from weeds and aphids and squash and hungry grasshoppers. I think I'll dig the carrots today. Because nothing is more fun than digging carrots out of compacted clay soil. Really, you should try it.

The house hasn't been properly cleaned since, um... we moved in back in February. Spring came so quickly that by the time we were unpacked, we were suddenly drowning in The To-Do List that comes with trying to learn how to care for a 40 acre ranch. Animals and outdoor work and outdoor play take precedence over house cleaning. I wash laundry, and dishes, and occasionally (if it rains) I manage to dust or vacuum. But this darn beautiful fall air is making feel like I need to be deep cleaning... which is, of course, impossible when one's entire kitchen is brimful of vegetables and fruits that the fruit flies are dangerously close to consuming in their entirety.

It's nothing that doesn't happen every single year about this time. An urgent need to get everything done coupled with an urgent need to sit in my wooden chair on the deck and bask in the beauty of fall.

I think the best remedy for it is to go pour a glass of wine and sit and watch the leaves change colors.

After I finish canning these tomatoes.

The Root Cellar

As far as root cellars go, ours is pretty un-creepy. It's not a scary dungeon built into the ground or anything - it's in the far corner of our basement and is neatly painted white (which makes it easier to see all of the spiders.) It's built with sturdy shelves and even bins for root vegetables. The temperature remains a steady 50-ish degrees year round. Honestly, it's about the nicest root cellar a budding farm girl could hope for.


And, as with many places around the farm, it was filled with "treasures" left behind from the old folks that built the place. It only took an hour of digging and vacuuming and throwing away boxes full of trash to get it all straightened up and be able to take inventory.


There are hundreds of canning jars here, all shapes and sizes. There are even hundreds of rings and some boxes of lids. Now all I need to do is grow enough food and find enough time to make good use of it all.


My meager stores that remain from last year's canning season barely take up one shelf... it doesn't look like nearly as much as it did in the old house, with just the one shelving unit to store preserved goods on.


Two walls aren't shelved... there's plenty of space to experiment with wine- and beer-making, vinegar and cider making, and any other fermenting I decide to attempt in the future.... when I'm feeling a little less overwhelmed!

Coring Pears the Easy Way

Every once in awhile, I come across some utterly fabulous tip for making kitchen work easier. My friend Katie passed this one on to me, and I'm forever grateful!

If you've ever tried coring pears, you'll know that it's tedious work. Of course, it's not bad if you're only coring a pear or two, but if you happen to need to remove the cores from forty pounds of pears, it can be slow going.

Unless you've got a melon baller.

Just cut the pear in half and use the melon baller to scoop out the core. It makes for the prettiest pear halves you've ever seen, and it's about a million times faster than trying to use a knife.

Do feel free to share any other ingenious kitchen shortcuts here - I'm all ears! :-)

Notes on Preservation: Freezer Veggies

Someone asked for some of this information, so here it is.
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One of my goals this fall was to learn to use a pressure canner. It never happened. So, as in years past, I'm working to freeze as many vegetables as I can before the first frost hits.

Vegetables (except for tomatoes) are low-acid foods and cannot be canned safely in a regular boiling water canner. I've heard a few horror stories about pressure canners, and they intimidate me, so I never found the courage (or the time) to learn to use one.

Knowing how much to freeze is a hard thing to master, and I'm still in the process. The one best tip I can offer is to keep records. For each garden season I keep the following records in a 3-ring binder in plastic-covered sheets:

Amount of each veggie harvested (usually noted in pounds with hash marks. You can get a cheap scale at Wal Mart for about $15. I love mine and use it constantly.)

The cost of any produce I purchase from local farmers or stores (so I know if I should wait for a lower price. Keep in mind that the cost of food goes up slightly most years. Don't wait too long and miss the best price!)

The date of the lowest price I've found. Some veggies are only at a really low price for one week out of the summer. Don't miss that week.

