Peach Jelly Flop

I tried my hand at canning again today…this time, peach jelly. All my jars sealed this time but my jelly is not drool worthy. My sugar sank and my peaches floated

I think my mistake was that my fruit was not ripe enough…according to the little troubleshooting section in the back of my ball blue book, if your fruit floats it’s a sign the fruit was underripe. I have more peaches left over so I am going to wait a couple of days and try again. If anyone has additional pointers–feel free to shoot them my way!

Adventures in Canning

I canned a quart of stewed tomatoes yesterday and added cilantro instead of green peppers. Tastes pretty good from what I sampled.

So the tomatoes are all canned and put away now. I have been really wanting to try pickles so I went ahead and found some recipe online that was pretty vauge for a first time pickler and what do you know–not one jar sealed. I’ve been told just to refrigerate them but I am thinking that I am going to try to salvage them. I realize that the brine was suppose to be hot which was not specified in the recipe and I also forgot to push the air bubbles out. In my ball blue book, it says if it something does not seal, correct the cause within 24 hours so that is what I intend to do. Talk about a bummer.

_Dill smells amazing. I have never bought fresh dill because I never had a recipe that called for it but as I was cutting it up, mixed with the smell of the fresh garlic on my fingers—I fell in love.

Something about it smells so fresh and wholesome–I really can’t put my finger on it. Just smells good to me I guess:)

Simple Life. Pioneer Life. Easy Living…

Here these past few days I have been making some big changes in this house on wheels. We have been going back to the basics. It was all inspired by a book I picked up at Barnes Noble called “Little House In the Suburbs” . If you can’t run and get it ASAP, she has a lot of the info up on her blog: http://littlehouseinthesuburbs.com
She writes as if she is talking to you and she’s witty, plus it is full of GREAT ideas!

So I have remade my household cleaners and they smell so fresh and actually put my clorox cleanup to shame. Next day I made butter–basically I just used a mixer and beat heavy whipping cream for15 mins and then added salt to taste.

When you first start mixing, the whip cream gets kind of frothy:

After I guess about 7 mins–texture begins to change:

Then after beating for about 15 mins, the butter and the buttermilk begin to seperate:

So once this happens–you drain the milk and seperate it from the butter:

Then pour cold water over the butter, drain the water off and repeat until your water is clear. After about 3 rinses with water, you smoosh extra water out of the butter and lo and behold! You have butter!

I also made dried garlic flakes for cooking but will never do it again. I literally kept them in the oven at 150degrees alll day and they still aren’t compleatly dry. Here is just a pretty pic of the garlic before I skinned them and put them in the food processor.

Also I have been shopping with sales ads at wal-mart (they match the price of other stores) and I was able to buy 5lbs of tomatoes for .68cents. With all those tomatoes, I stewed them with bell peppers, celery and onions and canned them! It was my first time to can but after that pop letting you know they sealed properly, I think I’m a lifer! Gonna find some cumcumbers today on sale and start the pickle process. If you don’t mind shopping at wally world, you can get some incrediably cheap food using those sales ads. I usually spend 100 without them and since using them, I spend around 70$ now and get a ton more food than before. Next, I might even start using them with coupons and save even more money. Dunno if I feel like messing with coupons though!