Today is the beginning of the third month!

Being November first and all...

So, today:

Breakfast: Get whatcha want. Again. Perhaps someday we'll get better at "doing" breakfasts...

Lunch: Tuna salad on crackers + left-overs (if you wanted them)

Dinner: Creamy, poppy seed chicken and left-over turnip greens

Claire and I spend almost all afternoon up at the guest house canning apples! Yes, we finally got around to doing some of that! We had time to do 3 water bath batches, or 21 quarts. Still being relatively new to this whole canning by ourselves deal (without Mama and/or Grammy), we weren't entirely confident about what we were doing, but I'm staying optimistic and hoping that the jars won't burst or not seal. ... I exude confidence, don't I? Oh, well. The green beans worked, so perhaps these apples will too.

We canned them in a very light sugar syrup. Our method, step by step (you were anxiously awaiting this, weren't you?):

• Got the canners and sugar syrup heating up. We had one canner on a propane burner on the deck. The other canner and the large pot of syrup were inside on the stove.

• I started using the handy-dandy apple peeler-corer-slicer to peel the apples (the corer-slicer part isn't functioning correctly, but thankfully it still peels well!), while Claire mixed up the sugar syrup and prepared the jars.

• Claire cut the apples into eighths (unless they were really small, then just quarters), and cut off the cores. I continued peeling, and the pots continued heating up.

• Once the sugar syrup finally got to boiling, we added the apple eighths. Then we did more peeling and cutting as we waited for it to start boiling again.

• Once the apples in the sugar syrup were hot, we pulled out the jars (which we stored in the oven - set at 170* - after we washed them.), and started filling them. I usually tried to cover the final apple slices with a little syrup, but after seeing the final product, I'm not sure that was as good an idea as it sounded at the time.

• The canner on the deck had long since started boiling by this point, so we filled that canner up first. Takes 7 quarts to fill a canner, so once we got all those filled, we dropped the rack into the water, put a lid on the canner, and started the timer for 20 minutes. I'm thinking we'll try 15 minutes next time... IF today's have sealed.

• Then we repeated the steps above. Filled the canner on the stove. Then the canner on the deck again.

• We put our finished quarts on towels on a table. That way they won't leave sticky rings on the table, and clean-up's only throwing the towels in the wash.

So, that's what we did. We'll see if we like them, if they seal, and if they keep as the year goes on.

Assets: NEWS FLASH!

Hello, foodie friends and budget buddies! (Corny, I know; forgive me, it's been a long day.)

Today my sister, a good friend, and I canned a total of 61 quarts of green beans. That's 9 pressure-canner loads. That's from about 9:00am to about 6:15pm. That's what our extra house is for.

11 of those quarts are our friends', but the other 50 are ours. Yep, we doubled our stockpile of canned green beans. I'm exhausted (we were stringing and snapping our beans until 11:15 last night!) and my feet hurt, but it was a pleasant, productive time of fellowship. In my totally unsolicited opinion, fellowship is always sweeter when it is productive.

Day 1 tomorrow, and I still have no idea what we're going to have. I really didn't want to begin this journey falling down... Check back tomorrow or Friday to see how I weathered this potential crisis. ;)

The Challenge - Assets, Part 5

I believe I'm going to make this the last post in the "assets" series. Wow! I am so blessed to be starting this adventure with all this!

First of all, I need to expand on part of yesterday's post. I mentioned that, because we're part of their CSA, we get a basket-full of fresh, organic produce from Beaverdam Creek Farm. What I didn't mention was that, being neighbors and friends, we occasionally go over and help them out. In return we get left-overs and "scratch and dent" produce. It really is a huge blessing! Just yesterday we brought home over 10 gallons of green beans! Hopefully we'll get around to canning them in the next couple of days.

Okay, so along with all the groceries I get to start with, I'm also beginning with a very easy family. Really the only food allergies we have to deal with are pecans and walnuts, and they're definitely easy enough to avoid or substitute.

On top of that, we're not really very picky! We've always had the "eat what's set before you" rule - often we didn't even have the option of not eating! This, I'm sure, helped expand our palates.

