Oops

Since it's fall and we recently received a side of beef from my parents, the freezers here at the Chateau are rather filled.  I blame it on the pain medication that I managed to forget this little problem when I bought these:

Fred Meyer often has "red-band" bananas, which are 10-20 cents cheaper per pound than the others, and most of the time I just peel and freeze them.  I used to always sprinkle a bit of lemon juice on them to keep them from browning, but now I've just opted to live with the browning.  It doesn't seem to make much difference in smoothies.

This year I came up with the rather brilliant idea of making and freezing smoothies to have for a fast, no-processed-food breakfast:

which worked really well while the weather was hot, though after trying one this week and shivering for several minutes thereafter, I'm thinking that will be the last batch until spring.  And it didn't use up nearly as many bananas as I had hoped, so Andy dug out the dehydrator for me.  One can dehydrate foods in an oven, but I've dehydrated food for so long that having a separate dehydrator has been a good investment for us.  Oddly, dehydrating food has been one of THE biggest challenges for the no-processed-food diet.  It isn't the preservatives--it's trying to keep the food from sticking to the trays.  You may not be aware of this, but a dried banana is a fiercely sticky object, and when it gets attached to something, it's quite determined to STAY attached.  Finally, a very helpful soul introduced us to this idea:

We keep a bag of the papers butter cubes come in, so they're ready in the refrigerator for:

 It doesn't really look like it does anything, but it works like a charm and honestly works better than nonstick cooking spray because I don't have to find a place to spray the screens where I won't mind everything getting coated with spray that goes through the holes. 

Perfect!

It's The First Weekend of Canning!

*  I must remember to check the seed packets to figure out what the heck the itty-bitty miniature bell peppers are supposed to be.

*  Nothing makes me forgive the garden quicker than finally getting enough cucumbers to make pickles.

*  I do think our no-processed-foods diet will make us live longer.  Of course, I'll be spending that extra time canning.

*  Next time I say I'm giving the zucchini Miracle Grow, I expect my friends to stage an intervention.

*  It would probably be a good idea to decide while planting whether or not I'll be working during canning season.  I am foreseeing some very cranky/exhausted Sunday nights.

*  It might be much smarter to start harvest season with an empty freezer, but having one bursting at the seams is so much more challenging..........

*  I have learned to kick off canning season with the things I really want--salsa and pickles.  I don't know anyone who would really get excited about more relish.

Ta-Da!

Meet the new non-processed summer breakfast of choice here at the Chateau...

 Frozen smoothies!  I don't know why this didn't occur to me at any time PRIOR to this summer, but at least it finally did.  I use soy milk because of my milk allergy, which could be technically questionable on the "no processed foods" rule, except that that rule is trumped soundly by the "cause no allergic reactions" rule.  Soy milk, nuts for protein, then whatever frozen or fresh fruit is on hand, throw it in the blender, then fill the little freezable cups and freeze.  Perfect!
 

The Good News And the Bad News

The good news is, we now have 17 pints of home made beef stew canned and ready for winter:

The bad news is, it was supposed to be 14 pints, and when the dreadfully unhelpful recipe said to "add enough boiling water to cover" the other ingredients, I covered them too much so we have more of a soup than a stew.  Not to mention leftovers that didn't fit into the canner, and what better way to round off a 91-degree day of canning when one has forgotten to close the windows and turn the air conditioning on than with a nice hot bowl of stew? 

I need this no-processed-foods thing to extend my life--I need the extra time to can.

Where There's A Will...........

I think I've mentioned before that I grew up on a cattle ranch, which my family still operates.  This means that I grew up eating beef.  LOTS of it.  I don't think many people made a really decent living at it, but one does eat well, and there's a lot to be said for knowing where one's food is coming from.

However, there are things that are very, very different living this way.  For one thing, one doesn't just "order up" food as one would like it.  One deals with things as they come.  For instance, if a cow gets hit by a car, one calls out the mobile butcher and gets 700+ pounds of very lean ground beef.  It's either that or take a $1000 loss, which would be silly.  However, it's a rather big adjustment to suddenly have a whole bunch of meat one didn't expect and wasn't planning on.  As you can imagine, my family owns some REALLY big freezers.

This year when selling the steers, 11 of them got turned back for improper marking.  That was a bit of a surprise.  The ranch has started keeping a few steers to sell directly to consumers, but 2-3 is a lot different than 11.  Since there are 4 kids from the ranch (my sister and I and two cousins), the ranch very generously gave us each a side of beef (one half an animal) and we just had to pay for the cutting and wrapping.  This is a fantastic deal, but the ranch didn't have adequate feed set aside for 11 1000-pound animals which it wasn't expecting, so there was a time crunch involved.  I had been diligently cleaning out space in our freezers and had waited as long as we could before picking up our meat, but when I picked it up on Monday and brought it home, we discovered it was MUCH more than we expected.  I spent the rest of Monday cleaning out the freezers, digging out things we could use immediately, and improvising a "frozen vegetable du jour" crock pot soup (which turned out REALLY well, I might add), and rearranging everything.  I found room for everything except 4 big 4-pound packages of soup bones, so:

 it was time to learn to can beef broth.  Thank heavens for this big stock pot, and I have some great canning books which walked me through the whole process, but I do wish they might have found a nicer way to walk me through a key step than "skim the scum off the top."  I realize I need to be much tougher for this lifestyle, but who wants "scum" on something they're going to consume?  Of course, it turns out that was the good part, because the next step after letting the stock chill overnight was to "defat" it:

