Spaghetti sauce and The Kitchen Counter Cooking School

Last month I read The Kitchen Counter Cooking School which was an eye-opening read for me.  I learned that you don't have to have mixes to make basic dinner foods.  You can use whole, fresh foods instead of packages to make almost anything.  I don't use tons of packaged foods, but I do use some.  I'm going to use fewer in the future.

Tonight I made spaghetti sauce sort-of from scratch.  I used canned tomatoes, but I did can them myself. 

1/2 lb hamburger cooked with
1/2 diced onion (the book tells how to do that easily and neatly)
1 minced garlic clove
Add:
1 quart diced tomatoes
1 pint tomato puree
salt
pepper
Italian seasoning, all to taste

That "to taste" is kind of new to me.  You're supposed to actually get a spoon and taste the food and see if you like it.  If not, change it.  Sounds basic, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

Good spaghetti dinner tonight!

Being prepared

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No, this isn't me with my best canning buddy, although I hope I can find a great price on peaches this year so I can put up a few.  I'd love to have a canning buddy too, although Caroline is turning into one, so I may have a home-grown one from now on.

There is a trend in the United States to can--peaches, tomatoes, pickles, spaghetti sauce, jam, jelly, you name it.  It's exciting because I've been a canner all of my life.  Limited for the most part, but a canner nevertheless.

I've become a customer of Azure Standard through a buying club in my town.  I am a patron of our local Family Home Storage Center.  I keep my eyes open for opportunities to maintain, consume, and increase our home food storage.

Dh and I have a debt-reduction plan and are laying our debts to rest.

I want to be prepared for at least some of life's surprises.

What do you think this service project is?

Every six weeks on a Thursday evening dh and I go to the local LDS Home Storage Center and pack food for the regional food bank.

As you can imagine, it's cheaper for the food bank to purchase beans and rice in 50 pound bags than in 1 pound bags.  As you can also guess, they want to give families 1 pound bags, not 50 pound bags!

The solution is to buy 50 pound bags of beans/rice and thousands of clear plastic bags like the ones newspapers are delivered in, then have volunteers repackage the commodities into 1 pound packages to be given away.  The food bank recently asked for more packages, so the shift increased from one hour to one and a quarter hours.  That's it! 

Last time I went there were a lot of volunteers from both my ward (congregation) and the singles ward, enough that we had 5 lines going and we repackaged 2.5 tons of pinto beans into ~5,000 packages.  We still had 15 minutes to go and could have done more . . . but ran out of plastic bags.


It all sounds like date night to Bill and me, so we usually stop on the way home at our favorite ice cream place, Culver's.

That's all!

This canning was not worth it!

Things between my Victorio strainer and me did not go well today and I'm not sure what happened.  From about 28 lbs of Roma tomatoes, here is my result:

Tomato sauce:

6 pints
4 half-pints

 The sauce came out of the strainer much thinner than expected and took a lot of cooking down.  I did get it to a very nice consistency though.  It's all on my pantry shelves now and I love to see my handiwork there, almost as much as I enjoy eating it!

I bought myself a few hours of work yesterday

Yesterday was Market on the Move, the program that lets you buy up to 60 pounds of product for $10. It was raining, so after Bountiful Baskets I drove over to the distribution point, thinking the line would be short. Not so. It looked to be about 45 minutes long and they still had 10 minutes before opening time. I took a quick look to see what they had, but decided that since I didn't have a coat let alone an umbrella, I didn't want to stand in the rain waiting. And I wasn't sure I wanted to can anything anyway.

Bill and I went out later and we drove by to see if the line was shorter. It wasn't.

Still later, on our way home, we drove by again and there was no line at all. Ugh. Decisions, decisions. I didn't really have anything planned for the day, but I didn't really want to can anything either. In the end opportunity won, so we picked up

Cucumbers
Zucchini
Yellow squash
Bell peppers
Grape tomatoes
Small slicing tomatoes
50 lbs of Roma tomatoes

Since we already had most of these things from Bountiful Baskets, we got them for our neighbors. I was especially interested in the 50 lbs of Roma tomatoes.

