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 […]
Frugal Fridays (Even though it’s Monday)
Why am I doing Frugal Fridays on Monday? Because my husband was out of town for 3 weeks, and life got a little crazy. And the baby decided he didn’t want to sleep. At all. It’s all good, though. Hubby is home and baby has decided to resume a good sleeping pattern. Therefore: Frugal Fridays. On Monday. Successes/Blessings: I canned 4 more pints of Cinnamon Rhubarb Jam (this is seriously the tastiest jam I’ve EVER made). I dehydrated 10 bananas for our food storage. I made yogurt and granola. I added walnuts and coconut to our granola this time because I had remnant bags of them floating around the pantry. I also used honey from my uncle’s beehive (he gave me a frame to extract a few weeks ago. YUM-O). A neighbor informed me of a sale going on at the used book store. When I showed up, they women there guessed that we were a homeschooling family, and told us to take as much as we wanted and that they weren’t going to charge us! How sweet!! We got a big reusable shopping bag full of books. I havested 4 quarts of black raspberries and a handful of sugar snap peas. I haven’t gotten many peas as I’d hoped for…mostly because the weeds have taken over that part of the garden. My fault. My son found out the hard way (by falling into them) that we have stinging nettles behind our garage. These have never grown here before, but I’m very excited! (Although I felt terrible that the little guy got a rash). I made a poultice out of some plantain leaves from […]
