Food Storage Friday: Strawberries!

I just thought that title sounded fun.  I am happy that it is Friday though.  I'm also happy that I have no more strawberries sitting in my house, waiting for me to do something wonderful with them before they self-destruct.  Our local grocery store had a great deal on a flat of strawberries and pectin, so naturally, I along with every other woman in the area decided to make jam.  My husband was thrilled, since he's not been too big on my mock raspberry jam.  He would never have known my secret ingredient if he hadn't come home early.

http://thefrugalgirls.com/2012/04/how-to-keep-strawberries-fresh.html

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get to those strawberries for two days and by the time I did get to them, they were going downhill fast.  I hate wasting so much fruit.  About that time, I ran across this little tip to keep strawberries fresher, longer.  So of course, I had to go buy another flat of strawberries to try it out.  This time, I went through the strawberries sooner.  I washed them and sorted out the berries that needed immediate action and put the rest aside.  I don't know if it was washing them in vinegar, or being more diligent in taking care of them, but this bunch of strawberries did much better.

It occurred to me, as I was stirring in those ridiculous amounts of sugar, that I should find a more healthy way to enjoy this spring-time fruit later on.  I know there are low-sugar and no-sugar jam recipes out there, but I never think of them until I'm elbow deep in strawberries, pectin and sugar.  Even though I know that sugar is the main ingredient in jam, I'm just always blown away at how much!

http://www.housingaforest.com/healthy-dehydrated-fruit/

Apparently, I'm not the only one with strawberries on my mind, because a friend pinned this blog about drying fruit.  And the lightbulb came on!  I have never tried dehydrating strawberries, but I don't know why.  It is so easy!  Well, except for the slicing uniformly part.  If I had an egg slicer, it would have been easy-peasy, but I had to free hand it.  I tried a few.  My husband ate them on his cereal and asked for more.  So I made more and then more.  I'm thinking of running back to the store again to see if the deal is still on so I can make even more, but that would mean sorting strawberries again.  I'm not even sure how many strawberries I dried, but I have about 6 cups of the yummy snack sitting on my pantry shelf.  If my daughter finds the stash, it will be gone quickly.  She already finished off the dried apricots from last fall as well as most of the peach fruit leather.  It's such a healthy snack, I don't really mind her eating them, but I would like them to last a few months!

My total (so far) tally of preserved strawberries:

6 cups dried
5 pints canned jam
13.5 pints freezer jam

I think I will pedal on down to the store again when the little one wakes up from her nap... or maybe not.

Update:
Now that the sale is over, I found some more recipes for preserving strawberries.
No sugar strawberry freezer jam
Low sugar freezer jams
Dried strawberries (in the oven)

Happy preserving!

French bread and sort of, but not really, Lasagna

I haven't been too exciting on baking day lately.  It's all I can do to get some bread baked for the week, but since I had made some lasagna for dinner, I thought something different would be nice to go with it.  It's my first time trying french bread and I think it turned out pretty well.  The kids loved it, especially with nutella spread on it.  We ate the first loaf before it was completely cooled, and the second loaf disappeared with our dinner.  There have been a few requests for more already.

It is a slightly more complicated process than regular bread due to the egg, or I should say, the separation of the egg.  Once that's done though, it's pretty simple.  Although, with the yolk mixed into the dry ingredients, it looked kind of strange when I dumped the water in.  Suddenly, the bits of yolk showed up so well, that I was afraid the water was too hot and had cooked it!  But, as it turned out, everything was fine and there were no cooked egg yolk chunks in our bread. 

Our lasagna wasn't really lasagna in the traditional sense, in fact, it probably has a name that I'm not aware of.  I'm hesitant to ever make lasagna, because I never have actual lasagna noodles around, or ricotta cheese for that matter, but spaghetti was getting a bit repetitive, so I decided to use what I had on hand to make a pasta casserole of sorts.  I have lots and lots of macaroni style noodles and a container of cottage cheese that needed used.  Not knowing how much pasta to cook, (I always cook too much or too little, never just right) I made way too many macaroni noodles.  No worries though.  The kids love plain noodles.  I'm set for lunches for the rest of the week.  The family loved my lasagna creation, so I thought I'd share my recipe here.

