Dear Mom,

Please don't be mad that I posted this picture. It's just too cute!
I realized that I'd never posted pics of the awesome t-shirts that Ma and Angie and I made for the Stitch n Pitch game in September. They say, "Knit One, Purl Two, Strike Three!" and have really cute little baseball badges with our initials and stuff.

That was a super fun night!!

Ain't No Challah Back Girl

This is actually Thanksgiving prep, if you can believe I'm getting started this early! I told Ben I'd make stuffing this year, and the recipe from America's Test Kitchen that I want to use calls for a loaf of Challah bread. I figured I'd get a jump on things and make it up this week, cube it and put it in the freezer till Thanksgiving, which should help dry it out for making the stuffing.
I used the recipe for challah from Tammy's Recipes, which, as you can see, makes a massive amount of bread. I actually really enjoyed doing some bread by hand, since our every day eating bread is always made in the bread maker. My tendonitis didn't love it though, hence the bread maker for our every day bread.

Braiding the loaves was super fun as well. This dough is a real pleasure to work with, and was simple to stretch and braid.

The recipe makes two very large loaves of bread. It's a finely textured sort of bread with a yeasty slight sweet taste. Very good! Ben absolutely loved it, and is very glad that there was an extra loaf. I'm planning french toast for dinner with some of this, and the whole loaf is going to get cubed up and frozen this afternoon. The rest? I don't think it'll be a problem to find volunteers to eat it.

Dehydrating Winter Squash and Pumpkins

This year, since I have no freezer space ever, I dehydrated our pie pumpkins and butternut squash puree. This makes storage a lot easier, since it can them be kept on a shelf. It's also better than canning, because squash and pumpkin can only be canned in chunks, since the puree is much too thick for safe canning.
As always, I started by halving the squashes, scooping out the seeds and strings, and placing them cut side down on a foil lined baking sheet. These roast at 350 for about an hour or so, until they're mushy when poked at... yes, that's a technical designation. :)

I scooped out all the soft roasted flesh and pureed it with the stick blender until nice and smooth. This could be done in a food processor or blender or even with a potato masher, of course.

I measured two cups of puree per tray and spread it evenly on parchment paper. I tried to keep a consistent thickness of about a 1/4 of an inch, so that it would dry evenly.

After dehydrating for about 10 hours, the puree was stiff and completely dry to the touch. It peeled off of the parchment paper very easily.

I tore the pumpkin "roll-up" into small pieces and was able to pack the two cups of puree into half-pint jars. To use this, I'll soak it in about 1 1/2 cups of warm water, until it's re-hydrated and stir it back into puree, and use it for any recipe calling for a can of pumpkin.

I thought maybe I should have added pumpkin pie spices to the puree before drying it, since that would have made the spices permeate the puree and blend together better, but this way it'll be able to be used for any pumpkin recipe, not just a pie. Maybe I'll try it that way next year too, and see which I like better.

Beppy Appleseed

I still haven't finished those apples! Last week, I had a relapse of flu or whatever it was and lost my voice, so I commited myself to spending as much time sleeping as possible. And when I wasn't sleeping, I was aimlessly watching tv. Just one of those weeks, I guess. But it worked, and I'm feeling a lot better. And my voice was back by Friday.

We spent the weekend in Fort Wayne, visiting my oldest friend to whom I am not related, Julie, and her husband, Brian. We had an awesome time, and it was just absolutely wonderful to wake up on Saturday facing a day that did not contain a single chore. Not one little dish to wash, or any animal whatsoever needing me to feed or manage it, or even a single bite of food I was responsible for planning or preparing. I just need that sometimes, and it was great.

Back to reality yesterday though. I cleaned out and scrubbed down and aired out the chicken coop and the dog house the pullets have been living in. I think the pullets will be ready to join the flock in a week or two, which will be good, because then I won't have to keep taking care of two coops and all. Moving them all around lately has been a sloppy miserable job, since it's been raining for a month. I was thrilled to have some sunshine yesterday and today. Maybe it'll help control the mudslick situations in the yard.

