Reality in the Digital World

When I began blogging, I had no idea what I was doing. It was a sort of journal / family sharing concept for me. And because of that, I highlighted what I thought family may find interesting or what I wanted to remember. Another aspect of blogging, one I hadn't anticipated, was the network of acquaintances you can develop as you receive comments and comment on the blogs you read.

I found as I read blogs I frequently felt overwhelmed, inadequate, or challenged. So many people out there doing so many things that I found worthy, interesting or helpful. How to do it all. Their lives looked so perfect. I once commented on this to my sister and she pointed the finger right back at me - the point being that my blog could make it look like my world was so smoothly oiled and full of fulfilling things. Ouch. I guess in my quest to be a positive voice, I didn't realize I was not presenting the entire picture. So if I'm going to make posts, I think I need to keep it real.

As I have been for a couple weeks now, I'm canning today. I'll include the picture of my 16 pints of peach jam that turned out very nicely today.

What sweet success! It tastes great, very peachy. Look at the shine on the clean glass jars and rings. Sigh. Now I'm thinking, as I read the blog post, "Oh, I should can some jam. I wish I was (fill in the blank) so that I had some pretty jars of jam on my counter." But wait! Maybe you have something better to do today than toil over jam.

Let's back up a bit and see if this is still as appealing. (Spoiler alert - my life is not all shiny)

Now before this picture could be taken, there was the actual canning. It involved hot, steaming cauldrons of water on this nearly 80 degree day. And not being one to enjoy long exposure to sauna-like conditions, I do all that I can to mitigate that sweltering situation. Like rig up a way to wedge a box fan into my kitchen window to send as much heat outside as possible:

Three nails and some kitchen twine later, I've got this beautiful creation over my canning stove. I know, you want me to do a tutorial on how to achieve this look. Maybe later.

And not only are the pots hot but the contents, as well. Now if this was a perfect, shiny life, I'd be doing this jam canning in a sundress with stylish apron and some pretty sandals. But since I have a fear of boiling jam adhering to my legs and feet when I clumsily spill a pot someday, I look more like this:

You know, your basic cold winter gear on a hot summer day. Jeans and hubby's slippers. (Don't tell him. I actually was wearing shorts and flip flops when I started out this morning and, being lazy, kicked them off and stepped into his slippers for the dangerous part of the canning). Is your jam envy waning? Mine is.

And of course, there is the spooning, measuring, stirring, etc. which results in countertops strewn with sticky, goo laden pots, bowls and utensils:

 

 Oh yeah, that's gonna be fun to clean up. And as long as I'm being brutally honest, here's another side effect of the canning - trash:

Yes, the trashcan is heaped with empty sugar bags, pectin boxes and I've decorated around it with vinegar jugs that need to be put in with the recycling. (As a side note, jam takes a great deal of sugar. And the more jam you make, the more sugar you need. I know this because it turned out that my quadruple batch of jam needed 30 cups of sugar. Oy! I emptied a large bag, two small bags and, getting more and more desperate, emptied the sugar bowl and most of my organic kombucha sugar to get enough to make the recipe. Oops. I'll be more prepared next time. Right.)

Now, I won't subject your poor eyes to pics of my trashcan every post, but I guess what I'm saying is that I don't want to contribute to that digital phenomenon we experience on blogs, Facebook, and Instagram. Always try to keep in mind that we are seeing the "greatest hits", not the entire recording session.

Now I'm going to go can some green beans. They leave a much less sticky mess behind.

When the Cows Come Home

Which is about when both my readers thought I'd make another post. I will make no promises here - just consider this a random, semi-annual post. If more follow, then you and I will both be surprised.

 

The cows did come home. Several times. One of the last times was after a two day absence in which we recieved several reports of sightings and shenanigans. There were the neighbors we know who knocked on the door to say, "I think I just saw your cows all the way down by the next road." The neighbors we'd never met who knocked on the door to say, "Do you have two big black cows?! They are in our garden. Eating." I felt so bad. After reassuring her that they weren't dangerous and would flee if she approached them, I went and hung my head in shame. Eventually, after a multi-hour attempt at roping and leading them home failed, another neighbor saw them in the field next to our property and offered to help chase them back into their own pasture. Bless you JB. So the cows came home. I baked fresh blueberry muffins for both the neighbor with the egarden damage and JB. I wrote a note of thanks and one of apology. I offered to make it up to them... somehow.

 

And then I called my husband (who was at work during the cows return) and said, "Stop on your way home and buy these pastured bovines some cow crack! I want them to be dependent upon you as their drug dealer until the butcher can fit them in his schedule. There will be no more wayward steers!" He, much relieved to hear that they were, indeed, confined to their own pasture once again, stopped and bought them some corn. It didn't take much to get them hooked and they would stand at the fence all day looking for someone to bring them a scoop. (Insert sigh of relief.)

