What beautiful Georgia Peaches…and they taste SO good!
My cousins over in the mountains near the panhandle of West Virginia routinely can hundreds and hundreds of jars of food every year. They butcher beef and pork. They raise cattle. One has a high tunnel and they sell plants, flowers, and veggies. Their larders look like something out of a magazine. So, when I accomplish what I did this weekend, I feel a little like… “Meh, they do this all the time. It’s not a big deal.” Yeah…tell my feet that! lol
Scalding the peaches for a minute then plunging them in cold water lets you slip the skins right off of them…easy peasy!
I didn’t start working on this stuff till rather late on Friday afternoon. Then it wasn’t just dig in and do. I had bags of groceries and produce all over the kitchen…that had to be carted in from the driveway. When I have a zillion things to bring in the house, I sweetly ask Mr. FixIt why on EARTH he decided to build the garage/building/driveway so FAR from the door. Oy!
This is the first time I’ve tried dehydrating peaches. I’m thinking of adding them to oatmeal in the deep winter. doesn’t that sound yummy?!
So, in forty-eight hours’ time, I dehydrated two big containers of mushrooms, canned twenty-eight quarts of tomato sauce, one and a half pints of tomato paste, fourteen quarts of peaches, a dehydrator load of peach slices, and fourteen quarts of vegetable beef soup plus enough to can another four quarts, I think. I took the last canner off the heat last night just before midnight. I was going to save the soup for today, but I got my second wind and Mr. FixIt had to substitute on the bowling league last night, so I just went for it!
Parsnips, carrots, potatoes, celery, onions, fresh corn cut from the cob, garlic, the tomato paste I made Saturday, a large container of V8 juice and six containers of low sodium broth (beef, beef bone, and chicken), a head of cabbage coarsely chopped, and two large bags of sweet kale salad mix that had lots of yummy veggies in it (and it was one sale!). seasoned to taste and easy on the budget. This will taste so good when it’s snowing!
I ran two canners last night. One has the little weighted gauge…you just select what pressure you want to run and then you can pretty much do what you want as long as you are within earshot of the kitchen. You have to listen for the “jiggle, jiggle” of the steam rattling the weighted gauge. The other canner has a dial gauge. It’s a lot trickier. You have to watch that gauge and adjust your flame to keep it at, or a little above, the pressure you want. Because, if it drops too low, you have to start timing all over again. The processing time for vegetable beef soup is eighty-five minutes at ten pounds pressure at our elevation. I got my knitting and made myself as comfortable as I could on the bar stools and finished the first sleeve of the sweater I’m knitting.
I heated the soup up enough to pack it hot, but not so hot as to cook the veggies. pressure canning will cook them plenty during the processing time.
While the second canner was processing, I cleaned up the kitchen and emptied the first canner and cleaned it so I can run the last bit of soup today. And that’s it for a little bit. I still have some jams I’d like to make, and a batch of apple butter and applesauce. But other than that, I should be finished with the canning. Now I can focus on clearing out the old freezer downstairs so we can get a new one. I’d like to be able to buy some things in bulk and freeze them.
Doesn’t this look yummy?!
I’m not a “prepper” by a long shot, but I am a good homemaker and I like to have enough set by to be prepared. A lot of us didn’t have things in place when the pandemic hit and I’d like to avoid that kind of uncertainty again. I like to be able to help people out with a meal should they need one without a lot of planning or running to the store.
We’ve had a lot of thunderstorms here the last couple of days. You can feel the change…fall is creeping in ever so slowly. I went out yesterday and checked the milkweed to see if we have any monarch butterflies coming out and I didn’t see a single caterpillar or chrysalis either one. I did see a sweet little butterfly on our African Lilies, but no monarchs. I hope they come back. I’m even more determined to build a pollinator garden now!
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“Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it.”
Proverbs 15:17 ESV