We have mice moving into the attic and the ceiling something awful. Neither one of us want to use poison on them for a number of different reasons, so last night at Rural King, we picked up one of the repeller things that's supposed to emit a sound only the mice can hear and drive them away. I hope it works.

So, back to the apples. This morning I went through them all and sorted them, and only found a couple really soft ones that had to get thrown out, so they're keeping really well. Ben and I are planning to make another batch of juice this weekend, and use it to start a gallon of apple wine going. I also have about 10 or 15 pounds left for dehydrating as well. Any that are left after the apple juice, I'll use to make applesauce, as well as the leftover pulp, after draining the apple juice. And I think that will be the end of the apple madness!

Easy Homemade Applesauce

Homemade applesauce is a really easy project to do in a crock pot. I use three big slowcookers to help make it worthwhile to do a bunch at once when canning, but it could just as easily be made in a medium crock pot, for a small amount for immediate eating.

First wash the apples really well, rinsing them thoroughly. I like to use a combination of different kinds of apples, some tart and some sweet, to have a good layered flavor in the finished sauce.
Quarter them, removing stems and trimming away any bruises or worm spots or icky blossom ends, and pile them into the slowcooker.
I start them on low and turn them to high after an hour or so, so that they'll release some juice before they get too hot and won't burn. They take about five hours to cook up until they're completely softened and mushy.

I use my victorio strainer to smash them into sauce and separate the skins and seeds from the rest of the sauce. A food mill will work for this too, but I really recommend one of these if you plan to do much canning at all, since it's great for all sorts of things, and only costs about twenty or thirty dollars more than one of those food mills does, and is so much easier to use.
This is the waste that comes out of the end, made up of the tough core parts, skins and seeds. The chickens cannot get enough of this. This slimy mush is honestly, like, delicacies for chickens.
I put the sauce back into the crock pot on high, to keep it very hot for the canning. Follow the instructions in the Ball book for canning applesauce. Quarts are processed in a hot water bath for twenty minutes.
I also add a tablespoon of lemon juice to each quart, since the applesauce recipe from the Ball book calls for that when making applesauce in a pot. I don't know if that's to prevent browning or to make it more acid, so as to make it keep better. It doesn't make it taste any different, so I just put a tablespoon in each quart before I fill it with sauce, just to better safe than sorry.

My three crockpots make 8-9 quarts of sauce, and they don't have to be babysat the way that a pot on the stove does, so I'm pretty happy with this method.

God Bless the Ball Blue Book

I may have made a tactical error. Six bushels of apples is not really too much for us and all our friends and family that we share canned good. Six bushels of apples all the same week, on the other hand... that might have been a bit much.

I like to make applesauce in the slowcooker, since it's easier for me, and I'm much much less likely to burn it. This method does limit my output to about seven quarts a day, though. So I can't really go through the apples very quickly.

I'll have plenty of sauce canned by the end of the week, and I've been drying two or three dehydrator loads every day as well, so I went browsing in the Ball Book to find another apple product or two that we might want to have.

Juice, I think, will be the perfect thing. It will be a treat to have our own natural homemade apple juice around, it'll be just what we need for making a batch of wine, since that usually calls for a press or for un-pastuerized/preservative-free juice, AND it'll take care of one of these bushels of apples in one fell swoop! (well, two swoops, since one batch is 1/2 a bushel, but we're planning two batches.)

Yay, Ball Blue Book!

An Overwhelming Sort of Day

Today I had to go to the dr twice, once in the morning for a blood draw, and then in the afternoon for my regular appt. Don't worry, the cold/flu is completely gone, this was my regularly scheduled appt. I also have seven bushel boxes of apples sitting in my dining room, being all neverending and sisyphian. :D

I just wanted to post quickly to say I'm still here, and still getting things done, just not finding the time to blog about it. I'm squeezing this in while the noodles boil for dinner (pasta with fresh tomato sauce and herbs and veggies).

Tomorrow, I'll share my apple-craziness.