Babies and Bounty

Strawberry jam canned mid-summer - the start of our canning season!

We've been busy! Harvesting, canning, cleaning, fixing, and playing (mostly with goat babies!).

Since my last post we've named the goat babies (Daisy is the girl and Dollar is the boy), had them disbudded (they both turned out to have horns), and attempted to milk Skylark. Milking has been unsuccessful thus far. First of all, one udder doesn't produce much milk so we are hesitant to take any for fear the babies will suffer. They are eating quite a bit of other food now, so we may try milking her some this weekend. Secondly, she hates it. We ordered a hobble (a velcro strap contraption that will hold her legs motionless while we milk) but we have yet to put it into practice - again, hopefully this weekend. Dollar is growing like a weed. He's easily more than twice Daisy's size now. Both goats are super sweet and very friendly.

Pepper has been bred. We matched her up to a buck with similiar coloring to her and she made friends quickly. She stayed at the buck's place for a couple of weeks but is now safely back with us and tolerating the babies reasonably well. She should be due right around Valentine's Day. I'm anticipating naming at least one of her babies 'cupid'.

The farm bounty has begun! We harvested pears and then I dried and canned as many as I could in one weekend. Lots went to waste though - I am getting better at dealing with this! Then we harvested blackberries - they went into a LOT of jam and quite a few batches of muffins. I have a recipe from my mom that was based on the original Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins (remember back in the day when department stores had restaurants and bakeries? Jordan Marsh in downtown Boston was known for their killer blueberry muffins). I've subbed in blackberries (and whole wheat pastry flour) with much delicious success. I particularly love that they freeze so well! I also freezed a few quarts of blackberries for recipes later in the year. Lastly, I made a pear blackberry pie with cardamom in it and it was DELICIOUS! It was so good that I'm tempted to actually buy more pears to make it again for Thanksgiving. Oh the sin!

Then the harvest moved to apples. I did 16 quarts of applesauce (I still have a couple left from last year!) and then 6 of those went into making apple butter in the crock pot which then turned into 7 pints of apple butter. I also did a couple of dehydrator loads of apple rings for winter use (and hiking food!). Delicious apple bread, apple crisp and baked apples were also made. There are two more apple trees that are just now ripening, so I forsee much more apple products in our near future.

We harvested the garlic which turned out beautifully and is drying in the garage. We harvested TONS (possibly literally, though I didn't weigh them) of onions. One dehydrator load took care of about 20 huge Walla Walla onions (Walla Wallas are similiar to Vidalia onions for you southern readers!) and the rest are stored in the laundry room for general use. Having what feels like a neverending supply of onions is nice...but I can honestly say that I will never buy bottled garlic again. The home grown fresh stuff (we did four varieties) is incredible!

I didn't get many zucchinis this year, but yellow summer squash is taking it's place. I've successfully subbed summer squash for zucchini in my favorite banana zucchini bread recipe, so I will be doing quite a bit of squash shredding for freezing and winter baking. All the winter squash varieties appear to be doing really well, so expect a future post about sweet potato squash, pumpkins, butternut squash and Fujitsu black squash recipe experimentation!

And then there were tomatoes - and more tomatoes...and more tomatoes. Wow. HUGE harvest this year. With a friend's help, we produced 12 quarts of seasoned sauce this past weekend and two pints of salsa. My next project will be to attempt to can tomatoes diced since that's how I use them the most. I'll probably end up doing another batch or two of seasoned sauce as well. I will also chop and freeze and also dehydrate as many as possible to try to tame the hoards.

Then I'll move on to carrots...looks like a bumper crop of some delicious carrots! I think carrots are like tomatoes - the store bought ones just don't compare to what you grow yourself in terms of flavor.

Grapes will be the last to be harvested, I think. The plan is to put a new steam juicer to work so that we can get the most of our grape harvest. Who knows...maybe home made wine is in our future!

Apple pie filling

Canned apple pie filling - absolutely yummy!

On Friday, a girlfriend of mine came over and we did some canning together. Even putting up the 'same old stuff' is more fun when you have company!

We started the day by picking apples. We hit up the first tree of tiny apples. Then we noticed that the other two small trees at the back of the property had two different types of apples on them. After a quick taste - we determined that these would be good 'pie' apples as well. We picked everything that was usable (mostly with scab) and they filled about half a bucket. Then we headed over to the two massive red delicious trees and picked a few of these as well.

