Halloween Homemade

I *gasp* make homemade treats at Halloween.  I only offer them to kids who are with thier parents, and ask if it is OK for their child to have a homemade treat.  I have never had someone turn me down.  We can't possibly make enough homemade treats for all the kids who come on Halloween, we have several hundred trick or treaters, but I do make some just the same.
I always make homemade hot cider, too.  It isn't so much about the drink itself, but it is the smell of the cider that makes it seem like Halloween.  I  have an old glass stovetop percolator that I fill with cider and add five or six cinnamon sticks, five or six cloves, and five or six allspice berries to it.  Once it comes to a simmer, I turn it down on low and leave it on the simmer burner.  It is a wonderful welcoming smell for our visitors.
We made Grandma Jenny's caramel corn this year.  It is a simple brown sugar caramel poured over popped corn.  I added some dried fruits and nuts, and we packaged it in zip lock bags and put a glow in the dark Halloween sticker on it.

Grandma Jenny's Caramel Corn
2 C packed brown sugar
1/2 C water
2 T oil (I used grapeseed oil, but any light oil would do)
Combine all three ingredients in a large saucepan.  Don't stir, just put on high heat until it boils.  Let the mixture boil for fifteen minutes on high heat, and then pour over corn.  Spread out onto nonstick baking sheets to cool and add dried cranberries and pumpkin seeds.  After it cools and hardens, bag it up.  Grandma Jenny said to use it for a large bag of popped corn.  She bought hers already popped, but we popped our own in our Whirlypop.  It is a stovetop popcorn popper that has a crank handle on top to keep the corn stirred while it pops.  It is great fun to use.  I have seen similar models at the Big R store for less than ten dollars.  It sure beats having to buy microwave popcorn, and put up with all the salt and preservatives.
We also made caramel apples.  I haven't made caramel apples in years.  We put one of my glass mixing bowls over a pan of water that was boiling on the stove to heat the caramel.  I ended up adding water to the caramels to get them to a consistency that would coat the apples.  They sort of slumped, and were too sticky to give out to the kids, so Don will end up taking them to share at work.  We had bought some cut little Halloween sprinkles to decorate them in.

So here it is, my pantry.  Don calls our pantry the vault.  It is a good description, because we have a lot invested in it.  Besides the investment in food that will cost me the same to serve six months from now, as it did the day I grew it or canned it, we have a large investment in time.  Time to provide for ourselves healthy nutritious food with no preservatives or added salt, and time to preserve the traditions that made the homesteader's and pioneers thrive!  It is a proud tradition, and I am proud of the vault.  I have canned more than I ever have in my life this year, and have learned so many new things!

Here is the rest of it.  The dry goods things are stored in another cabinet.  We will have to replace the shelving in the first picture this year.  It isn't big enough for what I want to do, so we will be exploring storage options to get the most use of our small space.

Making Tomatillo Apple Salsa

I am still cannning like a madwoman trying to get the garden all put by.  Counting down the crops until they are all either in the freezer, or the new dehydrator, or in jars in my pantry.  So here is the process for tomatillo salsa.  Tomatillos are a gooseberry relative, and makes it's contribution to the culinary world mainly as salsa and a sauce called salsa verde that is used in green chile, posole and other Mexican food delights.
I am making both tomatillo salsa and salsa verde today.  The tomatillo salsa is a water bath canning method recipe, and the salsa verde requires a pressure canner, because it contains chicken stock.
When we harvested the four tomatillo plants, we came up with three flats of tomatillos.  To use them, the papery husk must be removed.  Here is a photo of the tomatillos in the sink full of cold water.  Besides being enclosed in a husk, they are sticky little buggers, so water is a must.

