I Can't Wait!

My son gave me some of his college books on WWII and said he thought I'd find them really interesting. It started with "Maus" and then "Maus II". Both books are a definite must read! The have left a lasting impression on me. I then read "Night" and have "The Good Old Days" as well as "The Butcher's Tale" to still read. WWII has always interested me, as my father served proudly served our country during World War II with General Patton's Third Army, 10th Armored "Tiger" Division and 21st Tank Battalion. He participated in the Rhineland, Ardennes and Central European campaigns and saw action at the Battle of the Bulge. Unfortunately, he never spoke of this until just before he died, and many times he was difficult to understand. So now, when I see footage taken at any of these places or find something written about them, I pour over the footage and photos to see if I might see my father in any of them. I know it's probably silly, but there's always that chance.

I came across a find the other day and decided to order 2 books. They are both reproductions of instruction leaflets that were given out during the war and center around how to live with War Rations. The one is a cookbook entitled: "Eating for Victory: Healthy Home Front Cooking on War Rations" and the other is the companion book in the series called "Make Do and Mend: Keeping Family and Home Afloat on War Rations". Both of them are hard cover books that I ordered from the original country of origin: England. I found them online at Abe Books and they cost me less, even with postage, than I could purchase them here in the States! I think it's cool that they are coming from the place that the leaflets were originally published. So many times, reproductions are done elsewhere.

I think these will not only be informative, but could be very useful. It would be nice to have more ideas for using items out of the garden as well as cutting back on meats, etc. I have read that England encouraged healthy living at that and those recipes were part of it. Both books cost $11 including shipping and tax. Now, the hard part will be waiting for them to arrive!

Are they here yet?

How about now?.....

It's going to be a long wait!

Applesauce and Apple Butter - Finished!!!

It really felt good to pull out the last jars of applesauce and apple butter and listen to them ping! They will taste so good this winter. I really hadn't planned on making any this year, but I heard our local orchard had really nice deer apples available for $8.99 a bushel.  I asked hubby to get a bushel on his way home from work one day and was floored to see these "nice" apples! Many were the size of golf balls and some may have reached almost tennis ball size, but that would really be pushing it. What was I going to do with all of those pathetically small apples?!!! (As you can see in the photo, that is only a half bushel of apples. They are tiny!!)

I ended up making 2 large apple crisps, few jars of dehydrated apples, and the rest in sauce and butter. I'm pretty sure the orchard is not organic, so I had to peel them. I had put it off, since I know how long that takes and tried to ignore them as long as possible. I made and apple crisp first and although it was good, I kept wondering if I lost my mind getting these! Then I did the dried apples - oh my. That took forever. It about killed me to to compost all the peelings, because I really wanted to make apple jelly out of them. But at least they didn't go to waste!

I left the second half bushel in garage as long as I could. I tried to ignore it but as the temperatures went down in the teens at night, I knew I had to use them or lose them to the  cold temps. Ignoring would no longer be an option! I peeled and peeled and peeled and then cored for 5 LONG hours. Nope, not an exaggeration. They were too small to go on the apple peeler, so it had to be done the old fashioned way. I can't complain though, as it gave me time to listen to some podcasts that I wouldn't have found otherwise.

I added a few larger apples we had gotten at the university outlet. They have a nice orchard and gardens that are used as classrooms/research for the students. Every year, the abundance is brought in to the outlet and sold. Hubby will pick them up on his way home from work sometimes, so I had a mix of those apples as well. I didn't care for the one batch of sauce that I made. There was a flavor from one type of apple in it I just didn't like. I made apple butter out of that batch and the batch that was made specifically for the apple butter was turned into sauce. That batch had apple cider in it. It's a good thing that one cooks down the apples first before sweetening and adding spices!

I don't normally sweeten, but the spices seem to add a bitterness I didn't like, so I put in a bit of honey and a bit of sugar - I'd say not even a quarter of a cup,  but it made all the difference. I don't think I would have even had to do that if I had cooked this batch with the cider, but it wasn't an issue. I certainly wouldn't have added all the sugar that the Ball book has. Three whole cups for a batch and I had more than one batch in the pot! UGH!

After a few canner loads of jars, I had finally finished what I had put off for so long and it felt good. The jars still need their rings removed, then washed and labeled and finally put away on the shelf. That's on today's to-do list.

 

Not As Prepared As I Thought!

Our electric company scheduled an 8 hour power outage that took place yesterday. They've been warning us about it for weeks, which was really quite nice of them. It was in the 30's yesterday and I got up early to warm the house up, make a nice hot pot of coffee and bake some muffins. At exactly 8am the power went off and stayed off for almost 9 hours.

Although others in the area were upset, I was thankful for the outage. For me, it was like a practice run for the possibility of outages this winter and I found that although I was "prepared" for this one, in all actuality, I was not. Since our home is fully electric (sigh..) we have to improvise a bit. We do have a generator and we tested it out to make sure all is working properly, but didn't really use it yesterday except to run a hot plate to cook dinner on. That's an expensive way to heat up food! I should have had something else like canned heat or tea lights. 

I also need to can some soups or stews so that they will be available to heat up. Nothing warms you up like they do! I'm pretty much an ingredient canner, so I found this to be another weak spot in my being prepare! We did have water and juices but didn't need them, since we are on public water and we didn't lose it. That could always change though.

The house did cool down some, but wasn't unbearable - especially with wearing layers.  The generator will take care of that problem, though. That is, until we would run out of gas. I say that, because I was in an outage that lasted a good week. That was a fun one. We had freezing rain and then snow while there were still leaves on the trees. It took down lines, trees, transformers, made roads impassible and the snow really piled up and covered some of the downed trees, which added to all the mayhem.

