Why Can?

So, a new colleague asked me the other day, "Why do you can?" My initial reaction was going to be, "Why don't you can?" Then my brain caught me and I realized that it was a very valid question. Why do I can?

I've realized the answer isn't as simple but I think it starts with my dad. Most know that my dad passed at age 51 from melanoma. It was 2007. I was barely an adult (25). It was traumatizing. I am a firm believer that all this cancer crap in the world in environmental. Our life of convenience is killing us. Literally. I want to be around to grow old and watch my grandkids flourish. I want Jason to be there too. I'd give anything for my father to have met my children. I'll do what ever I can to keep us all healthy enough to live our dreams. So, I can food.

My dad isn't the only reason...

I'm a bored mom and wife. Yep, I said it. I'm bored. I work. I cook. I wipe asses... lots of asses. If there were 8 days in the week or 30 hours in a day, maybe I could do something for myself. So, what I do has to be multipurpose. Canning has stretched my knowledge, skills and helped me reach goals for my family. If you can eat it, I can can it! I've canned:

tomato sauce

italian tomato sauce

tomato soup

salsa

tomato paste

chicken stock*

diced tomatoes

pickles- dill and bread and butter

apple sauce- berry, strawberry, peach, vanilla bean

green beans*

carrots*

peaches

kidney beans*

black beans*

garbanzo beans*

beets

spicy pepper relish

jalapanos

blueberry compote

jam

(I am sure I missed something.)

Items marked with an * need to be pressure canned. See more info here.

So in short, I guess you could call homesteading/canning a hobby. My ONLY hobby! Everyone needs something they are interested in to feel like life is more than work. Canning and homesteading keeps me sane. Makes me feel human. Makes me feel successful. Makes me feel accomplished.

So, what does everyone need to show off their hobby? A pretty space!

Pictures above and below were our current storage options. In cases, shoved on shelves in the basement.

After a couple of hours on a weekend and some lumber and BOOM!

All of my pretty jars, lined up to show themselves off! Better than trophies!

Jason used this dead space in the basement along the hall to the quarter basement for them. It is a great use of space. It's pretty and also functional. When the jars are all crammed into cases, I can never tell what I have or don't have. I've tried lists over the years. They never work and then all of a sudden I'm out of something.

Now I have a new problem. They are so pretty. I don't want to use any of them! I am pretty sure that defeats the purpose! I see empty space and few and far between tomato products. I better get canning!

So, why do I can? Well they are pretty, duh!

Pressure Canning... We Didn't Blow Up! #spoileralert

Why would you chance blowing something up? To can it of course!

To properly put up food that has a pH worthy of growing botulism (higher than 4.5), one must can under pressure. Why? Here, my favorite canning blogger can explain it better here!

So, step one, try not to kill the family.
How do you do such a thing? Just put your head between your knees and kiss your a$$ goodbye, my dad would say. Others may just use a pressure canner. Jason bought me a pressure canner for Mother's Day last year. Romantic. I know! That's how we roll on the Eiting Homestead!

It was scary for it's innagural run but in the end all was well! I recommend just following the directions in the manual.... RTFM!

Very, very basic steps for those who are curious (Do not use solely these steps to pressure can..)

Hot pack your food with pH above 4.5 into jars.

Pack jars according to directions with 3 inches of water in bottom prior to jars. This canner is big enough to get two layers in. Can't do that in a water bath. Why is that awesome sauce? 16 pint jars in one swing. A water bath will only let you do 8 or 9.

Find a heat source. We used the grill. We have a glass top stove which is not recommended for canning in general. I water bath can on it and hasn't broken on me yet. It's something about the temperature and length at which it is at that temperature can crack or shatter the glass top.. yadda yadda. But for safety, we decided to do it on the grill. Jason got a stainless steel plate to put in lieu of the grates. We have a natural gas grill.. yep, comes right off of the house feed, so we wouldn't have to worry about running out of propane and knew we could maintain a consistent heat.

