Sometimes you have to make a purchase

I love to home process (can) foods. Can it be a bit of work? Yes, but to my way of thinking nothing beats being able to go to the pantry and grab a jar of food when you want it. 

This is the year I wanted to can cherries. I'd love to have a cherry tree that produces fruit, but the cherry trees I have are wild and don't fruit. I started calling around to the various orchards in my area and what a shock! If they had cherries available, it was at an astronomical price - $5.00 for a PINT. You'd need four pints to make one cherry pie!  I hated to do it, but I went to a grocery and got frozen cherries for my project - Spirited Cherries. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. My preference was for local produce, but it was time to be financially responsible to my budget. 

Spirited Cherries is a recipe found in the big Ball Book. It's very simply a tablespoon and a half of "spirits" (alcoholic beverage) per half-pint jar. And while I was in the frozen section, I got a big bag of blueberries and made Spirited Blueberries. 

The finished product cost about $1.00 per jar. That's a little high, but it shakes out to $.50 a serving. I'll be putting the fruit over ice cream or even yogurt if I have that in the evening instead of ice cream. That's thirty-six times I won't have to prepare anything. Open a jar, or the fridge, and enjoy. 

I think it's well worth the three hours it took to can both fruits. And considering the cost differential to local fresh, I don't even feel bad about that. I may even get more and make a second batch. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor/The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, home canning, cherries, blueberries, rural living, country lifestyle, budgeting, buy local, Ball Book

Cook once, eat fifteen times

Yesterday I finally did something I've wanted to do for two years - I made and processed Beef Stew.  Fifteen pints, to be exact. That's fifteen evenings the daily dilemma of what to fix myself for supper is solved. 

Cooking for one is a lot harder than I ever thought it would be. It's a lot of aggravation to prepare an entire meal when I know I'll be eating the same thing, or elements of the same things, for the next three days. I've already discovered that's a recipe for wasting food. 

When I lived alone over thirty years ago, my mother and grandmother pretty much kept me fed. Back before the cellphone days, I'd come home from work and find notes in my mailbox instructing me to go to one of their houses and what was on the menu. With my grandmother next door and my mother only a mile away, it was good to have options. Ah, the good old days! 

This Beef Stew recipe is from the Ball Book, as are many of the foods I home process. When I'm ready to enjoy a jar, I'll make a bit of thickening from flour when I heat it up. Adding flour to a jar before canning is a no-no due to concerns about reaching proper heat levels inside the jar during processing. We do want to be safe. 

In the overall scheme of things, this is a small accomplishment but I feel good about it. Every little thing is a step toward what will be my normal life without Ron. Typing that sentence felt odd, but it's a truthful sentiment. Who knew Beef Stew could make a life feel like it was moving forward again? 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor/The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, Beef Stew, home canning, country lifestyle, rural living, Ball Book of Canning, life after death, a writer's life, KC Kendricks, m/m romance, grandmothers

Just roll with it

This was to be the year I made and canned ketchup. It was not to be. I planted tomatoes that should have grown to the size of my fist, Beefsteaks, for slicing and canning. Canning them is fine, but it does require a longer simmer time to remove excess water. No biggie. It was not to be. The seed pack said Beefsteak but the seeds said, "we're cherry tomatoes!" 

Drop back two and punt. 

I've been harvesting the little 'maters and popping them in the freezer until I had enough to do something with. After a Saturday afternoon trip to the canning jar pantry, I decided I'd better make more pizza sauce. 

A few days ago I pulled the bags of frozen tomatoes out, plopped them in a large, deep pot, and cooked them down. Once they'd all gone to mush, I ran the mix through a food mill, put the sauce back into the pot, and let it simmer for several hours until it had reduced and thickened. From there, I made pizza sauce according to the recipe in the Ball Book. I ended up with seventeen jars (and seventeen seals) or enough for about the next year and a half. 