The amount I preserve, the method, and the date, and also the date I use the last one. If I use the last bag of diced tomatoes in February, I know I better do twice as many the next year if I want to make it to August.

I also keep notes each year of what varieties of certain vegetables I want to grow again and which ones were disappointing, and I make notes of how many pounds of wild game we're able to put by.

I can't tell you how often I look back at these records. I can tell how much more we're using (as our girls are growing!), what season to start looking for certain produce items, when the best time to go tomato picking is, how many pints of salsa we eat each month... anything I want to know is there in my records. I realize my records sound anal, but they only take a minute or two each night to update, and they are invaluable.

For our family of four, here's what I've got in the freezer so far for this year (some grown, some purchased from local farms:)

14 lbs of green beans (in 3/4 lb packages)
50 ears of corn (cut from the cob, 2 cups per pkg =24 pkgs)
8 lbs of beets (in 1lb packages. I wish I'd planted more beets though.)
18 1-cup packages of spinach, kale, chard, and other greens
5 lbs of kohlrabi (in 1/2 lb packages. It's not our favorite, but it's an easier and more space-effective alternative to broccoli.)
8 cups grated zucchini (I'll do more. It's good for zuke breads and such.)
2 lbs diced bell peppers (I'll do another 2-4 lbs before the season ends.)

I haven't started freezing tomatoes yet - I decided to save that for next week. I needed a break. So I'll write the tomato post then, and carrots will be frozen in the next few weeks, too.

Based on the above totals, I can tell you that we've grown and preserved enough for 6-8 months' worth of soups, stews, stir-fries and side dishes. Hopefully by then we'll have peas and greens and other early veggies coming out of the garden again, and we won't be forced to buy too much from the stores.

I'll try to keep up regularly with preservation notes, since I know so many folks are trying to do this now.

PS - it thrills me to hear how many people are adopting this way of life. Everywhere I turn I'm meeting people who are canning and dehydrating and freezing and buying local, organic produce in bulk. I'm so proud of all of you!

Garden to Table Challenge - Week Nine

I failed kind of miserably this week on this challenge. Cut me some slack, though - we were on a trip out of town for half of the week and I wasn't doing much cooking. So instead of talking about cooking, I'll talk about canning.

The bulk of this year's garden is just about finished. We're expecting our first frost in another week or so. The beans are yellowing and drying out...



I stopped watering the tomatoes so they'd start turning...



The pretty little garden from early summer is gone, replaced by a well-used, slightly neglected plot of land that's working hard to produce enough vegetables to feed our little family.

The peppers will be picked this week and put into the freezer. The last of the beets will be pickled. Only the broccoli, leeks, and greens will be left to do their best to survive. The cold frame is full of baby kale, lettuce, and greens for winter, and I'm starting to make plans for next year. I still can't believe an entire gardening season is already over! Where did the time go?

But just because it's starting to cool off doesn't mean we won't be enjoying garden veggies. The girls and I have been hard at work saving everything we haven't managed to eat fresh. The shelving unit my sweet husband built for me in the basement is piled high with yummy things that we'll be enjoying in the frozen winter months.



The bottom shelf is where I've stacked the tubs of beets and carrots packed in sand (which seems to be working out well, so far.) There will still be another half-dozen jars of pickles, some pickled beets, and probably more canned tomatoes, along with (hopefully) a couple bushels of local apples.

Here's the running total on canned goods so far:

Strawberry jam: 15 pints
Pickled asparagus: 6 pints
Apricots in syrup: 29 pints
Apricot jam: 5 pints
Tomato salsa: 16 pints
Peach salsa: 8 pints
Peaches in syrup: 10 quarts
Bread & butter pickles: 16 pints
Dill pickles: 8 pints
Whole tomatoes: 12 quarts

Many of the ingredients were grown in our own garden. Most of the rest were purchased from local farmers or gifted to us from neighbors. Maybe next week we'll talk about what's in the freezer... :-)

Are you still harvesting or eating local, fresh produce? Be sure to check in with Wendy at Greenish Thumb to share your successes and read about others' at the weekly Garden to Table challenge!