One of the biggest assets, I believe, is that we absolutely love "soul food," good Southern cooking! Thankfully this type of food is generally quite cheap. Southern cooking was, if I'm remembering some of my past research into it correctly, developed at least in part because they didn't always get the best cuts of meat, or have lots of seasonings. They used what they grew and what little they could afford. Generally, Southern cooking stretches over several meals pretty well, and the food is good, stick-to-your-ribs food.

Some other types of cuisine we enjoy are:

• Mexican

• Italian

• Thai

• French

• German

• Chinese

• Middle Eastern

• Classic American (Hamburgers, hot wings, and apple pie! Oh, yeah!!!)

The Challenge - Assets, Part 4

Wow! When I started listing my assets, I never imagined it would go on this long; this is great!

Today, I'm going to introduce y'all to where we get some of our fresh foods. It's quite simple, really, and a huge help to the grocery budget. We're farmers. I alluded to that fact in the last post. We don't make our living farming yet, but we get quite a bit of food from it. Our farm is Belle Springs Farm in the hills of middle Tennessee. We just recently started trying to make a more viable business out of our farm, so things are still works in progress. For just our family though, we've supplied a nice portion of our own beef, chicken, pork, and dairy in the past 3-4 years. At the time of this post, we have the following:

• 1 old dog, a blue heeler named Lily

• 2 kittens, half-Bengals named Brashley and Ret(icent)

• 8 Jersey dairy cows
• 3 cows - only 2 currently in milk. (Herd shares available! See farm link above for details!)
• 2 hopefully bred heifers. We hoping to get a vet out here soon to check on that.
• 2 young heifers
• 1 bull

• 32 beef cattle... or so. Mostly Angus.

I'm looking forward to the day when I can once again add chickens (layers and broilers), turkeys, and pigs to this list. As it is, I'm grateful for the endless supply of milk and the possibility of beef.

That's our farm. We're extremely blessed to live right next to Beaverdam Creek Farm! We have a CSA share from them. Let me tell you! Those Certified Naturally Grown veggies are delicious! Some of the veggies we have recently received in our CSA basket have been the following:

• Green beans

• Okra

• Tomatoes

• Potatoes

• Peppers

• Onions

• Garlic

• Leeks

• Squash (yellow, patty-pan, acorn, and butternut!)

• Watermelon

• Cantaloupe

• Basil

It's so wonderful to have fresh, organic, in season veggies available to us! I'm looking forward to figuring out creative ways to use them in my meal planning!

The Challenge - Assets, Part 3

I  cleaned out the chest freezers; everyone rejoice with me!!! I got rid of a few random pieces of bean-seasoning bits that were 3+ years old, and I made the executive decision to go on and get rid of the pints and half-pints of oatmeal and cream of wheat berries that have been in there for over 2 years. By way of an explanation for each of those respectively, we had 4 hogs that we processed about 3 years ago; the smoked, fatty ends of the hams and whatnot were wrapped separately to be used as flavor in beans, soups, and stews. As for the oatmeal and wheat berries, we used to occasionally use them in muffins, but, as you can see, we haven't in ages.

Anyway, after I was able to see, I did my best at putting like things together (beef with beef, chicken with chicken, veggies with veggies, etc.). Once I finished that, I had a pretty fair idea of what was in there. At that point, I will admit, I had to fight off some minor twinges of discouragement. My lazy self noted a decided lack of things we used really often and/or are quick and easy to prepare. Here's a quick overview of what I found:

• Pork (all of it's quite old...)
• 1 very large fresh ham
• 1 what I think is a smoked ham
• Various bean-seasoning bits
• 4 packages of country ham, all small-ish
• 3lbs of breakfast sausage

• Chicken
• About 8 whole, all but 1 from a trusted source (Some of us watched "Food, Inc." the other night...)

