Baking, Canning & Freezing.

 The canning (beans) was on my agenda for today. Baking and freezing were not! 

Vince went to pick strawberries. I know he's picked over 50 pounds of then. I've made a triple batch of strawberry syrup, a double batch TWICE of strawberry/rhubarb jam and a double batch of strawberry jalapeno jam. When he left, I said "Please only pick enough for us to eat over the next few days." Nope, he picked 12 pounds. He is 100% sure he never heard me say "don't pick more than we can eat over the next few days!"

The freezers are full; I only have enough jars to can the beans I had planned to get canned this week. I ended up taking a big ham out of the freezer and making room for some strawberries. Vince did the hulling while I was canning beans. Then I chopped the strawberries, kept out 1-1/2 cups for strawberry bread, and put 1-1/2 cups of chopped berries in 15 zipper freezer bags and stuck those in the freezer. I can make strawberry bread, strawberry-rhubarb bread, strawberry ricotta cake - there's all kinds of things I can do with frozen strawberries.

Strawberry Cake before Glaze

Strawberries for the Freezer

For the beans, supposedly 5 pounds of beans will produce 14 pints or 7 quarts of canned beans. Every now and then it works out for me but more often than not, it does not and today . . it did not. When we open a pint of beans, we always leave some - maybe 1/2 cup or 3/4 cup that we don't eat so I thought . . I will use 4 pounds and instead of filling the jar to 1" from the top with soaked and boiled beans, I'll fill the jar 1-1/2" from the top and and extra water. I had 14 pint jars washed and ready. Filled those up and still had beans. There were 2 extra pint jars in the dishwasher (clean) so I filled those. Still had beans so I grabbed a wide mouth pint, filled it; filled another wide mouth pint, and then another! Good grief. I ended up with 19 pints of beans and because three of them were wide mouth, it took two canners to get them all canned. 

Aren't those beautiful canned beans? That's my first batch and it's Anasazi beans. Tomorrow I will can pinto beans and I will use 3.5 pounds and see how that works - hopefully I will end up with 14 pints.

The best news is that strawberry season is winding down. Several of the local farms have already closed so I don't think Vince will be picking more berries. We can hope!

Changes to Prairie Life Sampler

 I'm struggling with Prairie Life Sampler. The design is beautiful and I fell in love with it when I first saw it but, for me, it looks crowded and cluttered. Here's a photo of the cover.

I don't like stitching fiddly stuff. I think the horses, the dog and those people and whatever they're holding -- all that looks fiddly and a bit cluttered to me.

Denise changed hers for that row and it looks great. You can see it here.

I'm thinking of taking a really lazy way out. Here's my plan:

1. Totally leave off the band that has the horses, covered wagon and people.

2. I feel like the words are too close and crowded so I've re-charged those to take up 5 rows with one extra row between them. That would take up some of the space where the horses and people are.

3. In order to use up more space, I'm going to stitch three rows of grass beneath the trees instead of just one.

4. I will leave an extra row (or two) above and below the squiggly line below the text.

5. Because I already have the border stitched, I can't (or won't) make any changes to it but, in that bottom band, I will stitch the very bottom area first (flower baskets) and move them up a row or two so they aren't sitting so close to the border. Some of that "stuff" above the flowers, I will just leave off

My plans may not work. I figure this piece will either get finished, get tossed or go into time out (forever!).  :)

Thoughts?

Here's my plan for now. When I re-charted the text, I didn't really chart every letter. I just counted the spaces and kinda roughly drew it out. I'm going to start in the center of each row and stitch a word or two left and right of center and do that with all five rows.

Then I'm going to stitch a few rows of the squiggly thing beneath the text and see where I end up as far as spacing goes.

I'll keep you posted!

Week 21 Project - Prairie Life Sampler.

 This week's project will be Prairie Life Sampler by Heartstring Samplery.

Here's what I have done so far:

The border is stitched all the way around. This week I would like to complete that top row that has a cabin and more trees - finish that whole band and add the flowers to the top border and continue with the side borders so they come down as far as I stitch.

At this point I have already made 2,283 stitches, which is 16.14%, according to the Markup app.

Rejoice Evermore Progress - Week 20

Week 20, the first week of my revised stitching plan, has come to an end. Here's what it looked like when I began the week:

Here's where I ended it this week:

I mainly worked at the top. I stitched all the leaves across the top border, along with all the dark bottoms to the flower. Almost all of that top band got finished. I still have to fill in the background of the center of the big flower on the left. I finished the center flower. The flower on the right needs the two small flowers on the vine finished and the centers stitched for the small flowers at the bottom of the stem.

I got the one over one for the verse at the end of Rejoice evermore stitched.

On the second band, I got everything at least started and it all worked out right according to the spaces.

I would have been happy to keep working on this one but there's another one waiting!

Canning Beans

I know that not everyone wants to can/preserve food. I don't really understand the reasons why . . nor do I need to understand the reasons why . . we're all ok doing things the way we want and no one has to explain anything to anyone.

I don't do it for cost savings, but on most things, there is a big cost savings. I suppose the main reason I do it is because I've done it my entire life. I think it all tastes so much better than anything storebought canned. But, also, I have meat canned in jars. I think I mentioned that the other day I opened a jar of canned beef chunks. There were potatoes and carrots in the jar. I added corn and a can of cannellini beans, a bit more seasoning and some beef broth and it turned into a pot of stew that was delicious.

Hopefully Vince is done picking raspberries so before I have to start dealing with tomatoes, potatoes and okra from the garden, I need to can more beans.

For anyone who has thought about canning but never took the plunge, I think canning dried beans alone makes it worth learning to can and buy the equipment. Besides the home canned ones tasting so much better, I did a little price comparison.

