Turkey Stock

Whenever you cook a turkey or chicken, dont throw away the bones! I always save my bones in several large freezer bags until I have plenty of supplies to make a large batch of stock!

Then I just put all the bones into my large stock pot with few onions, carrots, celery, and garlic...cover with water and let it simmer!! Now this is one of my favorite things to do in the winter when the wood stove is roaring because I just let it set on top of the fire and boil all day! But when I am running the stove top I usually will just boil for a few hours. 

Strain out the liquids and its that easy!! You know you have some good stock when it gels. I usually let it cool after straining it and then divide it up into various pint sized canning jars. We use it up fairly fast, but it can easily be pressure canned or jut put into the freezer. Ive also taken the gel chunks and put them into a gallon size freezer bag...then they are really easy to just pop off a chunk out of the freezer to add a little extra flavor and nutrients to a meal.

Busy Busy gettin things done!

It has been delightfully busy around here and I'm doing everything I can just to keep up with it! Peaches and Poppy are home!! They stayed with the breeder for almost 3 weeks just to make sure both girls were "well taken care of" :) Note: If you are considering getting and breeding goats...wow, brace yourself for the smell!! We did not want a billy goat because of the horrific smell they produce but I never considered that my does would completely stink of billy goat smell when we brought them home. Wow, it is bad! The breeder said that the smell would just go away, but its been a week and they still stink. (Ill let you know how it goes and what we end up finding to get rid of the smell.) It has been sad because Henry and Addie are so excited to see the goats and all I keep saying is "AHH, don't touch the goats!". So, if you are thinking about getting and breeding goats, make sure you are prepared for the "after smell" as well as some remedies to eliminate the smell from your does immediately!

While the goats were gone for a couple weeks Henry picked up a few extra responsibilities around here - bringing in firewood, watering the animals and putting the chickens "to bed" at night. It has been extremely helpful because he loves being a "big helper" and those are a few extra things that I don't have to worry about being done anymore :) It does take quite a while for him to do each job, especially since he can only carry in 1 piece of firewood at a time, but he loves it and eventually he will get really fast at each job! He gets really excited to get his boots, jacket, gloves and hat on (all  of which he does even if it isn't that cold outside) and runs outside while Addie monitors the back door for him and opens it when he comes back up with an armfull of firewood!


In other random news, we also had a hawk attack one of our chickens! I looked out in the backyard as it landed on the chicken and they both started a rolling flapping fight through the leaves...thankfully it only lasted about 3 seconds because Sarge saved the day! If that hawk would have hung around 1 second longer we would have seen a rolling flapping fight between Sarge and the hawk, but the hawk flew off. Im sure it will be back, but Sarge is definitely on high patrol these days!

In garden/canning related news:

I also canned up 7 jars of mixed vegetables (excellent for pot pie!). I really wish I could find the recipe I used for the mixed vegetables! I'm seriously loosing my mind because I just canned them up last night and I cant find that recipe anywhere!! I sure hope I used an actual recipe and didn't accidentally combine 2 different ones! I would love to share what I did with you all, but I have no idea what I did :) All I remember is that I used about 29 cups of vegetables (potatoes, carrots, celery, onions), covered them with water, boiled for 10 minutes and then filled sterilized jars with vegetables and water, added 1 tsp canning salt, and processed in a pressure canner for 85 minutes. Easy pot pie: 1 Pie Crust, 1 Can of mixed veggies (drained), 1 can of canned Turkey or chicken with stock...bake and dinners done!

Freezing Creamed Corn

Some friends of ours have family with a small sweet corn farm and they brought us quite a few ears of corn. I wanted to try out my new Corn Cutter I got a while back, so I used 18 ears of corn and cut away! It was so easy!

It took about 20 minutes and I had 6 cans of creamed corn!

I was going to put these in the pressure canner, but I decided to freeze them instead.

Freezing Peach Slices

My kiddos love fruit with their morning oatmeal and we also love smoothies from frozen fruit. So I thought Id freeze some peaches! The first 3 steps are the same as for canning peaches.

Step 1: Blanch your peaches by placing them in boiling water for about 30 seconds and straight into ice cold water.

Step 2: Peel your peaches. After blanching the skin should peel right off fairly easily. If you need to do another quick blanch to help loosen the peels more, just be careful not to overcook them or they will be mushy.

