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Water Bath Canning – Pickles and Pears

Saturday was canning day for dill pickles and pears. Altogether my Mom, our friend Priscilla and I canned up 14 quarts of pickles and 4 quarts of pears in light syrup. The pears were from the tree in my parents’ back yard. It has taken awhile for them to begin to get really ripe and delicious. You’ll notice the lovely pink color… we added 3 drops of red food coloring to each quart. My Grandma Pickett used to do that, so we carried on the tradition.

As for the pickles, they are from a recipe of my Grandma’s also… she […]

Winemaking on the Homestead

Yummy!

When we moved here to Georgia, we knew this was a temporary move. Living in a rented house, we were not able to have a garden. One of the things I decided I’d like to learn about was making wine at home. I had read about the basic process online and decided to give it a try.

My first batch of wine – Apple Wine (1 gallon)

Before I went whole-hog on the winemaking thing, I decided to try a simple, inexpensive project to see just how it would work. I found a very good recipe and plenty […]

Sprouting Foods

If you don’t have your own greenhouse, wintertime can be a time when you don’t have much of your own home-grown fresh food. Sprouting can be a tasty and nutritious addition to the winter diet. When I first learned about sprouting, I also discovered there is an entire community of people who are really enthusiastic about it. I discovered the site, SproutPeople.org. By reading information and watching videos at their site, I was encouraged to try it out.

Seed Sprouter

I purchased one of their Easy Sprout Sprouters and have found it to be very excellent. My favorite […]

Whole Wheat Bread

I love the taste of freshly-baked whole wheat bread. By making it myself, I can decide what ingredients I use, grind my own wheat berries, and make it much less expensively than I could ever buy it.

Hard White Wheat

By purchasing and storing the wheat in berry form, you can safely keep it for years without spoilage. Whole wheat flour, in contrast, goes rancid very quickly. I usually only grind up enough for a couple of batches of bread at a time, using half immediately and freezing the other half.

My grain mill is a Wondermill Junior […]

Dehydrating Vegetables – Potatoes

Shortly after I began learning about dehydration I found a great deal on Potatoes – $1.99 for a 20 lb. bag. With this being such an excellent value, I decided this would be my next experiment. Little did I know that this would become the all-time family favorite dried food.

Potatoes must be blanched* before they are dried, so drying potatoes is not quite as carefree an operation as with tomatoes.

I’ve put together a little picture tutorial on the method…

Ready to go…

*Any vegetable that must be blanched before freezing must also be blanched before dehydration. […]

It’s Knitting Weather

… a pile of socks!

Wintertime is my time for knitting. Every year (or almost every, I should say) about the time it starts to get cooler I begin wondering where I stashed that bag of yarn I found on sale. The yarn slips through the fingers so nicely in the cooler months… plus there is that feeling of wanting to wear some nice, warm socks, gloves, scarves, hats… I’ve almost run out of sock yarn in the past few weeks… the picture is a pile of the socks I’ve made recently.

I’m currently working on a pair […]

Vegetable Dehydration – Tomatoes

Dried Tomatoes

Almost all vegetables work really well for dehydration. When I first began learning the tricks of dehydrating, my first tomatoes were producing faster than we could eat them up. Since they don’t require any special preparation (no blanching), they are one of the easiest veges to dry for storage.

Simply slicing them about 1/4″ thick and arranging them on the dehydrator trays, then letting them dry overnight produced wonderful, bright-red, delicious slices of summer. When you eat a dried tomato, you’ll be surprised at the very distinct flavor. Since tomatoes are used in so many things we […]

Dehydrating from your Garden

A small sampling of my dehydrated goodies…

Since we left Ft. Worth, I’ve not had a garden. It has been something I’ve missed a great deal. However, almost 15 months since our departure, I’m still enjoying the fruits from that garden because of dehydration. I initially got interested in dehydration from a website called Dehydrate2Store.com. Tammy Gangloff, the owner of the site, has wonderful videos showing tips and techniques for getting started with dehydrating, her preferred equipment and supplies and ways to use the dehydrated foods.

Thank you, Ronco!

Like many folks who fell prey to late-night TV […]

Divinity perfected…

Yummy, white fluffiness… melts in your mouth.

As long as I can remember, my Mom’s Divinity was a candy we all looked forward to at Christmastime. Guaranteed to send a diabetic into sugar shock, its light fluffiness never fails to satisfy that sweet tooth craving.

Once I was old enough to help with Christmas candy-making and baking, I always took part in helping to prepare this recipe. Mom always made several batches of it each year so that she could share with neighbors and friends, so there were several opportunities to learn the skill along the way. So, I […]

Lactofermented Sauerkraut

The awaited result…

A little over a month ago, I decided to try out making my own lactofermented sauerkraut. I had been reading about the health benefits of eating naturally fermented foods (aids in digestion and tastes yummy).

Not being sure how much we would like it, I did not go out and immediately buy a sauerkraut crock, but tried it out using what I had around here. That turned out to be an empty plastic 5 quart ice cream bucket and lid.

I started out with two large heads of cabbage purchased at the grocery store (they […]