Wow what a week! Last weekend we made another trip home to spend time with these guys.
Beau’s youngest brother is getting ready to go on a mission this next week, and so we had a chance to spend time together which will be the last time we’ll all be together for 2 years.
While were there I got sick… strep throat or something very similar, so the first part of the week was survival mode. Try and keep the house cleaned, but not much more than that.
The end of the week has been the start of canning season. We’ve been working on getting peaches, peach pie filling, pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce and other canning projects finished up before they all go bad.
My beans are finishing up in the garden so we canned up a few of them, and hope to get some peas in the ground here quickly. I’m hoping to possibly get lucky enough to something before the snow.
With a bunch of various fruits laying around, we decided to make good use of them.
Blend them up good, adding your freezer pectin and sugar. Dispense into freezer jars. This was a great way for the kids to help make them without a huge mess. They could fill the blender, turn it on and fill the jars for me. I love doing the freezer jam too because they are small batches which means I can be more creative in the jam making. Nothing quite so good as strawberry, blueberry/plum, peach/strawberry, and blackberry/blueberry'/plum jams on some hot homemade bread.
There really is something satisfying about canning. Knowing your preserving things, being frugal and making things that taste so much better than the store bought versions. There is only one store bought version of peaches that we can stomach, and we are lucky to get it on sale for .79 when the timing is just right. It made me happy though canning these up and then figuring out that I just saved myself .72 for every quart of peaches. I’ll have saved $3.83 per quart when I finish up the pie filling instead of buying it from the store. (Dutch oven season goes through peach pie filling like crazy when we’re making cobbler.) Roughly $61.00 saved. (Plus they taste so much better!) I’d have saved even more if I had my own peach tree, which is now a must. When we graduate we can only go to places where I can have my own fruit trees. That’s not too much to ask for right?
1 comment:
How much fun to have the kids involved and learning the art of canning. I made Jason plant us an apricot tree at our old house and the dog actually ate the whole tree! I love fruit trees but they may have to wait until Nickel has passed on.
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