Poor Me.

I'm gonna whine for just a minute.

It has been one heck of a week. It was the first week of school. Both girls have colds, so we've only managed to squeeze in a lesson here and there between long bouts of laying on the couch, sneezing everywhere and a constant flow of nasal mucous.

My basement flooded, and I've been dealing with slightly rude flood clean-up guys for the past four days. They keep saying they're going to be here at a certain time, and they don't show up. It's finally cleaned up and put back together, but it was definitely a hassle. And the chemicals from the carpet cleaner give me a headache.

I'm supposed to be having a yard sale this weekend. The ad is already paid for, so I can't back out. That means there is junk piled high all over my house, awaiting the sale on Saturday. Junk and clutter irritate me. And of course, the Two Little Girls keep pulling things from the yard sale pile, trying to negotiate with me about selling them. I've now got the yard sale piles covered with sheets.

My dog - who is fully potty trained and has always been reliable - has pooped in the basement twice, and peed on my bed, and all over the kitchen.

Added to the toddler that still keeps pooping in her underwear and occasionally peeing wherever she happens to be standing, I am SO done cleaning it all up.

Two Little Girls are usually pretty well behaved and get along beautifully. Today, they have been replaced by Satan's spawn. Snotty attitudes, fighting and arguing and yelling, talking back and refusing to do anything I ask them to. Let's all pray tonight that Satan takes back his spawn and returns my sweet children.

I bought fifty pounds of peaches this afternoon at farmer's market, because I'd promised the farmer I'd be there this week to do so. Every time I walk into the kitchen, those fifty pounds of peaches are staring at me, taunting me, reminding that I'm crazy.

My birthday is only two days away, and birthdays depress me. Thinking about being Closer To Thirty kind of makes me want to cry.

Alright, I'm done whining. When the peaches are canned and the yard sale is over and I'm Closer To Thirty, when the snot stops running and Two Little Girls remember how to behave, and when I find a way to keep all the excrement contained, I'll feel much better.

So just in case you were wondering, life's not always perfect here, either. :o)

Spoke too soon...

Remember in my last blog post, how I was enjoying the relaxation that came with this part of summer, when I wasn't spending every afternoon canning?

Ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ha.



That was before we picked apricots at the neighbor's house...



This is just one of the four baskets we filled - twenty two pounds in all. Love generous neighbors.

Also love having a hard working little girl that willingly washed and pitted nearly all of them for me!

Of course, it wasn't just apricots - we've got tomatoes coming on now, and cucumbers that were discovered hiding in the vines. And then the neighbor brought over four huge zucchini and a couple more cukes for us.

In two afternoons, we put up

one batch of apricot jam
3 quarts plus 3 pints of apricots in syrup
1 pint of dehydrated apricots
2 pints of crushed tomatoes
3 pints of bread and butter pickles
3 pints of zucchini pickles



Certainly not a bad start to the canning season. Sadly, afternoons spent relaxing in the sunshine and watching the girls play are long gone - it's all uphill from here!

Canning Season Begins

I've been procrastinating. It's been strawberry season for a couple weeks now, and until today, I hadn't canned the jam our family would happily subsist on.

See, the thing is, I know once I start canning, I won't be stopping until sometime in October. It's not that I don't like it - actually, I love it - but it can be a LOT of work.



By the end of harvest season, I'll have canned strawberry jam, peach or apricot jam, tomatoes, tomato sauce, salsa, bread and butter pickles, pickled asparagus, tomato soup, peach salsa, peach butter, apple butter, applesauce, apple pie filling, apples, and peaches. And anything else that sounds appealing as the summer progresses and we see what the garden brings. And strawberry jam is always the first, the start of that enormous amount of satisfying but exhausting work.