I found a recipe for spaghetti sauce and started slicing and dicing. I used my food strainer (Vittorio strainer) and that made processing the tomatoes go much faster than I expected.

Would you be surprised to hear 50 pounds of Roma tomatoes makes only about 11 1/2 quarts of spaghetti sauce?

Grapefruit Jam

This morning I received an email with a link to Food in Jars' grapefruit jam. Grapefruit jam . . . the thought had never occurred to me! And I have a certain 25' grapefruit tree out in the back yard.

I picked nine fruits because the recipe said eight large and although mine are huge, the fruit inside is considerably smaller. I prepared them using my favorite method, then chopped them finely.

This part sounds weird to me, but the recipe said to save any seeds, tie them in a cloth, and cook them with the fruit because a little pectin will come out of the seeds. Most people don't use leftover fabric from sewing two skorts . . . but I do.

All you use is the fruit and some sugar, so here it all is in the pot ready to cook.

It took a lot longer to come up to 220 degrees than the 20 minutes the recipe indicated. It was more like 45 minutes, but by then it had thickened nicely. From the Food in Jars website I got the idea to use my electric oven probe/thermometer as a candy thermometer and it worked great since my candy thermometer curiously turned up broken awhile ago.

I didn't want to get my canner out for just three little jars, so after ladeling the jam into the jars (three, not four the recipe promised me--maybe I should have gotten ten or twelve grapefruits), I washed the pot out, got the water hot, put the three little jars in, then brought it all up to a boil.

Now I have three beautiful jars sitting on my counter.

It's the first time in twenty years I've made jam without packaged pectin and I'm ready to do it again.

Oh, and I've already heard the tops on all three jars click. They are sealed!

Lots of canning!

9+ hours at the sink yesterday yielded:

• 10 qts diced tomatoes
• 1 pt diced tomatoes
• 6 pints dilly beans
• 6 qts bread and butter pickles
• 7 pts relish

Here is what I made:

Don't those look good? 

Here is a look at the dilly beans with their cloves of garlic and fresh dill:

I see lots of soups and chilis in the coming months.  We've been eating a lot of vegetarian dinners lately and have been using more tomatoes than usual.

The relish was my only disappointment--and it was really time-intensive!  The recipe called for a cup of finely diced celery plus 2 teaspoons of celery seed.  It's just too much celery.  I wish I had either cut the seed amount in half or left it out all together.

Everything is packed away on shelves in my food storage closet. The pickles will be ready in about 2 months; the tomatoes and relish are ready now.

Cinnamon Roll Cake

Last night a friend posted this recipe on Facebook and I had a pan in the oven before we sat down to dinner.

Here's the recipe:

Cake:
3 c. flour
1/4 tsp.salt
1 c. sugar
4 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 c. milk
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 c. butter, melted

Topping:
1 c. butter, softened
1 c. brown sugar
2 Tbsp. flour
1 Tbsp. cinnamon

Mix everything together except for the butter. Slowly stir in the melted butter and pour into a greased 9x13 pan. For the topping, mix all the ingredients together until well combined. Drop evenly over the batter and swirl with a knife. Bake at 350 for 28-32 minutes.

Glaze:
2 c. powdered sugar
5 Tbsp. milk
1 tsp. vanilla


While warm drizzle the glaze over the cake.

Ready to go into the oven.

Before the first bite.

The only changes I made were to reduce the butter in the topping to only (cough, cough) one stick instead of two, and to use white whole wheat flour. I think the cake could use less butter, too.

Market on the Move

Here in Arizona we have an unusual situation. Fresh produce is trucked up from Mexico and is inspected in Nogales, Arizona. Sometimes for one reason or another, the produce does not continue on its journey north. It might have started to go bad, it might be too dirty or have scratches on the surface of the produce, or the trucking schedules might not be set to pick it up. When the warehouse is full and another load is on its way, the warehouse will take the produce to the landfull. About two full trailer loads get dumped every day.

