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Home-canned food has saved us from starvation on more than one occasion. On a snowy winter’s day, when the fridge was looking bare and I couldn’t go get groceries ’cause the driveway needed plowing, but the tractor was out of diesel, and the only local pizza delivery place decided they “wouldn’t risk it”, I’ve bounced [...]
Pure unsweetened apple butter was my kids’ first condiment. When they had their first rice cakes, and it was too soon to try peanut butter, I gave them apple butter. When I made Apple Barley Pancakes, they were never served with maple syrup; they were served with apple butter. Their first “cookies” were sweetened [...]
We’re eating enormous amounts of fresh raw food from the garden. Every day we take a bushel basket and head down to collect the daily harvest; we come back with our bellies full and our basket wanting. No dishes! And the kids love it because they think there’s something naughty about ‘stealing’ food right off [...]
It’s been a busy summer of gardening, harvesting, cooking and preserving. This year is, for me, the most productive season I’ve ever had. The early spring gave us an early summer which, in turn, gave us an early harvest. The dry start was scary, but eventually gave way to an almost perfect schedule of rain [...]
I’ve spent the last several days going through my old seeds and deciding what to use and what to toss. I generally have no trouble germinating seeds that are three or four years old. I don’t even store them under particularly ‘seed-friendly’ conditions, and yet many of them still produce. Now, that’s fine, of course, [...]
Better late than never. The best time of year to make baby food is late summer or early fall. Peaches, followed by apples and pears, reach their peak at this time, and these flavours are always well received. If you are new to canning, then making baby food is a good way to …
In my experience, it is almost impossible to boil down pureed tomatoes to a consistency that can accurately be referred to as “paste”, and yet, that is what the published canning experts tell us to do. Here is a much better alternative: Peel tomatoes and puree them until smooth. For every 4 cups of …
I canned five pints of salsa today. The tomatoes were a mix of Amish Paste, Roma and Hungarian Heart. With night temps back up into the “teens” all this week, the rest of the fruit will have a reasonable chance to mature. I may be in full canning production by Saturday.
I picked the last of my green and yellow beans for supper tonight. A few carrots left. Normally by this time of year, I’ve finished the bulk of my canning, but at present, the tomatoes are still mostly green. The plants themselves are brown and spotted with blight, but they’re dripping with …
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