But when I found a great sale on organic strawberries this week, I knew I had to give in. Besides, my husband actually pouted when he discovered we ran out of strawberry jam a few weeks ago.

The good news is that now that I've got a few years' experience under my belt, canning isn't quite the enormous project it used to be. In fact, we had a triple batch of jam finished by 10:00 this morning.

I say we, because this is now a family project. Even the Littlest One can help mash berries.

I just realized she looks homeless. We didn't bother dressing
her or fixing her hair before starting.

And the seven year old is actually helpful now - not just smooshing, but also stirring as the jam cooks on the stove. (With supervision, but she's gotten lots of stirring practice from our bi-monthly cheese making.)

If you're not sure about canning, jam is a great place to start. Berries, pectin, and sugar, a bit of patience and a big pot of boiling water are all you need. It's pretty straightforward. I use organic raw cane sugar and organic berries, just to make it slightly healthier. (Can jam actually be healthy? Probably not...)



A triple batch should be enough to keep our family's sweet tooth satisfied until this time next year - it works out to about 12 pints. Of course, a few of those will be gifted to good friends and family.

Notes on preserved food

My tomatoes are gone. I made it seven months without having to buy tomato products. (That doesn't include fresh. I had to start buying fresh tomatoes in November.) Not one package of frozen tomatoes left in the freezer, none in the canned-goods cupboard (except for half a dozen jars of salsa.) I used the rest of the sauce and diced tomatoes in an enormous batch of chili the other night. I'm kind of sad.

On the one hand, I'm impressed that we managed to eat garden tomatoes half way through February. On the other hand, it's at least five more months until another garden-fresh tomato graces our table. I realize now that if I'm to provide all our of tomato products from the garden for a year, I'll need at least another dozen plants (I had twelve last year.) And I don't have one more inch of room, so I might have to give up on that notion... or dig up another section of the back yard.

All that's left from my preserving efforts last summer are four cups of pumpkin puree, a cup of grated zucchini, two meal's worth of pesto, two cups of chopped bell peppers, a pound of stored beets and a handful of pitted sweet cherries. I can see the shelves in my freezer, ever more as we work at eating up all those veggies and all of the meat from the elk.

This past summer's garden and preservation experiment has given me a clearer picture of what I'll need to do in order to really grow the bulk of our food. (i.e. a LOT more work. And space.) I imagine it would take a few years of growing and saving and lots of record keeping to really get a handle on the right amounts of everything. Not sure if I'll ever get that far or not, but it's nice to think about. :o)

Mid-winter Spaghetti

Ya know what's darn satisfying?

Serving a meal to guests that is made primarily of garden vegetables, in the Dead of Winter.

The guests: My mother- and father-in-law

The meal: Spinach linguini made from scratch with frozen garden spinach
Spaghetti sauce made with tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes, bell peppers and garlic from the garden, plus an onion and some mushrooms and tons of spices.
Elk meatballs
Homemade bread

All those hours of work in the kitchen chopping and blending and freezing and canning really pays off when you can have garden veggies in January!

Tear-free Salsa

Salsa is the first thing I tried to can, three years ago. I enlisted my husband to help and put Chloe in front of the TV for what ended up being an all-day process. It was a HUGE mess, it was a TON of work, and all I got from it was two stinkin' quart-size jars of salsa. I don't remember why, but I remember crying. Out of frustration, not from chopping onions.

I tackled salsa again today and I'm happy to report that I did not cry (except when I chopped the onions, but Cora hugged me and it was alright.) I now have nine pints of absolutely delicious salsa plus about a cup leftover to snack on with chips tomorrow.



That should be plenty of salsa until next year, along with the peach salsa I canned last month. Now if enough tomatoes would ripen at once so I could make a decent-sized batch of pizza sauce, I'd be good to go.

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I started digging today. My intention is to double the size of the garden, use it as landscaping, and really make a work of art out of our back yard. Step one is digging and removing the Bermuda grass from a 200-square foot strip.