Use whatever you have Lasagna
Ingredients:
Some kind of pasta (maybe 8 oz?)
Jar of pasta sauce (I used my home canned stuff)
Cottage cheese that is coming close to the expiration date (of course if you actually have ricotta, use that)
Parmesan cheese
Lots of shredded cheese (I used a mix of mozzarella and monterey jack)
Dried parsley

Directions:
Cook the pasta until al dente.  Mix cottage cheese, parmesan and some parsley flakes. (I totally forgot the parsley till the end, so I just sprinkled some on top.)  Put a little sauce on the bottom of the pan and put a layer of noodles on top.  Then layer on the cottage cheese mixture, followed by shredded cheese, and then sauce.  Repeat as many times as possible.  The macaroni noodles take up more space than lasagna noodles, so I was only able to do two layers.  Top the whole thing with more shredded cheese and bake at 350 for 30-45 minutes.  Let cool a bit and serve with some fresh french bread. 

*Food Storage application:  While the noodles, sauce and parsley all came from my year's supply of food, this meal can't technically be a "food storage" meal because of all the cheeses.  Someday, when I have my own milk cow and I am making and storing cheeses, I'll be able to do it without any dependence on the grocery store.

Grinding wheat for baking day Tuesday

I did it.  After several phone calls to my mom and a practice run last night, I successfully ground my wheat flour this morning.  It brought back memories of "helping" when I was a girl.  The rumbling and shaking of the counter, pouring the wheat berries in and chasing them around to get them down the hole and the amazement at the finished product.  It was fun showing my kids the progression from the "seeds" to the flour, to the bread.

Here's a shot of the wheat going down the hole to be ground up.

 This is how it looks without that metal plate on top...before I got serious about grinding anything.  The stone toward the top of the picture (toward the back in real life) spins really fast against the stone in front.  The berries drop down the hole and fall between the two stones.

 Here's what it looked like after grinding.  Flour everywhere.  I learned not to blow into there. 

I started with a quart of hard white wheat and about 1 1/2 cups of hard red wheat.

 I ended up with a pint of the hard red.

The quart of hard white wheat yielded a generous six cups, filling both the quart jar and a pint jar.

Something I really didn't like as a girl was how heavy and tough the whole wheat bread was.  My mom's generation is all about hard red wheat and I didn't realize that there was anything else.  Last year, as I was attempting to slowly move my family from white bread to wheat bread, I discovered white wheat flour, which has the same health benefits and usefulness, but is a much lighter, easier to swallow wheat.  At least for me it is.  I don't think anyone actually noticed that it was wheat bread at first.

For my wheat today, I used a half and half mix of hard white and hard red wheat.  You can kind of see the different colors in this picture.

I don't know if it was the white wheat, or being freshly ground, but the bread turned out really nice today.

I also tried the bread recipe I found late last week.  It looks a bit rough and we haven't tried it yet because we ate almost an entire loaf of the pretty bread, and we're kind of full.

I also burned the heck out of my left thumb while getting this one out of the oven, so it's not really endeared to me.  The blister is showing up much better now, but I don't really feel like taking another picture. 

Due to my injury, my husband volunteered to finish off the day, which wasn't really baking, but it included bread, so it fits.

We made some scones, topped them off with taco fixings and called them gorditas.  My kids were very excited and are planning to open an eating store to sell them.  The store will consist of two camp chairs set up behind a cooler on the sidewalk outside.  We informed them that a store already exists that sells them, so I think I am off the hook for now.

It was a long day in the kitchen and now I need to get in there and clean it all up.  I think I set a record for pictures in a post with this story.  Sorry about that.  I usually struggle to find just one pertinent picture, but this one went the other way  See you tomorrow, when I'm back to my almost picture less posts!

Food Storage: How to use canned chicken

I was wary of canned chicken for a long time.  It just looks awful.  Really awful.  I didn't see the value of taking something I was perfectly comfortable with -frozen chicken- and turning it into something so scary and unusable.  Then, my freezer became full.  And I found a great deal on chicken.  A big box of chicken.  So, my mother and I pulled out the pressure canners and went to work.  When we were done, we had a bunch of nasty looking jars.  Usually, a bunch of full jars is a source of joy for me, but not this time.  I thought the money spent on that chicken was a waste.  I could never bring myself to use it and my husband would not be able to swallow it.  He's a texture guy, you know. 

Then I tried thinking of recipes that could use the chicken, since I hate to waste so much food.  I came up with chicken enchiladas.  I figured the chicken is so covered up in there, it might just work.  So, while my husband wasn't watching, I opened a can and chopped up the chicken inside, which is very similar to tuna in feel and texture.  I made the enchiladas and watched to see if he would spit it out on the first bite. 