Market on the Move is sponsored by a group called The 3000 Club. Each week three trucks pick up this donated produce and bring it to rotating sites in Tucson and Phoenix. For a $10 donation, people can choose up to 60 pounds of produce. The rest goes to food banks. This is a tiny fraction of what I brought home today:

I brought home:

25 lbs of Roma tomatoes
6 large salad tomatoes
3 quarts of grape tomatoes
1 basket of cherry tomatoes
2 kinds of hot peppers
10 green bell peppers
8 red bell peppers
10 zucchini
10 yellow squash
13 small ears of corn
5 eggplants

The Roma tomatoes turned into 13 pints of diced tomatoes and 9 pints of salsa, along with some of the peppers.

The eggplant and more bell peppers turned into a Spanish eggplant dish for the freezer. You'll see that on the menu a couple of times over the next month or two.

Tomorrow some of the zucchinis will find their way into zucchini muffins for the freezer for our regular Monday muffin breakfasts.

We gave away a lot of the produce to our neighbor and a friend who provides us with delicious bakery bread for free every 2 weeks.

It was a busy day, but I'm feeling very satisfied.

FHE treats from food storage

This recipe came across my email this morning and it looked like the perfect dessert to have after Family Home Evening.

Food Storage Chocolate Molten Cake

1 cup all-purpose flour (1/2 C. whole wheat flour + 1/2 C. All-purpouse flour)
3/4 cup sugar
6 tablespoons baking cocoa, divided
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup 2% milk (3 T. dry non-instant powder milk or 1/3 C. instant powder milk + 1/2 C. water)
2 tablespoons canola oil (2 T. bean puree)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup packed brown sugar
1-3/4 cups hot water
Whipped cream or ice cream, optional

In a large bowl, combine the flour, sugar, 2 tablespoons cocoa, baking powder and salt. Stir in the milk, oil and vanilla until smooth.

Spread in an ungreased 9-in. square baking pan. Combine brown sugar and remaining cocoa; sprinkle over batter. Pour hot water over all; do not stir.

Bake at 350° for 35-40 minutes. Serve warm. Top with whipped cream or ice cream if desired.

Crystal’s Tip: If you’re using a glass pan, decrease your cooking temperature to 325. Why? Glass bakes hotter than metal and you won’t get that burnt chocolate taste.

It was a little too sweet, but was delicious!

The recipe is from Everyday Food Storage.

Freezer dinners

Tonight was Chicken Supreme and I got the recipe from a site that focuses on Once A Month Cooking, so I knew I could easily freeze this dinner. I doubled it and put it in medium containers instead of large ones, so I got three dinners out of the double recipe. We ate one and I froze the other two. That gives me either two dinners without having to think much, or two dinners to give away when a need arises, or one of each.

A sweet treat

Caroline wrote up her own recipe for apple crisp, inspired, I'm sure, by the 3 1/2 pound bag of apples I got at the store yesterday. I thought it was a good idea, but I suggested she use a quart jar of home-canned apple pie filling I had in the pantry. She made it herself and I hear it was delicious!

How I made flour today

It's Friday--pizza night of course. I'm serving more healthful foods these days, partly because of the diet I'm on. (Yeah, the whole family gets in on it.) In order to make sure our flour is fresh, I buy only one 5 lb bag at a time, which means I run out now and then. No problem, because I have hard winter wheat in a 25 lb bag in my food storage, so I can just mill whatever I want whenever I need it. Since the mill sounds like a really loud vaccuum cleaner, I always mill my wheat outside in the carport. The temperature was 75F (24C) today, so no problem to do that!

American kitchens

From nbc.com:

The average American kitchen always has ...

1. Yogurt
2. Eggs
3. Cheddar cheese
4. Soy sauce
5. Solid pack pumpkin

But never has ...

1. Acai berry juice
2. Fresh artichokes
3. Fresh turnips
4. Mincemeat in any form -- can, jar or package
5. Almonds

I have mincemeat and almonds, as well as all the items on the first list. I've never purchased acai berry juice or turnips, although I always buy a dinner's worth of artichokes when they are in season.

