Mission Accomplished

For the last several years I've thought it would be cool to make freezer jam from strawberries we grew in our backyard.  Yesterday it finally happened.  We went from this:

 to this:

in rather short order.

It's been declared "yummy" by Steven and now I'm off to try some myself.

Tomatoes

2 bags in the fridge this morning= 11 quarts in bottles this afternoon.

5 bags to go.

Good thing I love tomatoes.
I might feel like eating them again sometime after Christmas.

Reaping What Was Sown

See these peaches? This morning they were still hanging on a tree, ripening in the sun. I've never picked peaches off the tree and then canned them. It's pretty cool. Thanks goes out to my neighbors that didn't want their fruit. There are more to do, but they're not quite ready yet. Maybe by Labor Day.

In other food news, fall must be somewhere near by as there are foods ready to harvest, eat, and store.

The season's first batch of peach pit syrup. It's made from peach pits some of my friends were canning last week. Hopefully there is a lot more to be had as I work on our peaches.

Here's some of the corn we ate for dinner. Lest I imply that all the corn cobs looked this good- the reason they got to be eaten for dinner was that they looked like real corn.

And here's most of the corn we froze. I didn't realize when I took this picture that I'd forgotten a batch that was still blanching on the stove. So, we ended up with 5 quart bags in all. It got to be cut up because these particular corn cobs were rather deformed looking and usually only partially filled with kernels. The earwigs got to quite a few of the strands of corn silk before everything could be fertilized. Darn bugs. At least I had the satisfaction of cutting down the corn stalks and creating lots of homeless bugs. Hope they move out of state.

One of our "watermelon" zucchini, but not the biggest we've had. I either forget to go out and check on it, or don't get the chance for a couple of days and then we end up with zucchini clubs.

Yep, that's all from one zucchini. It made 12 cups of puree that is now in the freezer waiting to be added to spaghetti sauce.

September is starting out crazy busy like August was, but there is something oddly satisfying about filling our shelves with jars of food. It's keeping me sane. Who'd have thought?!

$.99 Strawberries in March

Sunflower Market has $.99/lb. strawberries. The second week in March. That seems early to me, but I'm not one to complain about such things. They are beautiful, huge, and oh so juicy. (I would have taken a picture for your enjoyment, but the only way the camera is currently functioning is for Erica to press hard on the front edges of the lens with her fingers while pushing the button. We currently have lots of pictures of Erica's fingers and not much else.) I bought 5 tubs today. We ate one after school and the other 4 have been made into jam and are sitting in my freezer, except for a little in the fridge- some of which will probably not live to see tomorrow morning as I will eat a piece of toast before bed. I don't know who thought of having a sale on large, gorgeous, yummy strawberries in March, but today they are my hero. And probably tomorrow and the day after, and Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday as well. Maybe if I offer to keep them at hero status, we'll have them again next week as well.

PS- The suggestion given last fall about how to get the cents sign didn't work for me. I'm going to have to get a custom keyboard for days like today.

PPS- If your strawberries are cheaper, I'm glad for you. Eat many and feel good.

PPPS- Sunflower also had London Broil steaks for $1.97/lb., but they were out. They were selling sirloin steaks at the same price instead until their shipment came in. It was a happy grocery day. Glad it kind of fell apart yesterday (the regular day).

Garbanzo Beans

Ok, Jenny. This one's for you.

Canned Garbanzo Beans
Wash dry beans. For the number of pint jars used, measure 1/2 c. (slightly rounded) beans into a large pot. Cover beans with water and cook until beans are tender (1 to 1-1/2 hours). Fill jars with beans, 1" from the top. Add 1/2 tsp. salt to each pint and fill with boiling water up to neck of jars. Adjust lids and pressure at 10 lbs. for 60 minutes.

Not quite as easy as regular beans, but not too bad. Good luck!

Canning Beans

Today is Monday, which means I should be blessing my house (cleaning it) and returning it to its' regular, somewhat clean, state after a weekend. Guess what, I really don't feel like it today and I've been really good at coming up with other, hopefully somewhat productive, things to do. For instance, right now I have the pressure canner going with 9 pints of beans- 4 white, 4 red, a 1 black. I've been meaning to can beans for awhile, but I keep putting it off. Today, it ranks higher than cleaning the house so it's getting done. After I'm done here, I'm going to make some oatmeal bread because I've been putting that off, too, and I thought it sounded good today.

There are two things I like about canning beans. The first is that it can be done in the winter time. That means I can heat up my house when I really want it hot, not when the A/C has to run majorly over-time to compete with the stove. Second, dry beans are so cheap, but take forever to cook on their own. Not to mention the fact that cooking them all day also heats up the house in the summer. Pressure canning them takes them from dry and hard to soft and ready-to-eat in less than 90 minutes total, if everything runs like it should. They're also sealed in a jar and can sit on my shelf looking pretty until I'm ready to use them.