 So here they are,  Some of them are dinky, and some didn't fill out their little papery husks, but trust me, they will all be delicious! It takes a little time to get them all ready for using, but they are worth it.  We buy canned tomatillos, and use them for posole mostly.  It is a delicious pork stew with hominy and green chiles.  The tomatillos make a wonderful tangy broth to simmer the meat in.
After you are all done de-husking, you should rinse the fruits in cold water again.  Like I said before, these little buggers are sticky.
For my canning today, I used the recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens' book You Can Can.  It interested me because it added apples to the tomatillo salsa, and I had lots of apples that needed used.  The recipe called for a Granny Smith apple, but I used MacIntosh, because that's what we had on hand.  Here is what they look like when you get them all cleaned.


Pretty huh?   So I used my food processor to pulse/chop the tomatillos.  Also the onions, the jalapenos, and the peppers.  It is just easier, and my chopping thumb is still sore from the tomatoes I canned diced last week!  I am cooking my salsa in the oven in my huge roaster pan.  I am a notorious scorcher, so I am taking no chances of ruining all my hard work. The salsa will come to a boil and simmer in the oven before I can it in the water bath canner.  I have about eighteen pints of salsa in the roaster.  Here's what it looks like, and may I just say, it tastes delicious.

Fast food, Country Style

Well, I am still in the canning "weeds" as it were, and am canning almost every single day, if not doing the prep and soaking portions of the canning process.  Besides sixty pounds of tomatoes, today I have a canner load (eight quarts) of chicken stock that I need to do something with.  I can't decide if I want to make: chicken soup or just can the broth.  I am leaning towards the soup, even though it requires more effort and processing time.
A quart of chicken soup is a platform for so much yumminess you can't even imagine!  My husband likes me to add chopped cabbage and ramen noodles (the real noodles, not the soup mix) to it.  The day care babies like it that way too.  I can put dried mushrooms and rice, or frozen tortellini and spinach, or add a C of buttermilk mixed with a couple of T of cornstarch to thicken it, and finish with a C of cream for cream of chicken soup.  I can add tomato paste, roasted green chiles, some roasted garlic and thicken it with masa for a terrific chicken enchilada soup.  It is our fast food of choice, so I guess I'll make more while I can.
That is the wonderful thing about home canning.  I have a whole shelf to choose from full of fast food.  I can pour out a jar of Chicken Cacciatore, and boil some noodles, and have supper in less than twenty minutes.  I can start a gravy in the pan, with butter and flour cooking together, add the liquid from the canned pork loin chops, and some buttermilk to make a killer pork gravy, to which I'll add the pork loin chops in to warm.  Less than fifteen minutes, and I have hot pork sandwiches on the table. In the time it takes to boil the egg noodles, my hamburger stroganoff gets heated and sour cream added for another fast food meal.  There are the ultra fast pea and ham and bean soups, the chicken enchilada soup, the tomato bisque soup, all right there, homemade and seasoned to please our own pallets and accommodate my dietary restrictions.
We bought a new car this last month.  My old Sable was pretty sad.  The paint job that they put on vehicles in the nineties didn't last, and the windshield was going to cost more than the car was worth.  We got a beautiful used Lincoln Town Car, with all the bells and whistles.  We learned a long time ago, that it's better to buy the best used car you can find than to buy new.  I could never have afforded this car new, but it is like new still.  It even smells like a new car inside.  That beautiful smell of new plastic and leather.  I bet no one has worn their poopy chore boots in it ever.  Not that they will get the chance to now either, it is kind of MY car, and hopefully, I'll not be warming any newborn lambs, or hauling feed in it like my last car.  That's what I keep telling myself anyway.
There is great joy in driving a big Lincoln.  It is like riding a marshmallow down the road.  It has dual controls for the air conditioning, which should improve my marriage.  The only thing we really ever fight over is the temperature.  I'm a hot momma, and Don is always cold.  He actually wears a t shirt under his shirt 365 days a year!  He says it causes evaporative cooling in the summer.

No Salt No Sugar Bread and Butter Pickles

I do a lot of home canning, but this is a project everyone can try.  It is a project for the fridge, so there is no canning involved.  It does help, however, if you have a canning jar to pack them into, but it is certainly ok to use another similar sized vessel.
I just harvested the first of the cucumbers from my garden, and this is how I used them.  We have had to do several things to prevent the deer from eating our plants and fruit.  The last of which was an electric fence around the top of the fence.  It seems to be working so far, so maybe I'll actually get a harvest out of all my labors!

