Homemade Pantry: Applesauce

It has been awhile since I've done a homemade pantry post! We've been getting a lot of apples in our CSA.  We like apples but we've been getting lots of other fruit too - plums, peaches, and nectarines oh my! - so we've been ignoring the apples since they have a longer shelf life.  Awhile back I noticed they might just be going bad so I made and canned some applesauce.

 

Canning them took a total of two hours. Peeling them was by far the most tedious part.  I've put this on my Amazon wish list - the next time I'm looking to push my purchase over $25, I may just invest.*  Roxy was happy to pick up any pieces that made it to the floor.

 

I followed the recipe in my Ball's Complete Guide to Home Preserving cookbook but they also published it online (see the link).  I've mentioned before that I take a lot of liberties with recipes and use them more as guidelines.  This is NOT true with canning.  Unless you really know what you are doing, you need to follow recipes exactly (particularly the ratio of lemon juice or vinegar).  Botulism is not something to mess around with.

The apples got chopped and mixed with sugar (1 cup not the 3 the recipe calls for), and lemon juice. You heat them up with a touch of water until they are soft enough to mash.

 I used my immersion blender but left it pretty chunky. 

 

I got enough to make five pints and to have a bit of applesauce with my tea.

 Canning is not hard, here is what you need:

1. Canning jars.  I've stuck with ball regular mouth (you can get wide mouth jars as well).  You can reuse the jars and the rings but make sure to use a new lid every time.  Conveniently, Ball sells the lids separately.

2. A large pot.  You can get a designated canner, but as long as there is enough room to completely submerge the jars you can use any old pot.  I bought mine for $2 at an estate sale.

3. Jar lifter, magnetic lifter, jar funnel.  These are specifically designed for canning.  The jar lifter helps you put the jars in/take them out of boiling water.  The funnel makes it easier to fill your jars.  The magnetic lifter makes it easy to get your lids out of the simmering water. A chopstick is helpful as well to release air bubbles.

4. A canning rack. This just needs to lift the jars up off the bottom of the pot so water can circulate under them.  You can buy a rack specifically designed for this.  Kevin rigged this up for me with what we already had.

As for how to can, there are a lot of good resources.  This blog post lays it out step by step. There are a lot of steps so it can be overwhelming, but none of them are particularly hard or time consuming.  If you have lots of apples like we do (the apples I canned got replaced the next week through our CSA) it is a good way to preserve them for the winter.  We also have a lot of pears, I have a feeling pear sauce may be next for me.

DIY vs. Hiring Someone to DI4U

Do you see what I don't see?

A hint:

A bathtub! A bathtub is no longer in our game room!  That is right, we finished the downstairs bathroom.  I haven't been this excited to pee in a potty since I was a newly trained 3 year old.

After we realized the bathroom was not going to be a quick face-lift (and learning our lesson), the bathroom has remained an empty room, with the fixtures strewn around our house.  So we had a bathtub in this room for six months (we started the bathroom project in early April as evidenced by this post).  We have two bathrooms on the second floor, so it wasn't horrible, but we and our guests needed to trudge upstairs which was kind of a bummer.

We ended up calling mercy and hiring someone to do it for us.  Best decision ever. 

Just as a reminder, here was our before:

 

And our middle (when we realized it was not going to be a simple face lift due to some water damage to the back wall):

And our after!

I tried to get Kinsey is the same spot to compare the weird floor before (part tile and part wood)

and after:

So much better.  And Kinsey still needs a haircut.

The Curious Case of Pippa Button

Those of you who are friends with me on Facebook know that on my birthday I got a really great gift: the news that Pippa is not in fact dying!  At least not imminently.