The tomatoes are still producing, and I'll have enough for another batch of pizza sauce. It wasn't the plan for 2023 but in the long run, it works just fine. I'll just have to make more pizzas. 

Sometimes you have to go with the flow.

The Lady of The Hideaway

KC Kendricks, The Hideaway, pizza sauce, tomatoes, gardening, home canning, rural living, country lifestyle, a writer's life, plans change

The tomatoes have blossoms

A few short days ago I was in my little garden patch talking to my tomato plants. I wanted to give them some encouragement so their buds would turn into flowers on the journey to become fruit. It has happened! 

All eighteen plants now have blossoms. I have two varieties planted, Beefsteak and Giant Pink Belgium, and I think this is the last year I'll plant two. If I stick to one heirloom variety, I can save the seeds, and in time, have a strong tomato well acclimated to my microclimate. I'd like to try it, anyway. 

Unless I get an incredibly huge amount of tomatoes, I'll have to supplement my harvest with half a bushel or so from the local fruit stand and/or farmer's markets. I processed a good number of jars in 2022 and I think it will see us through. And if it doesn't, I'm not going to get hung up about buying commercially canned tomatoes. I think we do what we can when we can.  

One thing I would like to home process is ketchup, so we'll have to wait and see how that works out. But for now, the tomatoes are blooming and I'll be happy with that. 

The Lady of the Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, tomatoes, home canning, gardening, rural living, country lifestyle, growing in containers 

Future tense

Future tense: a tense expressing an action that has not yet happened or a state that does not yet exist

I must confess that, so far, retirement has not been entirely as anticipated. We've been busy, both doing and planning. I thought I'd spend a lot more time on the patio with my laptop, but that's not been the case. Catching up on home & garden projects is satisfying, as is getting our ducks in a row to be able to do a few fun things. Tomorrow we're having new front tires put on the van which is the last step before we take off on a day trip.

This should have already been done, but the heat wave slowed us down. The last three weeks or so have been brutal and working outside needed to be done in small increments. After an early morning tending to the garden and/or cleaning up after the tree trimmer, it was too much like work to get the van to town for tires. The heat has passed and the time is tomorrow. 

It's actually been raining most of today - a blessing of soft, gentle rain that soaks into the ground. I spent most of my day writing which was a welcome change of pace. I need to get that story finished and out the door. It's taken far too long as it is. 

I have more canning projects on the horizon. The last of my own tomatoes went into nine jars as tomato sauce. What few tomatoes are still on the vine will go to the table. The heat wave affected the plants and they withered and stopped setting flowers, so no more fruit. When I go to the local orchards to get pears, I may price tomatoes and decide if I want to get a bushel to finish out the amounts I planned to can this season. 

Even if I don't make my canning goals, it has been a good season. Any amount of food without additives is a win. 

Now we've turned our focus to autumn chores. I've called the chimney sweep and am waiting for him to return my call. There's firewood to split and stack, and the lane needs a top dressing of gravel. Once the leaves fall, a few low-hanging branches need to be pruned. 

I'm enjoying being home even though I'm working a lot harder than I did at the day job. 

Am I bored? Nope. To a country girl, this is all play. May it continue to be so.

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, home canning, country lifestyle, rural living, splitting firewood, gardening, tomato sauce, autumn, pruning trees, tires, day trips, a writer's life

Butter beans 2022

When all else fails, do it yourself. 

The spousal unit and I enjoy old-fashioned ham potpie. It's a great way for our household of two to use up the Christmas and Easter hams. We have ham a few times, then I freeze what remains for potpie. 

To make the potpie, I first simmer the ham bone to get good broth and freeze it. Then freeze the ham. When the time comes to actually cook, the broth, ham, two potatoes, maybe a quarter cup of diced onions, parsley, seasonings, potpie bows or sometimes bot boi noodles, and butter beans go into a big pot and come out as potpie.

Ah, butter beans. Around here, one can no longer purchase butter beans. 