This post has two purposes. The first is it gives me something to do besides pushing the vacuum or the duster or cleaning the downstairs bathroom. The second is that I have misplaced my recipe to can beans on several occasions before. Since I currently have it right in front of me, I'm going to post it here where I can always find it again. I guess a bonus for the readers of this post is that they, too, now have access to the recipe should they ever want it, and I know you've always wished you had it! So, enjoy!


Canning Pinto Beans (or whatever kind you like)
Prewash dry beans. Measure 1-1/3 c. beans into each of 7 quart jars or enough to fill your cooker. Add 1-1/4 tsp. salt to each quart and fill with boiling water up to the neck of jars. Adjust lids and pressure at 10 lbs. for 75 minutes.


See how easy that is?! I'm doing pints because I use that size more often, so I just put in 2/3 c. beans into a pint jar instead. My canner held 9 pint jars easily. It probably could have done 10 if I squeezed. I also don't like all the salt, so I just added 1/4 tsp. You could leave it out completely if you wanted. The only beans I think you can't do this way are garbanzo beans (chick peas). At least this paper has a different recipe for canning them. I've never used it because I don't use garbanzo beans enough. Let me know if you want it though, and I'll post it. Double bonus for you!

Saturday Night

I'll have to thank my neighbor for not wanting her apples and Greg for his help cleaning up my fabulous mess!

Grapes

So, it's Saturday, not too far from Sunday. My grape jelly experiment is finally over. I was never very good at guesstimating anything, so my projects tend to run long and require multiple trips to the store the first time I try something new. Grape jelly was no different. At least this project didn't require something from Home Depot. Allen's Grocery store is a lot closer.

I figured our box of grapes held enough for a couple batches of jelly- that would require about 9 pounds of grapes and give us about a dozen cups of jelly. I bought the appropriate containers and pectin. Thursday after school we started de-stemming grapes. I should have gotten out the scale. Turns out we had nearly 30 pounds (told you I don't guesstimate very well) of grapes. Two days later I have 32 cups of jelly and 7 cups of syrup. (Yea, I know, who eats grape syrup? We will because I was trying a different recipe that didn't use pectin. You just boil the juice and sugar until it's thick enough. After 45 minutes of boiling and stirring, I decided we had enough grape jelly to be getting on with and we'd just go for a little grape syrup instead. I'll let you know how or if it goes. My advice, buy pectin!)

The whole jelly thing was kind of fun. The boys loved helping me squish the grapes. It was strangely therapeutic- like popping the bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap. Then you boil the grapes and run them through a strainer (Victorio Strainer. For my siblings- it's the same kind we used to use for making applesauce with Mom.) to get rid of the skins and any stems that may have snuck in. That was Steven's favorite part. We ended up with one of those giant silver bowls full of grape juice. You have to let it sit overnight in the fridge because, something new I learned, grape juice will develop tartrate crystals. They look like lots of pulp that just appears in the juice. You can strain them out after the juice has sat overnight. So, grape jelly is at least a 2-day project. We made room in the indoor fridge for the huge bowl because my white counters already had purple blotches all over them and I wasn't about to risk the same with the white carpet as we walked the giant bowl out to the fridge in the garage. I felt very homemake-y for providing such copius amounts of homemade grape products for my family.

Day Two was fun. The recipe said to remove the tartrate crystals by straining the juice through several layers of cheese cloth. This is just a marketing ploy by the cheesecloth people. If you make grape jelly do not use cheese cloth. Many more purple blotches were added to the white counters. (Good thing they come right out with bleach!) There is probably a great product out there for this part of the process, but I don't own it. I ended up just using the little strainer I had in my utensil drawer. I used to use it to sprinkle powdered sugar evenly on brownies. I have a shaker for that now. Now it's pretty much used only once or twice a year to strain pulp out of someone's orange juice. It worked much better and made less of a mess than the cheese cloth. I made a double batch of jelly and felt very pleased with myself.

By Day Three (today) the excitement had pretty much evaporated for that big bowl of grape juice that was staring me in the face every time I opened the fridge. This afternoon I decided to try the no-pectin version mentioned above as I had used all the pectin I had bought and didn't want to go to the store. An hour later I found myself headed to the store to buy more pectin. The last batch went into jars about 7:00 tonight. I am very grateful to have the grape jelly in jars and the big silver bowl clean and back in the cupboard where it belongs. Greg was a total dear and helped do the dishes. It still feels good to have learned something new and have something tangible to show for it. Right now, though, any thought of eating anything grape flavored is pretty repulsive.

So, feel free to stop by for a visit sometime. We'll have peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches for lunch and pancakes with grape syrup for dinner. (I don't know what your mornings are like, but there is no way pancakes will happen most mornings here.) We could even try a little vanilla ice cream with grape syrup for dessert. If you come before Thanksgiving, we'd love to see you, but I'll probably just watch you eat. I know, you can't wait to get here.