food storage – Grow. Pray. Build. — Bloom Where You're Planted.

How to Can Turkey

Ashley M. — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 08:00:52 +0000

First things first. This post contains affiliate links. This means that if you click a link within this post and then purchase something, I receive a percentage of your purchase total as a commission. This does not cost you anything extra, but it sure does bless my family and my blogging efforts…and we totally appreciate that! I purchase turkey around the holidays when it’s at rock bottom prices. At what other point in the year can you get meat for .50 cents/lbs or cheaper?! You get the meat, plus you can make a fantastic broth with the carcass. Canning meat kind of weirded me out, to be honest. I’ll eat tuna fish, but I’ve never been able to enjoy canned chicken breast or other meats. And in my mind, they pretty much all equated to Spam. ::shudder:: BUT, I kind of got over that after reading many other mamas talking about how much better home canned meats taste than store-bought, and obviously since you’re canning them at home, there are no weird unpronouncable ingredients to worry about. So, I decided to give it a try. I had 2 turkeys. A 16 pounder and a 20 pounder. This yielded me about 20 pints of canned turkey, plus lots of broth. I froze the excess broth that I didn’t need for canning. Raw Pack vs. Hot Pack? It’s possible to raw pack turkey. I was tempted to go this route because I thought it would make my life easier. However, I read several sources encouraging me to roast the turkeys one day, take all the meat off the carcass once it cooled, and then on Day 2 […]

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Tour My Pantry

Ashley M. — Mon, 18 May 2015 16:37:00 +0000

I submitted this article over at one of my favorite blogs to support Mavis’s effort to raise money for food pantries. You can click HERE and head over to One Hundred Dollars a Month to read about how I stock our pantry. Enjoy!

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The Easiest Crockpot Applesauce. Ever. (Can it)

Ashley M. — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 08:00:51 +0000

I live in New York… the apple state. There are a lot of things I love about this state, most of which have to do with its natural resources. Apples are one of those. Vineyards are another. Mountains…lakes….lush nature. We have a lot of God’s beauty here, and I try to enjoy it and take advantage of it as much as possible. Sure, there are times when I drool at the thought of states with lower property taxes, less strict building codes, looser hunting laws. All the things that make a homesteading lifestyle a bit easier. But ya know…that’s when I come back to that whole “Bloom Where You’re Planted” concept. So this month we headed out on two different occasions to pick apples. We have two apple trees on our property, but the apples were just not good this year. We found U-Pick apples for .80/pound, and picked a little less than 80 lbs. I probably canned about half of those into applesauce, which yielded about 10 quarts. The rest will be saved to eat fresh. We may get out one more time to pick a few more. I’d like to have some more applesauce and also make some apple butter, but we’ll see. We have a busy month ahead and I’m not sure we’ll have time. So. Back to that easiest applesauce EVER recipe. I have two crockpots … a 6 quart and a 3 quart. When I load BOTH of those with chopped apples, it was enough for 5 quarts of applesauce. Just to give you an idea of the amount of apples I used. Crockpot Applesauce: Ingredients: -Apples (we used […]

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Preparing for Winter

Ashley M. — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 18:18:03 +0000

Preparing for winter isn’t for just for the paranoid and old fashioned. It’s not just for those with an earthen root cellar, or acres of gardens, or massive pantries with fancy Pinterest-worthy shelves ready to hold your fancy-pants apothecary style jars with chalkboard labels of organic wheat berries….and the $500 grain mill with which to grind them. It’s also for your regular, everyday, practical family. Apartment dwellers, small families, large families, wealthy families, and anyone in between. That will look different for each family depending on your financial situation, how harsh or mild your winters are, how much storage space you have, and the size of your family. But I firmly believe that everyone should do something to prepare for winter, especially if you tend you have harsh winters. A little something, if nothing else. But something. Around here, we’re doing some winter preps. Why? Hauling 4 kids through sleet, snow, slush, and freezing temperatures in a big ole van to grocery shop for 2-3 hours while very pregnant sounds like nothing short of torture, and I’d like to spare myself as much as possible. It’s not abnormal for the men working in my husband’s line of work to fall or get hurt during winter. They work outside on ladders, and do a lot of driving…even in the bad weather. If this were to happen and he had to be out of work for a time to heal, we’d lose our only source of income. Having food stocked up would be one less thing to worry about. It’s also not abnormal for us to lose power during a bad blizzard. Or for the roads […]

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Family Updates, Gaden Notes, and Preparing for Winter

Ashley M. — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 15:38:10 +0000

It’s been almost two months since my last post. I have good reason…promise. I mentioned in my last post that I’d been feeling ill and exhausted…leaving me feeling slightly burnt out on the ways of simple livin’. You may have guessed … Yep! Baby #5 will arrive in the Spring. I’m well into my second trimester at this point and feeling much, much better. Being able to eat again is such a gloriously glorious thing. Food. My BFF these days. I have pretty rough first trimesters. With the last two babies, I ended up in the hospital dehydrated because of the severe morning sickness. Thank goodness it wasn’t as bad this time around, but I was still feeling very lousy. Tired, moody, tired, sick, tired, moody, sick, sick, sick. You know the drill. Adding to this the fact that my husband was out of town for 3 weeks for work, and we really brought it down to survival mode in our household for the end of Summer. I did eventually start feeling well enough to can the tomatoes when they came rolling in. Our harvest wasn’t as good as it was last year, but we still got enough for lots of salsa, stewed tomatoes, and tomato sauce. I tried this recipe for my tomato sauce. It requires no boiling/peeling of the tomatoes, which I really appreciated. Being efficient with my time is essential, especially when trying to can with 4 little ones running around. There’s nothing fast about canning. Anything I can do to make it faster or more efficient, I’ll try. I know that’s a slightly controversial thing…not peeling the tomatoes. I’m […]

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Pressure Canning Beans

Ashley M. — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 14:22:00 +0000

I got a pressure canner for my birthday! I’ve been wanting a pressure canner for years. Ever since I started waterbath canning 4 years ago, I’ve wanted a pressure canner. I’ve also been sort of terrified of pressure canners, though. I have a story much like everyone else’s. A grandma of a friend’s uncle’s nanny had a pressure canner loaded with beans explode in her kitchen. Not only could someone have been maimed for life, but the poor woman was scraping black beans off of her ceiling for months. (I’m being a little bit dramatic here, in case you couldn’t tell). One of the things that I was most looking forward to pressure canning was beans. We eat a lot of beans, and I try to buy them dry in bulk because it’s what’s most affordable. But then I always forget to soak them. I tried precooking them and freezing them, but our freezer is full with 1/4 steer and 1/2 pig. So freezer space is limited. Plus…I always forget to pull them out to thaw anyway. Having them canned is just so much more convenient. I read this post from one of my favorite homesteading blogs about canning beans, and consulted the instruction manual that came with my pressure canner (<referral link). And I did it! I might have nested nervously in front of the thing while I watched for any signs of pending explosion. But I did it. And now we have a pantry full of beans, cooked and ready to heat up and eat. You might notice that my jars don’t have the metal rings on them. After the canning process is done, […]

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