I decided to pull out some of the cherries I dried this summer to make scones. And wouldn’t you know it, the one piece I decide to photograph doesn’t even show any of the cherries! Oops!

Cherry Scones

2 cups flour

1/4 cup packed browno sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/3 cup chilled butter, cut into small pieces

1/2 cup dried cherries (or other fruit)

1/2 cup milk

3 tbsp maple syrup

Preheat oven to 400. Combine all dry ingredients in a bowl; cut in butter with pastry blender until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add cherries; toss well. Combine milk and syrup; add to flour mixture, stirring just until moist. Turn dough onto lightly floured surface and need 4-5 times. Pat dough into 8 inch circle on coated baking sheet. Cut into wedges, cutting into but not all the way through the dough. Bake at 400 for 17 minutes. Serve warm. Sprinkle with powdered sugar if desired.

Enjoy!

Not necessarily the prettiest of apples with all the bruises and all, but man! It made some pretty tasty applesauce!

The wind blew a bunch of apples off our tree at the duplex. Since our renters don’t seem to want the fruit off the trees, we went and picked them up.

Luckily for us, the old yucky apples on the ground had just been cleaned up {seriously, about 30 minutes before the wind!} so all that was left for us were the freshly fallen and somewhat bruised apples.

After a slight freakout session but with support from my food storage group, I ended up canning 24 pints of apple juice and 16 quarts of apple sauce. And it tastes YUMMY!

It doesn’t sound like too much, but I figure one quart of applesauce a week will last us about four months. And 2 pints of apple juice a week will last us about three months. But I probably should do more still. I mean, there are still plenty of apples left. It just takes a lot of time.

Now I’m gearing up to do pie filling with apples off my moms tree. And soon my grandpa’s other peach tree will be ready to pick {hopefully he will remember to call us when they’re ripe}, and last night he gave us a few pears to eat too. YUM! YUM! And once we hit the first frost the grapes will be ready to juice! Can’t wait!

I was about to give up on this whole canning business after I made this salsa, but that’s a looooong story that basically boils down to inexperience, not enough tomatoes, no food chopper to make it quicker and way too much time involved.

BUT!

Even though I went through all that just for a quart and a half of salsa, it was THE BEST SALSA I have ever tasted! No going back to store brands ever after that! Not even the store bought fresh pico de gallo salsas!

Zesty Salsa

10 cups chopped, seeded, peeled, cored tomatoes (about 6 pounds)
5 cups chopped and seeded Anaheim peppers (about 2 pounds)
5 cups chopped onions (about 1 1/2 pounds)
2 1/2 cups chopped and seeded jalapeno peppers (about 1 pound)
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons cilantro, minced
3 teaspoons salt
1 1/4 cups cider vinegar

Combine all ingredients in a large saucepot. Bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. Ladle into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Adjust two piece caps. Process 15 minutes in a boiling water canner.

Wear rubber gloves when cutting or seeding hot peppers to prevent hands from being burned.

Makes about 6 pints

Zuke Chips

Thinly slice zucchini. Then sprinkle with a little garlic salt and dehydrate about a day to a day and a half. Enjoy!

They are ultra-light and tasty! Satisfies my need for something crunchy like potato chips. I’m still playing around with the seasoning a bit. My sprinkle method results in some chips ultra salty and others hardly at all. So if anyone has any other seasoning flavor ideas or methods, I’m willing to try.

Btw, thats not a zucchini from my own backyard. Still! It’s so depressing! I might try this with summer squash though, at least those are growing a little bit.

Well, since I haven’t been able to eat anything out of my own garden yet I’ve turned my attention to other things. Like trying my hand at dehydrating things. These are my banana chips.

What? You’ve never seen red bananas before? C’mon, when I was in Brazil I learned there were more than 20 different banana varieties and these happen to be the Strawberry Kiwi Banana variety! Sort of.

I don’t think an actual strawberry kiwi banana exists {though there was a banana maca which means apple banana variety in Brazil}, I made this one into a strawberry kiwi banana by dipping the slices in strawberry-kiwi jello powder before dehydrating them.

Other upcoming flavors we intend to try out include:

Cinnamon Sugar banana chips
Honey glazed banana chips
Regular plain ol’ banana chips
Maybe other jello flavors

Mmmm! Tasty snacks!

Wow, I haven’t had an Independence Days update in quite a while. I’d like to say it is because I have been so busy in the throes of preserving from my bounteous garden. But really its because my garden hasn’t been doing much. Literally.

I mean, I don’t even have any zucchini for heaven’s sake! Zucchini!! That grow like weeds!!! It’s been making me very sad.

I haven’t been able to harvest anything from my own yard yet. Everything I’ve done has come from someone else’s garden~~my cherries were from my mom’s house, as were the apricots I just picked yesterday. But my yard? Well, I have ONE yellow squash that is growing, ONE honeydew, a bunch of peppers {they’re the ones doing the best out of everything!} and my tomatoes so far all turned out like the above. I don’t know whats wrong with them. But I must figure it out to try and save the rest of my crop.

~Sigh~ What’s a girl supposed to do?

Through the course of all this cherry business, my cute husband passed through the kitchen and asked me, “Is it worth it?”. With my hands hurting from the cherry pitting business, my feet and back aching from all the standing, I almost wanted to say no.

