Spicy…

Aug29

My folks and I had a wonderful time last night canning up some surplus tomatoes…

The victims…5 boxes of home-grown tomatoes.

Popping the skin off them by boiling them in water for a few minutes and then…

plunging them into ice-water and pulling the skins right off.

Dad had the wonderful job of cutting out the cores while mom chopped them into bite sized bits.

We added the other ingredients and started the cooking process.

We then put the salsa into hot jars and put seals and lids on them…
(ready to go outside to the hot water bath canner.)

The set up outside…

The first batch! I love listening to the seals “burp” as they stick to the glass!

We had an amazing moon to can under as well. All lit up from the fires burning near.

The rest of the guys did a little relaxing…

The finished product!

We ended up with 24 pints of salsa, not too bad for our first go around!

Revisiting last fall…

Feb16

Last fall seems to be a huge blur to me…between having all-day sickness and trying to keep up with school work, it’s all a big blur. However on days like today…

It's rainy and wet out, no sun...yuck, mud soup!

It seems to bring a little sunshine to our day when we can enjoy goodies like these…

The fruits of fall...

From these fruits…

Apples and Pumpkins...

We were blessed to be able to work out a trade with Kathy over at Two Frog Home. In August we processed chickens and gave Kathy the chicken feet so she could make and can some incredible looking chicken broth and this fall she had an abundance of wonderful apples. So early October, my mom and I spent 2 days prepping, cooking, pureeing, cooking some more and finally canning some apple butter, applesauce and pumpkin butter. In the middle of early pregnancy they felt like l-o-n-g days, but they were oh-so fun!

Mom and I ended up cutting and coring the apples (leaving the skins on) and cooking the apples down to mush in my electric roaster. Then put Sawyer up to the task of running the manual food mill (good work for a 16-year-old!) which produced beautiful looking sauce. We ended up cooking some of it down into a thick caramel goo for apple butter and made the rest into applesauce.

: Pureed pumpkin…

We also had an abundance of pumpkins this year, so in between doing batches of apples we cut pumpkins in half, gutted them and baked them down. Once they were soft enough we scraped out the pulp and pureed it in food processor. We froze some as was to use for pies and other pumpkin treats and then cooked the rest down into a another yummy goo (pumpkin butter) and canned it.

Days like today you can almost see spring coming…in between sprinkles.

Slowly…

Sep21

Sorry not much from us lately. We’ve been busy around here getting going again for the school year and doing a bunch of fall cleaning before the real cold weather hits. We have some exciting news to share that will have to wait for now until I have more time.

: Garrett with a funny potato…

This weekend we harvested half of our potatoes and all of the onions . They are now safely tucked away for the long upcoming winter. The weather has been a bit strange here and not at all very fall-like, we have been having very nice warm weather (80’s to 90’s) with a few cooler days thrown in once in a while and no frost. That was until this morning when we awoke to a thick coat of frost. I need to get out and see what is salvageable from the green tomatoes and get them inside and eventually we will have to put the garden to bed and start the dreaming/scheming process over again for next spring. The weather looks very promising for the next week though.

Still have a bit of canning to do, we have been saving strawberries for the whole month of September so we want to make some strawberry rhubarb jam. We also need to make some pumpkin butter and apple butter and I hope to can some black and kidney beans. We sent the last pig to be processed last week and we should be able to pick it up sometime soon! Then when the weather gets a bit cooler we have a couple of sheep that will be headed to freezer camp and some turkeys that will follow. Then of course we have hunting right around the corner which is all Sawyer can even think of! Lots of stuff to keep us busy.

Saturday night I combed Teigen’s hair straight up and he thought it was so funny and wanted me to take a picture of it…

Teigen after a tub...

Hope everyone’s enjoying this last day of summer!

Processing Day…

Jul31

Yesterday we processed 20 of the 42 Cornish x chickens. We ended up moving them over to my dad’s house about a month ago as he had more room to finish them in. After 8 weeks of growing, our smallest bird yesterday was about 4 lbs and the largest was 8 1/2 lbs! My dad kept asking Sawyer if he accidentally grabbed one of the laying hens! Most of the birds where between 6 1/2 to 7 lbs…not too bad!

One big chicken!

My dad and Sawyer started early yesterday morning getting all prepped up and getting the fire started to boil the water which was used for scalding the chickens.

The scalder- a metal garbage can set up on two block with a fire going underneath...

We (the little boys, girls and myself) did not show up until later in the afternoon to do the wrapping but we didn’t miss all the fun! Sawyer had the fun job of knocking heads off and helped in gutting them and dad scalded and plucked…

Here's dad after the beheading, gutting and scalding-getting ready to be plucked...

The plucker doing a fine job removing the feathers...

Dad said his rubber pants were a bit hot to wear all day yesterday!

Sawyer with the gizzards and hearts a real delicacy...

I’d say yum, but I really don’t think it’s all that yummy… at all. However Sawyer disagrees with me and enjoys the little tidbits! 8{

Tori pulling another one out of the cooler...

A *new* rubber garbage can was used as a cooler. We ended up using milk jugs that had been filled with water and frozen to put in the *cooler* to keep everything cold.

Tori did the finish work and picked out any remaining feathers...

Boomer, my dads' dog, guarded the final product!

Chicken 2009, nice white packages...

The little boys helped run the final packages down the stairs to the freezer. Today the process begins again on the remaining chickens. It’s so nice to have a freezer full of home grown chickens to feed us through the coming year!

Last night I also participated in a home canning class at the community college. Last Thursday was the first class in which we learned how to water bath canning and we processed some nectarines. Last night we learned how to use a pressure canner and processed some tomatoes. The classes were so much fun and I feel more confident in using my pressure canner and can hardly wait to get started on processing more fruits and veggies!