Putting up Chicken Stock

Chicken stock is one of those things that I keep in the pantry because it can be used for so many dishes.  I can cook rice in it to add flavor, I can use it as a base for soup or in the crock pot to replace water in a recipe.  It can also be a filling warm drink on a cold winter's day.

My basic stock recipe is pretty simple.  I use the leftover bones from several chickens to start.  I cover the bones with water in a large stock pot and then set it to boil.  While that is heating up I slice up some carrots, celery, onions and garlic and add that to the pot.  I don't add salt to my stock, though sometimes I will add a splash of vinegar to help draw more minerals out of the bones.  I also add a couple of bay leaves for flavor.

I let the whole thing boil on low heat for several hours, sometimes the whole day if I have the time.  After it has boiled long enough I let it cool down for a while before I chill it in the fridge overnight.  Chilling it helps the fat to congeal on the top where I can easily scoop it off and save it to cook with later.  I take the bones out and remove any remaining meat which I save for things like chicken salad, chicken soup, or chicken tacos.  I strain out all of the veggies and feed those to the chickens as a special treat.  What I am left with is just the stock which I strain through cheese cloth and heat again to let it cook down a little and become more concentrated.

The final step is to pressure can the stock so that I can use it as needed over the next few months.  The stock is heated to boiling while the pressure canner and jars are prepared.  When everything is good and hot I transfer the boiling stock into pre-warmed jars leaving one inch of headspace in each jar.  One by one the jars go into the canner and once it's full the lid gets locked down and I wait for the pressure to rise.  At my elevation I need to process chicken stock at 13 pounds of pressure for 25 minutes.  When it's all done I let them cool down slowly before I remove them from the canner to cool completely.  This round of canning gave me five more quarts of fresh home made chicken stock to add to my shelves.

Bottling the Plum Wine

It has been several months since I started my first batch of plum wine.  I got a good deal on a couple of boxes of plums in August and got the ball rolling on what was to become my winter supply of plum wine.  I have been a little lax about the schedule of racking and bottling with this batch, but I figured that letting the wine age in the carboy wouldn't hurt anything, so I could wait for the chore of bottling for a few weeks while I attended to more pressing needs in my schedule.  I did the first racking of the wine in late October, so I was only a couple of weeks behind schedule for bottling.  The wine itself was finished fermenting for several weeks before I racked it the first time, so it had plenty of time to clear before I bottled it.

I began by cleaning and sterilizing all the bottles that I had available.  I asked my friends to save their bottles for me, so I didn't have to buy any wine bottles for this round.  I still had new corks available from my cherry wine bottling earlier in the year, so I didn't have to spend anything on that either.

I removed the labels from as many bottles as I could, but I didn't want to spend all day on that project, so I settled for bottles that were as clean as I could make them.  I sterilized them by filling them with boiling water right after washing them.  One by one they were set to dry before I got around to filling them with my sweet brew.

The bottles were filled and corked in small batches and I ended up with twenty six bottles of wine in all.  Since I only spent $50 on plums for this wine that comes out to between two and threes dollars a bottle when you figure in the cost of sugar and the few additives that were used.  Not bad at all for a delicious end product that will knock your socks off in a just a few sips.  

I don't know the specific alcohol content of my wine, but I know that it is in the higher ranges because of the quantity of sugar I use in my recipe.  The yeast I use can tolerate a fairly high alcohol content before it dies off, so I believe it to be between 15% and 17% alcohol, which is fairly high as far as wine goes.  This is the kind of wine best used for sipping, since drinking more than a glass will make most people a little tipsy.

I am so happy that I was able to make another batch of plum wine this year using locally grown fresh plums.  I really think it makes the final product something special and everyone that has tasted it agrees that it is a phenomenal wine.  I have one more small batch of late season plum wine to rack and bottle before I am done with wine making for the year, but I am happy with what I have accomplished in the wine department this year.  I have had more than enough bottles to share with friends, and I have a good supply that should last me until next summer when wine season begins again.

Another Hat Order

The past few weeks have been busy for me in the crochet department.  It seems like I have been crocheting nothing but hats for weeks now.  This week I had an order for a hat just like the one I wear.  I wasn't sure if I could find the exact same blue that was in my hat, but I came across one that was pretty dang close.

