Apple Pie Filling for the WIN!

I need to face the fact that I will never get done canning homegrown and homemade foods for the pantry. I think it's some kind of addiction.  I had apples left over from making applesauce, but not enough to fill the canner with another complete batch of applesauce, so I made apple pie filling. 

No, I didn't end up with a complete batch of seven quarts of apple pie filling, either. I have a Presto 23-quart canner so a "batch" equals seven quarts, or nine pints if using the water bath method, or up to eighteen pints if pressure canning, or twelve half-pints in a water bath. Half-pints are usually jams and jellies or a specialty item like chutney. 

So...five quarts of apple pie filling. I'm happy with that and with the fact I have enough of the filling "sauce" left to open a jar of sliced apples from last year and bake a pie for Sunday dinner. Win-win. 

The apple pie filling was by far the most difficult processing I've done this year. You have to peel and slice the apples, blanch the apples, and drain the apples BUT KEEP THEM WARM! Yeah? Well, the best way to do that is to get them in the jars, get the sauce over them, and get them in the canner. And...the sauce. It's an easy recipe and it's delicious, but it goes from liquid to thick in three seconds flat. It needs stirring while the apples need warming. Holy crap! I brought out the old two-burner hotplate because I needed to spread out for this operation!

It worked and I guess that's all that matters. I had quite a sticky mess to clean up while the jars processed for twenty-five minutes. I'm five for five on the seals, and we'll have a few apple pies to keep our bellies happy this winter. 

I'm very pleased with my summer food preservation efforts. I don't know what next summer will bring, but I plan to spend the cold months reading canning books, making soups, and getting ideas for next summer. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, home food preservation, canning, Presto, apple pie filling, gardening, soup, books, planning, simple country pleasures, rural lifestyle, a writer's life, applesauce, pantry prepping

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

Preparedness

 

What is preparedness?

For most of us, the world took an odd turn in the year 2020. One day we’re going about our day-to-day lives and the next we’re behind closed doors wearing a surgical mask. Was anyone prepared for that change? 

Most of us probably were not prepared, or at least not as prepared as we wished we were. I remember my first trip to the local grocery after the state I live in went on lockdown. The empty shelves were sobering proof we had more than a medical crisis. The stories told to me by my grandparents of living through the Great Depression echoed in my memory. 

I got real serious real fast about preparedness. As the pandemic drags on, as the political climate becomes unstable, as the economy declines, it's more and more obvious just how our daily lives are at risk. 

This series is simply to share what I've done and what I will continue to do to maintain a level of food and resource security. It won't be enough to survive a total collapse, but I believe I can lessen the day-to-day impact of what is coming over the next few years. 

To read more about my journey, please click to go to What is Preparedness?

And no. It's not clickbait. This blog is not monetized. 

The topics in the series are:

What is Preparedness?

Why concern yourself over being prepared?

Take an inventory

Preparedness is not Doomsday prepping

How much does an adequate pantry hold?

Home food preservation - is it safe?

More about jars and lids

Yes, you can afford to build a pantry

The get home go bag

Do I need a dehydrator or even a freeze dryer? 

I hope that sharing my journey to being better prepared will help you in yours.

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Love, love, love lemons!

The spousal unit does not share my love of lemons. I can get away with adding a bit of lemon to different dishes, but there is a dearth of lovely lemon goodies in the freezer.  

No lemon cookies, no lemon cake, no lemon muffins, no lemon curd for scones, no lemon lush for dessert. It's a sad thing. 

But there is hope! I bought a cheap bag of lemons and ran them through the freeze dryer! 

It was a simple exercise. I sliced the lemons on the mandolin, saving the odd end peels for zest. The run took about seventeen hours, and I put the lemons in two quart jars and vacuumed sealed them, one with an oxygen absorber for longer storage, and one without for more immediate use. The odd peels are vacuumed sealed in a pint jar at the moment. Come the weekend, and daylight, I'll run them the chopper to make zest and put that in an even smaller jar to use. 

This coming summer, I'll have lemon slices to add to water along with a slice of ginger and a spring of mint for a very refreshing summer treat. Planning ahead and having those things you frequently use on hand in the panty is the whole point behind all my "prepping." What I didn't know is that it would end up being such fun!

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

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)