Let the Canning Begin

One of my favorite times of the year is here!  Woo Hoo!!!  It is canning season.  It is such a family affair.  The family that cans together, stays together.  Lol!  The entire family gets involved.  I love when the kids are in the kitchen helping.  It teaches them cooperation and patience, not to mention all the great science lessons.  I think it is very important that we teach our children how to be sufficient in living off the land.  It is definitely a much healthier lifestyle than fast foods.  When they have a part in the process, it gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment when they see the end product.  It makes Friday night pizza nights more special when we spread that homemade sauce on the dough that we made ourselves and we top it with fresh or dried tomatoes grown in our garden.  When we pop the lid on a fresh jar of dill pickles, it makes your mouth water.  Yes, it takes work and time to do all these things.  That is where the patience comes in.  In today's world, it's easy to loose that character trait.  We want instant gratification, however, the best is always worth waiting for.

Okay, I think by now you have figured out that I really love canning so for the next few weeks, my canners will be permanent fixtures in my kitchen.   Now let me share with you what we have been doing.  The tomatoes are plentiful right now so pizza and spaghetti sauce are a high priority.  We use a lot of both and our goal is to put away enough to last us the entire year.  Yep!  I know that is a lot of canning but you just can't duplicate the great taste from a Hunts tomato can off the grocery store shelf.  We are also drying tomatoes with fresh basil from our garden.  These make excellent snacks for the kids and they give a super fresh pop to many of our favorite dishes, like stir fries, soups, and salads, to name a few.  Again, you just can't buy that fresh flavor!  Another favorite, is fresh dill pickles.  Yeah, we are a sour bunch.  Lol!  We all love our dills.

Permanent  stove fixture

Pizza Sauce

Sealing the sauce and pickles

The finished product!

Fresh tomatoes/basil ready to be dried

We will also be making some yellow tomato jam and blackberry jelly this week.  My son and I love the jam poured over cream cheese and then spread over some ritz crackers.  Mmm, mmm, good!

In between all the canning, we are still processing our broilers. I cannot express how great it is to have pasture raised chicken back in our freezer.  You can read more about this process on our Broiler Adventure pages.

 Yesterday was a very exciting day for us.  We sold our first order of 30 broilers.  It was a lot of work but we were very pleased with the end product and packaging.  The bonus of this sale was getting to see some long time friends of 10+ years.  They drove down to the farm to pick up their order and have lunch with us.  Papa Roo cooked some scrumptious venison burgers, the boys shot their bows and guns, and Chicken girl did her thing in teaching them all about the chickens.  The adults had a great time catching up with life events over the past years.  I am so grateful for the friends we have met through out our military career.  Without the moves, we would have missed out on a lot of blessings.

Well, there is much to do today so I better go fire up the stove!