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.