I keep going back and forth on whether this is the best thing to do - it's going to divide our lovely, big backyard in half. But it will be pretty and will produce more food. My husband likes the idea, so I'm going for it. I promised I would try to do it without his help.

I have to jump up and down on the shovel three or four times to even get it in the ground, but I made a bit of progress tonight. I look forward to posting end-result pictures next summer (after it's been planted.)

Restless...

Ugh! I'm so restless lately.

I've had a couple of hours every night for the past week or so all to myself, and I've not done a damn thing that's worthwhile. What's wrong with me?

I'm burned out on every hobby. I just don't feel like knitting. I'm not in the mood to scrapbook and every page I do try to finish turns out really blah and unimpressive. My garden is... well, it's pretty much self sufficient now. All I have to do is water it every night and pick the vegetables that are ready. There aren't many weeds to pull, there's not any planting to be done anymore... I've been reading, but just sitting and reading is so dull- I need something to keep my hands busy. And I just finished a book so I'm bookless until library day tomorrow. I'm overwhelmed with the number of unfinished projects in piles around me that I just don't feel like finishing.

I'm bored!

<~~~a statement that rarely comes out of my mouth. I need a project. A big project. A fun project. Something creative, inspiring, something new. Something that will make me feel accomplished when I finish it. And something that's not terribly expensive. Any suggestions? (Because really, I need a new hobby, don'tcha think?) === I canned tomatoes yesterday (without any more exploded jars, thankfully.) We made tomato sauce the old fashioned way: slave labor.
The basic recipe (for anyone dying to can their own tomatoes...) You get about a pint of sauce per pound of tomatoes. This is a rough estimate. It's not worth the work unless you have at least five pounds (in my opinion. You're welcome to form your own opinion.)

Peel the tomatoes - drop them in boiling water for 10 seconds, plunge them into ice water for a minute or so, then slit the skins and peel them off. It's not hard, but takes some time.

Squish out the guts - slice your tomato in half, use a paring knife to cut out the core. Then squeeze the tomato until all the gooey stuff and seeds come out (some seeds left in are okay.) Do this over a bowl, and expect a lot of random streams of tomato guts to go flying in every direction. Cover your hair and wear an apron (I'm not exaggerating.) If you're doing this with a six year old (as I was) expect giggles. Put the gutless tomatoes into a bowl (in front of your six year old, if you have one handy.)

Squash the tomatoes - using your hands, squeeze the heck out of the tomatoes over and over again. You could use a potato masher, or even a blender for really fine sauce, but that's not nearly as much fun. If you have a six year old, this is where you employ them. Tell her it's brains, to be eaten with worm noodles come wintertime. ;o) Squish and squash until you have a fine soupy concoction in your bowl.

Cook the sauce - put the squished brains... err, tomatoes... into a pot. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for about 10 minutes.

There's your sauce. It's basically the same consistency as "Crushed Tomatoes" when purchased at the store.

To can:

Heat jars (Sterilizing is unnecessary based on the boiling time.)

Put 1 Tbsp lemon juice in the bottom of each pint jar (This is important!). Adjust for jar-size accordingly.

Fill jars.

Process in boiling water canner 40 minutes for pints. (Not adjusted for altitude.) Be sure jars are covered by at least 1 inch of water throughout processing time. Otherwise, you'll have to add on more time for any minutes that your jars weren't covered.

Tomatoes are a funny thing. They are scary to can and can cause botulism more easily than any other vegetable. If you open a jar later and anything at all seems wrong with it, throw it away. Better safe than sorry.

There you have it - canned tomatoes, from scratch. It's a lot of work, really, considering the price of tomato products at Wal Mart. But Great Value Crushed Tomatoes don't give you nearly the satisfaction as your own do. :o)

Adventures in homemaking...

Back when we went on our trip to Montana, my neighbor watered the garden for me. Except that they went camping too and didn't water for three days. My cukes all died except one pitiful plant. I think she felt guilty because she keeps coming over with bags full of cukes from her own garden for me. I don't hold it against her that my cukes died, but I do appreciate her kindness and generosity!