He didn't.  He ate a few helpings and then complimented me on how good the enchiladas were that night.  Hmmm.  Not what I expected at all.  I was amazed actually at how good they were too. 

So that gave me courage to try more recipes.  Chicken chili is good, as well as a chicken tortilla soup that we like.  I'm going to try a chicken salad soon and see how that works out, but I don't often make that, so we won't have much to compare against.  Really, anything that takes cooked, cut up chicken would probably work great with canned chicken. 

I never thought I would admit that I like canned chicken, and you certainly won't see me eating it straight out of the jar. (shudder)  But, I like that it is already cooked and ready to go, and I love that it isn't taking up valuable freezer space.

Hopefully tomorrow I can type out a few of these recipes, but not tonight.  I have to go put away that chicken chili we ate for dinner.

My first ever baking day Tuesday!

Maybe.  Tuesday might not work every week.  It felt like I was baking almost every day, and there are other things I want to do with my afternoons, so I declared yesterday baking day for the week. 

Originally, I had planned to get started immediately in the morning, but my brain doesn't kick in till about 10, so I got a late start.  My 4 year old helped, so that took a bit more time, but we made a lot!  We made bread dough and then made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies while the bread was rising.  Then we punched down the dough and made these oat muffins -still using up apples-while the bread rose again.  Then I remembered that hubby's birthday is this week and I should have made a cake instead of cookies, so after the kids were in bed, I made a little chocolate cake.

The grand tally:
3 loaves of bread
8 rolls (because I only  have 3 bread pans)
2 dozen crumbly cookies -not sure what happened
18 muffins
1 9x9 chocolate cake
1 bowl of cookie dough, because it makes me happy

I wanted to share my cookie recipe, because I love these cookies so much, and with the oatmeal, I can pretend that they are healthy.  I've honestly been making this recipe since I was a little girl.  I'm not sure why they fell apart, maybe I didn't let them sit on the pan long enough.  They still taste good though.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp soda
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
4 Tbs milk
4 cups rolled oats
1 cup chocolate chips, or raisins if you really want to be healthy, or dates or nuts...

Preheat oven to 375
Sift flour with soda and salt into mixing bowl.
Add butter, sugar, brown sugar, egg, vanilla and milk.  Mix until smooth.
Add rolled oats and chocolate chips.
Drop by spoonful on ungreased cookie sheet about 2" apart.
Bake for 10-12 minutes

*food storage friendly changes:
add egg powder, butter powder, or milk powder with dry ingredients, then add needed water when recipe calls for milk.
I used 4 Tbs egg powder and 1/2 cup water in place of the eggs, and 8 tsp powdered milk and 1/4 cup water.

Living off of food storage: One week challenge

Some scoff at the idea of storing large amounts of food, but really, having just a little extra is always a good idea.  I remember once as a younger girl, we had a huge blizzard.  The roads were closed for several days.  The grocery stores were an amazing sight to me.  Empty shelves everywhere.  In just a few days, those well stocked shelves were completely empty.  No milk, no bread.  I remember it very vividly.  Luckily, my mother has a basement full of food, so we weren't too affected, aside from the convenience factor.  But how many people weren't so prepared? 

I realize winter blizzards aren't a concern for everyone, but there are plenty of other natural disasters to pick from.  How can you know if you are really prepared?  Something kind of fun to do is to take the week-long challenge.  To do it, you pretend that you cannot get to the grocery store, or that there is nothing there.  Look in your pantry and feed your family from there for a week.  No preparing before hand.  Starting right now, could you do it?  Would it be absolutely miserable? 

Living off of food storage: Meal planning, part 2

I talked a bit about not wanting to go back to the meals we had as newlyweds. I also do not want to go back to our meals from the few years after that. I graduated, we moved, we added two children. Every day, I seemed to forget that dinner doesn't cook itself. Suddenly, it was 4 o'clock and I had nothing planned, nothing defrosted, no energy left to come up with something brilliant. I would call hubby and have him pick up Taco Bell on his way home. Or Burger King, or Quiznos, or... you get the picture.