My customer was so happy with the way it turned out that she wants me to make a second one for her husband.  It will be the same colors but just the beanie hat (no ear warmers).  Beanies are the fastest hats to make since there aren't any extra steps involved so I should have a second hat ready for her in a day or two.

Potato Harvest: Better Late Than Never

I have had so many little projects to do lately that I have been putting some things off for longer than I would have liked.  Harvesting my potatoes was one of those things.  They have been patiently waiting in the ground for months.  Luckily for me they keep pretty well in the dirt as long as I can keep the chickens out of the bed.  I have had to cover the bed with a sheet of plastic if I let the chickens out or they will scratch up and peck holes in any potatoes that they find.  As I have been digging them out I have come to discover that I am also feeding a healthy slug population under the cover of the plastic sheet.  I decided it was time to save what I had left in the bed and get those taters out of the dirt.

Digging them out is a slow process for me because I try my best not to damage any as I go.  There will always be a few that get stabbed with the potato fork and those get put into the "use first" bowl.  These ones live on my kitchen table and I pick a few out the bowl as I need them for a meal.  I have also been trying to keep the tiny spuds in this bowl because they don't keep as well as the full sized potatoes and I can boil them up by the handful as new potatoes.  All the potatoes that are larger and unblemished go into the storage box.  These will live in a cool dark closet in my back room for the winter.  After I eat my way through the "use first" bowl I will start working on the stored potatoes in the box.  If there are any left in the box by spring they will likely get replanted in the garden to grow more potatoes for next year.

This box is about half full with the three varieties of potatoes that I grew this year.  The Purple Viking and Red Chieftain potatoes did the best this year, while the Yukon Gold only produced a handful of potatoes from what I planted.  All of the potatoes were "free"  to me this year since I planted what was left of last year's crop this spring.  I had plenty of them left over so I didn't need to spend any money on seed potatoes this year.  Between volunteer potatoes that came up in last years bed and these free potatoes I haven't had to spend a penny on potatoes since the spring of 2016.  If I am lucky I will continue this trend and have fresh homegrown potatoes for years to come.

The Hens are Laying Again!

My laying flock has been taking a break for the past few months.  They were going through a molt and recovering from rooster damage so it has been very quiet in the nest boxes lately.  I did have one younger hen in the flock and I believe that she and an occasional random older hen have been laying the one or two eggs that I have been getting each day.  I believe in allowing animals to follow their natural rhythms in life so I do not supplement light to keep the hens churning out eggs through the period when their bodies should be resting.  I would like to try to keep hatching chicks every 6 months or so just so I can keep my egg production more consistent throughout the year and still allow them to go through this natural break period.

The hens themselves are looking quite nice.  Most of them have grown back their full complement of plumage, though I have one or two stragglers that still look a bit on the ragged side.  They seem much more content now that they aren't under the constant harassment of the roosters.  I hope they don't get too stressed when I add the three youngest chickens to the laying flock in the next few weeks.  They have been getting acquainted with them when I let both flocks out together into the garden and fighting is minimal in that open context.  I'm sure it will only take a little while for them to adjust to their new shared quarters once I put them together.

In the past several weeks I have been getting one to two eggs a day.  It has been enough to keep me from running out of eggs, but not enough that I had any extra to sell.  In the past couple of days I have seen an increase in egg production.  I am hoping that a couple more hens have come back online now that they are done growing in their winter feathers.  If the girls get back to laying then they can start to pay for their food again.  They haven't always covered the bill, but it sure helps when they bring in a few dollars here and there.

I sell the fresh eggs to people at work.  I don't have many to sell and there is plenty of demand so I don't think finding homes for a surplus will be a problem.  I will just have to be careful to make sure that I keep a couple for myself here and there.

Backyard Harvest Dinner

Here it is the beginning of December and I'm still harvesting enough out of the garden to make a tasty dinner.  Since I was trying to round out the meal I did take a few things out of the cupboard and the freezer but overall the meal was grown almost entirely in my own front yard,  It included a fresh picked carrot and head of broccoli, onions, shallots and garlic harvested months ago, dehydrated yellow squash, and frozen chicken breasts.  The only thing that I didn't grow in my garden was the mushrooms that rounded out the meal.

All cooked up and ready to eatL

I still find it hard to believe that I can eat this well out of my garden at this time of the year.  I also love the color of the fresh foods that I am eating  The rainbow purple carrots, the bright green broccoli and the deep purple onions and shallots really add a depth of color to the meal that makes it even more enticing.  