The other day she dropped off four enormous cucumbers - almost 6 pounds' worth. We can't eat six pounds of cukes even if we ate them for every meal, so I decided to make a batch of bread and butter pickles to be canned. I'll take a couple of jars to my neighbor to let her know we appreciate her!

Anyway, as I was pulling them out of the canner I noticed the water looked a little yellowish and cloudy - not normal. I pulled up the quart-sized jar I'd done and the pickles all fell out of the bottom. That's when I realized the bottom had cracked clean around and the bottom fell off of the jar.




I've never experienced anything like that before! Glad it wasn't an explosion or anything, though that's not common in boiling-water canning. It's either because the jar was old (probably acquired at a yard sale or something, and jars have a life of about 10 years) but could also be from a whole host of other reasons... I'm not terribly concerned, I doubt it'll happen again soon.

Now I've got to clean out the canning pot before I do the 12 pounds of tomatoes I've picked over the last week from our own garden. The canning pot is a mess:



I did manage to at least get four pints of pickles canned - won't last long, but they'll be yummy!



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I made a preemie hat for my dear friend Deb's new granddaughter, Mackenzie Danielle, born last week. She was born 10 weeks early: nearly the same as Chloe and seeing her pictures brings back so many memories! If you're a pray-er, or if you're interested in sending some thoughts of health and wellness, please do - Mackenzie's mama Meghan is still in the hospital with some lasting effects of pre-eclampsia. She could use some positive energy.

Here's the hat:




It's actually the second one but I forgot to take photos of the first. Chloe's preemie doll is the model. :o)

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Here's a pic of Chloe saving lettuce seeds for next year's garden:



And a photo of two busy little bees pollinating our pumpkin blossoms:



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One last bit of good news: Chloe's tooth finally came out this morning! And then she was walking around the house with it (who knows why) and dropped it. We managed to find it in the carpet though. YAY! for Chloe!!

Foodstuffs

Spring is the beginning of the Season of Food in our house, and I'm so glad it's here.

The early crops of the garden are sprouting and happily spreading their leaves toward the newly-warm sun. So far we've got a nice little patch of snap and sugar peas, two little spinach beds (that will provide more than enough spinach for the spring, plus plenty to freeze for meals later) and two lettuce beds that are growing quite rapidly. One row of radishes should be ready for picking and another is just beginning to sprout... time to plant another, I suppose. (Though I've not yet figured out why I grow radishes. It must be because they grow quickly, providing 'instant gratification' of a sort; they're fun to pull up, too. None of us care for eating them much though. We're growing purple and red radishes this year - it'll be a fun surprise for Chloe to pull up a purple radish! Anyway, enough about radishes.) I planted broccoli and there are about eight little plants sprouted, but they're growing awfully slow and broccoli can't withstand the heat that'll be here by June, so I've a feeling that will be a waste of space. Ah well, you live, you learn. Carrots and beets are sprouting now too (finally - they take so long!) I find it so peaceful to sit out in the garden pulling up teeny little weed sprouts and dreaming of how pretty it will all look when it's fully grown.

Come Mother's Day I'll put the rest of the seeds into the ground - the warm weather things. Those are the ones I really look forward to. The cold weather stuff is more like a teaser for the better things to come - green beans, cucumbers, bell peppers and ohhhh tomatoes. Yep. Can't wait for summer.

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In addition to garden planting, it's also Asparagus Season here in Western Colorado. We're lucky enough to have asparagus growing wild along the country roads pretty much everywhere. I think I talked about that last year. My mother and I picked and then pickled something like ten pounds of asparagus (maybe more, I really couldn't say.) This year I'd like to do the same, and also freeze 10 or 15 pounds to have on hand throughout the year. We've picked probably four pounds already, but most of it's already been eaten. I do have some in the refrigerator with which I intend to make cream of asparagus soup, a delicious treat we had while in Mexico that I can't wait to taste again. I'll let y'all know how it turns out. If it's good, I'll post the recipe.

