Stocking Back Up

We always try to keep the house stocked with food and basic necessities, however after the crazy last semester of school we were pretty low on everything. Yesterday, I started stocking back up and working on filling up the freezer for the upcoming semester of school. Paul will do all the cooking (and all the other household duties) again in the fall, so I try to make up a bunch of meals that are easy and quick to make.

Friday we put together 3 large containers of homemade vegetable soup. If you aren't making your own vegetable soup, you should start, it's so easy to do and tastes wonderful. We keep a tupperware container in the freezer and after every meal any left over beef (preferably roast) and veggies goes into the container, once the container gets full, it's time to start thinking about making some soup. It worked out perfectly this week that we were going to have company over for dinner so I made a huge pot roast with tons of potatoes and carrots, at the last minute though they had to cancel, so we were left with a huge amount of leftover. We took the leftover pot roast, shredded the beef, took broth, vegetables and the soup bucket containers (we had 2) and dumped them all in the large soup pot. Add a can of tomato juice and in a few hours you have great homemade vegetable soup. Sometimes if I don't have enough vegetables in my soup bucket and I'll add them when I make this soup, like this time I added corn. One of the things I love about this soup is it reminds me of my mother, growing up every weekend usually starting around October she would make a big pot of homemade soup, she rotated between vegetable, chili and potato. I also love the fact that this is a cheap meal, it saves food that otherwise would have been thrown out, every penny saved helps.

My next task this weekend was chicken. Kroger had an amazing sale on split chicken breasts ($1/lb). I didn't end up buying as much as I planned but I brought home about 12 pounds of chicken and Paul and I started de-boning the chicken. We had three piles, one the bones, another for the little pieces of meat that came off the bones and another for the breasts. Some of the pieces of breast were huge and we were able to split them into two servings. After we were done, I threw the bones into a pot, added onion, celery and carrots, filled the pot up with water and salted well and set it on the stove to simmer. While Paul was bagging up the chicken into serving size bags, I took the little pieces of meat and cooked them on the stove in some oil, salt and pepper. After everything was done we ended up with enough chicken for 20 meals and several gallons of delicious chicken broth.

It's wonderful to see the freezer starting to fill back up.

Summer Break

Summer Break is rapidly coming to an end. I did get a lot done this summer

- Read 12 books
- Planted flower and vegetable garden
- Organized Pantry
- Painted kitchen
- Trips with nieces to zoo, easton, and COSI
- Two gaming cons

I did some canning today, the taco sauce and pickled peppers turned out great, but my broth was a disaster. The first batch was chicken broth and one of the jars blew the top off and only a few sealed. The second batch was beef broth and only 2 of the 7 jars sealed. I've never had a problem with seals before. I wonder if I got a bad box of lids.

Overall it's been a wonderful summer break. Back to the grindstone in two weeks. Only taking two classes this fall, Foundations of Nursing and Pathophysiology. Should be fun.

Making Pumpkin Puree

We decorated with so many cute little pumpkins, I decided to try to make pumpkin puree for homemade pumpkin pies and other baked goodies. Here are two of the four pumpkins I used.

Cut them in half and scoop out the insides. I saved all the seeds to roast and use later for snacks.
Bake in the oven for about 1 1/2 hours until tender.

Move to a pan to cool.

Scoop out pumpkin and put in a strainer with cheesecloth to drain for a few hours.

Use immediately or package up to freeze for later use. I put mine into two cup packages for later. I got about 8 cups of pumpkin puree total.

Verdict: For the amount of time and effort this took, the pies had better be the best pumpkin pies the family has ever eaten!

First Garden Bounty

Our garden is starting to produce and we are so happy. I'm so grateful Paul's mother planted a bunch of veggies for us in her garden. Most of the food above is from her garden. The picture below is our first bell pepper from our garden. It's so pretty and smells so good, I almost don't want to eat it. The tomatoes are starting to turn red, we ate a few little cherry tomatoes this week and the chili peppers are doing awesome. We'll have more than enough little red chilis for several months.