Current Crochet Project: A Handspun Hat

I am excited to be working on my current project.  A customer at work saw some of my finished products and requested that I make a custom hat.  They wanted it to be thin but warm, preferably wool and dyed to match his jacket.  Luckily for me I had a couple of skeins of my handspun yarn that just happened to be made from a soft and warm combination of merino wool and tussah silk.

I rolled the skeins into balls so I could crochet from them easily and began to work on a hat.  I used a fairly small sized crochet hook because this yarn is thinner than most of the yarn that you can get at the store.  A small hook means a lot more stitches go into making a project so it can take quite a bit longer to finish a product.  It also means that the fabric it makes is thinner which is what I was going for since the request wasn't for a thick bulky hat.

Once the hat was finished I dyed it dark blue as requested.

I am really happy with the finished product.  My hand spun yarn was just what I wanted for this project and I even got to practice a different dye technique which turned out just the way I had hoped it would.  It was a great learning experience all the way around and I look forward to making more handspun yarn for future projects.

Reducing the Rooster Population

This spring I hatched a small batch of chicks with the intention of using some of them for meat.  Of the four chickens, three of them were roosters.  They were all pretty well behaved and none of them crowed very loud or often.  Some of them were rough with the ladies, but since I had separated the roosters from the hens, most of the hens have recovered from their time spent with the boys.  I could have kept all three roosters to use them in a breeding plan, but the truth is that only one of them really fit what I was looking for in a breeding rooster.  The one I decided to keep was the largest of the three and he crowed less often than the others.  Eventually he will go back in with the girls for the winter just so he won't be too lonely in the rooster pen by himself.

The two roosters that went into the freezer were pretty good sized as they were both nine months old and had definitely reached maturity.  I waited until it was nearly dark outside and the chickens had gone to roost for the evening.  I had no problem catching the roosters and they stayed calm as I prepared them for butchering.  Both deaths were over in minutes and I thanked them both for nourishing me as they passed.  With the most stressful part of the process out of the way I started on the work of cleaning the birds.

The first step in cleaning a chicken is to remove the feathers.  When I set up for butchering, one of the first things I do is set a large pot of water to heat on the stove.  Once it gets to 160 degrees it is hot enough for scalding.  To scald a chicken I simply dunk the freshly killed bird in the hot water and swish it around for a couple of minutes until the feathers start to pull out easily.  Most of the feathers come out by the handful, but the wing and tail feathers can take a little more effort.  Once I got the carcasses as clean as possible I brought them inside and began to part them out.  I usually divide them into leg quarters, breasts, and wings.  I also save the backs and necks for stock.  One of the things that I like best about butchering my own chickens is that I can keep any of the organ meats that I want also.  I usually add the heart, liver and gizzard to my stock and it adds an extra depth to the flavor.

When it was all said and done I ended up with several pounds of fresh home grown meat for my freezer.  These two roosters will provide me many delicious meals and for that I am grateful.  Raising my own meat from chick to freezer is a lot of work, but knowing how my meat was raised is important to me.  I know that these roosters led a good life and the end was quick and as painless as possible.

Late Fall Harvest: Broccoli

Things in the garden have slowed down to a crawl here at the end of November.  There are still a few crops that are happily humming along blissfully unaffected by the low night time temps here.  The broccoli is one of them.  I tend to be a lazy gardener when it comes to some things and I am not very good about cleaning up some crops after I harvest them.  I picked my main harvest of broccoli in September but never took the time to cut down the plants after I cut off the good sized heads.  I was rewarded with a second harvest of side shoots, some of which were making sizable heads too.  I already have plenty of frozen broccoli so I am using this bonus harvest fresh from the garden as I go into winter.  If I can make a little more room in the freezer I may freeze one more round before it gets too cold since I know that these plants likely won't survive the deep cold that is just around the corner.

Gardening will never cease to amaze me.  Even when you think that all is lost with a crop, some times they are tenacious and reward even your neglect with wholesome goodness.  This year I had to replant my broccoli several times and this final planting was from starts that I bought from a local nursery.  It was a last ditch effort that paid off even though they were off to a late start this season.  I was lucky that they didn't simply bolt in the heat of the summer.  I think that our slightly cooler than normal summer and the abundant rainfall helped this crop mature into some beautiful huge heads of broccoli.  I believe that most of my heads were over three pounds each and even these side shoots have become quite large considering that they are mostly an afterthought.  I hadn't paid much attention to them after the main harvest so when I noticed that I was going to be able to add more pounds to my broccoli harvest tally I was very happy.