Double treat for me this week

On Thursday my ladies' group at church is having a pressure cooking demonstration. I've had two pressure cookers over the years. One went into the yard sale after I was thisclose to not getting my dinner out of it (ultra-tight lid) and the other was a cool Brazilian one I had that over time stopped sealing. No seal, no pressure.

Everyday Food Storage has a video that shows how easy it is to use a modern electric pressure cooker. If I can figure out where I could store such an appliance, I think it will appear on my Christmas wish list.

The double in this treat is that the same page has a recipe for low-fat harvest pumpkin brownies made from food storage items. I am so into pumpkin this time of year! In fact, when I make these brownies I'll probably have to call them Jack 'O' Lantern brownies because that is where the pumpkin I'm using came from. Let's just say the day after Halloween 20 neat packages of homemade pumpkin puree made it into the freezer. ;-) This recipe uses bean puree instead of added fat, so I guess that makes it a triple for me.

source
So check out this page for the brownie recipe and a video on how to use an electric pressure cooker.


Linked to Everyday Food Storage.

Super bargains

I'm back in the sale/coupon groove again after taking off for vacation. Couponing isn't really a casual hobby if you really want to save money. I don't just cut out a coupon here and there and take it off to the grocery store *if* I remember to. Nope, I have a system of a small file box of extraneous coupons and careful stacks of the Sunday newspaper advertising inserts in my office. I don't cut them out until I know I'm going to need them.

How do I know if I'm going to need them? I go to afullcup.com and I find out what coupons I'm going to need and where they are. THEN I cut them out of the advertising inserts or print them off the Internet. It's just easier that way. The extraneous coupons in my file come from the little blinking machines in the store, magazines, inside product packages, and previously printed off the Internet. I'd say 60-75% of my grocery store shopping is done by looking for a sale and also by looking for a sale and then matching a coupon to that sale to really get rock-bottom prices.

My first stop yesterday was at Fry's. It's a Kroger-family store.
Pineapples $1 each -$.50/1 mq x2 Fry's doubled each coupon to $1=FREE.
Brownie mix $2.49 each -$.75/2 doubled to $1, -$.75/2 ecoupon with a $1 bonus from the ecoupon company, -$1/1 Betty Crocker mq because I complained about a product's quality.

However, Fry's made a mistake in my favor. They charged me the regular price for the brownie mix so I marched myself (and three dds) right over to the customer service counter and asked for the correct price. For their mistake they gave me one box for free and refunded the difference. I walked out with the four items free and 28 cents extra in my pocket thanks to the coupons and the free item.

Albertson's was playing games this week. Hold on to your hat and I'll explain this one. Buy 10 Kellogg's/Morning Star/Keebler products for $3/each and get $10 off your order (=$2/each). Then you get a $10 Catalina coupon good on your next order at Albertson's (=$1/each). THEN you use coupons. I mostly had $1/2 mqs on the cereal and $1/1 for the Morning Star items.

I had coupons for all the other items as well, either Albertson's newspaper coupons or Albertson's coupons + mqs. My total for all of this plus 2 gallons of milk was a hair over $37 AND I still have a $10 Catalina coupon for my next trip.

So here are the ups and downs of this kind of shopping. The downside is that coupons tend to be on processed, packaged food. The pineapples were a rarity in the couponing world. Another downside is that on a trip-by-trip basis or even a weekly basis, the food I buy is lopsided. Lots of cereal this week. No soup, beans, eggs, and so forth. Because of that, I devote a lot of space to food storage. Over several months' time, it all evens out, but I have to be able to store it to have a balanced supply of food at any given time.

The upside is that my family likes processed food and I balance it with homemade bread, cheese and other dairy products, lots of fresh fruits and vegatables, and meat. The other obvious upside is that my cost for feeding my family is quite low and I always have lots of food on hand in the house.