Find a man to lift it onto grill. I couldn't lift it with 18 jars and the weight of the pot.

You heat until you see steam and then you wait 7 minutes. After the 7 minutes you put the pressure gauge on at selected psi based on food and altitude. Then let cook at that psi for time per recipe.

This is the, put your head between your knees and kiss your a$$ goodbye part!

You then let the pot depressurize for hours or overnight and BAM... done! Canned homemade beans.

Then, because you feel like such a rock star, repeat the next Sunday with a new recipe, homemade chicken stock!

All in all, not too shabby. Bad news, I would never be able to do this without Jason simply because I wouldn't be able to lift the pot! Good news, the freezer is no longer my only option for storing foods with pH above 4.5. Boo-Yah!

Tested Recipes!!

Homemade Chicken Stock- Pressure Canned

Pressure Canned Beans

Chicken Stock- Pressure Canning

So, this is my recipe. I know I got the basic portions somewhere...

I usually do this every few months. Up until now (ability to pressure can) I would make a vat and then freeze in Mason jars. No freezing any more!!!

The basic recipe for the stock is as follows:

1 package of chicken breasts on the ribs (my store sells in packs with three breasts)

Boil in as much water as you want stock. Count for some evaporation.

Add scraps from the produce drawer that aren't looking so hot. The butt of the celery. Last of the baby carrots. Shriveled up onion.

Also, a few cloves of crushed garlic, salt and pepper.

Cook as long as you can (I do at least three hours). I cook in my stock pot with the strainer in it. Then I just have to pull out the strainer and all the stuff comes with it. I toss the bones, skin and cooked veggies and throw breast meat into Kitchen Aid. With the paddle attachment, in about 5 seconds you have instant shredded chicken. We will then throw it on salads, make chicken tacos or quesadilla some night of the week, etc.

Here your stock is finished.

Next steps are for pressure canning...

Refrigerate the stock over night. Pull out prior to canning and skim off the fat. I was thoughtful to measure the water I put into the pot prior to making the stock so that I would have a ball park of how many jars I would need to can. Chicken stock has a pH of 5.8 so it can not go into a typical water bath canner. See further explanation here.

 Hot packing.

packing the canner

Easy! 16 pints ready for recipes!

For more information on pressure canning see Pressure Canning post!

Canned Beans

I've been trying my best to rid our family of all the man made crap in our food these days. One of the hardest to get rid of has been BPA from the lining of tin cans. Black olives and beans- kidney, black, etc. I've still had to buy in cans. I tried dried beans for a while but I would always forget to soak the night before so I always failed! UNTIL I READ THIS POST! This is one of my favorite canning bloggers. She solved my problem for me.. now just black olives. Hmmmm.

How to Pressure Can Dry Beans

You can pull the basis of the recipe out of there. I did it with kidney beans and white beans but used regular pint mason jars. With the beans I had had hanging around the house, I was able to get 6 pints of kidney beans and 6 pints of white beans!

Beans ready for recipes!

Why would you pressure can beans?? See post here.

Use that freezer stash!! (Working Mom Shortcut)

Here's a post in my running, Working Mom Shortcuts, posts!!

After spending all that time this summer freezing food, I was determined to USE it this year. In the past, I would freeze something with the best intentions but end up throwing it out five years later after it was forgotten in the freezer. Such a waste of time and food. So, I had to find a system that would work so things didn't get forgotten. I've used whiteboards in the past and for some reason I just couldn't keep them updated. So this time, at the end of fall, Jason and I went through and did an inventory of all the (three) freezer spaces in the house. I then had to figure out how to organize it to be useful. I came up with this below:

So my thoughts were to put the quantities in the boxes and then just cross them off as things were used. So far this has been working well. I think the secret was to wait to collect the inventory when all the freezing was finished as in the past I think the hard part was remembering what to record before it went into the freezer. Here's a doc if you want to recreate.