You will note, the jar is not totally full of pickles.  We had some quality control checks before I took the picture.

No Salt No Sugar Bread and Butter Pickles

for the fridge

5-6 pickling cucumbers, sliced in 1/4 inch rounds

2 C white vinegar

11/2 C stevia in the raw

1/4 tsp turmeric

1/4 tsp celery seeds

1/4 tsp mustard seeds

pinch of red pepper flakes, or a squirt or two of tabasco

1/4 tsp pickle crisp

Slice cucumbers and pack into a quart jar. Add pickle crisp to the jar. In a small saucepan, heat the vinegar, stevia, turmeric, celery, mustard, and red pepper flakes until boiling. Pour over pickles. Remove bubbles by running a chopstick down into the jar to release them. Let cool. Refrigerate for 48 hours, or until colored all the way through.

These pickles have 2 calories per serving, for six or seven pickles, and one g carb, no fat and no protien.

Blueberry Apple Pie

I love to make pie.  We recently had some nice blueberries for pie, and when I went to make it,  the two clamshells of berries just didn't look like enough to make a properly filled pie.  My definition of properly filled is so much filling you couldn't cram another berry in there.  So, I peeled the three Granny Smith apples that were in the fruit bowl and added them too.  It turned out really good, and I got requests to make it that way again soon!
When I was putting this together, I got distracted a few times.  Because of my distracted state, I forgot to put the butter pats over the fruit before putting on the top crust.  I remembered about the time I got it all crimped.  So this accounts for the gaping hole in the top.  Actually, it worked out well;  I got the butter put in the gaping hole, and it didn't drool all over my oven because the hole prevented it from doing that too!
I used store bought crust.  The last homemade crust I did was an all butter thing, and it was tough as shoe leather, so why reinvent the wheel?  I went back to what works.

Blueberry Apple Pie
2 pints fresh blueberries
3 Granny Smith apples peeled and sliced thinly
1 tsp cinnamon
1 C sugar
1/4 C flour
1/2 stick butter cut into little pieces and dotted over the pie (hopefully before you put the top crust on hehe)

Mix above ingredients.  Pour into bottom pie crust, and top with top crust.  Wet the edge of the bottom crust, and crimp to seal.  Decorate the top with a couple slashes, and a fork to release steam.  Place filled pie on a cookie sheet lined with foil  (I forgot the foil last time and had to buy a new cookie sheet.  After an hour, the burnt fruit syrup is not going to come off!  Bake at 400*F for an hour.

My Grandma's Plums

I canned plums today.  It is a trip into my childhood and food is the vehicle that takes me there.
My Grandparents were homesteaders on Buckhorn Flatts near Riverton Wyoming.  They ran some cattle, raised sugarbeets, ran the beet dump, and had a dairy.  When I was little, I loved to be at Pappa Hinkle's house.  The men would come into Grandma's kitchen after milking, and have coffee.  They ate their lunch around that table, and talked of all things.  There was humor and love always in that house.  We ate cottage cheese with syrup, and tomatoes with sugar sprinkled on them, and these wonderful canned plums.  Sitting there next to the white built in china cabinet, and looking out the window that overlooked  the chicken house, which I had a fascination for, I always felt at home and content.
I loved my Grandmother's canned plums.  Their tart and tangy sweetness is just one of those things that tastes like nothing else. The smell of the syrup alone is one of those things that makes you pause, and inhale deeply, exhaling with the word Aaaahhhh.  They should be served ice cold, or thickened in a pie.
Now that I am grown and can my own fruit, I find that plums are my favorite to can.  They are so simple.  Just cut them in half and pour over a light syrup made from 8 C water, and 2 C sugar boiled together.  Then process in a boiling water bath for twenty minutes for pints like these pictured above, or 25 minutes for quarts. No treating with fruit fresh, or peeling off skins, just plunk them in the jars and away we go!