We worked hard all week to get everything put up for winter. So far this week we've done 2 qts and 7 pints of peaches, 3 qts of cherries, froze 12 cups grated zucchini, made 2 cherry pies and froze them, 4 pints of dill pickles and dehydrated a ton of squash and zucchini. The herbs out front are getting huge and I'll probably dry another batch of basil, sage, oregano, thyme and tarragon this weekend. Paul also worked hard to make several batches of his wonderful homemade wheat bread. It's nice to have the bread ready to go in the freezer.
I ruined my dehydrator trying to dry candied cherries. Luckily Paul was able to find me another one at the store. This one is slightly bigger and has a better fan setup, which allows for quicker drying. However, the best gift I got this week was from a friend that loves to go to yardsales, she picked up 100 canning jars for me for only $10!! That's an amazing find. We are set for canning jars for quite awhile.

School started today and life will be very interesting and crazy for awhile. I'm anticipating very little sleep but I am excited to get started.

Condo gardening

I'm doing my container garden again this year, but I think I might have gone a little crazy. We got the majority of it planted tonight. Paul took a bunch of pictures which I'll try to get posted later. Here's what we have so far.

12 beef steak tomato plants
4 roma tomato plants
4 cherry tomato plants
4 grape tomato plants
Green Onions
Spinach (already pulled, season is over)
10-15 basil plants
2 thyme plants
3 sage plants
3 oregano plants
5 cilantro plants
8 yellow bell peppers plants
4 super chili peppers plants
1 serrano pepper plants
1 tabasco pepper plant

His mom has some squash and zucchini going for us at her garden, since those don't do well in containers. She also planted 4 pepper plants though I'm not sure what kind. I'd love to have a few more things, but I think I'm done because 1. Paul will probably strangle me if I bring home anymore plants or potting soil, 2. The majority of this stuff will be ready just about the 3 week of nursing school, and 3. there is no more free space on the patios!!

Who says you have to have land to have a garden?!!

Instant Oatmeal for Pennies

Instant oatmeal is a great healthy easy breakfast. You can make your own much cheaper and healthier than the storebought. First you'll need a box of quick cooking oats, baggies and salt.
Powder 1 cup of oats in the food processor. Put in each baggy 1/4 c oats, 2 Tbsp powdered oats and 1/4 tsp salt. Seal baggie and store in a tupperware container. To prepare add 2/3 c milk or water and microwave for 2 minutes. Add more or less milk depending on how you like the consistency of your oatmeal.

You can make your favorite flavors too. Just add 1 Tbsp sugar and 2 Tbsp dried fruit and enjoy. We try to dehydrate our own fruit whenever we can right now we have coconut, strawberries, apples, oranges and bananas.

A box of instant generic/store brand instant oatmeal is $2.00 for a box of 10 servings. We paid today $2.00 for a box of oats, which will make 40 servings. Plus our oatmeal has 4 ingredients oats, salt, sugar and fruit, not the big list of ingredients we can't pronounce that the store bought oatmeal has.

Update - We made used our homemade instant oatmeal for breakfast this morning (me-maple syrup and brown sugar, him-cinnamon and apples) It was delicious!! So much better than the storebought. The only change I'm going to make is to try 1/8 tsp salt instead of the 1/4, it was a little salty tasting to us.

School and Food Storage

Gosh, I didn't realize it had been almost two months since the last post. School has been keeping me busy, way to busy. Someone asked what I was planning for Labor Day, my answer was "study" UGHH This is the last week, have the Chemistry test on Tuesday and Biology on Wednesday. It looks like I'll end up with a B in Chemistry, I have to get a solid A on this last test to bump it up to an A in the class and I'm not counting on that happening. Biology is a solid A right now, so we'll see how the last test and final turn out. I have two weeks off of school after the tests, I plan on starting Christmas presents and am hoping to get alot of them done before classes start again. Next quarter I'm taking Anatomy and Microbiology, it's a total of 10 credit hours and two labs on Saturdays, I am going to be suffering.

