MLK day Festivities

I canned another meat recipe yesterday.  I canned the seasoned ground meat recipe from the Ball Blue Book using more ground deer from the freezer.  This time all the jars sealed!!!  I was so excited.  By accident, I put a tablespoon of season salt into the mixture instead of a teaspoon (I do that way more often than I like to admit) but this time the taste was AWESOME.  I don't think it would have been salty enough without it.  It was actually really quick and easy to can and a double batch of quart jars fit into the pressure cooker, so even the processing time was quick.  The taste is really good, but it is a neutral taste, so I think it would be good for tacos, spaghetti, pizzas, casseroles...anything that uses crumbled browned ground meat.

My dear husband did his own homesteadery activity yesterday.  He made homemade suet cakes.  One of his favorite winter pastimes is to shoot starlings out of the back yard with his air rifle.  He did some reading about what kind of suet cakes attract starlings and he found that the smell of peanut butter draws them in.  We picked up some suet from the meat department of the grocery store (I'm thinking it was about 2 lbs, but I forgot to look).  He brought it home and cooked it to render the fat from it.  Then he mixed in a half cup of peanut butter, a cup of corn meal and enough bird seed to make it look like the suet cakes from the store.  He then set the bowl outside to cool and harden.  When he brought it inside, he cut it into four pieces and put one piece in an old onion bag and hung it on the swingset.  I haven't seen any birds on it yet, but I haven't seen any birds at the bird feeders yet today either.  It's a shame you can't eat starlings...then again, a cat won't even eat a starling.  If you don't know why starlings are bad, check out this website:   http://www.extension.org/pages/Starling_Damage_Assessment

Okay...I have a confession

My confession is I'm in a homesteader funk, just 10 days into my new years resolution.  I figured I would get to this point eventually, but I didn't think it would come this soon.  Yesterday was horrible.  I knew I was dreading doing anything, but the winter doldrums were too much to take.

I realized late last night, though, that I was engaging in some homesteader activities even though I wasn't actually producing anything tangible.  My husband and I got our first seed catalogues of the year in the mail and we started talking about our garden.  It is so much fun to pour through the different varieties of corn, tomatoes, squash, peppers and gourds!  I'm such a foodie!  I get so excited thinking of all the culinary possibilities! I'm all excited because we'll get to plant beets this year and I LOVE pickled beets.  I was so disheartened when I saw that High Fructose Corn Syrup was an ingredient in canned beets from the store!  I'm not one of those hippies that needs everything to be organic or anything, but High Fructose Corn Syrup is bad for you...so is Trans Fat, so I avoid both.  We have a list of veggies that we want to start from seed and my husband is looking into getting grow lights to start them indoors. 

Today, as far as motivation goes, is a different story.  I just finished a pot of Southwestern Vegetable Soup (from the Ball Blue Book again) and we are going to have it for lunch and what we don't eat, I'll can.  It is quite spicy, but the husband really likes spicy food, so I know he'll gobble it up.  I may also try another batch of something with the ground deer.  We'll see if the jars seal better this time.

I know...I skipped a day...

Well, the marmalade venture was a success.  I got four half-pints of orange marmalade and nine half-pints of grapefruit marmalade.  They even jelled well!  Now I just have to figure out what to do with it all.  We do use jelly, especially with peanut butter, but I have to be careful not to make too much.  I was thinking that I could heat up the grapefruit marmalade and thin it a little and use it as a dressing on fruit salad.  I still, though, can't get past the weird taste of grapefruit.  I love the initial sour taste, but the bitter aftertaste gets me.  My husband really likes it, though, so I guess he'll eat his own fair share of it.  

The only real complication I had with the marmalade was getting it to boil down.  I boiled and stirred those pots forever...the grapefruit I stirred for almost 40 minutes.  I found that I can do the gel test better with a metal spoon than a plastic one, but even with a metal spoon, I was just getting drops, not really gel falling off the spoon in sheets.  It is solid at room temperature, though, so I guess I did it right.

I didn't do any homesteader activities today. :(  I didn't even go out to feed the rabbits and the chickens.  My husband had to do it when he got home from work.  Wednesday night is bible study night and on a whim I decided yesterday to prepare a lesson.  I guess I made the lesson up from scratch, so is that considered a homestead activity?  Probably not one any of my blog readers are particularly interested in.  I also spent the day frantically cleaning the house.  I thought about mixing up a homemade cleaner, but that just wasn't in the cards for today.  Maybe another day.  My lesson turned out okay.  I didn't like it much, but they decided to do the second part next week, so either they liked it, they were just being nice, or they are lazy and don't want to come up with their own thing.  I guess it doesn't really matter, we were studying the bible and talking about God and that is all that counts.

Finally! I started the marmalade!

I finally found time to start on the marmalade.  I'm making a half batch of orange marmalade and a double batch of grapefruit marmalade.  I searched high and low for an orange marmalade recipe after a friend gave us several oranges and two grapefruits.  Only a few of the oranges got eaten and no one touched the grapefruits.  I finally found recipes for both marmalades in the trusty old Ball Blue Book.  