And of course, strawberries are on sale in all the supermarkets right now, so I bought a four pound container and made six pints of jam. I forgot how good homemade strawberry jam tastes! While I was cooking it, letting it heat the the gelling point, I had my canning pot boiling away so it would be ready when the jam was. At some point during this I realized my stove was making an awful humming-sort-of-buzzing noise. It made me nervous enough that I shut everything off, took off all the pots on the stove, and gave up. I went ahead and put the jam into jars and, after it cooled, into the fridge. Each of the jars sealed even though they were never properly canned and the jam actually turned out really good, if just a bit soft. I just hope it keeps alright - I'll keep all the jars in the refrigerator, just in case.

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On a totally different note - if you have kids and a library card (or maybe even if you don't have kids...) check out the book Wabi Sabi. Chloe picked it out a couple weeks ago and I finally got around to reading it with her. (Not because I'm a slacker. We check out about 30 books every week. It takes time getting through all of them!) I found Wabi Sabi to be quite a profound little book that teaches a wonderful lesson - maybe one that adults can glean a bit more from than children. And it's a great lesson in Japanese culture and religion, and haiku too, in case you're homeschooling and want a fun unit study starter. :o)

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'Tis all for now. I hope everyone out in blog-land is doing well!

Socks

I finally finished the jaywalker socks - a week or two ago, actually. I'm just a slacker. This pic was taken before they were washed and blocked so they're kind of lumpy looking.

Yarn: Regia Ringel
Needles: size 1 dpn's
I pretty much followed the pattern exactly, and love them. I like that the stripes don't entirely match - gives them a definite hand-knit, quirky look.


Stockings for Cora's Halloween costume (and hopefully to be worn at Christmastime too)


Yarn: Red Heart Supersaver
Needles: size 7 dpn's
Pattern: none, I just made it up as I went along. I turned the first heel after I'd had a few beers, so it's a little goofy, but oh well. :-)

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Last night's dinner was stuffed peppers. Yum. And the peppers were from the garden, along with tomato sauce and dice tomatoes made from tomatoes I grew. It's so satisfying to be eating fresh, homegrown food. It also takes creativity. Really, what are you supposed to do with dozens of bell peppers? It's a shame they can't just get ripe one or two at a time, instead of all together.

Stuffed Peppers:

6 bell peppers
1 lb ground beef
2 cups prepared rice
1 cup tomato sauce
1 cup diced tomatoes
1/2 cup shredded cheese
spices

Brown the beef, then toss it in a bowl with the other stuff and mix well. Add whatever spices you like or have on hand. Cut the tops out of the peppers carefully, creating little pepper cups. Stuff the mixture inside, bake for 45 minutes at 350, until peppers are soft.

The recipe makes lots more stuffing than you need to stuff 6 peppers. Put the rest in a ziploc bag in the freezer, and it can be thawed to have stuffed peppers on a busy night when you don't feel like cooking. :-)

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I also have an obsession with food preservation. I canned 5 pints of bread and butter pickles the other night with cukes from the garden. Altogether I've probably canned about 30 quarts of food this year, and we haven't done apples yet and I still want to do salsa. The girls love snacking on canned peaches mixed with yogurt, Chloe eats pickled asparagus like it's going out of style, and we eat peanut butter and peach butter sandwiches all the time now. There's just something so satisfying about feeding my family things I've made like that.

The list of canned goods:
Peach salsa
Peach butter
Sliced peaches
Peach halves
Pickled asparagus
Bread and butter pickles

That might be all.... Not to mention all of the green beans, corn, and pesto I've but by in the freezer.

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My honey is off for the week again. I'm letting him sleep in now, at least a little. There's much to be done over the next two days, and then we're heading to Denver for a field trip/family getaway.