Thursday, January 26, 2012

I Am So Not the Pioneer Woman

It's a really good thing it's not the 1800s and I'm not in charge of feeding the masses because we'd all be dead in about 2 weeks.

In the fall, I embarked on my first experience of "putting up" fruits and vegetables for the this winter.  It's something I'd wanted to do for a while, but I had some serious fears of exploding pressure cookers and bochulism.

I successfully blanched and froze a few bags of green beans and thought they would last us a while.

After my trial run of spaghetti sauce and winter squash, we went apple picking and then it got serious when I bought an apple peeler.  We got 40 lbs of apples and I went to work making applesauce, apple butter and a couple of apple pies.  Those pies were to die for.  I can't tell you what kind of apples they were, but they were really good.

I made what I thought was a lot of applesauce, a good amount of apple butter and not enough apple pies.

What I really made was not enough applesauce, way too much apple butter and too many apple pies (because they took up so many of my apples!)

Then I asked k-ster to bring me home a few cranberries because he works next to a cranberry bog.  3/4 of a paper grocery bag later and I had enough cranberries to put Ocean Spray out of business. 

This was all in October. 

Today, it's not even the end of January, and I'm down to this:
My last jar of applesauce.  I made some damned good applesauce this fall.  This batch was darker because I let it cook in the crockpot so it browned a little because it took so long.  One batch had the prettiest hint of pink.

Sadly, we have way too many jars of applebutter left and I've been giving them away left and right.  I'm not really in love with it.  I used a recipe that was USDA approved but it suggested way too many cloves for my liking.  It kind of numbs my tongue.   It took a lot more apples to make the apple butter than the applesauce and I am having canner's regret!

We have a number of cranberry sauce jars left and 2 jars of winter squash that I keep forgetting about.

The green beans have long since been eaten.

The cupboards are nearly bare.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, you'd be so ashamed!

Next year, more apples, no apple butter, and I'm going to start freezing green beans much earlier.  I had no idea how much planning had to go into providing food through the cold, hard winter!

2 comments:

  1. Mmmm!! You are making me hungry. I want that last jar of applesauce! I'm so impressed. You'd make a much better Pioneer Woman than me!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In the past, our stash has lasted too long because I won't let us eat the canned things except for special occasions or special meals. This year has been better and it makes sense that we eat it all as needed. We too are almost out of applesauce... it just takes soooo many apples to make it that you dont get as much as you wanted.

      cloves... boooo!

      Delete

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