Been doing a little bit of work with the container garden, no where near what I had hoped, but we do have a nice little supply of herbs for the next year. And Paul's mom brought over a ton of tomatoes and zucchini so we'll have fresh tomato sauce for the winter and I dried the zucchini to put in casseroles and soup during the winter. Since my canner is still at dads I had to either freeze the veggies or dehydrate them. Also in the picture is homemade chicken broth. I highly recommend making your own chicken broth, it's easy, tastes so much better and saves money. I buy a whole chicken, usually around $3, boil it with water, onions, and herbs until the chicken is cooked. Then you take the chicken off the bones (very easy) and divide it up into containers for meals, we usually get 3-4 containers of meat. What's left is yummy chicken broth, strain the broth to remove the herbs. I store mine in glass jars which go into the freezer, there is usually 2 big jars worth of chicken broth. You can make homemade chicken soup with this or cook rice and noodles in the broth to give the food a richer flavor. So for a $3 chicken you can make 4 maybe even 5 meals. Oh if you keep the broth in the fridge you do need to use it fairly quickly, it doesn't keep forever in the fridge, that's why I keep ours in the freezer.

The other things we've been working on is our food storage/emergency prepardness kit. Most people don't like to do this, talk about this or even think about it, but emergencies happen and saying well I live in the city I'll be fine is silly. Remember the blackouts a few summers ago in New York, the winter storms that knock out travel and electricity, that can happen no matter where you live. We have a pretty good supply of food put away, with what's in the cabinets and stored upstairs we would be fine for 3-4 weeks, granted we'd eat alot of soup, but we wouldn't starve. Don't forget if you don't have a gas stove you'll need to plan a backup source for cooking. The big thing now I've been working on is water storage. You have to have water, to flush the toilet, to fix food, to give the animals. We need to purchase some big 5 gallon water containers for us for meals and drinking water, but until we do that, I've been washing out (dishwasher to make sure it's clean) juice containers, filling them up with water and putting the cap back on. Water will keep this way for 6 months, so be sure to put a date on the container. It's an easy way to start storing water. Granted you might not want to use it for eating and drinking, but it will be good for washing out clothes, washing yourself and flushing the toilet. Ok enough of my lecture on prepardness.

I'll leave you with a picture of my cutie :) As you can tell on the carpet, he's going through his end of summer shedding. Poor Paul is not enjoying it either. This is a picture of him with his new ball, it's so cute whenever he get a new ball he has to take it with him everywhere, even bed. He's hiding under the table to enjoy the ball.

Small Garden

Just a small garden this year since I don't have a yard at the new place.

Baby basil and dill sprouting

The front porch.

First Harvest

The first veggies from my garden.

Cherry tomatoes and chives

Summer squash, thyme, and basil.

Garden 7/6

Garden Progress

Here's an update on the garden. Don't mind the weeds please, I haven't worked in it for a few days. Below is the lone squash plant, I'm hoping one plant doesn't overwhelm me with squash.

Three of the tomato plants. See the little baby tomatoes! The fencing is to keep out bunnies and naughty next door neighbor children :)

Parsley plants

The basil plants, they really took off this week after the rain.

The sunflowers all died, naughty children next door kept pulling them out of the pot. The thyme is still growing, the chives are about half dead, and the cucumber plant is still alive if I can just get it into the ground! Never got the spinach and onions seeds planted, probably too hot now.

Herbs so far

It's still not much, but here's the pics of my herbs so far. Everything but the thyme was started from seeds in the kitchen.

The chives and two little parsley plants struggling along.

The Basil and Parsley. They are actually doing really well, especially the parsley. With as many basil plants as I have everyone will be getting pesto gifts in August :)

Thyme (store bought) sunflowers and a few more parsley plants. The sunflowers for some reason aren't doing well. If they were a little more sturdy I'd put them in the ground. It probably didn't help that the cat thought playing in the pot was fun and that sunflowers were his personal salad bar.

First Time Canning!

I did it! I canned my own food. It wasn't much, just some dill pickles, but they are so pretty sitting there in their little glass jars. Making something for yourself is very rewarding. I've been wanting to learn to can for awhile, but I didn't get my garden in this year so I thought I wouldn't be able to try canning this year. But, veggies are so cheap right now, I thought well why not just buy some and try it out. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. While I was cleaning up, you could hear the jars sealing with their pings, it was so exciting!

I've also been drying some veggies, have done tomatoes, peppers and onions so far. It's a great feeling to see my food storage start to grow.

Ok, ok, I know this isn't the sarah you know, but things and times change. Welcome to my new world.

P.S. the picture above isn't of my pickles, but I did take pictures of them. Will post them as soon as the roll is developed.