Like I said, it's been working very well. I was quite happy last week. It was a freezer week. I only needed to get milk, bread and some fresh fruit. All the other meal components were straight from the freezer (or canned) to feed us for the entire week. Pork, soups, vegetables, pre-made casserole, muffins for breakfasts (the kids couldn't eat them fast enough), etc. This has made me be able to stretch out my weekly grocery shopping to once every three weeks (with the exception of milk, bread and fresh fruit). More time with my kiddos and less time in my own personal hell, Woodmans!

Steal my technique if you need!! Mommies have to stick together!!

Older Working Mom posts below!

Top Ten Working Mom Shortcuts

Meal Planner Working Mom Shortcuts

Google Calendar Working Mom Shortcuts

Homesteading..."Stockpile"

I've always been one to save, store or reuse. But this season I decided to only store what I thought we would actually use and to make sure it was in a user friendly portions.  I also added an extra challenge for myself- Could I store, preserve or freeze enough to completely supplement my shopping all the way through the winter? Right now I shop every other week. It's been a real money saver. Could I save even more by "shopping" out of my freezer and pantry? Hmmm... sounded like a challenge.

Another challenge I've been trying to follow through on is eating organic/local as much as possible. Unfortunately, living in Wisconsin makes this not quite possible year round but how far could I stretch it?

Game on!!

Thanks to our garden, our CSA from LongArm Farm, Tree-Ripe Citrus pickups and the local farmer's market, here is the culmination of what I've "stockpiled" on the Eiting Homestead for the season after we ate heartily on organic, local produce all summer and fall!

FROZEN

2 small, 4 big chicken stock

4 gallons broccoli

2 gallon swiss chard/other greens chopped

1 quart corn, green bean mix

4 small kale pesto

chicken kale soups 22 small for lunches, 1 big for dinner,

5 gallons Shredded cabbage

2 gallon quartered cabbage for corned beef and cabbage

3 gallons Zucchini/yellow squash spears

2 gallons Zucchini/yellow squash grill circles

6 (5 packs) Zucchini muffins

7 (5 packs) Rhubarb muffins

3 gallons asparagus

2 gallons whole strawberries

18 servings gallons green beans

2 quarts, 3 gallon blueberries

2 gallons snow peas

1 gallon rhubarb

1 gallon fudge

1 quart green peppers

mango strawberry freezer jam- 15 pints

cream mushroom soup- 19 pints

1 quart choke cherries for crepes

1 gallon blackberry currant crepe filling

1 gallon, 1 quart squash cubes

1 gallon blackberries cubes

2 gallons strawberry cubes

2 gallon kale cubes

1 cabbage casserole

1 quart peaches

2 quarts corn

PANTRY

5 pounds onions

26 tons carrots...literally!

13 quarts peach applesauce

2 gallons scape infused red wine vinegar for Christmas gifts

10 quart, 24 pints, 10 half pints tomato sauce

9 quarts hot salsa

5 quarts mild salsa

6 quarts dill pickles

21 quarts, 4 pints tomato soup

12 pints tomato paste

12 pints diced tomatoes

35 pints Italian tomato sauce

6 pints pickled beats

1 quart dried green onion

1 cup dried basil, rosemary, dill, oregano, thyme

24 half pints peach jam for Christmas gifts

24 half pints strawberry jam for Christmas gifts

Only tomato products!

Cubes of every kind for smoothies!! Fruit, greens, squash!!

Kale pesto with almonds!

Chopped and blanched greens (I throw into meatloafs and meatballs.)

Blanched and frozen green beans.

Dill pickles. Bloody Mary anyone?

Jams for holiday gifts.

More frozen veggies.

So, not too shabby!! We're eating organic and local at the Eiting Homestead! Looking to sign up for a Meat and Egg CSA for the winter from Grassroots Farm, LLC. EEK!!