Whimsical Turtle Hat

One of the fun things about crochet is that you can make just about anything if you put your mind to it.  I recently had a special request for a hat with a turtle theme.  I wasn't sure if I wanted to put a turtle in the pattern or make the hat into a turtle so I started looking at patterns online.  Lo and behold I came across the perfect thing:  a hat that was a turtle.  I downloaded the pattern and got to work.  I used my own color combination for the turtle, and had to adjust the pattern a little to make the hat more hat-like, but in the end I am really happy with how it turned out.

This pattern involved more sewing than I am used to, but I think the details really help add dimension to the hat.  The turtle is looks like a happy cartoon character and that was exactly what I was going for.

Unleashing the Chickens!

The chickens have just spent most of the spring and summer cooped up so to speak.  They live in an enclosed pen with an attached hen house.  I cover the top in the summer to provide shade, but the lower section is open to the elements.  The idea with this pen was that it would be mobile, but it takes two people to move it, so it has become a stationary pen which is not ideal.  I would have liked to pasture them, but unfortunately my yard looked like anything but a pasture when I moved in.  I have attempted to plant some dry land pasture mix but it has come up patchy.  Maybe I can try again next year to see if I can make my yard more pasture like.

The rest of my yard has become garden space which is kinda like a chicken smorgasbord.  This is the other reason I kept the chickens in a pen during the growing season.  It would have been nice for them to do bug patrol duty in the summer, but they would have eaten everything they could get their little beaks on which includes my veggie supply.  Instead they got the gleanings from my harvests: the giant zucchinis and cucumbers that got away, the blemished tomatoes, the ends of beans and peas that were destined for the freezer.  Just because I didn't want the chickens to run amok in the garden didn't mean that they didn't get a fair share of it's produce.

Now that the garden has died back for the winter the time has come to let the chickens do their part to fertilize and till the surface of my garden beds.  The days that I am home and available to "supervise" I open the door to their pen and let them roam around the house and garden.  They mostly stay in the yard for now, but as I continue to clean up the yard, they will have less to scratch and peck at, so I imagine their boundaries will change by the end of winter.  There are still some crops out in the garden that I don't want them to get into, so a simple barrier like a plastic sheet protects my potatoes until I can harvest them.  After I plant my garlic I will cover that bed with a chicken wire hoop to keep the chickens out of it.  I will probably also plant a bed of spinach that will get covered with a low plastic hoop tunnel which should be a nice supply of winter greens for me and the chickens.

The chickens are loving their new found freedom and have been busily cleaning up the yard in their own way.  Since the season is new for them there is plenty of things for them to graze on in the yard and my feeding costs have decreased a bit while their diet has improved.  I have noticed that the yolks of their eggs are a richer orange since they have been doing more foraging, so moving towards pasturing them is definitely on my list.  Having happy chickens is the best way to get tasty healthy eggs for my own diet.

Preparing The Winter Garden

You wouldn't think that much yard work goes on in the winter months, but the weather here is mild enough that I use the winter to catch up on some basic garden maintenance.  Autumn and winter are a good time to go through and clean up the garden beds.  I generally remove the dead vegetation and add amendments to my soil using what I have on hand.  This year I have been burning piles of dead ragweed bushes and will be adding the ash from that to each garden bed to increase the mineral content of the soil.  A friend of mine also gave me bags of leaves which I am mixing into the soil in each bed to increase the amount of organic matter which will also help feed my future crops.

Eventually I would like to move towards a no till approach in my garden, but at the moment I think turning over the soil in the beds is helping to improve the soil.  The first year that I had a garden here, turning over the soil was a chore.  The soil is hard packed clay that is loaded with river cobble.  Using a shovel was tedious, but I felt that I was able to remove more of the larger rocks from the beds using this method.  I have also been trying to plant deep rooted crops like carrots where I can to help break up the deeper soil and help bring nutrients closer to the surface to make them more available for shallower rooted crops.