At our Walmart, one pound of dry beans is $1.46. At Azure, it's right at $1.11/pound counting the freight charges if I buy 25 pounds.

Five pounds of dry beans will produce 14 pints of ready to eat cooked, canned beans so that makes each jar a bit less than .40/jar. If using the Walmart dry beans, that makes each jar about .52/jar. If I go to Walmart and buy Bush's canned garbanzo beans, it's $1.48/can. If I buy the Great Value can, it's .86/can.

I can beans using the overnight soak method. I follow Abbey Verigin on YouTube and she does a lot of canning. Her method, shown in this video is pretty much the same one I use. Instead of boiling the beans for 30 minutes, I boil them for 20 minutes. That way, I feel like they're nice and tender and not mushy. There is a method, and Abbey mentions it where you do not soak or boil your beans. That is not an approved canning method and that doesn't bother me. I've used that method before but I find that the beans are never quite as tender as I like for them to be.

My big All American canner will hold 19 pints. My smaller All American canner will hold 10 pints. When I'm canning beans, I will have both of them going.

I will wash and soak all the beans the night before. The next morning I'll take two pots - say the pinto beans and cannellini beans. Rinse them and get them on to boil for 20 minutes. Then I'll get them into jars and in the canner. The pints have to process for 75 minutes. By the time the canner comes up to pressure, cooks, then cools down, I count on each load taking 2-1/2 - 3 hours. I've canned enough and the All American canners are pretty consistent so I will sit down and stitch with the door to the basement garage open so I can hear if the canners stop "jiggling". After about 2 hours, I'll go upstairs and get another two pots of beans going. By the time the canners downstairs are ready to be emptied and re-loaded, I'll have 28 more pints of beans ready to be canned. I do that one last time and that gives us 84 pints of beans on the shelf, ready to pop open, heat and eat. We probably eat 5 jars of beans each week. Since we have a few jars of beans left, and we'll use those before we start using the newly canned beans, I won't have to think about canning beans again until at least October and, by then, everything except maybe the okra should be finished.

I do not have open shelves for storing my canned foods so I store the jars in their original boxes. This week, I'll be canning black beans, cannellini beans, garbanzo beans, pinto beans, lima beans and last but they're my very favorite - Anasazi beans. Since I will have six types of beans, I will put two jars of each per box so when I grab a box, I will heat up whatever I grab and that way, we won't use up one kind and end up with all of another can left.

Then, in a week or two, I'll make 28 pints of baked beans and that will likely be enough for close to a year.

Garbanzo Bean Sandwich

 I've been seeing recipes for Garbanzo Bean Salad for sandwiches and I wanted to try it. We use a lot of garbanzo beans but I've never made a salad with them. It's much like tuna salad.

I pretty much just combined what I had remembered seeing, leaving out some items I didn't want (capers and onion). 

This is what I did:  Drained and rinsed a jar of canned garbanzo beans, put about 3/4 of them in a chopper, added a tsp. lemon juice, a bit of Tabasco sauce, and a tablespoon of dill pickle brine. Then I dumped all that into a bowl, added 2 chopped boiled eggs, a bit of salt, about 1/3 c. chopped celery, about 1/3 cup chopped dill pickles, 1/2 tsp. smoked paprika and stirred in enough mayo to make it all stay together.

It was delicious and Vince loved it. I love tuna salad but I may have loved the garbanzo bean salad better.

One pint jar of beans made enough for the two of us to have sandwiches with plenty of salad on them. I added spinach and sliced tomatoes to the salads. There's enough left over for us to do it again.

Insects and Other Unwanted Varmits

 I'm very thankful that, at least for now, we don't have to depend on what we grow to survive.

We had several raspberries I've been watching and had planned on picking them today. I went out this morning, birds flew out of the raspberry vines and the almost red raspberries were gone. I've now wrapped that whole trellis area in bird cloth. It was windy and that stuff was blowing everywhere and getting caught on the raspberry vines so I'm sure I haven't outsmarted the birds but we'll see.

Next, until Vince found the base for the compost barrel, I had been digging holes in a bed I wasn't using and burying veggie scraps - except for potato peelings because I learned my lesson about that - potatoes growing in every raised bad! Then when I needed to refresh a bed, I would get the soil out of the bed where the scraps had been composting. 

Yesterday I walked down the pepper bed and . . why is squash growing in the pepper bed? Yep - came from the compost bed.

I try to be so careful not to get ANY seeds in that bed but a few weeks ago I had cooked a butternut squash and had the seeds sitting on a saucer to dry out and clean so I could plant some of them and apparently, they ended up in the compost bucket and got planted in the pepper bed.

I dug up a whole clump of them, divided them into three clumps, planted them in a bed that has all volunteer plants from last year. They should be fine there. 

Last and probably most important - yesterday I asked Vince if we could PLEASE stay home all day today and tomorrow. He said yes - not going anywhere. Then he sent me this video last night We are having a heck of a battle with mosquitoes. I got online and tried to order the mosquito bits from Walmart - out of stock. Can't even be ordered. Home Depot and Tractor Supply both had them and both were the same price and both were cheaper than Walmart. I asked Vince . . Can we please go to Tractor Supply? Thankfully it's on our end of town so we went there and got those. We didn't have any colored buckets so Vince bought 5 buckets. Tractor Supply didn't have red lids so he bought red spray paint and came home and painted them. I have the yard debris and mosquito bits and water in the three buckets and they're set out around the yard. 

I ended up ordering the Barricor from Walmart so it should be here sometime next week. It's all out war on the mosquitoes!

Next up  . . war on the squash bugs!  :)