Thanks to Jason for tending to our garden. Also, thanks to my most favorite farmers at LongArm Farm!!

Tips and tricks to freezing, coming soon....

A Week with a CSA!!

So, we are doing a CSA this summer in addition to our garden. We started out just doing a half of a share because I didn't want the pressure of having to eat/process it all during the week. Long story short, we are know getting the full share every week (Saturday). I've gotten a lot of question wondering what the heck we do with it all. This post will have a good example of what to do with CSA stuff that doesn't resemble predictable vegetables (early summer in Wisconsin!) for a family of 4- two adults, 2 toddlers (who don't have the foggiest idea what I sneak into their bodies!).

This week's score included: parsley (curly and flat leaf), cilantro, kale, nettles, rhubarb, baby beet roots and tops, cabbage, mixed greens, and scapes. In addition, the Tree-Ripe Citrus truck was in our area on Tuesday, so I may have also gotten 25 pounds of peaches and 5 pounds of blueberries!!

Does everything need to be handled on the same day? No. I had all week! There is also time to do research! As always, Pinterest is a wonderful resource. My CSA board!  So here goes nothing...

Rhubarb - went into some delicious whole wheat rhubarb muffins. I made a double batch. We ate some and froze the rest in 6 muffins to 1 quart size ziplock to pull out during the school year. This is the third CSA with rhubarb. I've used this recipe each time as the whole wheat, oats, rhubarb... makes me feel like they are healthier!!

Blueberries- Coletyn ate them!

Baby beet roots/with tops - These aren't like beets you see in a store. The roots themselves were roughly the width of my pinkie and about 2 inches long. There were also two huge bunches of them!

• beet greens joined the nettle in a meatloaf as a spinach replacement
• beet greens and roots when into the kids' smoothies
• beet greens were chopped, blanched and frozen in 1 cup quantities for future meatloafs
• beet roots were washed in boiling water (only way to get dirt off) and roasted. After roasting, I turned them into a beet root pesto for my mother. I still can attest that beets taste like dirt. So in the food processor they went with some roasted scapes, lemon juice, parsley, oregano, salt, pepper and garlic powder. Then I drizzled in the grape seed oil. Voila, pesto!

Scapes- more scapes- hmmm! Well, I still had two huge bundles of scapes (pictured below) left from a previous CSA that I had just been using in replace of garlic in all my recipes. Now, more scapes. The danger of a CSA. That's okay. I embraced it! I bought a gallon of red wine vinegar, bruised up the scapes and shoved them in. I'll let them sit for a few weeks, shake them when I go to do laundry, and bottle them nicely as Christmas gifts. Scape (garlic) infused red wine vinegar, anyone???

Blueberries- Coletyn ate more of them!

Kale- As soon as I saw the Kale I knew what I wanted to make. I have this to die for recipe for kale soup. Thank you Bevcooks.com and well, of course, Pinterest!! I replaced the italian sausage with these chicken sausages below. Thanks Woody! And I may have also made a double batch. We ate it for a meal then I froze the rest in meal size portions for winter lunches at work. I hate packing lunches!!

In the midst of all this, I also decided that instead of just using the rest of my freezer stash of stock (yes, I make our stock... it's so easy) I needed to make a huge stock pot of more stock. Jason wanted salads with chicken breasts on them for his lunches for the week, I had root veggies that were on their way out in the fridge and I didn't have enough stock in the freezer for my double batch of soup. So, chicken breasts on the ribs, water and cleaned out the herbs and roots veggies that were close to turning.. bam. Stock!

Stock and soup. Dual burners!

Blueberries- Coletyn... who wants to change a diaper!

As I was cleaning out the fridge for making the stock, I found a quart of milk that was about to expire and some left over roasted chicken scraps. Hmmmmm. What could I do with those?? Add them to two quarts of the stock I just made and voila (not really voila but I needed a dramatic effect- see recipe!) 19 pint jars of cream of chicken soup ready for the freezer for the winter crockpot meals. Sans the BPA of course! I've always wanted to make these, I've just never seized the opportunity. Thanks to Once a Month Moms for the recipe!

