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!

Cookin’ from scratch is DELISH!

Sunday Funday—cleaned, made ribs with a killer homemade sauce and french fries with homemade ketchup!

Yesterday, I cleaned and reorganized the trailer because we have a very limited space so organization is key. In the past week, I have bought a huge kettle for canning, a big food processor, all the jars for canning and some lavender and rosemary plants that are being kept inside till it warms up. So yesterday I moved stuff around and actually created enough space to even get my printer back out and hooked up. I felt really productive. Usually I really loathe organizing and even cleaning but here these past few weeks, I have been really enjoying working on making my trailer look and smell good. Clutter is one of my pitfalls so I am really working on finding out of sight homes for things that normally occupy counter-space and my table.  

Anyways, I had some boneless pork ribs thawing out and decided to see if I could make a good BBQ sauce for them. I googled honey BBQ recipes and found this recipe which can be found here: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/honey-barbecue-sauce/ . That is hands down the most yummy honey BBQ sauce I have ever tasted. I am from Texas and take my word I know good BBQ and bad BBQ for that matter. If you don’t like your sauce quite so sweet–just adjust how much brown sugar you add and maybe go easy on the amount of honey you use. The recipe called for ketchup, so I made that from scratch an hour before I made the sauce because the directions stated that it needs to sit for an hour for full flavor. It made a pretty good amount of ketchup, so I made french fries too. I found the recipe for the ketchup in my book “Little House in the Suburbs”.  So, my condiments made cheap pork ribs and homemade french fries taste like we were eating at a good resturaunt. I didn’t even grill the ribs because it was so windy, I cooked them in the oven and paired with that sauce, they were amazing!  I added a couple of my pickles to the meal and walah! Dinner was served!

Here is a picture of the ribs and fries pre-pickles:

Little house in the suburbs has a great website with so many great ideas, if you can’t get the book and are interested check out this link:

http://littlehouseinthesuburbs.com/category/food

 

 

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!