You have to remove the peel and slice it thinly and then chop up the pulp, add water and boil it and then let that mixture sit for 12-18 hours.  Right now, both batches are sitting on the counter.  It is supposed to be an icy day tomorrow, so I'll stay home and can marmalade.

I also posted to my mom's group website that I was thinking about selling our surplus eggs and starting an egg route.  I already have two people interested!  I'm pretty excited and if I get enough customers, it will justify buying more baby chicks in the spring.  Right now our 20 chickens lay about 6-7 eggs a day.  I wouldn't be able to have a ton of people on my egg route, but I could start a waiting list if more people are interested.  Here in a few months, we'll be getting even more eggs.  I wonder if I can sell other stuff like that too, like soap.

Frustrating!!!

Frustration was the name of the day yesterday.

I didn't go to bed until 3 am Sunday morning running the jars of meat sauce through the pressure canner.  I ended up just letting them sit on the towel on the kitchen table all night and when I woke up 5 hours later to go to church, they were still hot so I didn't check the seals.  We spent the whole day at my parents house celebrating Christmas (finally) and when I got home, the jars were cooled, but only six of the eleven quarts of sauce sealed.  URGH!!!!

I was going to do the good homesteader thing and try to reprocess them, but after I dumped all the sauce from the unsealed jars into the pot to reheat, my husband and I got into a disagreement and he wanted to talk it through (which was the right thing to do, but it doesn't get canning jars filled and processed!!).  So, the sauce boiled on the stove for an hour or so and all I got to do was turn it off and let it cool overnight, since I wasn't going to stay up all night a second night in a row processing jars (I've had a sore throat and cough now for three weeks, I need my sleep).  It's too late to try and re-can it, so I'm just going to put it into freezer bags and freeze it.  I feel so defeated, because the main reason I was trying to can that stuff was to free up some room in the freezer by getting the ground deer out of there.  Grrrr.

On the upside, I do have six jars of sauce in the basement.  I have so much fun walking them down to the shelf and lining them up nice and neat, all in rows.  A shelf of full canning jars is so pretty.  I think the prettiest ones are the jams and stocks.  

Still no work done on the marmalade.  The oranges are starting to look pretty puny.  If it doesn't happen today, I'll have to find something else to do with them.  I also just ate my last peach fruit roll up I had made from the bumper crop of peaches that my IL's got this year.  The kids love them, so maybe I should make more room in the freezer by using up frozen berries to make fruit roll ups.

Meat Sauce and Stockpiling

I didn't get to the first part of the marmalade recipe.  It's okay.  I forgive myself.  I just need to get my butt moving on it before the oranges go bad.  I have tons of work to get done tonight and there is no time for canning tomorrow, so it'll have to wait until tomorrow or Monday.  

I did do some stockpile grocery shopping today.  It feels good to know I have a little stockpile in the basement that would last my family a few weeks, but I feel like such a freak when I do the grocery shopping.  I tried just replacing what I use, but that proved to be a long frustrating job, so instead, I wait until I get low on something and find it on sale and then buy a bunch of it.  Today I ended up with a grocery cart full of just toilet paper, soda pop, canned tomatoes and chex mix.  Then I went to Walmart and bought 11 boxes of the same kind of cereal.  It feels good to shop that way, knowing that I only go serious grocery shopping once a month, but the looks and comments I get are kind of crazy.  I always get asked if I have a big family.  I should make some story up about my 27 kids or something.  I don't look old enough to have 27 kids.  I'll have to think up something else.

My other task for today is canning meat sauce.  We deer hunt and so does my FIL and BIL.  Unfortunately my husband and I have so far come up deerless this year, but my FIL and BIL have taken deer and given us most of the meat.  We eat a lot of deer meat, but I always struggle with what to use the ground deer for besides chili, spaghetti and meat loaf.  I don't care much for ground deer jerky and every attempt I've done at burgers comes out like meatloaf.  It also takes up a lot of room in the freezer.

I came across the meat sauce recipe in the Ball Blue Book and thought I would give it a shot.  Sure, it is just spaghetti sauce with meat, but how easy will it be to just make the pasta and open a jar and reheat it?  Plus, I need more meat variety in the canned goods stockpile--chicken and tuna fish just don't compare to a red meat source.  I'm running the first batch of quart jars through the pressure cooker now, but I have to say, it tasted pretty good going in.  I'm someone who cooks by taste and not buy recipes, so I'm always a little nervous as to what the canning recipes will taste like, but this one was pretty good.  It says the recipe yields 3 quart jars, but I got 5 1/2.  I almost always get double of what they say in the recipe.  I've got to get two batches done tonight before bed...which doesn't look like it will be until 1 or 2 am. :(

As a follow up to the last post...the longer the cheese cake was in the fridge, the better it got!  Today, it was scrumptious.  It came out of a Reader's Digest book of Homemade stuff...I can't remember the exact title, but the book will soon be listed under my favorite books section.  I did get huge cracks across the top, but the taste and texture was awesome.  The only change I made was I didn't have enough graham crackers to make the crust so I took some gingersnaps and crushed them up and added them in.