But one can certainly get dried large lima beans and home-process butter beans, and that's what I did this morning. I now have fifteen pints of butter beans cooling on the island. That's a lot of butter beans!

I didn't plan on ending up with fifteen pints. I aimed for nine, which is how many pints my Presto 23-quart canner holds on the bottom layer, but it is what it is. They won't go to waste. There are any number of soups I can add them to, plus any number of casseroles. It'll be fun finding new-to-us recipes and changing up dinnertime. And, of course, I can double the next batch of ham pot pie and freeze-dry a few meals. 

Canning butter beans is just one example of how a lot of people are working around how limited some items we used to consider staples have become. Not to mention how much money I saved.

At my local Walmart, today, if you could actually purchase a can of butter beans, the Hanover beans would cost you $1.38 a can, and the Goya would cost $1.74 a can.  I canned them for 31cents a jar. You can argue I had to buy the jars - totally endless reusable jars - and lids, but for jars I've had and used for years, it won't add much. Metal lids cost about 25cents a lid if they're purchased at the correct price point. So you can argue the added cost but it won't add up to $1.38 a jar. 

May I also point out I KNOW there is nothing added to my jars that I don't know about except beans? It is important to know what is in the products you consume. 

I'm not sure what the next canning project will be, but I'm actively looking. Canning is fun!

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, home canning, butter beans, simple country pleasures, rural lifestyle, pantry prepping, a writer's life, ham pot pie, do it yourself, canning jars, canning lids

Beans in molasses sauce

 

A recipe for navy beans in a molasses sauce was recently brought to my attention. It's from the National Center for Home Food Preservation's website. They also include a recipe for the beans in a tomato sauce. 

https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_04/beans_tomato_molasses.html

I watched a YouTube video of them being canned and thought it would make a good switch-off for always having baked beans when we put burgers on the Blackstone and eat on the patio. I downloaded the simple recipe and yesterday, I got to work. 

I followed the recipe, which should have netted me nine pints. I ended up with fourteen pints. Yeah. That's a lot. The recipe for the molasses sauce is written in a way that you'd believe the recipe would fill nine pints. I found this to not be the case. I had to make three batches of the sauce and was very glad I'd reserved all the liquid from cooking the beans. 

The canning process itself was standard. Fill clean jars with prepared beans, add the liquid sauce to the proper headspace, wipe the jar rims, put on the lids, and then process in a pressure canner. Thirteen of the jars sealed, and one with a Golden Harvest lid did not. It's in the fridge for consumption sometime this coming week. My assumption on that jar is I may not have had exactly the proper headspace and it siphoned. It does happen, even to those canning gurus on YouTube. 

The contents of properly sealed jars, according to Ball, should be good for at least eighteen months. It may take us that long to eat all the beans. That's okay with me. Having side dishes prepared is always a good thing. 

The recipe is at https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_04/beans_tomato_molasses.html . The National Center for Home Food Preservation is a good resource to bookmark if you like to have additive-free home-preserved food. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

**Update: The spousal unit says the recipe needs a bit of brown sugar. He may be right. I'll add a quarter cup to the sauce recipe if I make them again.**

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, National Center for Home Food Preservation, country living, simple country pleasures, home canning, a writer's life, additive-free foods, molasses, beans, gardening

Seeds for 2022

One of my grandfather's favorite pastimes was perusing the annual seed catalogs. He received catalogs from Gurney, Burpee, and a host of others, but Burpee was his go-to seed supplier. It was a no-brainer for me to order my seeds for 2021 from Burpee. Now that we've arrived at the time of year to start to think about the 2022 growing season, I went to the Burpee website and ordered a few things: 

Cucumber, Straight Eight
Cabbage, Brunswick
Cauliflower, Snowball
Brussels Sprouts, Long Island
Tomato, Bodacious

Tomato, Veranda Red Hybrid (cherry)

Seeds do not magically expire on any given date, and I have a good many left over from this year. The germination rate may fall a few percentage points, but I'll still get good plants. I may not plant any jalapeno seeds in 2022, though. I had an incredible harvest this year and one woman can only consume so much Cowboy Candy on her own. 