I love these twist top Ball plastic jars. The lid interlocks
 with the bottom of a jar on top. Makes
 stacking in the deep freeze a dream!

Stock left for freezer, next recipe and soups ready for freezer!

Parsley- I put parsley in everything. It always isn't enough. 

Cilantro- Jason and I really don't like cilantro. I think we had one to many bad cheap restaurant salsas. I  gave it to some friends.

Mixed greens and cabbage went into salads all week long.

Peaches- we of course ate a few pounds (Cecelia sometimes two per meal) and I also used them in kids' smoothies with the baby beets. I also put a few peaches, blueberries and coconut milk in the blender and used these zipzicles I've been waiting to use. Cecelia loves them. I also just so happened to have a bottle of strawberry wine hanging around and a few sprites. Sangria anyone? Yes, that was finished to the last drop!

Peaches still... I also made a pork marinade and we had peaches on the grill. With what was left, (probably about 15 pounds) I blanched them for about 30 seconds, ice water bathed them and slipped the skins right off. I could then quickly cut off pit, add a little lemon juice, mash and store in 4 quart size freezer ziplocks. 2 will be for peach applesauce in fall. I made strawberry and blueberry last year. They were spectacular! I am feeling peach preserves for the other 2 quarts. I'll decide later!

Blueberries (those that Coletyn didn't eat) were flash frozen on jelly roll pans then after frozen put into two gallon size ziplock bags. Freezing them this way allows me to be able to take the quantity I want out of the bag instead of having too many or not enough. Don't worry, I am feeling the need for a whole freezing vs. canning post in the future!

All this just in time for Saturday to roll around and a whole new box of veggies. This time, some are getting a little more familiar (as in they look like what we have in the back yard!) I think I am officially done having to get veggies at Woody's (I was supplementing a bit here and there!) until winter! Boo yah!

Hungry yet?!

Cucumbers, green pepper, cauliflower, purple cauliflower, green beans, dill, kale, swiss chard, kolarabi, sage, thyme, pickling cukes!

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

Am I talking about our backyard in this post? Nope!! This post is dedicated to where we are getting all of our veggies this summer (other than our backyard)!!  This year I signed up for a CSA from a Wisconsin farmer. What is a CSA? Click Here for explanation. I buy organic produce year round but love supporting local farmers. Unfortunately, all the local farmer's markets do not have farmers with organic produce. Then this winter, a girlfriend posted information about a new farmer from the west side of Madison, offering CSAs in the area. Weekly, June 15 through October. 2 drops in November and 1 in December. So, we signed up!  Long Arm Farm has definitely been spoiling us around here. Our (my) new favorite day of the week is Saturday!!  

Our first CSA box!

Early July Box

Why a CSA for our family. A couple of reasons!

• I home cook everything. Due to my allergies and a dreadful hate of processed foods, I cook us everything.
• I can preserve, can and freeze just about everything!
• I take great pride in stocking our freezerS and mason jars to get us through the winter months!
• I was bored with our same old recipes and needed a push to expand my culinary skills and our family's taste buds.
• I always prefer to support local versus Mr. Woodman!
• Organic produce isn't cheap. I've been very happy with the quantity of produce in each box.
• It's been occupying my time off of work and giving me "something" for me to do (other than play with the kids and clean the house!) Seriously, doing things like this make me happy, feel appreciated and feel accomplished. As many of you know, life as a mother is very selfless. I found a way to feel good and productive and be able to provide healthy food for my family year round. 
• Jason has been losing weight and I knew this would force me to cook veggies up the ying yang!
• It's been a fun experience for Cecelia!

Curious what I do with everything? Stay tuned!! My CSA recipe Pinterest board..where the R&D begins!