• Beef
• 2 large packages of ribs that are... really old.
• 3 large packages of roasts + 2 more individual roasts

• Fruit
• 2 quart bags of mixed
• Several bags of blueberries

• Veggies
• Several, but not many, quarts of squash casserole "mix"
• 2 pints (or are they half-pints?) of butter beans
• 1 small bag of black-eyed peas, I think...
• 4 or 5 small packages of spinach
• Roughly 2.5 - 1lb bags of green peas
• 5 bags of ready-to-be-fried okra
• A few pints of shredded carrots

• Nuts
• 1 large bag of hazelnuts
• 1.5 bags of chopped walnuts
• 1.5 bags of pecan halves
• 1 bag of almonds

• Dairy
• 9-ish lbs of homemade butter
• 16 lbs of homemade cheese that's somewhere between mozzarella and ricotta 

It looks like a lot, but, as I said earlier, a whole bunch of stuff we usually use is gone. For example, note the conspicuous absence of ground beef or venison on the list. Thankfully we're going to take one of our steers to be processed in the near future. (More about our farm next time!)

The Challenge - Assets, Part 2

As I organized the various parts of our pantry this past week, I took the change to get a rough estimate of some of our more "bulk" items, or the items we seem to have stocked up on. This list is not the complete list of my total assets when it comes to already-purchased foods, but it'll give you an idea. I'll start with the home-canned stuff.

• 50 quarts of green beans

• 14 quarts of apples

• 1 quart and 8 pints of apple sauce

• 1 pint and 4 half-pints of apple butter

• 16 randomly-sized bottles of apple cider vinegar

• 27 half-pints of pepper jelly

• 2 pints and 72 half-pints of squash relish

• 6 pints and 1 half-pint of cucumber relish

• 11 pints and 2 half-pints of peppers (pickled, I guess)

• 4 pints and 1 half-pints of bread and butter pickles

• 2 quarts of tomato juice

• 2 pints of salsa

• 5 half-pints of extremely spicy, green chile hot sauce/enchilada sauce

• Some red wine vinegar

Aside from the home-canned stuff, our more major stock items are:

• 6 - 50lb bags of hard red wheat

• 50lbs of hard white wheat

• 50lbs soft white wheat

• 25lbs of pop corn (actually... that might be a 50lb bag...) and several small bags

• 25lbs of white flour (don't judge me!)

• 25lbs of steel cut oats (plus a good bit in a 5 gal. bucket...)

• Roughly 10lbs of macaroni

• 1 - 106oz. can of cheddar cheese sauce (gag)

• 2 - 105oz cans of crushed tomatoes

• 1 - 105oz. can of tomato sauce

• 2 - 30oz. and 12 - 6oz. cans of tomato paste

• 8 - 14.5oz. cans of diced tomatoes

• 5 - 10.75oz. cans of tomato soup

• 3 - 4lb boxes of salt

• Roughly a gallon and a half of local honey

On top of that, we've got several large bags of dried beans, the types and sizes of which I cannot at the moment remember. Rather a random assortment of things, no? Stay tuned to see what, if anything, happens with these items throughout the coming year!

Well, I didn't get around to organizing/going through the chest freezer yesterday as I had hoped (too busy attempting to make this blog aesthetically pleasing...), so I'm going to try again today.

The Challenge - Assets, Part 1

First of all let me say that the template of this blog will probably be constantly changing for a while. I'm not really liking the way Blogger is fencing me in when it comes to text color - particularly on the side bar.

Okay, yesterday I mentioned that I was starting out with a bunch of "assets." Today, I'll start by listing what spaces are at my disposal. The challenge, remember, begins in exactly one week. This week I've been reorganizing all our food stuffs so that I am able to tell precisely what we have. One of the benefits of doing this is that the shelves look a LOT neater, and the spaces are used much more efficiently.

We have roughly 3 1/2 of these industrial/restaurant wire shelves, similar to THIS, that are used as our pantry (our new-to-us, 110 year old, frequently remodeled house has no pantry...). I've spent the last couple of days looking through everything on those shelves and making them nice and pretty. ;) Well, more organized anyway.

I wish I had a before picture 'cause this looks a LOT better!

On top of these three shelves, we have currently in use 2 chest freezers and 2 refrigerator/freezer units. I haven't yet gone through those... (but I'm planning on it!). I've got some plans for a few smallish changes, but they haven't happened yet, so I can't really include them in my assets.

Anyway, that's the kind of space I have. Check back tomorrow (hopefully) for part 2. I might actually get around to listing some of the food items we already have on hand.