Step 3: Cut your peach in half and pop out the pit. You can use a spoon to dig out the center red part or you can leave it, but it will get dark during canning but wont affect the taste.

Step 4: Cut your peaches into the size slices you want and lay them out on a kitchen towel and put them in the freezer.

Step 5: After the peaches are frozen, remove them from the freezer and seperate them from the towel (most likely they will be slightly frozen to the towel...but thats why you use the towel and not a tray or else you will have to scrape them off the tray)

Step 6: Put them in freezer safe bags, label, and put back in the freeezr.

Strawberry Cutting and Freezing

We were blessed with the opportunity to purchase a large quantity of strawberries for 50 cents per pound. Seeing as I didn't get around to preparing the beds for my strawberries and we didn't grow any this year, I was super excited to be able to stock up on strawberries!! We love berries, the kids eat them almost every morning with their oatmeal, and we also love afternoon smoothies! I called my sister and told her about the strawberries and so we loaded up all the kids and drove out to buy some flats of strawberries! We ended up getting 160 pounds and so we went back to her house and the cleaning began!! We put the kids to work and they were fantastic! Kurtis, my brother in law, (after he got over the initial shock of Evie buying so many strawberries) pitched in to help and made some fantastic strawberry adult beverages! My mom and dad stopped by to help out for a while too! And of course Bryan hurried over to help out with the strawberry mania!

We Started by filling up the sinks and cleaning all the strawberries. Madison (my 7 year old niece) was extremely helpful!! She probably did more work than most of the adults! She kept the sinks full by getting all the strawberries out of the flats when the we needed more cleaned and she would clean them and drain them and then keep our little piles stacked up and ready to be cut! She also helped collecting all the stems we cut off and filling the freezer baggies with strawberries! She was amazing :)

All the other kids wanted to help too! Laken (my 5 year old niece) and Henry were helping with the assembly line of bringing new strawberries to clean. Mason (my 1 year old nephew) even pitched in a few times with carrying strawberries! Mostly Laken, Henry, Addie and Mason offered their services with EATING the strawberries...I think we have a few that we could spare though :)

The crew at work! You can see the big pile of bagged strawberries on the counter...and that was barely one third of what we ended up with!

We really didn't have any special method behind our madness, we just cleaned and cut the strawberries and then put them in freezer bags. We filled the flats back up with the bags and stacked them. We ended up with a little over 60lbs lbs of cleaned strawberries each (Evie and I). We ate ALOT of strawberries, kept about 10 lbs of whole, uncut strawberries, mom and dad took a few bags and who knows how many the kids hid around the house to be able to eat later...lol, I'm just kidding Evie, I sure hope not!! And the stems all went to our compost!!

I didn't get a picture of the entire pile of bagged strawberries...I know I know I'm bummed too! And by the time I realized I hadn't taken that picture, Evie had already put all her strawberries in her freezer and ours were loaded up in our car ready to go home...and the last thing we wanted to do after 3 hours of strawberry cleaning was to unload everything just for a picture!

I do have to share this picture though!! Bryan and I were trying to take a serious, nice picture and when I was looking back over the pictures I see Evie in the background! The funniest part is that I didn't even see her at first until Bryan said "Ah, look at the Troll in the background" and Kurtis said "wow one eyed cyclopes!"...I relooked at the picture and then we all laughed hysterically for quite a while! Thank you Evie for a hilarious picture!! I guess thats what happens when you get 2 sisters together for any length of time...we just get giddy and silly and funny things happen!

Broccoli is ready to harvest! Freezing broccoli!

We brought in about 3 pounds of broccoli the other day and I blanched them and stuck them in the freezer! Super easy and we can enjoy these this winter :)

First off I have to say, Doesn't this little head of broccoli almost look like a bridal bouquet?? Hahaha that would seriously be an interesting wedding!

Step 1: Rinse your broccoli and separate heads into the size of your choice

Step 2: Immerse in a brine (1 cup salt to 1 gallon of water) for 30 minutes. This will help remove all insects... and with organic gardening, you probably will have insects...but at least you know for sure its organic!!

Step 3: Rinse and drain

Step 4: Blanch for 3-4 minutes (immerse into boiling water for 3-4 minutes and then immediately into ice cold water)...drain (I let it rest on a kitchen towel for a few minutes to make sure ice wouldn't form on my broccoli in the freezer)

Step 5: Pack in your freezer container and label (don't forget to write the packaging date)