That first year and even the beginning of the second year I found the soil to be oddly devoid of earthworms.  Finally as I have been turning over the beds this fall I have started finding signs of life in my soil.  I have been adding leaves and grass clipping to the beds both as I turn them over and also as a mulch after the beds are planted.  I think they have helped to improve the composition of my soil quite a bit.  It holds water much longer than the hard dry soil in other parts of my yard and thanks to the mulch it doesn't get muddy when it does get soaked.

This winter I am planning on trying to grow a few overwintered crops in some of my beds.  I always get a bed of garlic planted in the fall so it can come up in the early spring.  I also want to try growing a bed of spinach under a low hoop tunnel and a bed of turnips for the chickens.  Both of those veggies have germinated well for me in the cold in the past so I am going to try to get them planted in the next few weeks to see if they can get established before the temps get too low.

Foe the most part the garden is done for the year.  I still have root crops like my potatoes, carrots and parsnips that are waiting to be harvested, but there is no hurry for those crops since they seem to keep just fine where they grew in the soil.  The potatoes might have to be fully harvested before deep cold sets in, but the others can be harvested as needed all the way through early spring.  The cold weather actually improves the flavor of carrots and parsnips which is another reason to let them overwinter outside.

Canning Tomato Sauce

I finally had a free day to get some needed chores done around the house.  At the top of my list was canning tomato sauce to free up some space in the freezer.  I had four and a half gallons of whole tomatoes sitting in my freezer from this fall's tomato harvest.  I could have had more, but I ran out of room in the freezer and I'm sad to say that many of my tomatoes went to waste.  The chickens have been cleaning up what I couldn't get to in time and next year I will probably plant fewer plants since they are so prolific.

I began by giving all the tomatoes a warm bath to help them thaw and also to help remove the skins before they went into the pot.  I turned on the stove and brought the whole tomatoes to a boil, stirring them up and smashing them as they cooked.  Once they were all cooked to mush I put the sauce through my food mill to remove the seeds and any big chunks that I missed when I was peeling the tomatoes.  The sauce was then returned to the pot where it continued to cook down for several hours.  I like my sauce on the thick side so I reduced it by half to make it the right consistency.  While that was cooking down I prepared my jars and canner for the next step.  The extra skins and seeds went to the chickens who promptly made quick work of the small pile.

The next step was filling the jars with the sauce.  I was canning pints so each jar got one tablespoon of lemon juice before getting filled with the boiling sauce.  I left 1/2 inch of headspace in each jar, wiped the rims and tightened down the lids before returning them to the canner to boil for 45 minutes.  I only ended up with nine pints of sauce this season.  I still had six pints of sauce left over from last year so this small amount should keep me happy until next year.  I don't eat a ton of tomato based dishes, but between the salsa and the sauce I should have plenty to last me.  I am always surprised by how little sauce I get from a huge number of tomatoes.  Perhaps next year I will have time to can a batch of sauce while the season is still going strong so I don't have to depend on how much room I have in my freezer.

The Beginning of Yarn Season

The garden is pretty well finished for the year and all that remains are a few broccoli and cabbage plants that have been happily growing despite the frosty nights here.  I am nearly finished canning garden produce as well, having only the frozen tomatoes that I need to turn into sauce left on the list.  The days now have more time to devote to other things and I have recently begun to crochet again.

My current project was a request from a coworker.  They wanted a thick blue scarf and I had just the perfect bright sky blue yarn just waiting to become something.  I am using a double crochet stitch worked in rows to make a nice thick and even fabric for the scarf.  Once I get it long enough I will finish the edges and add fringe to the ends.  I think its going to be a nice warm addition to a winter lifeguard's wardrobe.

Other coworkers and friends have begun to make requests for hats, slippers and other things, so my project list is growing.  The best part of people making special requests is that I get to make something for someone that is uniquely theirs.  I have never made the same hat twice and now that I can spin and dye my own yarn I can cater to special requests of color or material for a project.  The only real limiting factor is time.  Fortunately with the yard work slowing down to a bare minimum I will have lots more time to devote to my craft.