 

I called the processor and made an appointment. I called family and let them know, "Your beef will be on it's way soon - make room in your freezers."  And then I took my own advice.

 

I know my husband's penchant for cranberries with his turkey. You know, that pasture-raised turkey we put in our freezer and can? And he won't eat that jellied storebought stuff. No way. Turned out I had a lot of cranberries stashed in the freezer. Since you can't buy them year-round, in season I'm always snagging them when I see good berries for a good price. There must have been a lot of good prices. I believe I uncovered (between two large chest freezers) about 20 bags. Including a couple of monster-sized Costco bags.

 

 

I got inspired and decided to make up the cranberry conserve he liked and can it. Ready-to-eat. After studying the recipe I found it to be even more acidic than the recipe for basic cranberry relish in the Ball canning book so I didn't make any changes. Lots of fresh lemons, fresh oranges, fresh Granny Smiths and frozen cranberries later, we had significantly more room in the freezer. And 50 pints of Cranberry Conserve in the pantry. I won't encourage anybody to can something that isn't an official canning recipe but it is a very tasty dish. I will encourage you to try it with your next turkey. Or pork roast. Or roast chicken. Or come help us eat some. I left out the nuts from the recipe to add fresh and toasted on the day of use.

ANYWAY, I also canned frozen peach filling. Talk about making work for yourself. Freeze it and then can it. I was desperate for space. And I dehydrated frozen peas. And canned a couple of frozen turkeys.

The day came When the Cows Came Home. I had to laugh when my husband noted that he wouldn't have thought we could fit a steer in the Subaru. But we did and we hurried home to tuck all that frozen, vacuum-sealed, pasture-raised deliciousness in the freezer. We had managed to free up almost one entire chest freezer for this purpose. We organized, we applied our best Tetris skills, we used up every square inch we could. And it all fit!!

All except 63 pounds of ground meat. So I started canning. Are you starting to see what it is I do when food storage is in doubt? I can. I can all I can.
 

You can brown 10-12 pounds at a go when you use a roaster over two burners. Win!
 

And we chopped veggies, we browned meat, we formed meatballs, we cheated and used store-bought red sauce because, frankly, the kitchen was already a disaster site with the beef preservation. And we chipped away at 63 pounds of beef slowly defrosting in a large chest cooler in the dining room. If that isn't motivation to keep working, I don't know what is.

And when the dust settled, we had beef vegetable soup, meatballs in sauce, and ground beef for super-speedy dinners! Here are some of the jars of wonderfulness waiting to cool and head to the pantry.
 

I'm especially excited because for me, each of these jars represents a day with extra sewing time this late fall-winter-early spring. Yay! Dinners nearly done before I even get started. I see me finishing a quilt!
 

No promises but I think I may have another post or two in me at the moment...

It's Confession Time

As much as we try to eat real food, whole food, as-often-as-possible food we've raised or grown ourselves... I confess that we hadn't found a salsa we liked as well as store-bought. I cringe to even have to say that. But there we were, putting Chi-Chi's salsa on our homemade tortilla. With home-cooked refried beans. With green chili and pork from our own pigs. It was criminal, really.

 

So when we had a day of harvest that looked like this

 

 

I decided it was time to try yet another canned salsa recipe. Maybe this time we'd find one that we could tolerate. I stumbled across a website that had a recipe that actually sounded good, along with lots of detailed information on getting the ratios right. There were weights for all the ingredients according to batch size and tips on adjusting heat. What most caught my eye? The fact that there wasn't a drop of vinegar to be found in this salsa. They used lemon juice as their acid. Why, that's so much like the lime juice I would use in my pico de gallo that I felt quite certain this could make the difference in flavor that would finally appeal to my family. Because if there was anything we'd agreed on over the failed attempts at canned salsa, it was the vinegar taste that just wasn't supposed to be there.

 

So we skinned and chopped tomatoes



 

We weighed and diced and minced peppers.

 

 

We won't even discuss the onions and the goggles required for this undertaking.

 

And we produced jars and jars of salsa. We loved it right out of the pot... but what would it be like in a few weeks or months?

 

Let me just say that we've got a jar of store-bought salsa on the shelves and even though we made a rule that we should finish up the store-bought before getting into our home-canned, that rule has been clearly broken. And nobody wants to be the enforcer. We have finally found a salsa that we can proudly put atop, beside and into our other homemade goods.