I'll back up a bit: the day before my birthday (which also happened to be our anniversary) I came home from work and realized that Pippa was not at home.  Normally she comes right out to greet me (technically to ask for food but I take it as a greeting).  She was not anywhere I could find, nor did she come when I shook her food bag or said "Pippa, what's this?" (her cue that she and the dogs are about to get a treat).  Normally, she comes running for either of those things, even out of a dead sleep.  We also happened to have our friend Peter over working on the downstairs bathroom.  I automatically assumed that Peter had inadvertently let her out - she loves to be outside and will sometimes make a break for it.  I have no doubt that if someone left a door open, she would make her way out.  I also think she'd come back when she got hungry, as long as she wasn't thwarted by a car.  So I was in borderline freakout mode.  I called animal control (they told me to call back the next day at 11), I told all our neighbors, I left a message for Kevin, I called my mom pretty close to tears, I walked all the streets in our neighborhood looking for her.

Turns out Kevin had come home for lunch and taken her back to the clinic to run some tests.  No note or message.  He didn't get my message until after he was done work and by then I had been freaking out for a few hours.   We had some words about this.

Kevin took her into the clinic to run tests because she seemed to be doing so well.  He thought she would have gotten worse or even passed by now.  The results of her tests were unusual in the best possible way.  Her red and white blood cells are all back in the normal range (high even) and the Feline Leukemia Virus test showed up negative!  This is really unusual and Kevin has no idea what is going on.  It was pretty rare that she would have tested negative in the shelter as a kitten and then turned positive later on.  It is even more strange that she flipped back to negative.  It could have been a false positive, but her red and white blood cell counts were dangerously low - which was evidence of the leukemia.  Kevin's going to run some more tests in a few months and do a bit more research to see if he can figure out what is going on, but for now I am content with the knowledge that our cat is not dying!  She is a fantastic cat and we both are really fond of her, so we are really happy.

Unfortunately for her that means she is now back to third class status (we left her alone during our trip with someone checking on her every few days and she was not happy about that at all) and now officially on a diet.  When we thought she only had a few months to live we gave her all that she wanted.  She put on 25% more weight, going from 6 pounds to 7.5.  My sister says the photo I posted here was misleading and she is really not that fat.  So I did a photo shoot with her (forgive the blurry action shots, I'm trying to learn the semi-automatic settings on my camera):

 (I really wish this one had been in focus)

Since she hates the diet food Kevin got her and will leave a lot of it uneaten, I have a feeling she'll be back to her fighting weight in no time at all.  She won't go back to eating salmon and tuna several times a week but at least she'll get better dry food.

Adventures in Vegetarian Cooking: Cheesy (or Vegan) Potato Leek Soup with a Kick

One of my family's favorite stories is when my sister was a toddler and my mom asked her what she wanted for dinner.  "Drip Soup" was her answer.  It took my mom awhile to figure out that she was referring to Leek Soup (Drip - Leak - Leek).  It has been Drip Soup in our house since.

We've gotten leeks a couple of times in our CSA share and this time we also got potatoes.  Even though it was a hot August day and not really the best day for soup, I decided I'd make the soup for the freezer.  Even though I made this in August both leeks and potatoes store well so you can probably still find them at fall or winter farmers' markets.

Make sure to wash the leeks really well. Dirt hides in the leaves so strip the outer layers off under cold running water.  You'll probably end up with something like this:

Chop up the leeks, the onions and the jalapeno pepper (what adds the kick).  This will be pureed at the end so no need to worry about size or uniformity.

Our super pot has a brown function so I sauteed the leeks and the garlic prior to adding the potatoes.  You can also do this on the stove top in a separate pan prior to adding it to your slow cooker or pressure cooker.

Pippa is not allowed on the counters.  She is allowed on windowsills and she exploits this loophole to watch what is going on:

I pressure cooked it for 30 minutes in our super pot.  You could also cook it in a slow cooker or on the stove top.  I then used an immersion blender and ended up with...

 It doesn't look super great, but it got a ...

Thumbs up! (Served along side a covered quiche - which was an experiment that worked out well and may just show up in a future "adventures in vegetarian cooking" post).

The rest went into the freezer for a future winter meal.