Last year I completed my goal of downsizing my yarn stash as much as possible.  I made hats with partial skeins left over from previous projects and happily increased my hat inventory with no additional cost to me.  This gives me plenty of space to restock my yarn stash with both store bought yarns and yarns that I spun myself.  I have a feeling that most of my spinning will take place after the holidays when gift requests have died down for the year.  My goal is to finish spinning all of the roving that I have so it will be ready for any projects that I come up with along the way.  I would also like to take my bags of alpaca fiber to a local mill to have it cleaned and made into roving.  The cost for this is a bit prohibitive right now, but it is something that I have been wanting to do for years.  Having the fiber doesn't do me much good if I can't spin it into yarn.

The winter is just creeping in, but with the coming cooler weather comes hours of time for quiet, busy projects indoors.  I have many hopes for what I can make this season, though I know that it won't be long before spring garden planning will begin again.  In the mean time I will use my creativity to share warmth and comfort with the people in my life.

First Elk Hunt

This year I decided it was time to finally go on my first hunting adventure.  I was pretty nervous about it.  The potential for killing such a large, elegant creature made me quite unsure of myself.  After all the years that I have spent taking care of animals, the thought of purposefully ending a life to feed myself was a bit intimidating.  I have killed chickens for my freezer, but that was a relatively controlled experience.....tracking an animal through the woods is quite a bit different.  I was worried about maiming an animal, but not killing it.  I definitely wanted to be sure of a quick kill and I honestly don't think I am a skilled enough marksman to feel confident about doing that successfully.  Luckily (or unluckily) for me I never had the opportunity to find out if I could kill an elk this trip.  Though we found tracks and other signs from them, I never caught a glimpse of any in the areas that we were hunting in.  I did see plenty of other wildlife like mule deer, wild turkeys and grouse along with the usual woodland fare of songbirds and squirrels. 

I learned a lot about hunting this trip.  I learned more about what I should carry with me and what kind of endurance I need to have to hunt more comfortably.  Trying to hike quietly through a forest while carrying a pack and rifle can be quite difficult.  My legs became sore in places that I never knew could hurt.  My shoulders ached with exhaustion because I wasn't using an entirely appropriate day pack for hunting.  I did carry plenty of warm clothing for which I was grateful for in the cooler hours of the day.  I also had plenty to snack on when we took breaks throughout the day.  Hiking up and down mountainsides has a tendency to fire up your appetite so snacking often helped to keep up my energy levels. 

Being my first hunting trip I am not at all surprised that I came home empty handed.  I did go with experienced hunters so I felt that I was in good hands and I learned a lot from them over the course of the trip.  If anything the experience has inspired me to get out and hike more just to work on my hunting skills.  Walking quietly though the forest following game trails and not getting lost is not something that you can learn overnight.  I am hoping that when next years hunting season starts I will be better prepared to have a successful hunt. 

Racking the Plum Wine

The first batch of plum wine for the season has been fermenting for well over a month now.  It has reached the point where there aren't any more bubbles rising to the surface, so it was ready for the next step.  Racking the wine is the process of siphoning off the wine from the "debris" of yeast and tiny fruit pieces that have settled to the bottom of the carboy.  This step helps to further clear the wine and prepare it for bottling.

This particular recipe calls for sugar to be added at this stage as well.  Fermentation has ended when the alcohol content of the wine is high enough to kill off the yeast.  Adding sugar at this point will not restart fermentation, but it will sweeten the wine a bit more.  The wine will still need to sit for at least another month to clear completely after this racking.

To begin I simply siphoned the wine into the primary fermenting bucket that was cleaned and sterilized in preparation for this step.  Once I siphoned off as much as possible, I added the remaining sugar called for in the recipe and stirred it in until it was fully dissolved.  Then I siphoned the wine back into the now clean and sterilized carboy where it will continue to clear until I am ready to bottle it.

I did have a tiny taste of this wine and I think it will make a fantastic bottle of wine after a little more aging.  It still carries the sharp yeasty flavor since it was freshly siphoned off of the dead yeast that created it.  That taste will go away with time so that is all that I need to give this beautiful batch of wine....time.  I hope to be bottling this batch in another month or so and I am still waiting for the late season batch to finish fermenting.  It won't be long until my shelves are full of wine bottles too!

Using Every Little Bit: Apple Juice From Skins and Cores

Canning my own food can be a time consuming process, but the payoff is that I know exactly what is in the food that I eat.  The main point of canning for me is to preserve the fruits of my labor for the coming months so that my effort in the garden isn't wasted.  I also buy some of my food from local farmers (mostly fruit because I grow my own vegetables).  When I spend money on food I want to be extra sure to not waste any of that either.

