• cooked apples
    Canning,  Growing Produce,  Preserving

    Applesauce

    I love applesauce. I love eating it. I love making it. And I really love how it makes my house smell. Cooked apples with cinnamon …mmmmm… nothing really beats that. The other major plus for me is how many apples it takes to make applesauce. If you have an apple tree you know what I am talking about. When you get a big crop of apples there is just no way that you can eat them all before they start going bad. This is what we were dealing with this year. Applesauce is a great way to use a lot of apples and make them shelf stable. Then you can…

  • Canning,  Garden

    Tomato Sauce

    We eat a lot of tomato sauce in this house. It is easy and fast. I make some kind of Italian dish at least once a week. Plus, we started having pizza and movie night every Friday and I use tomato sauce for the pizza as well. We have started planting enough tomato plants that we could keep ourselves supplied in tomato sauce without buying it from the store. That is usually about 10-12 tomato plants. That means that I make a lot of tomato sauce. So we had to come up with a good method for doing it. I think we have got it down. I have looked up…

  • Canning,  Garden,  Growing Produce,  Preserving

    Pickled beets

    This year we dicided to try a new variety of beets. They are supposed to be striped like a peppermint candy. They turned out to be really pretty. Unfortunately they don’t look quite as good pickled as the good old dark red ones. But, they taste just as good. Maybe even better. It’s hard for me to compare because the last time we grew beets I was expecting our second baby and I was a bit nauseous when I was doing the pickled beets. I had to fight to overcome my association with morning sickness and beets. I have been dragging my feet a bit actually. This time around Tyler…

  • Canning,  Preserving

    Apricots galore

    If you have, or have ever had an apricot tree, you probably know that they don’t do well every year. And you probably also know that when they do well, they go a little crazy. One apricot tree, in a good year is enough to keep anyone rolling in apricots for a few days. You will probably end up giving a lot of them away as well. Well, that being said, we have four mature apricot trees! Needless to say, on the years that we get apricots we are swimming in them for a few days or weeks. We recently bought a freeze dryer which is great and it means…