It seems 2022 will be as much about experimenting and learning as 2021. I've ordered a Harvest Right freeze dryer to preserve those things that don't home can well. Cucumbers make pickles, of course, but I like them in different salads, unpickled. I also hope the freeze dryer will be somewhat less labor-intensive than canning. Canning a seven quart batch of pickles is an all-day job. You do not walk away from a pressure canner and "let it do its thing" the way you can with a freeze dryer. 

I'm excited about my 2022 dream garden. My final work day is May 31, 2022 (at the very latest!). I'll retire sooner if an adequate hire is made and they learn my job quickly. By the end of May, all the seedlings will be in their grow buckets and bags, and I'll be sitting amongst them in my expanded garden corral with my morning coffee. In a perfect world. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Cheesecake and meatballs!

 Yesterday, I fed my addiction: I canned meatballs! And not only did I put seven dinners worth of meatballs into jars, but I also made a cheesecake in the Instant Pot while the pressure canner was busy cch-cch-cching away. And then there are the four meals worth of diced potatoes blanched, bagged, and into the freezer. 

It was a busy morning! 

At first, I thought I'd can the potatoes but after a brief discussion with the man of the manor, I decided to go the diced route. The potatoes were just on the cusp of beginning to go soft so this was a good way to save them. They will make great home fries or even potatoes and eggs. 

The cheesecake was done on a whim and is the dessert for Sunday dinner, which will be something with meatballs. I had one jar that didn't seal because I think I tightened the ring down too far. I could freeze that batch, but meh. Let's eat them! As for the jarred meatballs going into the pantry, as the price of ground beef rises, I'll have six dinners at yesterday's beef prices. I have another five-pound pack of ground beef (88/12) to brown off and then decide if I want to freeze it or can it in pints. 

It was a labor-intensive morning, but it was for a good cause - my pantry. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Taking pantry inventory

 

We knew it would happen - we need to inventory the pantry. I keep a spreadsheet of what's in the dry pantry and what's in the freezer, but I get remiss about adding and subtracting items. Generally, this isn't a problem because the pantry isn't so huge we can't remember what's in it. Taking an inventory is more about refreshing the memory than updating a spreadsheet. That's not to say the spreadsheet isn't important. 

Our spreadsheet has both food and non-food items on it, and a couple of cross-referenced columns for things we buy only at Sam's Club and/or Costco. Theoretically, I should be able to check the spreadsheet and see if we need to make a run to the big box store but it only works if I keep the spreadsheet up-to-date, which I've admitted to doing a not-so-great job of. 

In this past year, we moved the pantry to an unused bedroom. The Lord of the Manor has some physical limitations and it's not safe for him to go up and down the stairs. Thankfully, our house is a rancher so building a shelving unit was both practical and easy for him. (Silver lining - the den is now all MINE.) The pantry is still growing as I add more home-canned items, but it will never be huge. If we have enough guests at once, plenty of room remains for them to sleep comfortably in that room and to easily grab a midnight snack of the Little Debbie of their choice. 

In the future, we will likely add to the spreadsheet. We don't really know everything we have in the shed or in the bins marked "electrical" or "plumbing." It's likely we often purchase little things like fittings when we should have checked the bins first. I have a lot of gardening stuff and I really should keep a list so I know what fertilizers and weed killers I have on hand, and how old they are. 

Taking the occasional inventory of the pantry is the only way I know to stay organized enough to be able to honestly say I'm saving time and money by having a working pantry. We won't go into detail about how well the pantry served us during the pandemic of 2020. Suffice it to say it did, and it's been worth all the effort we put into it.  