This year when I was processing a box of apples into apple sauce and apple pie filling I came across instructions on how to make homemade apple juice using the "waste products" of apple canning - the skins and cores.  I was intrigued by this since my apple pie filling called for unsweetened apple juice and I didn't want to buy some if I didn't need to.

The recipe is simple enough:  add skins and cores to a large saucepan and just cover with water.  Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer for 30 minutes.  After straining out the skins and cores I was surprised to find that my apples made pink juice!  The red apple skins must have changed the color of the juice while they were cooking.  The juice was plenty sweet without adding any sugar and I now had more than enough for my apple pie filling recipe.  

I made a second batch of juice with the peelings from the apple pie filling and might try to make some apple jelly or maybe a small batch of apple wine to round things out with my bonus free apple juice.  Also in the theme of wasting less, the spent skins and cores will go on to become chicken snacks which saves me a little money on food for them too.  

For the record this box of apples cost me $26 and gave me eleven pints of applesauce, 8 pints of apple pie filling and 3/4 gallon of apple juice.  The juice will probably make at least 8 half pints of jelly with a little left over for sipping.  Not bad for a days work.  Now if only I was growing my own apples too!

Chicken Socialization

The three chicks that hatched in July have been growing steadily.  These were the chicks that had the sweet rooster as a father and I have made a point to handle them everyday.  They seem to share is his friendly disposition so raising this batch of chicks has been a lot of fun.  There is one in particular that seems to love my attention.  She always come running every time I open their pen and flies up to say hello.  She tends to snuggle into my lap for a few minutes and actually seems to enjoy being petted.  I have to say that even though the rooster was sweet, he never went out of his way to snuggle like this.

I try to not get attached to the chickens but I can make an exception for a sweet hen.  She won't ever be a true pet, but she might get a free card to live out her days if she remains this friendly.  Besides, who wouldn't want a calm, friendly genetic line in their flock?

Taking Stock of My Stores

Since the busy canning season has drawn to a close with the coming of the first frost I thought it would be a good time to tally up what I had stored for the winter.  I am trying to see how long my stored food will last me and it's helpful to know how much I started with.  In canned items I have quite a variety of things with a few more to be added as time allows this winter.

Jellies and jams:

There are 12 half pints of plum jam, 13 half pints of apricot jam, 3 half pints of peach jam 24 quarter pints of pepper jelly (not pictured here), 1 half pint of blackberry jam (a gift from the neighbor), and one quarter pint of cherry preserves (a gift from a co worker).

Canned fruit:

My canned fruit collection consists of 10 pints of pears, 13 pints of peaches, 4 pints of apricot halves, 8 pints of apple pie filling, and 11 pints of applesauce.  

Salsa:

I only canned red salsa this year as I didn't get any tomatillos for salsa verde this year.  I ended up with a grand total of 35 pints.  I think this is more than enough for me for the year but I may end up making one more batch just to use up more peppers.  I have so many that I don't know what to do with all of them!

Pickles:

My stores of pickles are very well rounded due to my love of dill pickles.  I canned over fifty quarts of them this year though I have already given some away.  I still had a few jars left over from last year so I plan on eating those first.  Pictured here is my entire stash of 62 quarts of dill pickles.  That ought to get me through to the next growing season I hope!

Not pictured are 18 quarts of chicken stock and 6 pints of last years tomato sauce.  I will be adding to the tomato sauce stores over the next few weeks as I find time to turn my frozen tomatoes into sauce.  I also have 6 quart jars of dried zucchini, 2 quarts of dried apricots, and 12 bottles of cherry wine.  My wine stash will be rounded out in a couple more months when my 7 gallons of plum wine are ready for bottling.

Other things that I have in "storage" are crops like my potatoes, carrots and parsnips which are still in the ground.  These crops I will harvest as I need them over the winter.  They keep better in the ground and with the mild winters we have here I should be able to harvest them periodically as I need them.

I also finished curing my onions and shallots so they were all trimmed up and added to my pantry shelves

I ended up with a little over 4 lbs of shallots, 9 lbs of red onions, and nearly 32 lbs of yellow onions.  I find this quite impressive knowing that I used several pounds to make my salsa and I have been eating the "use first" ones for many weeks now.  If I had to guess, I would bet that my whole onion harvest was nearly 60 lbs.