 

You can find the recipe and all the directions here. It's actually a great lesson/tutorial/walk-through for even the most novice canner while still providing great information for those experienced in many types of preserving.

Of Cabbages and Kings

Or at least King-sized projects.

We had success growing cabbage last year but we don't yet have the proper storage to try and keep it whole. We dried some - I highly recommend it. I shredded it the way I would use it in meals later, blanched it and then put it in the Excalibur. When I rehydrate it there is still some crunch and all the flavor and expected aroma. It's been a very positive experience.

Still, we wanted to try something more with it. That's when I opened up my newest Backwoods Home magazine (last summer) and found Jackie Clay-Atkinson's article that included Amish Canned Coleslaw. That sounded like something we could really get behind.

So we chopped, we shredded, we prepped. And then we realized that we didn't own a single bowl big enough for our ambition. What to do?! We needed something large. We needed something that would hold liquid. We needed something clean enough to eat out of. We needed...

A large plastic storage tote. (Don't get into the whole BPA thing with me, please. It was not in this long and it worked very well for our needs.)

And we canned up the most delicious coleslaw! It really delivered on the promise that it would taste great. How nice to pop open a crispy, delicious cabbage side whenever we please.

Kent is very good at canning. I'd never make it through the season without all his help.

 

Here's a link to the recipe online. You'll need to read down the page, past the sqiurrel relocation, past the daffodil bulbs and the vegetable broth:

 

Amish Canned Coleslaw

 

And here is the text lifted from that link:

 

I love the Amish canned coleslaw, BUT it is NOT an approved recipe. (It is basically pickled sweet cabbage, so I’m not too worried. I can’t tell you to try it, only that generations of Amish have used it and so have I for a few years now.) Here’s the recipe:

1½ cups vinegar
2 cups sugar
½ tsp. celery seed
½ tsp. mustard seed
2 tsp. salt
1 large head cabbage
1 cup diced celery
½ cup diced onions
2 cups shredded carrots

Mix vinegar, sugar, and seasonings. Mix with vegetables. Stir very well. Pack into sterile jars and process in a water bath canner for 10 minutes. (If you live at an altitude above 1,000 feet, consult your canning book for directions on increasing your processing time to suit your altitude.) — Jackie

We're in a Pickle

-ing state of mind around here. Oh, did you think I meant something else? While we've made the decision to cut back on canning this year in the event that we end up moving sooner than later, there are a few "staples" we don't want to be without this winter. One of those is kosher-style dill pickles. This year, we added a little extra garlic, extra peppers and lots of fun. Kent helped me with the canning. We stopped by Heinies Market on Wednesday and they had beautiful pickling cucumbers. So we bought two 20# boxes along with a couple bundles of fresh dill. The car smelled heavenly on the way home. Especially when you throw a bag of ripe plums in the mix.


If you live in the Denver vicinity, I can't say enough about Heinies cucumbers. Forty pounds of cukes and not a bad one in the bunch. Not even a bad spot. I was impressed again this year. Here I am at the sink trimming and cutting cucumbers into spears. Here's a tip, make sure you cut off the blossom end of the cucumber as not doing so can make them turn out soft. And if you know the science behind this, I'd love to know.


We cut them into spears for the kosher dills. I'm opposed to pickling whole cucumbers only because you do not get as much cucumber in each jar.


And another trick is to use more firepower when working with large canning pots. Here we have set the gas stove we bought for power outage emergencies on the marble topped baking table. We opened all the windows for ventilation and this made the difference between water boiling in 10 minutes or 50 minutes. Plus, two super-sized pots fit on it at once. This also let us reserve the stove burners for the lids and bands and the pickling liquid.


We used the cold pack method, using hot jars, room temperature veggies and then a hot water bath. Every single jar sealed and the next six weeks will seem like a long wait to taste this years batch. Aren't they pretty!?


We used 29 of the 40 pounds and the yield was 27 quarts and 1 pint. At that point we had used all of the fresh dill. It worked out great.


But what of the 11 remaining pounds? We thought we should try some spicy sweet pickles. This was a new one for us. We'd had some store-bought we liked called Famous Daves. We found a recipe for sweet pickles and then added dried hot peppers, one to each pint. It's an experiment. And just to be different, we cut these into slices.


Kent manned the liquid portion of the packing. He did such a great job with filling to the proper level, wiping rims clean and tightening just right that every single jar sealed up beautifully.


We got 17 pints out of the remaining 11 pounds of cucumber. We had exactly enough slices to fill 17 pints and that was also exactly how many pints would fit into our two canners at one time. I love it when a plan comes together. (Has anyone seen the A-Team movie, BTW?)


Yum!