I can now take one needed item off the list. I just ordered a pack of Safe Heat Chafing Fuel. That will be one less thing I will need to be concerned about next time. I'm going to have to still put up some soups, but that won't be a problem.

Well, today will be filled with canning up the applesauce and apple butter I made a couple of days ago. I forgot about the power outage when I was cooking it up, but no problem. I just put the big pots out on the grill and that kept them nice and cold. I'll have to heat them up and then adjust the spices, but not an issue.

Playing Catch-up

Summer has come and gone and I won't say I'll miss it this year. It was hot, humid and rainy. I didn't put a garden in because of the cold, rainy weather this spring. I should have attempted something, especially after seeing the prices for produce here! The Farmer's Markets in this area are outrageous to say the least. I know we are in a more prominent area, but gouging will stop me from buying local!

 Wegman's was running a sale on frozen veggies. A pound bag was 79 cents, so I made sure to dehydrate some. I saved 20 cents a pound and all the work was pretty much already done. I told hubby to wait and watch, because the sale ran quite a while, I was sure the veggies were going to go up in price. They have gone back to 99 cents a bag or more, but the bag sizes have gotten smaller. Yup - price increase!

It appears it's really time to buckle down and get serious. We had some serious crop failures this year with lots of rain and flooding plus an early freeze/snow in the midwest as well as down south! Potatoes, seed corn, sugar beets, and dried beans were some of the crops that were affected. I'm sure we are now going to see some price hikes with everything. Those are major crops and many things in the food industry depend on them.

Currently, milk is running $4.20 a gallon at Walmart and Sam's and even more for name brands. I've stopped buying fresh milk. That's just too expensive - especially when other parts of the country are selling as low as $1.50 a gallon! I hate living in a regulated state. It's supposed to help the farmers, but I just heard on the radio that Deen's is going under, because sales dropped, Walmart no longer uses them (Walmart does their own now) and what they do sell isn't enough to support them. It's really sad when specialty milk is cheaper than the real thing! I can get almond milk for $1.75 for a half gallon! I've switched to powdered milk.

I'm anxiously awaiting my garlic order to arrive. I'm very late getting them in, but figured I'd take a chance and try. MIgardener had a sale of them, so I picked up 3 different bulbs to try. According to my tracking number, they are supposed to be delivered today. We've had such cold temps - quite a bit below normal, so hopefully they will do ok. If not - I've only lost 3 heads of garlic and $10.

They're All Dead

Six years ago, I planted a small Common thyme plant.  It grew and flourished and spread into a huge patch. I had harvested enough time to last me a year, last year, and couldn't wait to see how lovely it would be this year. That didn't happen. Every single plant I had in that patch died. I can only guess it was last year's strange winter. We had warm weather well into December and then the temperature dropped hard and fast. This thyme was acclimated to this area. I bought it from a lovely gentleman that lived just up the road from me and he had taken some from the thyme he had grown for years in his garden. I was heartbroken to see it all gone. I waited and hoped it was just late coming back. It wasn't. It is truly gone.

I will now have to start over. So, out with the old, and in with the new. I'm hoping this one will survive. This one is English Thyme. I've read that some say the Common and the English are the same, others claim the Common is has larger leaves. Personally, I think this one looks a lot like the one I started with - both in the size of the plant, as well as the size of the leaves. We shall see.

On the up side of things, I was combing through Craig's List, when I came across a listing for canning jars, rings, and lids. I wasn't hopeful that they were still available, but they were and I got a nice little deal. For $8, I got:

• 1 dozen quart jars - 10 wide mouth and 2 regular
• 10 12-oz jelly jars
• 11 pint jars - 6 wide mouth, 5 regular
• 2 new boxes of wide mouth bands/rings
• 1 new box of regular bands/rings
• 1 opened box of regular bands/ring that had 6 lids and 8 rings

I was pleased with my find. They will be put to good use!

Market Bag Finished

The Market Bag is finished and although it's nice, it's not exactly what I wanted. The bag is smaller than I thought, however it does hold quite a bit. I put in a decent size head of cabbage, 2 grapefruit and 8 clementines and still had room to spare.

The only thing I didn't like about it was the bottom design. Although it is solid and won't allow things to slip through, it has corners that look like weird "ears" when you put something in it that doesn't completely fill the bottom. My cabbage was the heaviest and looked VERY odd in the bottom. I know that aesthetics won't affect usefulness, but I guess I'm just a snob when things don't look right. I will continue on my bag search, but will still use this one for smaller things like peppers, etc.

Crocheting a Market Bag

I've been looking for good bags to use at the Farmer's Market. I'm not sure how sturdy my Tyvek type reusable grocery bags are, and they aren't the most joyous to carry around at the market. I usually have a numb and painful hand by the time I get back to the car.

I came across some market bags on Ravelry (don'tcha just love that place?!!) and found one that I liked. It's called Market Bag by Lily Sugar 'n Cream and Bernat Design Studio. It's a free download at their website. Ravelry has posted you need to be a member to download it, but I am not logged in, and could still download the pattern.

I'm using Peaches 'n Cream 1-pound cone in #159 Pink Lilacs colorway and am about 1/3 of the way done. It's an easy pattern and I'm hoping it will perform the way I want it to. I chose this over other mesh bags that were on Ravelry, because of the solid bottom. I thought it would help keep smaller things from falling/poking through the bottom. I also like that the sides expand and fit around the items that you put in the bag. Just not sure if it will be wide enough to get things like cabbages, etc. in. I guess I'll find out when it's finished and being used.