Here is the recipe:

2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 large leeks, green tops removed rinsed well and roughly chopped
5 cups of potatoes (any kind), chopped up (peeled or unpeeled)
1 jalapeno, partly deseeded (more if you want a bigger kick)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1.5 teaspoons pepper
4 cups vegetable broth*
Cheddar cheese for topping (without the cheese this recipe would be vegan.  In fact, I served this to my vegan friend Molly a few years back when she visited me in Alaska.  If I recall correctly, and if she was not just being polite, she gave it a thumps up too.)

Sautee the olive oil, garlic, and leeks until soft (about 5 minutes).  Add the potatoes, jalapeno, salt, pepper and broth.  Pressure cook on high for 30 minutes.  Blend with an immersion blender and either freeze or serve with cheddar cheese.

*Full disclosure, instead of vegetable broth I added water and a couple of turkey bones (from summersgiving), which makes this recipe not vegetarian.  Let me talk a bit about my philosophy towards eating meat.  I've already mentioned that I've wavered back and forth between eating meat/no meat since I was a teenager.  I've also mentioned how I abhor (my feelings are stronger than hate) wasting meat.  To me, wasting meat is wasting that animal's life completely.  That animal already lived (probably miserably in a factory farm) and died for me and for me to throw it away means its suffering was for nothing.  So we rarely throw away meat. 

Upon reflecting on it a bit more, I also think that the reason that vegetarianism never stuck for me was because I hate to be an inconvenience and it was always all or nothing for me.  Either I ate meat or I didn't.   So if I went over to your house and ate the meat lasagna you cooked for me (the inconvenience part) I might as well have a turkey sandwich for lunch the next day because I was clearly not a vegetarian (the all or nothing part).

But now the goal is not to give up meat entirely but to reduce it a lot.  Since starting this experiment we've cut down on our meat consumption considerably (we rarely buy it anymore and I go days without eating any at all).  So I feel less guilty eating the meat lasagna and will have a hummus sandwich the next day.  Sometimes if I'm sharing tapas with Kevin and he wants the grilled pizza with ham on it, I'll eat it because it's his dinner too.  Other times I'll ask if we can share the vegetarian version.

Maybe this makes me a hypocrite and if you've found this post by googling "Vegan Potato Leek Soup" you probably won't stick around.  But that is okay because this blog is for family and friends and this choice is really working for me.

Finding Joy in What You Have

I will admit that seeing some of our Juneau, Alaska friends/being in the mountains made me really really wistful.  I miss the small city Western mountain lifestyle we had in Alaska quite a bit.  Kevin reminded me that I am only thinking about the good things and forgetting the bad - the nonstop rain, the expensive flights home, the job that wasn't a good fit for me.  That is true, but I did love it there, right from the start.  And do miss it.

We made the choice to live in upstate New York and are putting down roots.  We bought a house, I like my job and am doing well, Kevin is most likely buying a veterinary clinic, we have made really good friends.  We've been able to see family a lot and make events that we wouldn't otherwise have been able to.  For example, I got to go down and say goodbye to my grandfather while he was in the hospital AND be at his memorial service.  That would not have been possible if we lived out West.  The house that we bought, while a lot of work, does not stretch us financially (actually the opposite, we pay less than we did when we were renting a tiny two bedroom apartment) and our dual incomes go far in this low-cost of living city.  It may not be surrounded by mountains or have a laid back Western vibe, but we have a lot going for us here.

Also, there is something to be said for owning your choices and being happy with what you have.  I don't want to spend my life wishing I had made this different choice or that different choice.  Every choice has pluses and minuses.  You make your decision with the information you have and go forward.  Some choices might be wrong but ultimately they will lead you to the life you are living.  To be happy you need to find joy in what you have (or make a change).

While we were hiking in Montana we both kept saying we need to take advantage of what the Finger Lakes do have to offer a lot more than we have been.  (And take more hiking vacations too).  We made good on that the first weekend we were back and went to Watkins Glenn, a cute little town an hour and a half south of us.  We hiked the gorge with some newish friends (soon to be good friends I think) and then went out to a cute restaurant for a late lunch.

It is not the stunning scenery of the West, but it made for a really nice afternoon.  I think I am officially over my wistful blues.