Making Room in the Freezer

As the fall harvest begins, I was finding several different bags of fruit in the freezer from last year that we hadn't used yet. On top of that, we had an obnoxious amount of rhubarb this spring already! What started to be a batch of Huckleberry jam, turned into an afternoon of making jam and sauces!

The jams I used from last year's berries were huckleberry, raspberry, strawberry rhubarb and cherry. My favorite recipe book is The Ball Complete Book of Canning, which if you don't have, you should get! It has every recipe that you could possibly use and more. Only one recipe have we not likde and that was the Cherry Jam, where the optional ingredients we didn't like. We leave them out and we love it!

I still had over 30 bags of rhubarb in my freezer (what can I say we love rhubarb coffee cake all winter long, but this was a little much!) so was checking out the recipes in my canning book. I've made Strawberry Rhubarb Pie filling and Rhubarb sauce, which my family didn't care for the texture. Then I found a recipe for Victorian BBQ, which used rhubarb and raisons in it. I thought, why not? The jars in the far right row of the picture are the BBQ sauce. I slow cooked a roast with the Victorian BBQ over it and it was a hit with the whole family!

This took me about three hours in one afternoon, and I now have about 35 jars of jam, 7 jars of Victorian BBQ sauce, and more room in the freezer for the incoming harvest!

If you're wondering how I have so much energy after canning everything in the freezer, raising 5 kids and homeschooling, you should check out my favorite Energy Drink!

Comments

DIY Pig Feeder

This is our second year of raising pigs for the fair. We've had some bumps along the way, one of them was our homemade feeder of last year. I tend to have ideas, and then Mr. Right gets the pleasure of trying to execute my ideas. Most of the time it works out, but last year, our feeder was a fail. This year, we need a feeder that can go a long period of time, since our pigs are not on our property where we live. Our neighbor made a complaint about the smell of the pigs last year to our landlord, so the landlord told us no more pigs. (Keep in mind, there are only 2 pigs on 6 acres and they are only here for 5 months and then go to the 4-H fair and livestock auction) Thankfully, another neighbor graciously allowed us to pen up a corner of her horse pen, to put our pigs in. This year, I wanted to be sure that Mr. Right did a quality version of the pig feeder that would make it through the entire five months, and hopefully...

Local Harvest

I am so surprised at the amount of people who don't take advantage of local farmers and produce! We heard about a place called "Tomato Toms" and just had to check it out. (Especially since it seems nearly impossible to grow tomatoes in our town. I think it's something about the elevation) We took a Sunday afternoon to drive to explore local produce and find Tomato Tom. This drive, I thought for sure that no one could be possibly growing anything on such dry land (see the background to the first picture, below). Then we drove up a scary driveway and look what we found: Tomato Toms was a fantastic sizable garden of u-pick heaven! We picked 60 pounds of tomatoes in 10 minutes. Then took about twenty more minutes to figure out just what onions and peppers we needed to go with our tomatoes. The tomatoes weren't store perfect, as in no blemishes or anything, but they were beautiful and tasted wonderful off the vine! I don't normally ...

Burlap and Ticking

I found a queen size bed ruffle with a ticking ruffle on it. Immediately, I picked it up (for only $1!) at our local thrift store. I knew that I would combine it with my find of burlap bags. ( I picked up 200 of them for only $10! Yes, that's right, they were only $.05 each! I overindulged in them, and could take no less than 200 because of the price.) One of the problems with my new bags is that they are a little smaller than the printed ones that I have. I personally like really long table runners because I have a really big table, but I decided to get over my own feelings and make this runner as long as I could (the ruffle really helped, too). So here is the runner. I think the ticking and the burlap really look great together. I know how to make ruffles and have ticking, but for $1 I thought that this really was worth using from a different source! You could have it in the middle of a big table like above, or you co...

Prairie Scraps

Search This Blog