But really, it hasn’t been so bad. I’ve developed a strategy. Not sure if it is a good one, but it has helped me make it through the mountains of cherries. First I dumped all the cherries to soak in the sink and get rinsed off. From there I just have to take out handfuls at a time to work with.

Then comes the pitting work. I tell you, a cherry pitter makes the job sooo much easier!

Then the cherries get divided into the blender in the correct portions for jam and fruit leathers and put in ziplock baggies for the freezer with notes on how much sugar, pectin and whatever I need to know as far as the recipe goes to finish them off later.

Some go whole {but pitless of course} into ziplock baggies for the freezer for either smoothies later on, or to pull out and dehydrate at a later time.

So pretty much, I haven’t canned any of them yet. I’ve just been preparing them. But freezing them this way has put a lot less stress on me to try and make it through them before they go bad.

And now that they’re all prepped and waiting for me whenever I’m ready, I feel like baking some bread. Go figure!

Homegrown goodness from Grandma’s yard

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this whole eating in season thing. It’s definitely a different way of eating than just running off to the store whenever you want, to get whatever you need, no matter if its the right season or not.

I mean it requires a lot of effort, to monitor whats growing, needs to be harvested {or preserved} and a lot of creativity sometimes to figure out what to make out of it. It’s like free-form cooking, or cooking without recipes!

And I always seem to have little bits leftover that are adding up in the fridge waiting to be eaten or dealt with because it seems there is always more coming right behind it.

So I think we either eat less than I thought, or are blessed with way more abundance than I ever realized. I’m going to go with the last thought. I think we’re blessed.

I was a little worried when they first arrived that they might go into shock after the shipping and transplantation. Now I’m worried about learning how to prune them. I don’t want to do it wrong and kill them or something! I’m sure once I learn the proper technique it will be ok though.

Found these cute little pots at the dollar store for a dollar each {imagine that!}. They came in a variety of bright and happy colors and would easily lend themselves to something like those inspirational pots I posted about a while ago.

If you don’t want to hang them over a fence, then simply take that part off and screw them into your wall with the appropriate fastener for your wall type.

I plan on planting mine with a few herbs, but you could also plant some edible flowers.

Then label them right on the pot with some of that cute vinyl lettering you can get these days. Or heck, if you have pretty handwriting, take a permanent marker to them!

Have fun with them and if you do this project, please send me a picture and I will post it right here!

• Plant Something: nothing this week
• Harvest Something: the green onions are going crazy! Tomatoes look like they’re about to burst into production as well as the zucchini!
• Preserve Something: nothing this week
• Prep Something: got some new pots to plant some herbs, and some wire fencing to create tomato cages of sorts
• Cook Something: was gone most of the week so I didn’t really do much of this
• Manage Your Reserves: working on cleaning out my cold storage room so that I can organize my food storage better
• Work on Local Food Systems: I didn’t work on this very much either since I was gone

I’m currently out of town but had a quick moment to pop online so here’s a quick little update.

Before I left town, my tomatoes were getting big. Headed off to find tomato cages and all the stores are out. My Can-Do-Girl was making her own and I think they’re adorable with all their little imperfections–like little alien space creatures–I will have to get pics and probably will have to make my own when I get back.

While here on vacay, I’ve helped my MIL plant her green onion ends, learned more about food storage at her church and done a lot more research on pruning my espaliers {thanks for lending me your library card–and the new St George library is absolutely gorgeous!}

I will be home for one day then off again for a fun family camping trip to test our survival skills in the wild! Thanks to everyone at home who are keeping an eye on the house, mail and watering my plants!

I love gleaning bits of information from here and there. While this article in the LA Times talks about a California garden climate (you lucky year round gardeners!), the principles of crop rotation and alternate growing seasons can work anywhere:

Lyons recommends changing out plants “en masse” twice a year; he plants summer vegetables in April or May (”I’ll add more tomatoes in July so they’ll go right through into winter,” he notes) and winter vegetables in October or November. Every six weeks, he puts in interval crops, like pole beans, haricots verts, green onions, beets and carrots.

“When you alternate full growing seasons,” he says, “you can rotate crops very easily. You put in your tomatoes in the summer, then you put in something else in the winter, and then you can do tomatoes in the same spot the following summer.”

Good enough reason for me! Correct me if I’m wrong, that means all I have to figure out is the cool season crops and then my summer season crops can stay in the same place that I’ve already figured out–and I won’t have to re-figure out either season year after year!

• Plant Something: rhubarb, pumpkin
• Harvest Something: more strawberries
• Preserve Something: baked a bunch of banana bread loaves using our ripe bananas, then sliced and froze them for breakfasts later on
• Prep Something: bought a compost bin from a yard sale
• Cook Something: baked four loaves of homemade bread
  
• Manage Your Reserves:
• Work on Local Food Systems: considering starting a “garden club” or “country club” with some of my neighbors as way to covertly make it fun and useful at the same time, which I think will be key to getting some people going around here. Also, thinking of suggesting some classes to my church’s womens group about food storage and emergency preparedness {which means I’ll probably be the one who ends up teaching it and learning as we go along, but I think it would be fun!}

Look what we found today lounging around in our garden beds! It’s name is Lucy/Harold because we don’t know if its a boy or a girl.