Now that term I like, and if given the chance I would "defat" my thighs in a nanosecond.  It took a while to figure out a good way to do this, but finally I found a way to work it:

The huge stock pot is really great, but it would be even better if my kitchen utensils were long enough to straddle the thing.  Oh well--this worked, and I was really pretty shocked that this:

is all I ended up with from a quadruple stock recipe.  Not all of that is fat--most of it is actually sediment.  I guess the whole point of a soup bone (which I'm thinking is actually leg) is that is really from a tough, well-exercised part of the steer so it wouldn't have much fat, but I was thankful all the same.  I'm not quite tough enough to face an entire block of just chilled fat--not even if it's butter, no matter WHAT Julia Child says. 

After a two day process (one to make the broth, overnight to cool, then canning the next day), we have beef broth!

I think the final count was 6 quarts, 9 pints, and some that needs to be frozen into ice cubes.  I have six more packages of soup bones to deal with, but I think that sounds like a project to start tomorrow..............

This is the Plan

The biggest problem with canning--well, besides that all that standing being what actually uncovered the hip problem that resulted in the emergency room saga--is that one needs lots of storage space if one has lots of jars.  Since I was incapacitated at the time, Andy rearranged the storage space underneath the stairs, and got all the jars put away:

In other years, I have put flats of jars away as they were filled, but that left me with rummaging around through entire flats of jam or salsa while looking for something totally different--like relish.  This year I thought it might be easier to mix jars up into flats of things that might be needed around the same time.  So, yesterday I pulled out one of the flats

and moved all but a few jars into our pantry.  Admittedly, one does not always need a new jar of green tomato chutney, but carrot salsa is always nice to have on hand, and the roasted red pepper spread is simply a treasure.  So, I think this is good.  The one problem is, of course, if one had something specific in mind--like the salsa I was actually after when I crawled into the closet in the first place.  In that scenario, it's a bit like the scavenger hunt from hell.  I'm thinking that I just need to change my expectations a bit.  While I might have had taco salads in mind, when one finds roasted garlic pasta sauce and has some pasta to put it on and has a green side salad with it, one still has lunch.  I have decided to just treat this as my own personal Iron Chef contest, and shall just hope that the flats with the more unusual items--piccalilli relish and green tomato chutney--are well spread out throughout the crawl space. 

All Mixed Up

Today I am canning red tomatoes.  The green tomatoes we picked a couple weeks ago have been happily ripening here in the kitchen, so I should be able to put up another 10-15 pints.  As I cook with a lot of canned tomatoes, this really, really is a good thing--even if I have no greater desire right now than to take the canners outside and beat them into pancakes with a sledgehammer.  With only one income, one of the reasons we tell ourselves that gardening is a good idea is that it saves us money.  I think it actually might even do so--my future therapy bills not withstanding.  In all actuality, because jars can be reused and we eat a lot of salsa and I eat a lot of pickles, I think the garden pays for itself with just those two items, but now every additional jar of tomatoes I get from the garden saves us about $1.25-$1.50.  So while today's $15 or whatever doesn't seem like much, it's all extra now.  We've spent all we're spending on the garden for the year, and every extra can of tomatoes is pure "gravy" right now as it were.  This sort of thinking is what saves me from running down the street screaming and throwing tomatoes at passing cars.

Because the climate has changed so much, I am still canning while it would be very helpful to be able to eat some of the things I have made.  Usually, this overlap doesn't happen as there's still fresh stuff.  Unlike past years, so far I haven't flipped out entirely at the mere mention of OPENING a jar, and we've even enjoyed some lovely chicken soup.  Today I am using some of the basil pesto that has basically overrun one of the freezers.  The fact that I need the freezer space in order to freeze the extra vegetable broth might have something to do with it.  But being in an opening AND canning mode is very, very weird.  I think it would be wisest, however, for no one to go near those darn jars of canned tomatoes just yet..........

I Threw Out Tomatillos!

Yesterday I made another batch of tomatillo salsa,

then threw the leftover tomatillos into the compost bin!!!  Okay, there weren't too many left, but I actually could have combined them with some green tomatoes for another batch of salsa, but I'm not going to!!!!!    I have has the sense to say "that is enough!"

This is a very big moment for me.

:)

It Is November Now....

........And I'm still canning.  Bad Global Warming!!!  Or, if you're Rick Perry, "Bad-Inexplicable-Climate-Change-That-I-Can't-Explain-But-Still-Refuse-To-Believe-In-The-Scientific-Studies."  Isn't it just amazing how often a closed mind is found inside a pig head?

My back still hurts if I sit, so yesterday I decided to try out the theory that canning involves standing so shouldn't hurt, which was sort of risky as the original problem was caused by standing on the hardwood floor all day, even with the mats.  10 pints of crushed tomatoes later and my back doesn't hurt any more than it did to begin with, so I think I'll try canning again today.  But as soon as it's time to put Christmas decorations up, all the canning stuff is going AWAY.  I don't care if there are tomatoes left by then........