Oh. Em. Gee... the cooking!
I feel like I have done nothing but cook or help cook for the last 48 hours. LOL!
Yesterday, we went to the u-pick, and snagged $53 worth of fruit. We always get ahead of ourselves, and at checkout we're like BUH-WAH?!?! At least it's money well spent on healthy foods, and still half what it would cost us at Wegmans.
How the hell did we spend $53 on FRUIT? Well... 37 lbs of Gala apples is a pretty good start. Galas are my favorites, and the first to ripen for picking. The last two years we missed them, so this year we made sure to get there in time! As we were filling two bags, I jokingly said to John, "So, you think we have 20 lbs here, or what?" He replied, "Each." Sure enough, we were just shy of 40 lbs.
We also got probably 15 lbs of peaches, and maybe five lbs of plums, as well as 2 pints of raspberries.
Knowing the peaches tend to get squishy fast, and some of them already were, we got started canning the soft ones, and ended up with 7 pints of peaches, on top of the five pints we did last week. That took care of just half of the peaches we picked.
Next, we baked an apple pie, and I cut up 10 apples for the dehydrator, to make apple chips.
Today, we decided to make apple butter, and filled six half-pints for canning (some may be gifts come Christmas), and put another pint in a freezer jar for our own consumption right now.
After that, I decided to make some more peach freezer jam (which I made a few weeks ago), since I had enough jars (exactly enough, it turns out... I'm really proud of myself for getting it just right this time... I almost always have too much, and need a sixth jar), and there were still a couple of soft peaches.
Having accomplished that, I decided to make some banana-raisin mini-muffins (with applesauce instead of oil), which helped make some room in the freezer, since I had some bananas stashed in there. I still have more. :)
We recently got our home equity line of credit set up, and our first purchase will be a chest freezer for the basement, since the upstairs freezer is crammed with tomato sauce, freezer jam, pickles and strawberries, in addition to our regular stuff. Hopefully we'll be able to get a deer this year, too, from one of John's former co-workers, and have bambi for the winter. :D
After all that cooking the last two days... now I need to think about dinner! Hoo boy.
Edit: Oh, and we still have a bag and a half of apples left. All that, and we've only used about a quarter of them! LOL!
Yesterday, we went to the u-pick, and snagged $53 worth of fruit. We always get ahead of ourselves, and at checkout we're like BUH-WAH?!?! At least it's money well spent on healthy foods, and still half what it would cost us at Wegmans.
How the hell did we spend $53 on FRUIT? Well... 37 lbs of Gala apples is a pretty good start. Galas are my favorites, and the first to ripen for picking. The last two years we missed them, so this year we made sure to get there in time! As we were filling two bags, I jokingly said to John, "So, you think we have 20 lbs here, or what?" He replied, "Each." Sure enough, we were just shy of 40 lbs.
We also got probably 15 lbs of peaches, and maybe five lbs of plums, as well as 2 pints of raspberries.
Knowing the peaches tend to get squishy fast, and some of them already were, we got started canning the soft ones, and ended up with 7 pints of peaches, on top of the five pints we did last week. That took care of just half of the peaches we picked.
Next, we baked an apple pie, and I cut up 10 apples for the dehydrator, to make apple chips.
Today, we decided to make apple butter, and filled six half-pints for canning (some may be gifts come Christmas), and put another pint in a freezer jar for our own consumption right now.
After that, I decided to make some more peach freezer jam (which I made a few weeks ago), since I had enough jars (exactly enough, it turns out... I'm really proud of myself for getting it just right this time... I almost always have too much, and need a sixth jar), and there were still a couple of soft peaches.
Having accomplished that, I decided to make some banana-raisin mini-muffins (with applesauce instead of oil), which helped make some room in the freezer, since I had some bananas stashed in there. I still have more. :)
We recently got our home equity line of credit set up, and our first purchase will be a chest freezer for the basement, since the upstairs freezer is crammed with tomato sauce, freezer jam, pickles and strawberries, in addition to our regular stuff. Hopefully we'll be able to get a deer this year, too, from one of John's former co-workers, and have bambi for the winter. :D
After all that cooking the last two days... now I need to think about dinner! Hoo boy.
Edit: Oh, and we still have a bag and a half of apples left. All that, and we've only used about a quarter of them! LOL!