• Blog - Kitchen

    Apples, apples everywhere

    October 2, 2012 - By 

    On Saturday, a few families on the block got together to help harvest the apples from our neighbor’s trees. 
    It’s a big job but the fruits of our labor really pay off.
    This year 63 grocery bags of apples were picked.
    The apples were all big and beautiful with very few blemishes or worms.
    Amazing!

    We took home about 6 bags worth. 

    I set up shop in the garage so I could make a mess and not worry about it. 
    Concrete washes quite nicely. 
     After countless hours of cranking the peeler, I ended up with 23 gallon size freezer bags of peeled and sliced apples ready for the next stage of processing.

    So far I’ve dehydrated 10 trays of apples, 4 pans of apple crisp-ready to be thawed then baked and cooked up about 2.5 gallons of applesauce. 
    And I still have a freezer full of bagged apples. 
    I am going to have to can the rest of the applesauce I make since my freezer can’t hold any more.

     

  • Blog - Kitchen

    Pinterest FAIL!!!!

    September 17, 2012 - By 

    The boys were gone all day Sunday so Little J and I made plans to do lots of fun “girl stuff” that we like.
    We shopped a bit, visited my mom, went out to eat then came home to get to some crafting.

    We planned to make some salt dough and “better than salt dough” ornaments, tags, etc.  Little J loves to both cook and paint so I figured “two birds” right?!?

    As you can see we had a bit of an issue with the “better than salt dough” recipe.

    I saw the recipe on Pinterest under the most beautifully white and perfect ornaments. Yeah…what the recipe gave me was a goopy mess. I tried to salvage it by using metal cookie cutters as forms while they dried at 175°F in the oven.

    Lesson learned… people aren’t always careful about what they post.

    We did go on to make some salt dough ornaments that actually did turn out.
    As you can see they aren’t the pristine white I was going for but then again I use unbleached flour so what can I expect!