The freezer tally was a little more difficult to get as I had to dig everything out to see what I had.  At this point in the season I have about 30 quarts of green beans, 32 quarts of broccoli, 5 gallon bags stuffed full with peppers and 4 1/2 gallon bags holding tomatoes for sauce making.  I also found pork bones that need to be made into stock and many more meals of pork and chicken from my butchering adventures last winter.

I guess you could say that I am well stocked up for winter as far as my pantry goes.  It really hits home how much time I put into my garden when I see the stacks of produce that I have stored up over the course of the growing season.  I am very happy with this year's tally.  I think this is probably one of my most successful years yet and I know that there is still more to learn that will help make my future gardens even better.

Pepper Jelly

This year I have harvested more peppers than I know what to do with.  So far I have made 32 pints of salsa, dried some sliced and whole peppers, frozen five gallon bags literally stuffed with halved peppers and have been eating them fresh as often as I can.  I still have a box full of them on my counter awaiting processing.  While I will probably end up dehydrating more of them, I thought I might try preserving them in yet another form: pepper jelly.

The basic recipe is "Green Pepper Jelly" in the Ball Canning Book.  I had a variety of colors of sweet bell peppers so I thought I would make a batch of each color.  The first step is to put the peppers through a blender to extract the juice for jelly.  The pulp drains through a jelly bag and I used 1 1/2 cups of juice for each batch of jelly.

The next step is to mix the juice with vinegar, lemon juice and pectin and bring it to a boil.

Once boiling, the sugar is added and the mixture needs to be stirred constantly for one minute.  When the jelly begins to gel, I remove it from heat and quickly skim the foam from the top.  From there it goes into hot jelly jars and then back into the water bath to boil for 20 minutes.

When it's done I take the jars out and let them cool for several hours.  Each color pepper made a beautiful jelly, and every batch tasted great!

The book says that this is a savory jelly, but it is sweet enough that I would use it on toast too!  I also imagine that it would make a delicious glaze on roasted chicken or pork.  These jellies are so pretty that I might just add them to gift baskets for the holidays too. 

Sweet Cherry Wine Bottling

It has been over two months since I brought home forty pounds of cherries to make into wine.  I washed, pitted and stemmed them all, mixed them with sugar and yeast (and a few other things) and set them in a fermenting bucket for a week.  After that I strained the mix into my glass carboy where it continued to ferment for a month.  Once the bubbling slowed way down, I mixed a little more sugar into the batch and then racked it into another carboy where it could finish fermenting over the next month.  Finally the time had come to bottle the wine.  The fermentation had been stopped for well over three weeks and the wine looked dark and clear in the carboy.

The final step was bottling the wine.  The actual bottling isn't very hard - just siphon wine out of carboy and into bottles and cork and done.  Its the work that takes place before this part that is most important.  I make sure that every bottle is clean inside by washing them in hot soapy water and rinse them out well.  Then I pour boiling water into each bottle to do a final sterilization before adding the wine.

 This wine is a beautiful ruby color and is very fragrant and sweet.  It already has good flavor and that should only improve with time.

In total I ended up with twenty-nine full bottles of sweet cherry wine.  Twelve of them will be going to pay back the two investors that gave me money up front to pay for the cherries.  The rest will be stored in a cool dark place where they can continue to age until I get around to sharing them with friends.  In all the cost of the wine was around $115 for the cherries and sugar which comes out to just under $4 a bottle.....not necessarily cheaper than the cheapest wine you can buy, but infinitely better.  Cheers!

Fall Color Tour

Autumn is in the air around here and the trees everywhere are starting to put out their colorful fall garb.  

The nice thing about living in the mountains is that fall doesn't start at the same time everywhere.  The tree's colors peak at different times depending on what elevation they are at and how cold it has gotten there.  Down here in the valley the trees have only just begun to change into the bright yellows, oranges, and reds of autumn.  Up higher, things are quite a bit different.  The first snow has sparked a cascade of color at the higher elevations and I decided to go for a drive to check them out. I was not disappointed.

I ended up in Silverton and followed the main road up the little valley to the end of town.  The town is surrounded by beautiful peaks and a small creek runs through the center of it all adding character to the idyllic scene.

The drive back was just a beautiful as the drive up and I stopped several places along the way to enjoy the fleeting beauty that is autumn.