Top 10 reasons I don't have my food storage

10. My neighbors have a TWO year supply! No, they don't. They don't have any food. Did you know that 85% of the members of the church don't have any food storage at all? If your idea of food storage is to eat someone else’s food………..this is a really bad plan.

9. I've paid tithing for 20 years...the church can give me a little food. Many members believe that when the times get hard, the church is going to come through like Joseph in Egypt. Absolutely not true. All the church storehouses and welfare farms across the country would only feed 4% of the members of the church. The church has been asking YOU to store food for 75 years. They're NOT storing food for you. Thus, another bad plan.

8. I'm moving in with my children/parents! Really....that’s just a bad plan all by itself. But it points out that most members don't have a year's supply because they're PLANNING on eating someone else'sf ood! Of course, since no one HAS any food, we have yet another bad plan.

7. I have a year's supply...and the bullets to go with it! I've heard time and again, "How dumb is that to go to all the time and expense of getting food...just to have some guy with a gun come and shoot my family to take it away?" Here's a better question. Are you afraid of the guy with the gun? Or are you more afraid of BECOMING the guy with the gun? What would you do if your children were starving to death? Would you lie? Cheat? Steal? Would you shoot your neighbor for his food? I guarantee....if you were watching your children starving to death, you would do anything you had to to keep them alive. If you don't have your year's supply, you are putting yourself in danger of losing not only your temporal salvation, but your spiritual salvation as well. So far, all the reasons we don't have our food storage involve eating someone else's food. Please, don't put your family's temporal salvation in other people's hands. No one is storing food for you. Not your neighbors, not the government...not even the church.

6. The boat and the 4 wheelers are taking up all my storage space! (priorities!)

5. 3 letters....Y2K. Ok, that's 2 letters and a number....but they're always making way too much out of everything! This is never going to happen!” (Every prophecy that has ever been given WILL happen.)

4. If anything DOES happen, the government will be here within hours! (insert laughter) Did you know the government has been telling us that we need to have food storage? They're actually CALLING it food storage! We now have the government telling us to store food, water, medicines...whatever we will need to be able to stay in our homes for several months.

3. I can't afford scrapbooking AND food storage. The average food storage can cost as little as a dollar a day. We live in the richest society in the history of the world, and while there are cases where money may be a problem, most of the time it is a matter of priorities. We have chosen bigger homes, nicer cars, more tv's, computers, vacations ...everything is more important than our food storage. If Iasked, "Who has a cell phone?" most of you would say yes. You pay at least $30 a month to have a cell phone....that's about a dollar a day...the cost of one year's supply of food for your child. Is your cell phone really more important than your child's temporal salvation? You have to make food storage a priority.

2. I'm waiting for the cannery to sell Papa John's dehydrated pizza! Food storage has always had a stigma attached to it. If it's not wheat, beans and powdered milk, it's not food storage. With the system I use, food storage can be sweet and sour chicken, tamale pie, chile and cornbread, beef stew, shepherd's pie, minestrone...even chocolate chip cookies! Your imagination (and your pocketbook) are the only limitations you have.

And the #1 reason why I don't have my year's supply of food? A year?? I thought it was 72 hours!!

This is a joke of course. I actually do have food storage and in fact have been living mostly on the in-house (vs. long-term storage things like wheat, flour, macaroni, beans, etc) storage for months. My husband was unemployed and not having to go to the store very often was very helpful for our budget. Once the unemployment period was over we knew we'd be moving and I don't want to have to transport any more food than I have to, so I'm continuing to use up as much in-house storage as I can.

The Christ of Church of Jesus Latter-day Saints has recommended its members store food, water, and other items, including money, against future problems such as an economic downturn, natural disaster, trucking strike, or anything else that could limit our ability to take care of our families. There is a webpage that gives lots of information and suggestions as to how a family can do that. Lots of good advice there.

My family doesn't have everything it could have, but we could definitely go several months without going to the store and without hurting too bad. We could go at least six months with a limited diet, and probably longer with a very limited diet.