Then one night, I realized that I was causing myself undue stress. I like to cook, I know how to cook, all I need to do is prepare a little. Back then it was just hubby and I buying value meals, but it was still between 15-20 dollars for a meal. Now, there are four of us, so our fast food bills are closer to $30. When I have a plan, we don't do the desperation fast food meals so often. I love the feeling of having dinner ready to cook, or already cooking. When we are driving around town and hubby asks, do you have something planned for dinner, or should we stop and grab something, I can triumphantly say, "Dinner is in the crockpot!" We save so much money by simply cooking at home. Plus, I'm a little less fat. Win, win.

Knowing how much it helps me, I dove into my new meal plan. As I started working through it, however, I noticed that every once in a while, I found myself dreading the coming week. I felt completely uninspired to cook, something I truly enjoy doing. In trying to figure this out, I noticed that there would be one or two meals planned for the week that were very complicated or time consuming, or just not that great. We didn't want to eat them, or prepare them that often. For example, lasagna is not my forte. I don't have a great recipe, so I don't love the product. I just couldn't get motivated to make it. Maybe if I have tons of spare time one day, I'll make five pans of it and put them in the freezer. On the other end of the spectrum, I love schnitzel, but it takes time and work. That meal is more suited to special occasions, not a monthly making.

For my improved meal plan, I took another look at that list of meals. I made smaller lists, one for things that I like to make and we don't mind eating every month or more, and one for things we like, but may not want that often. Then there is another list- actually a pile of papers in my notebook- of things I would like to try or maybe improve on.

Now, I have a four week rotation of meals. Each week has 4-5 meals planned out. The remaining days, I choose from the other lists, or have a leftover extravaganza. This gives me a great start on the weekly plan, but still allows some freedom for variety. So far, I like it, but I am still tweaking things and adding new things. I had fun trying out summer harvest recipes, but now we're transitioning more into soups.

Figuring out how much I need of what has gotten interesting. I had already stored up most of the food for my first meal plan. I figure I'll still use the basics no matter what I make though, so instead of figuring all that out again, I'm keeping track of what I use from what I had stored. Hopefully this time next year, I'll have it a little more scientific-like. For now, I'm doing old fashioned subtraction.

Here's my meal plan, for now. I'll probably keep playing with it, and I need to add a few things, but this will give you an idea.

Week 1

Meatloaf

Pizza

Roast

Chicken

Stroganoff/ chops & sauce

Sometimes list

Week 2

Burgers

Spaghetti

Chops

baked potato bar

Chick enchiladas/

Sometimes list

Week 3

Tacos /Navajo taco

Stir-fry /Orange chicken

Steak

Meatball/ roll-ups

Chicken

List

Week 4

Sloppy Joes

Soup

Roast/ribs

Fry/grilled chicken

Crock-pot chicken

List

Sometimes List

German noodles

Crepes

Runzas

Brats

Schnitzel

Hamburger Pie

Shepherd’s Pie

Fajitas

Lasagna

Pasta Griffa

Chicken Parmesan

Alfredo Chicken

Cobb salad

Risotto

Stuffed Chicken

Chicken Dumplings

Rotisserie chicken

Soups

Calico beans

Spicy beef

Chili

White Chili

Cabbage

Onion

Stew

Baked Potato Soup

Chicken Tortilla

Tomato

To Try

Tamales

Gyro...

Living off of food storage: Meal planning, part 1

Okay, I talked last time about why I stockpiled food. Now I want to talk about what food to store. There are generally two ways to look at it. You can store things that will last a lifetime - an "in case of emergency" food supply, like my mother's fake meat. Or, there's the store what you eat mindset, where you buy a few extra items that you usually buy while at the grocery store. That one never works for me because I forget to easily, or I don't restock as I use it.

My plan was inspired by a woman from the Everything Under the Sun blog, although I didn't find her blog until after I had heard her plan. What she suggests is selecting 7 breakfasts and 7 dinners that you like and then figuring out how much of each ingredient you need for each meal and then multiply that by 52. Just like that, you know how much food to store for the entire year.

A nice idea in concept, but I don't want to eat the same food every week of the entire year. I've done that with frozen pot pies and it gets really old. I decided to write down every dinner that we like. It came out to be well over a month's worth of meals. It just seemed like a good idea to implement the weekly food idea as a 6 week meal idea.

I went to work scrawling out amounts. Had I followed her advice about writing each of those meals down on a note card, my life would have been easier. However, I seem to need to do things the hard way first. That's just the way I am. I wrote on my recipes, multiplying everything by 13 (threw that extra month in, just in case). Then I had to try to pull all those amounts together.
This is what I ended up with...

This is just one page. The scanner is so smart, it automatically crops the ugly edges off, so you can't see the other 5 pages stacked behind this one. This page is amazingly neat. Did I mention, I did this the hard way?

Finally, I got everything tallied and since we had a good 8 months till we would leave for school, I decided to start doing the meal rotation right away, and I'm glad I did because I found a flaw in my reasoning. This is where those note cards would have come in especially handy.

In the planning, I figured on using each meal about once a month. It seemed simple enough that way, but I found that some meals just don't want to be made that often. Like lasagna, or crepes. I ended up re-evaluating my meals and I came up with a system that I am pretty happy with. I'll let you in on it in my next food storage post, so you can hopefully learn from my mistakes.

Living off of food storage: Why a year supply?

Why a full year supply of food?

In my experience, people either understand storing lots of food or they don't. My mom has a large storage room, so I'm quite used to the idea of having extra food on hand. No need to drive to town if we run out of anything, just go downstairs and get more. I like that feeling of preparedness, plus, it cuts down on impulse purchases if you can stay out of the grocery store.

But, why so much food? People are starting to see the wisdom in having some extras on hand, but a full year? Many people stock piled food in fear of some huge catastrophe, such as the Y2K scare. But it seems to me that having enough food on hand would ease much of the burden for families struggling through this recession. Just having oats, pasta and beans on hand would insure healthy eating, even if it's not delicious. I know many families have been grateful for their storage while they are going through job changes, or unemployment. For us, heading off to school without much income, it seems like the best plan. With so many unknowns in the coming year... will we be moving again? Staying here? Finding summer work elsewhere? Staying for summer classes? Will we run out of money? ...I want to be sure I can feed my kiddos and feed them well.

I don't want a repeat of the first two years of my marriage. I was still attending college and my husband was working and taking evening classes. I was way too busy to plan meals, and our tiny apartment barely had room for our dishes, let alone any food storage. We ate frozen pot pies (the cheap ones) and pasta roni almost exclusively for those two years. Sometimes we shook it up with hamburger helper. While these meals were very cheap, they were also lacking. I can honestly say that I have not had a frozen pot pie since then. I want to be able to eat real, quality food.

Moderation, however. It seems that in my mother's day, storing for the long term was the thing. She has enough hard red wheat to feed an army, as well as can after can of pretend meat -textured vegetable protein- which will store forever. Good thing, because it will never be eaten.

I want to be somewhere in the middle. Enough for a year, but things we will use. But, how do I know how much of what? If I can figure out my scanner, I'll show you my crazy tally sheets next time.

Living off of food storage: addicted to canning

Have you ever felt addicted to canning?

Two years ago, I had the sudden urge to fill the shelves. We -my mother, two sisters and I- canned over 700 jars of everything. Jams, currant syrup, beets, tomatoes, soup, salsa, chili sauce, apples, applesauce, spaghetti sauce, peaches, pears, raspberries, apricots. We kept finding new recipes to try. Green tomatoes were used in relish, taco sauce and jam. We filled everyone's shelves, passing the goods between my brother, my four sisters, my mother and even my grandma.

Last year was the same. We did over 900 jars. People in the area started bringing us all their old, unused jars because we were begging for them. I felt kind of silly overstocking like that. It's not like we needed 50 jars of spaghetti sauce. I couldn't explain it though, I just had to fill those jars. Then I started to get an idea of why I felt so inspired to can.

Around this time last year, it became apparent to us that we were going to have to move in order for my husband to finish his degree at a university. That meant leaving the cheap rent of my parent's place and finding an apartment that could fit our family. It also meant that our income would be very small, if anything. We tried to save up money, but hubby's hours were unreliable and we were expecting our third child. Seeing that money was going to be short, I decided to store up as much food as possible and live off of that storage for the coming school year.

This year, with the move and getting settled, I didn't really can anything. I just didn't have the time or the tools. My shelves are still full though. There were still plenty of canned goods for us to bring with us as part of our year supply. I don't know if those years of canning will get us all the way through school, but they should get us through this year at least.

Now we've started living off of that supply, and the experiment has begun. The canned goods are just a part of our storage, but I think I've written enough to bore you for one post.
I'll write more about our preparations for surviving college tomorrow... or maybe Monday. There's no school tomorrow, so my schedule will be shot.