Canning

We sure have been busy the last few days. Monday after school I decided to clean out my downstairs pantry. Since I am now into the canning season I wanted the shelves wiped off and clean. I started looking around at all the jars of old stuff I had canned and thought, "I really needed to dump some things." I have been putting it off for years!

When Dustin lived at home he was so good about eating many of the things I canned. He was always growing and hungry. I'm sure I dumped at least 200 jars of different things like: apple sauce, apple pie in a jar, peaches, jellies, syrup, ketchup, spaghetti sauce, pickle relish, tomato juice, etc. Things I thought I would use but didn't. Many jars were 10 years old!

It was work carrying all those jars upstairs, dumping them into a big bucket, and lugging the bucket outside to the trees. Washing the jars was a breeze compared to the rest. I told Whitney, "Don't buy any canning jars!! I have enough for you and all the other children!"

I finally finished putting away all the empty jars and getting my room cleaned around 6:30. When Whitney stopped on her way home from cleaning in Gackle and the church I was proud to show her my clean and organized room. She admired it and made me feel even better! She then helped me pick about 4 quarts of choke cherries and 6 gallons of apples and carried a 5 gallon bucket of potatoes I had dug downstairs for me. By then it was almost bedtime. She also took care of the eggs. It felt like I could barely walk that night as I thought my hip might have gone out. But it felt better after a good night's rest.

On Tuesday after school Daniel, Leah, and I washed the apples and put them through my juicer. I wanted to get a gallon of fresh juice to make into apple cider. We ended up getting a little more. The extra I put into containers and froze. I can use that in my Sabbath punch.

Daniel was an especially helpful boy. He loved using my juicer. (I remember when Brandon liked using the kitchen gadgets.) Daniel had to push down pretty hard to get the hard apples to go through. Leah was washing the apples in the sink for me. I would cut the apples in half or quarters depending on how big they were. As young as the children are they cut my work time in half.

I put the juice through a strainer. To the jar of juice I added 1 cup of sugar. Cora's directions said to cover the jar with a cloth and put it into a dark place, stir occasionally, and in one month I should have apple cider vinegar.

Years ago I bought this Champion Juicer. It was quite expensive but it has been worth it. It makes juicing almost effortless compared to a hand cranked one. Plus the cheap hand cranked one I had would never do raw produce! I use the juicer when I make my tomato sauce. I wash the tomatoes, quarter them, and put them through the juicer. It leaves me with a pulpy juice with no seeds or skins. Then I cook the juice down to sauce consistency and process it in jars. It beats anything you can buy in a store. I probably go through over 100 quarts of tomato sauce in one year. I don't know how much a quart of tomato sauce costs as I never buy it. But I imagine I have made up the cost of my juicer.

While we made the apple juice I had the choke cherries cooking in water and then drained the juice for jelly. I only wanted to make one recipe as I had just dumped several jars of old jelly.


Today I finally got to the few tomatoes I had that were ripe. Too few to make sauce so I just canned them whole after I took the skins off.

I've got several buckets partially full in the basement that will be ready for canning on Sunday. Plus there should be more in the garden that will be ripe.

I was thinking that fall is such a busy time. First we are back to full time school. Then there is all the produce to take care of. Each season has it's own work, I guess.

School has been going well. My little students and I are back into the swing of things. We are getting started by 9:00 and usually finish by 1:00 in time for me to make lunch. I took some pictures of our school time and will try to post them in the next couple days.

I just wanted to tell you about the great stir fry I made today! Around noon while Daniel was doing his math facts I snuck downstairs and put on some brown rice. It takes almost an hour to cook so it isn't something I can make in a hurry. After we were done with school I cut up some onions, chicken breasts, and lots of garlic and started frying it in my pot. While that was working I made a cucumber salad and sliced one of my brandy wine tomatoes. When the chicken was cooked I took it out of the pot and put in some summer squash, ginger root, and Anaheim chili peppers. I stir fried that just a few minutes. Then I added some liquid amino's, it's like soy sauce, and put the chicken back in. It was so good and had just a touch of heat from the peppers. Tim really liked it, too.

After Daniel and I had done the dishes and I swept the floor we went for our nature walk. I like that this year's curriculum tells us what to look for in our weekly nature walk. Since we are studying all about ecosystems, niches, biomes, and such we should have plenty to look for. Today we were to collect leaves and bark for our nature notebooks. We have a lot of different trees in our yard and tree belt. The children got tired of collecting after about 4 different kinds. We just stapled our leaves to a piece of paper and did a bark rubbing right beside the leaf. We collected 8 different leaves and identified more trees than that. We will put plastic sleeves over the pages and put them into their three ring notebooks.

I usually have Leah take a nap at 4:00. It was almost 5:00 by the time we got back from our nature walk. Daniel had pulled her on the wagon down and back. I was already in the house when I heard her screaming and bawling. It wasn't a hurt cry, it was an angry cry. She will occasionally melt down if she is over tired. She couldn't talk so I asked Daniel what was the matter. He had found a chicken egg in the goat barn and Leah wanted to carry it. He wouldn't let her so she got upset. I read her a short story and lay with her until she fell asleep. I don't think it took her more than 2 minutes and she was out!

I best go and wake her as she will sleep until 7:00. That makes it a little hard to go back to bed by 9:00.