We started with applesauce and made 7 quarts using a mixture of apples. I washed and prepped the apples, my friend cored/sliced them. After we'd put them through the food mill, we discovered that the sauce tasted very bland. We added spices and sugar and doctored it up enough. Then we canned it.

While this was going on, we also were making apple butter in the crock pot which smelled just amazing (as usual!).

The next project was apple pie filling. While I was hunting down a good recipe, I discovered a little bit of helpful info about red delicious apples. They are eating apples only. They apparently have no taste when cooked - guess that's why our apple sauce was so bland - too many red delicious in the mix! Live and learn! Though, I would like to mention that while they may not be good for cooking, they dry just beautifully! We dried half a dehydrator of them and they are very tasty. So for from now on, our red delicious apples will be eaten or dried. In fact, I spoke to our neighbor about taking a clipping off her tree of yummy apples. I'm going to graft it onto one of our trees, so I think I'll do it on the red delicious trees since we have way, way more than we will ever eat!

Anyway, I found what sounded like a good apple pie filling recipe and we set to work. The water, sugar and spices went into a pot to boil. The cornstarch and lemon juice and a little more water waited on the counter. Then we peeled, cored and sliced what we thought were enough apples. All the while, the jars were in the dishwasher keeping warm. When the apples were ready, we dumped the cornstarch water into the pot and mixed it. It thickened almost immediately. Then we set about filling jars. We filled 5 quart jars with apples and topped them with the sauce. We had just enough sauce left over to fill an additional pint jar, so we sliced another couple of apples for that and set them all into the canner to process. Twenty minutes later, we had what you see in the photo above!

Then we canned the apple butter before shutting down the stove for the evening. What a day!

On Saturday, I threw the apple pie apples from the pint jar into a pan. While it was heating, I made pancakes. When the pancakes were ready, so were the apples, so I piled them on. HEAVEN!! Seriously, it was so incredibly good!! In fact, it was so good that on Saturday evening after a day of painting (different post!), I spent a couple of hours making another 7 quarts of the filling! I altered the recipe a bit to make it slightly spicier and to make enough to fill 7 quarts with each recipe. And, you can bet that I'll be doing a few more batches in the coming week. I think this is my favorite canning item so far!


The recipe:

5 1/2 cups white sugar
1 cup cornstarch
4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons salt
14 cups water
3 tablespoons lemon juice
~8 pounds apples

DIRECTIONS
1. In a large pot, mix sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt and 12 cups of water. In another bowl, mix cornstarch, lemon juice and 2 cups of water. Bring first pot to a boil and when apples are ready, add cornstarch. Cook until thick and bubbly. Keep simmering until all jars are filled.
2. Sterilize canning jars, lids and rings and keep jars warm.
3. Peel, core, and slice apples. Pack the sliced apples into hot canning jars, leaving a 1 inch headspace.
4. Fill jars with hot syrup, and gently remove air bubbles with a knife. Leave a 1/2 inch headspace.
5. Put lids on and process in a water bath canner for 20 minutes.

Makes 7 quarts.

Siding progress and growing chicks

I finally took more siding pictures last night. The front of the house (and the front porch) is not complete, but you can definitely see progress.

Here you can see the section we chose to do in 'shingles' as opposed to boards.

The big wood beam just above the post was replaced and it's now straight out from the house as it should be. You can also see where the ceiling was removed.

This is from the other side of the door. The big brick planter is gone - and that post will be covered to make it more attractive (when the ceiling goes back in).

The north side of the house - don't you just love the yellow 'accessories'?

The back of the house - we are thinking we need to replace that stoop which now looks terrible!

The back side of the house showing the deck (and the screwed up fencing we need to fix). Again, more yellow accessories including doors!!

And just for good measure, here are a few of the chicks. They are now 9 weeks old. We have at least 2 roosters (both White Leghorns) and they are just learning to crow. We also question the sex of a couple of our Ameraucanas. I could have sworn that one of them was making crowing sounds when I was taking these photos.

Roosters and chickens - the black/brown one in the far back was the one I could have sworn was starting to crow...

This is Bruno - he's the rooster with the reddest comb - he's also the best at crowing (so far).

And this is Maple. She's the smallest bird and easily the most friendly and least skittish of the group. Isn't she pretty?

Lastly, my applesauce and applebutter (which I had on toast for breakfast today!):

Applesauce made with three types of apples - one of which I know is Red Delicious. I love how it's got a slightly pink tint to it. It's quite tasty, too!

Applebutter - basically boiled down applesauce with sugar and spices added. It's amazing how much more flavorful this stuff is over the store-bought varieties!