Take the time to plan a pantry and begin to work your plan. It won't happen in a week, or even a month. Building it to a good working level takes time, but it truly is worth it. If you'd like to know more about how we set about getting ready, you can visit the static page in this blog at Building the Pantry. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor

Sweet potato processing - Bourbon Sweet Potato Pie

Growing up, sweet potatoes were reserved for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I'm so glad we're now able to enjoy them throughout the entire year! I like them baked, mashed, and yes, "candied." I generally purchase enough cans from the grocery to last for a year. Around here, you won't have much luck finding them on the shelves other than at the holidays. 

This year I noticed a local grocery was selling sweet potatoes for $.67 a pound. I purchased twenty pounds, or enough for seven quarts and ten pints. I processed the quarts this morning and plan to do the pints tomorrow. 

A few days ago, the governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, laid out a grim picture of where the State is headed in the fight against Covid-19. I'll be working from home again for at least the next three weeks, an eventuality I saw coming and prepared for. 

That's what the return to home canning is all about - preparing for the unknown. The term "prepper" has some social condescension attached to it, but there is a difference between a "prepper" and a "doomsday prepper." Being prepared to weather a pandemic is prepping in the purest form. We prepare. We plan. And we don't have as many things to worry about, like, will I be able to have Bourbon Sweet Potato Pie as part of our Thanksgiving feast?  Yes, I will. 

Home canning sweet potatoes is a bit of work. Peeling a sweet potato is annoying. They like to hold on to their skins. A good trick is to parboil them first, and then peel. As for canning instructions, get the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving AND read the guide to your particular canner so you do it correctly. However, I will share my Bourbon Sweet Potato Pie recipe, which is based on an old recipe by The Frugal Gourmet. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

Bourbon Sweet Potato Pie

Preheat oven to 425F.

Prepare a single pie crust. 

2 cups mashed sweet potato

1/2 stick butter

1/2 cup sugar

2 large eggs

3/4 cup half and half

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup bourbon

optional: a pinch of ground ginger

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and the half & half, and mix. Add everything else and mix really well, then pour into prepared pie crust. 

Bake for 15 minutes, then turn oven down to 350F and bake until set, about 40 minutes (you know your oven so adjust time accordingly). It's done when a knife comes out clean. 

Serve hot or cold but don't forget the whipped cream!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So that's it. Bourbon Sweet Potato Pie. It's not just for those of us below the Mason-Dixon Line to enjoy, and it's not just for Thanksgiving. Not any longer! 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor

Apple Butter

The spouse requested apple butter, so I decided the best course of action was to make some. I have a copy of the Ball Book of Canning which contains a wealth of canning recipes that include two types of apple butter. I went with the traditional style. 

Making apple butter isn't difficult, and having a Kitchen Aid spiralizer really helps. That tool will peel and core an apple with the flip of a switch. It also spiralizes the apple and one quick cut down the center and you have apple slices. This will come in handy later today when I process the remainder of my apples in slices for pies and cobblers. 

I had a lot to do yesterday, so I cooked the apple butter in my large crockpot. That worked well, but I followed the recipe and therefore had too much water in the mix. I ended up with the crockpot on low overnight and processed the jars before dawn this morning. It took that long for the excess water to evaporate. But a longer cooking time did allow the apples to caramelize to a dark, rich color. 

As much as I'm enjoying stocking my pantry with homemade goods, it's a lot of work. I have a new appreciation of how hard my foremothers worked every year. I can go to a grocery store that, even in the year 2020, has food items on the shelf. I'm just not sure how long that will last so we're doing what we can to have food stores on hand. 

For my grandmother, who raised her children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, going to the store wasn't much of an option. She had to purchase flour and sugar, but fruits and veggies came from her own land. So did chicken, eggs, pork, dairy, and venison. Some years the cow would deliver a bull (steer) and they had beef. She canned all her meats in those days, or my grandfather smoked it. It was only ninety years ago but it was a different world.

So I'll think of her later today as I slice apples with a modern kitchen appliance. She did it all by hand with a paring knife. I live on a foundation she built with hard work and love. It's very humbling. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor