How to keep an old house warm

 It is currently 14 degrees outside and it has been for a while now most of Jan has been under freezing the price of heating has gone up and we have yet to finish the castiron fireplace. So to keep the house warm we bake, turn on the tea kettle, and humidifiers are going. The wood floors and all our wooden things suck up the moisture all winter with the HVAC unit going. 

This month I am working my way through this book 

 

Fat Chicken update

Our Lovely 12 ladies are now on garden clean up so today I was able to sneak picture of our gold lace wyandotte  and silver lace wyandotte chickens ready for winter along with one of our ISA browns in spring we will get 6 new hens and our ISA's will make their way to the stew pot. This week one of our silver lace girls started breaking eggs of the other chickens so she might also go with that group of chickens.

Next years chicks will be Orpington or Golden Comet.

Mushroom Harvest

 In the fall on our property, we are lucky we have a wet boggy spot in the woods that turns into exciting new foods for us. This year I took 3 people out to show them and share with them all the wonderful mushrooms we have on the property because a home is not a home unless it is shared with others. I feel like because I know the ones on our property we can eat I should share that with our neighbors so if in hard times they need to eat they can. It is also the reason I started blogging to share with others and hopefully help.

First is the hunt 

These are the 2 kinds we usually get and I like to eat giant puff balls and elm oysters ( you can get kits for oysters in the store)

Next clean and cook with them 

Puffball powder good to mix in gravy and breading 1 filled dehydrator 12 hours at 130* in the blender and stores for a year.

Peeled sliced and buttered gives ya fried mushrooms 

Mushroom lasagna just sub the noodles for mushrooms in your favorite dish ( ours is just ricotta, cottage cheese and mozzarella layered with my jar sauce 1 hour at 375*)

Mushroom Rissoto pre-prep , so this is just the cheese and mushrooms you can saute and add to your rice for a yummy risotto, I freeze it for easy meals quick. 

                                                        75% of that came from this ! 

The Elm oysters I dehydrate or freeze and use in stirfry.

Tomato Jelly.. Red and Green

Things you will need for this one 

2lbs of tomatoes 

1/2 cup of sugar ( brown or white does not matter)

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar 

pinch salt 

1 tsp paprika 

When you end up with this many tomatoes at the end of the season and you have sauce, salsa, ketchup,and frozen tomatoes to last your family all winter you get creative 

Today I took some of our green and leftover red tomatoes and brewed them down in my instapot ( pressure cook high 45min and saute for 30 )

add in  the apple cider while cooking it down

when you move to the saute add everything else

when there is no liquid in the bottom of the pan you are done, You can water bath can this or it keeps in the fridge for 2 to 3 weeks.

I also make this green and add green apples to it for a chutney same steps just add the apples when you add the cider.

 

Summer catch up

                 Sorry everyone for the delay in posts there will be a ton I am playing summer catch up with the garden and the blog, This summer our harvest doubled what we had last year and I can not even think about how big it will be when we have the trees ready to harvest. I will do a blog for each of the process methods we use to save things for winter. This is a preview of the harvest I was working with these past few weeks as we went full blast into fall.

Vacuumed seal saves time and can in a lid shortage

                     The canning world has been rocked by tons of preppers and new to food preservation add to that a supply chain problem this summer we ran into an odd problem no lids or limits on lids.

We can a lot at any given time there are 20 to 30 cans in the fridge, basement, or shelves. so a lid shortage at the peak of the season was not ok and we started looking into other ways to save our food usually I use my vacuum sealer for dried goods and snacks also I use it to save seeds but it was put into action fast to freeze the million of tomatoes we got out of the garden 

This year we filled our freezer with our harvest so the little vacuum sealer paid for itself the first year keeping our food fresh.

Crab apple can work like big apples

 




                While waiting on our big apple trees to do their thing we have some trees that came with our house and we are using what we have till we can make more. I found out you can use crab apples like regular apples people think they are bitter but that is because they leave the seeds and stems on when they cook them down.

Today we went out and picked as many as we could of our crab apples before the birds ate them all.

                                                        First, we rinsed and cut the apples 

Then we tossed it in the instapot with 5 cups of sugar and some cinnamon sticks 

Then we smash them up or drain them off to make apple juice or apple sauce just like big apples!