The apple butter time of the year! Last week we canned 19 pints of apple butter.

Here it is cooking down....


...and after we added the spices...


Doesn't it look delicious?

Despite my tardiness in posting, we had a nice thanksgiving. Our main course was gumbo & french bread (here's the gumbo cooking)


I made delicious bean dip from Foodie Farm Girl's recipe. (It's not terribly photogenic in this picture, but we ate it before I remembered to get a better picture!


We also had pecan pie, squash pie, and soybean pie (yum).



(I ate squash and soybean for breakfast and lunch for days afterwards....)

The leaves are starting to change color (partially from cold, partially from drought...), and there's a chill in the air. This can mean only one thing:  it's time to haul out the comfort foods.

Our pet birds love their mixed veggies, so we decided as part of our frugality efforts to make our own. So we have frozen corn left from last year, and frozen green beans. Peas, we decided, are too expensive if we have to buy them to freeze them, so next on the list was carrots. Despite our successes this year, there's no way there were enough from our garden to freeze....so we hiked off to the store and bought a 5 pound bag on sale.

On to chopping....

Several weeks ago, found us with pullets up to almost full-size laying, and waaay too many eggs in the fridge. I decided to try my hand at an egg-heavy baking venture. After looking at a few different recipes (and deciding that we probably would never eat that much pound cake if I froze a bunch...) I settled on Challah bread. It's yummy, and uses quite a few eggs....unfortunately, it also looks a bit...ahem..intensive...and no, I have no family recipe to go on. Instead, I borrowed someone else's. An expert, Smitten Kitchen. :-)

Her recipe pretty much says it all, and really did make for a pretty easy experience.  I don't have any pics of the dough, but S. was kind enough to get my attempts at following Smitten Kitchen's braiding directions burned into monitors everywhere. :-) I gave up on the directions (sorry!) and just stuck to what I know, which is a fairly straightforward multi-strand braid....take the right-most and alternate over-under-over, then take the new right-most and repeat. Not authentic, I'm sure....but it looks much more presentable than my earlier attempts.


After braiding, I brushed both loaves with lots and lots of egg yolk....


Then into the oven. The loaves did take a bit longer to bake then the instructions said...but I used the internal temperature guidelines...and that worked out great! We ate one loaf right away, and froze the other one for later. This was very yummy---it took a while, with all the risings, but I'll definitely make it again...

A couple of weeks ago, we finally (I think) pulled in the last of our cucumbers...there weren't quite enough for pickles again....(phew). We decided instead to try a half-batch of relish. Why? 'Cause I thought it would be neat---we'd never made relish before. The pickles were on the old and large side too, so we were a bit concerned about pickle texture....Relish seemed perfect!


We actually only had about 4 pounds of pickles this time...so a half-batch worked out for us. We didn't dice the pickles by hand (instead preferring to be clever and automated, we used the food processor). The food processor yielded a bit more...um...shredded? Grated? A result then we would have gotten if we'd diced by hand (or tried the mandoline....ahem...yeah, forgot about that).  Ah well, learning experience, right?

So, following the directions, you had to soak and brine (with turmeric) for a bit, and then bring the whole mess to a boil...

So I know you know that we've been doing nothing but harvesting cucumbers and summer squash for the past few months... And I shared that we made some delicious stuffed squash, and TONS of sauteed squash....but did I mention grilled squash? It's super-easy. Just marinate slices of summer squash in some olive oil and light seasoning, grill until tender, then store them in the refrigerator for dinner later in the week. :-)

Once again, this year, our green beans did not do well (and our soybeans are gangbusters, but the beans aren't developing within the pods :-( which is another story, I suppose). So, we hiked off to our grocery store and bought a bunch in bulk to freeze for the winter, since it worked so well last time!

First we washed and snapped 'em.


Then, we blanched them and froze them.



Easy! And we have two stuffed-to-brimful freezer bags of green beans. (This time we froze them on a cookie sheet before transferring them to the bags...each bean stayed separate...not in a block of ice, like last time.)

So, despite my lack of posts in August, we actually were pretty busy. We froze some green beans, made relish, baked Challah bread to use up some eggs,grilled tons more of those scalloped summer squash, and brought in our biggest crop of carrots yet (we've never really been great at growing carrots). So why no word of these things? Ummmm...they're coming. I promise!

In the meantime, how about some more pictures of our lovely laying hens dust bathing? :-)
....and of course, Roscoe the rooster.

So while I was meeting some new friends, I also met my first citrus tree. It was a grapefruit tree.


So...naturally we picked some grapefruit ('tis the season for grapefruit, apparently).


Now this all happened the week of Christmas...quite some time ago...what to do with with all of this rapidly-becoming-overripe grapefruit? Can it, of course...

We made grapefruit marmalade (I haven't opened it yet, but I tasted it before canning and it was quite tart...something that I would like on an english muffin, but not to everyone's taste.)

So, without further ado...here's what we did (amounts from the recipe are approx, as we doubled-ish):

Grapefruit Marmalade (adapted from the Ball recipe)
Yield: about 3 half-pints (We canned 8 jelly jars after doubling the recipe)

- 2/3 cup thinly sliced grapefruit peel
(the recipe claims that this is about one medium grapefruit..we didn't find any of the equivalencies to hold true for our grapefruit..it was more like 2 of ours)
- 1 and 1/3 cups chopped grapefruit pulp
(I poured the majority of the juice out and put it in the fridge)
- 1 quart water
- sugar


Cover grapefruit peel with water; boil 10 minutes; drain. Add chopped (ha! chopped? Have you ever tried to chop the inside of a grapefruit?!) pulp and 1 quart water to drained peel; boil 10 minutes. Cover and let stand for 12 - 18 hours in a cool place. (Ours actually ended up 'sitting' for more like 20-24 hours....) Then cook rapidly until peel is tender (only took us another 5-10 min).

On New Year's eve we made ravioli, stuffed with spinach, tomato, and tofu. I don't really have a recipe, since, well...we didn't really follow a recipe. :-) Good reason, right?

I know there are a lot of people lately who have been into the whole making-ravioli-using-pre-made-wonton-wrappers thing (I won't knock it...as I've never had them that way and I'm sure it's faster and easier). But we made the pasta the old fashioned way instead...with a mix of semolina and all-purpose white flour (and egg, of course).



Then comes rolling out the dough...



...and used the pasta machine to roll it thinner...


Simultaneously mixing up the filling:


Then we scored the dough (with a pizza wheel), filled it, folded it over and crimped it with a fork....voila.


And 4 or 5 large bags of homemade ravioli for the freezer. (No, S. can't spell...)

Just a few pictures...

Mmm. Chestnuts roasting on the woodstove. One of my favorite ways to stay warm. (no woodstove? While I can't vouch for them, there are plenty of recipes for roasting chestnuts in the oven, too) Especially on a day like this one a few weeks ago: