Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies

I'm either a genius, or I'm certifiable.  I decided to make cookies this afternoon with no recipe whatsoever and weird ingredients on top of it.  And they got right on the first try!

I made a second batch tonight, just to make sure the spices were right, but they were good on the first try.

Enjoy!

1 disc Mexican Chocolate (chopped) - like Nestle's Abuelita
1/3 cup Powdered Sugar1 stick Butter

3/4 tsp Ground  Cinnamon1/4 tsp Ancho Chili Powder1/4 tsp Ground Cayenne (optional)

1/3 cup Dark Cocoa Powder - like Hershey's Special Dark Cocoa

2 eggs1/2 Tbsp vanilla

1 1/2 cup All Purpose Flour

Preheat oven to 350.

Cream Chocolate, Powdered Sugar and Butter.  Add spices.  Add Cocoa Powder

Add Eggs, Vanilla.

Add Flour

Drop small spoonfuls on parchment paper, press flat with fork.

These cookies can be placed very close on baking sheet, they don't melt or spread.

Bake 7-9 minutes or until set up and dry looking on top.

Don't pay $8 for Abuelita without checking Dollar General first.  Seriously.  It's like $3 at Dollar General.

Gramma's Hamburger Barbeque, otherwise known as Sloppy Joes

One of my family's favorite meals is Gramma's hamburger barbeque.  It's basically sloppy joes without the can of Manwich.

I spice them up a little compared to what Gramma makes, but that's because we love all kinds of spices and seasonings at our house.  Even still they're super easy and the recipe scales up well for sitting in a crock pot all afternoon at a party and reheats well the next day or the day after.

1 lb. Ground Beef, Chicken, or whatever
6 oz Tomato Paste
1/3 cup Ketchup
2 Tbsp Yellow Mustard
1/3 cup Brown Sugar
salt and pepper to taste
Chopped Onion (optional)
other seasonings to taste (we like garlic or garlic powder and crushed red pepper)

Brown ground beef.  Add salt and pepper to taste and chopped onion if you're using any.  Depending on the fat content of your ground beef, you may need to add some water along with the rest of the ingredients to help them mix better.

Add Tomato Paste and stir well.  Add a couple tablespoons of water if mixture is too thick.

Add Ketchup and Mustard and stir well.  Add a couple tablespoons of water if too thick.

Add Brown Sugar and other spices.  Allow to simmer for a few minutes before serving.

My family always just served this on hamburger buns, but Dave prefers it open face on Garlic Cheese Toast.

Roasted Garlic Butter

Dave asked for Garlic Butter a couple weeks ago.  So when I roasted the garlic for our garlic jelly, I went ahead and roasted twice as much as I needed.  The other day, Dave picked up a couple of steaks and we thought that the Garlic Butter would make a good finishing butter for them.


8 oz of heavy whipping cream
4 oz of garlic
salt and pepper to taste.

Set cream out on counter for about an hour to allow it to warm to room temperature, or at least close.  (The only really different between whipped cream and butter is temperature and no one wants Garlic Whipped Cream, not even Dave.)

Roast garlic at about 350 for 10 or 15 minutes, or until cooked through.  You don't need to peel the cloves, you can squeeze the garlic out once it roasts, but you need to at least separate them.  I peeled them because I like the crispy, dark flecks you get that way.

Once cream is warm and garlic is cool, pour cream into food processor.  You can either pulse it for 45 seconds or so at a time, or just turn the processor on and keep an eye on it.  It will start to look a lot like whipped cream, but slightly yellower.  As soon as it separates into butter and butter milk (Trust me, you'll know.) stop the food processor and drain off the buttermilk.  Press the butter against the side of the processor bowl to squeeze out as much of the rest of the buttermilk as you can.

If you let the processor go too long, the buttermilk will be whipped back into the butter and is very difficult to separate back out.  It can be done, but it's very time consuming.

Remove butter from processor bowl and give it a quick rinse and wipe to get the remaining buttermilk out, and put the butter back in.  Add garlic and salt and pepper to taste and pulse in the processor until you have an even consistency.  (You'll probably need more salt that you think,)

Enjoy!

Oh, Darling, yes we can can.

It's been an epic year for canning at our house.  And with the projects Dave's mom and I have been working on in addition to ours, the cabinet is getting full pretty quick.  As I'm writing we've got hot pink applesauce made with cinnamon imperials in the waterbath.

We split the tomatoes and plain applesauce between everyone, but ended up with a bunch of jars of each, and then there's everything Dave and I did.

Our Tally this year so far:

Raspberry Wine Jelly - 10 4oz jars
Garlic Jelly - 6 half pints
Currant Jam - 5 4oz jars
No Sugar Strawberry Jam - 6 half pints
Strawberry Balsamic Jam - 6 half pints
Pickled Garlic - 7 half pints
Pickled Grapes - 1 half pints and 3 4oz jars
Garlic Green Hot Sauce - 1 half pint and 6 4oz jars
Tomato Red Hot Sauce - 1 half pint and 6 4oz jars
Mom's Apple Pie in a Jar - 6 half pints
Cinnamon Red Hot Applesauce - 7 pints  


And then there's the two big bags of pears and, I suspect quite a few more apples to deal with.  WOOOOO!  We're going to be busy.

Plus we're still working on eating things we canned last year.

(FYI - I am not willing to invite total strangers into my house, but as time allows, I will happily teach friends to can or make jam, pickles or applesauce.  I will probably ask you to buy your own jars, though.)

Corn and Tomato Salad

So I got, roughly, a quart of small, delicious, red and yellow tomatoes from someone at work.

Then, later, we realized it was 9pm and we hadn't had dinner yet.  I looked in the pantry and in the fridge and came up with this.

1 quart (give or take) assorted tomatoes, chopped

1 15oz can black olives, drained

1 15oz can black beans, rinsed and drained

1 16oz bag frozen corn (I guess you could used drained, canned as well, but this is what we had)

2 Tbsp Lime Juice

3 Tbsp Vegetable Oil

2 Tbsp Arizona Dreaming or other taco seasoning

Salt to taste

Dave says it needs onions, so Optional:

Chopped red onion, or diced garlic

Gently toss Tomatoes, Olives, Beans and Corn (and Onion).  Mix Lime Juice, Oil, Seasoning thoroughly and coat veggies.  Add salt to taste.

Enjoy!

Frying Pan Apple Crisp

So, this is one of our favorite "treat" breakfasts.  It's made all from things we usually have just lying around, and doesn't take all that long to prepare.  We love it equally with apples or pears, but will a little adjustment of the cooking times, I bet it would work with peaches or blueberries.

So, here we go.

1 cup oats
1/3 cup flour
1/3 - 1/2 cup brown sugar
cinnamon to taste
1 stick butter, cut in half

4 average Apples or Pears, peeled and cored, cut in bite-sized chunks

Melt 1/2 stick of butter in your frying pan, once the pan is coated, toss in the apple chunks.

While apples cook, mix up the Flour, Oats, Brown Sugar, Cinnamon and remaining butter to make crumbs.  Mixture should be very crumbly, it doesn't need to hold together.  (I did use some extra sugar in this batch, the apples I had were Lodi Tarts and they lived up to their name quite nicely!





Once the apples are beginning to cook down and become translucent, push them together in the center of your pan (if you're using a giant pan like I did, otherwise, they're probably already there).







Top with crumbs and cover.












Don't worry about peeking now and then, it won't hurt anything.  Once the steam has worked its way up through all the crumbs, and the brown sugar is starting to caramelize, give it a good stir and let it cook a few minutes more.








 When it looks like this, ENJOY!  We eat it just like this, but it's equally delicious with whipped cream or ice cream.  It makes about 4 servings, or as we like to say, just enough for us to have breakfast.

Homemade Sausage

And there was this.

No, the peanut butter didn't go in the sausage, since that seems to be what everyone wants to know.  I finally got to play with the sausage stuffer that I've had for years.  (We've used the grinder lots, just not the sausage tube.)

We used a pork shoulder roast and natural hog casing.  We decided to flavor it with Smoked Sundried Tomatoes, Asiago cheese and about a bulb and a half of garlic.  We also added a pretty good amount of dried basil, salt and black pepper.  The hardest part of making it, for us anyway, was the fact that we couldn't taste it as we went.  Dave and I both cook largely by smell and taste, rather than any kind of recipe or measurements.

All in all, in turned out delicious and we got almost 5 pounds.  The casings burst and shrank and we're not entirely certain why, and it was dry and crumbly because we didn't have enough fat, BUT it was delicious.  We got all the flavoring and seasoning proportions right, and by dumb luck since we decided to try this without any kind of recipe on the first go.

In hindsight, if we would have looked up some recipes, we would have know about adding extra fat, but if the outcome is tasty, who cares if you learned the hard way.

We'll definitely make sausage again, but we'll probably stick to tested recipes for the next couple just to get a better feel for it.  AND because we want to make bangers and that calls for breadcrumbs and things so it's a whole different thing again.

CHEEEESE!!!

http://fhif.wikia.com/wiki/Cheese

CHHEEEESE!

I love cheese.  Making cheese, eating cheese, cooking with cheese, sharing cheese.  But let's talk about making cheese.

I can't say that I have a lot of experience making cheese, but we use this recipe for Farmer's Cheese to make a boatload of different things.  It's super easy to make, the blogger calls it "Easiest Cheese Recipe" and it really is.

Here's the breakdown:

• Boil a gallon of milk.
• Add 1 cup of cider vinegar.
• Strain out all your curds.
• Add 1 Tablespoon of salt.
• Squeeze out a lot of the liquid.
• Add whatever you want.
• Squeeze out the rest of the liquid.

TADA!  Cheese.

You get about a pound of cheese from your gallon of milk, so unless you add expensive other stuff, this costs about $4.  I happen to think $4 is a pretty good price for delicious cheese.

Usually we add some dried oregano (about a teaspoon) and sundried tomatoes (cut in little pieces, maybe an ounce?) but this weekend we had a whole bunch of stuff we wanted to try, so I divided the pound into 3 more or less equal amounts and made 3 totally different cheeses.

From Left to Right:  Fresh Garlic and Oregano, Brown Sugar Cinnamon, Honey Raisin

The beauty of the Farmer's Cheese recipe is that it makes a savory cheese as easily as a sweet one.

The Garlic has a healthy sprinkling of oregano and 4 cloves of fresh garlic.  We crumbled it into our rice for dinner tonight, and it was delicious.

The Brown Sugar is a little over a half teaspoon of Korintje Cinnamon (which is my new favorite) and a small handful of Brown Sugar.  I'm not gonna lie, we ate the whole container with a fork while we were watching tv 2 nights ago.  It was absolutely lovely.

The Honey Raisin has healthy dollop of honey and a handful of Golden Raisins.  We're really happy with it, and I had to take it from Obes before he ate it all.

So I would call all three a success.  Making tiny amounts of a bunch of different flavors required a little more planning than I usually do ahead of time, but it was worth it to know that if any of it turned out awful, we wouldn't be wasting much.

Creamy Chipotle Tomato Soup

So we made grownup grilled cheeses tonight - multi-grain bread, sharp cheddar, bacon, sliced tomato, and Dave wanted tomato soup to go with it.  I was going to just pick up some tomato soup, but everything was either, you know, Campbell's, or super expensive.  Like $4 a serving.

This is what I came up with.

16 oz. Chicken Broth
32 oz. can of Crushed Tomatoes
1/2 packet of Chipotle Taco Seasoning
dollop of Heavy Cream (less than 1/4 cup)

Heat Chicken Broth and Tomatoes over medium heat until bubbly.  Add Chipotle Seasoning and reduce heat to low.  Add Heavy Cream.  Add more Chipotle Seasoning if desired.

Cookie Dough Bites (Homemade Candy!)

So I decided I want to add a few more new candies to the homemade candy arsenal.  We already do Double Coconut Eggs, Peanut Butter Eggs, Buttercreams in several flavors, Peppermint Patties and Cordial Cherries.  I came across a recipe for cookie dough bars the other day and thought that might be a fun addition to the list, rolled in balls and dipped in chocolate instead of cut into squares.

I picked up mini-chips and threw them together, but I thought I could taste the flour too much, so I added more vanilla and some Korintje cinnamon, since I usually double the vanilla and add a bit of cinnamon when I made chocolate chip cookies.  But it still wasn't right.  It was good, but not what I was looking for.

Last night I tried again.  I wanted something that had the texture of a buttercream and the taste of the Nestle Tollhouse dough.  I started with my buttercream recipe and added the things that make a Tollhouse cookie so distinctive - the brown sugar, vanilla and of course semi-sweet chips.

I'll probably add these to the assortment of candies I make at Christmas time.

Here we go!

1 12oz bag Mini Chips

2 sticks Butter (at room temperature)

1 cup Brown Sugar (packed)

3 cups Powdered Sugar

1/2 cup Cornstarch or Arrowroot Powder

lots of Vanilla Extract (a Tablespoon or so, to taste)

a light sprinkle of Cinnamon (optional)

Candy Melts or additional Chocolate for coating.

Cream Butter and Brown Sugar until fluffy.  Add Powdered Sugar and Arrowroot (or Cornstarch) 1/2 cup at a time, mixing thoroughly in between each 1/2 cup.  Add Vanilla and Cinnamon.  Blend again.

Add entire bag of Mini Chips.

Refrigerate 15 minutes to make dough easier to handle.  Roll into bite size pieces.  Melt Candy Melts or Chocolate according to package instructions.  Coat each piece and place on wax paper to let coating set.  Place in refrigerator to speed setting.

Enjoy!

Caprese Ravioli

I love delicious handmade food.  I love delicious food that takes hours to prepare.  But you know what?  I also love delicious food that only looks/tastes like it took hours to prepare.

I made a recipe from some awful talkshow the other day.  (The Chew, maybe?  I don't know, it has Mario Batali and Michael Symon.)  But anyway, it was delicious.  And they used wanton wrappers instead of making pasta from scratch for the ravioli and it worked out really well, except you have to be SUPER careful of them sticking to each other.

What I love best about this recipe is that you can go totally nuts and make everything from scratch, hell, even the pasta if you wanted to, or you can do what I did, and stop by Wegman's on your way home and pick it up already half made.

So, let's get started!

1 package of Wonton Wrappers (approx 1/2 lb, otherwise you'll need 2 packs)

Roasted Tomatoes with Garlic cut in half inch or smaller pieces (about 1/3 cup)

1/4 cup Basil Pesto

8 oz. Whole Milk Ricotta Cheese

1 Egg

1 Tbsp(ish) of Water

Mix Pesto and Ricotta until a uniform brilliant green,  Taste it, if the pesto flavor doesn't come through to your liking, add more.

Beat Egg and Water in a small dish or cup to make an Egg Wash for sealing your ravioli.

Working on wax paper or parchment so you don't make a giant mess, layout a single layer of Wonton Wrappers with a bit of space in between.  (I worked with 6 at a time.)  

Place roughly 1/2 tsp of Pesto Ricotta mixture on each Wonton Wrapper.  Top with a small piece of Roasted Tomato.  Brush Egg wash around outside edge of Wonton Wrapper and gently fold in half, pressing lightly on the edges to seal the delicious fillings in.  (I fold mine on a diagonal because I like the shape, you probably only need egg wash on two sides of the Wonton if you do it this way.)

Set finished raviolis to the side in single layers on more wax paper or parchment.

Boil gently in a large pot of water until the raviolis float.

While ravioli are boiling, heat olive oil or more pesto in a skillet.  As raviolis cook, transfer directly into warm oil/pesto and toss lightly to coat.

Garnish with pine nuts, fresh basil, more roasted tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, etc.  

If you're like me, and you went nuts and doubled the recipe, freeze them in single layers for later.

Enjoy!

Tzatziki Salad

So I got a basic Tzatziki recipe a couple of years ago, but instead of making it as a dip, I stirred in all kinds of delicious things and put it inside of mini pitas.  Awesome, absolutely fantastic.  Also delicious if you use cucumber slices as chips and scoop up piles of it.

If you don't know what Tzatziki is, it's a yogurt based sauce with dill and garlic and lemon that you might come across in a Greek Restaurant or pita place.  It's super flavorful and surprising and wonderful.

16 oz Plain Yogurt, Greek Yogurt or Goat's Milk Yogurt
4 Tbsp Olive Oil
2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
4 -6 minced Garlic Cloves (trust me, fresh is worth the effort)
1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Black Pepper
Fresh or Dried Dill to taste

1 medium Cucumber, chopped
1 handful Sun-Dried Tomatoes, cut in small pieces
6 oz crumbed Feta Cheese
1 cup sliced or chopped Assorted Olives (I like the Olive mix from Wegmans.)

Whole Wheat Mini Pitas, Sliced Cucumbers or other chips or crackers to serve with.

To Make Tzatziki:

Combine Yogurt and Olive oil in food processor or with whisk.  Stir in Lemon Juice and Garlic and mix thoroughly.  Add Salt, Pepper, and Dill and stir again.

To Make Salad

Once Tzatziki is well blended stir in Cucumber, Sun-Dried Tomatoes, Feta and Olives and mix well.


Stuff in Pitas, spoon onto Cucumber slices or scoop up with chips or crackers.

Enjoy!


Notes:

• You can use Garlic Powder, but fresh tastes SOOOO much better.  Likewise, fresh Dill is better than dried for this.
• Tonight we tried this with Smoked Sun-Dried Tomatoes, and it was fastastic,  The earthy flavor of the smoke makes a lovely counterpoint to the brightness of the garlic and lemon.
• If you don't have a Wegman's (and you really should, everyone should), you can use an assortment of green, black and kalamata olives.

Sweet and Spicy Bulgar Wheat Salad

2 cups Bulgar Wheat
1 whole Cucumber
1 Red Bell Pepper
1 Fresno Hot Pepper
2 slices of Honeydew
Pomegrate White Balsamic Vinegar
2 Tbsp Butter
Salt, Pepper to taste

Prepare Bulgar Wheat - combine 2 cups Bulgar Wheat, 4 1/2 cups of water, salt, pepper, butter in a saucepot, cook over medium-high heat until water is absorbed and Bulgar Wheat is tender.

While Bulgar Wheat cooks, dice/chop the Veggies and Honeydew.  Finely chop the Hot Pepper.  Cut the Cucumber, Honeydew and Bell Pepper into roughly 3/8" chunks.

Once Bulgar Wheat is cooled at least partially, mix in Honeydew and Veggies, season with Vinegar to taste.  (We used a little over a 1/4 cup.)

Note:  I think you could effectively use any light, sweet vinegar, but believe it or not, Pomegranate is what we had laying around.  Rice Vinegar, Plain White Balsamic, other Fruit Infused Vinegar would work well.

Hippy Trick: Vinegar Bath

Alright, so it's not a great picture, it's from my crummy cell phone, but bear with me here.  If you've found this post, you have internet and that means you have to have heard of using white vinegar for cleaning.

But did you know how easy it can be?

I hate very few things in this word, but one of the is mineral build up, on everything, because I have city water.  The tub faucet, the shower head, the kitchen sink sprayer, even my big stock pots I use for waterbath canning.

Easy fix?  White vinegar!

The picture above is my sink sprayer soaking in a glass of white vinegar.  I don't have a pic, but upstairs, the shower head is wrapped in a plastic baggie full of vinegar.

Let it soak a couple hours, good as new!

As for the stockpot?  2 Tablespoons of white vinegar every time I waterbath.  No more build up!

Just as Easy as the Box Mac and Cheese

So, I had been doing really well posting recipes on a pretty regular basis, but as some of you may know, I've been dealing with some health problems - fighting with anemia and recovering from a related surgery.  I'm still a lot more tired than I should be most days, but I"m starting to get my feet back under me and the fact that the weather is starting to turn warm is a huge help.

Tonight I decided to make Dave mac and cheese, which I haven't made except out of a box since before my battle with anemia started.  And I think it's about time I shared the recipe.

I've often thought that a great mac and cheese doesn't need to be super complicated to be delicious.  So many of the recipes I've found online call for eggs and breadcrumbs and flour and so on and so on.  Now, I'm all for a crunchy crust on top or the addition of some bacon, but mac and cheese doesn't need to have 20 ingredients.  Without further delay, here's the recipe, which as I told Julie years ago, works just like the box stuff!

1 lb. of pasta (I like gemelli instead of plain elbows)
1 stick of butter
1 12 oz can of evaporated milk
4 cups of shredded cheese (I like mozzarella or a mix of mozzarella mild cheddar)

Prepare pasta according to directions on package,  Drain thoroughly.

Stir in evaporated milk and butter until noodles are well coated.

Add cheese gradually, stirring well after each cup or so until add cheese is added and mixed throughout.

Salt and Pepper to taste.

* Recipe can be easily halved, or doubled (I've done both.)

* Consider using Extra Sharp Cheddar for some bite with a little Monterrey Jack mixed to help it stay creamy.


If you find any other good combinations, please let me know!

We have KRAUT!

So a couple months ago, we went to the farmer's market and brought home more cabbages than I could carry for about $10.  (Seriously, Dave had to carry them to and from the car.)  We feed them through the shredding blade of the food processor, along with a half a red cabbage from my Mom, by way of my Gramma, with more determination than you can possibly imagine.

This was set to be Sauerkraut, Round 2.

The first batch didn't have enough salt, as best as we can figure and when it got a little mold on top, which in and of itself isn't really a problem - you just skim it off, the mold quickly got below the brine level, below the weighted plate in the crock and into the cabbage before we realized what was happening.

Now if you're not a fan of sauerkraut because you think it's gross, you can't imagine how disgusting it is when it gets rotten like that.  If you are a fan of sauerkraut, let me say, the blue mold was a sight to behold.  And did it ever smell bad.

So this time around, we added way more salt.  I mean, like a pound of it.  We checked on it more often, We skimmed the beginnings of mold off and checked it some more.  We skimmed more mold and checked again and I'm happy to say, that today when we took the weighted plate off, what was underneath was in fact, actually sauerkraut!  It's a delightful shade of pink from the red cabbage and very salty, but it's sauerkraut!

I'm really excited, and actually need to finish this because the waterbath is finally hot enough to can it up!

Final Totals:  14 quarts in jars and 3 more in the freezer.

It's Not Me, It's You. Really.

Dear Facebook-

It's taken me a long time to make this decision, but I think we need to break up.  I'm just not happy with you anymore.  I'm not getting a fair deal in this relationship, it's all give give give and nothing in return.  You've become that shitty friend, the one that no one likes, but you have to keep him around because there's a few specific people we really do love, that we can get in touch with, except through you.

You don't keep your promises.  I've told you time and time again, please show me my "Most Recent Stories".  I don't give a shit if 87 people like the picture my cousins posted of their kids last week, I want to see the picture they posted earlier today.  And you do let me switch, I get a notice and link asking me to switch back.

You're wasting my time.  I've been fighting to build up likes for my blog page, but you keep changing the algorithm so that fewer and fewer people see what I have to say.  I started that page so that I could post about my needlework with people who are interested without bothering the people who don't care.

And then there's the forcing me to befriend strangers just so I can pass time with a few silly games.  What if I just want to play a silly game?

Oh, and the wanting to use my stuff without asking.  I get that you make your money from advertising, but GET YOUR OWN DAMN PICTURES!  I don't want to you use my pictures for your purposes, but I can't keep in touch with out of state relatives without giving you permission to use my photos and artwork for whatever the hell you want.  Talk about being unfair.

Not to mention, the intentionally screwing with everyone's feelings all summer.  Or am I the only one who remembers the outrageous "social experiment" this summer.  Did you end getting sued over that?  Did your research partners get in trouble for violating federal standards?  Wouldn't know if you get your news from what people are sharing through you.  Scrubbed it from existence didn't you.

That being said, I can't just delete my account.  I have friends a zillion miles away that it's impossible to keep in touch with any other way.  I have a few people who like to read my blog (which doesn't get nearly enough attention since you came into my life) who don't remember to check, so I want to let them know when I update.  There's Skye Taylor's Art Forum, which is an amazing supportive place, and I'm not willing to part with that.

But I don't think you'll be seeing me post much.  I'd rather give my time to my art.  To some writing with a little more substance.  No more games.  I'll spend that time on writing some substance for my blog, painting and fixing things around my house and cooking fancy dinners for my sweetie.

I'll be checking in from time to time.  Not to see how you're doing ,but to catch up with the friends I can only talk with you around.  I'm sure you won't even notice I'm gone.  You're pretty self-centered.  Actually, you remind me a lot of my ex, and I don't need that in my life.

...and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.

or more like a big guy with a ponytail.  lol.

Years ago, my Grampa planted a couple of pear trees.  One of them is a dwarf pear of some kind and the other is, I think, a variety of seckel pear.  But Dave loves pears, and apparently we're the only ones who want to see the pears actually get eaten.

So, we went up 2 separate afternoons, and with some help from my dad and my sister, we picked all the pears (although there were only about 6 on the dwarf tree) and brought them home.  We ended up with 5 grocery bags of pears.  Not produce bags, grocery bags.

We made 4 jars of brandied pears.  We made 4 1/2 pints of pear butter with orange and ginger.  We made 6 jars of spiced pears.  We made 5 more jars of brandied pears.  We made 7 jars of cinnamon pear jam.  We canned pears in heavy syrup and I made a pear betty.  Unfortunately, we didn't get through all the pears before they started going bad, but we got all but the last 2 dozen or so preserved.

We're pretty proud of ourselves.  It was a huge project and took most of our free time for almost 2 weeks.  We ran out of canning jars.  We ran out of lids.  We ran out of space in the pantry.

Recipes:

Most of the recipes came from this site - Oregon State Extension Office.

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/fch/sites/default/files/documents/sp_50_678_preservingpears.pdf

Spiced Pears from Fresh Preserving 

Pear Jam from SUREJELL (we just added about a 1/2 Tablespoon of Cinnamon.)

Not that I expect you all to run out and get a whole tree worth of pears, but we are really enjoying these recipes, and in fact we just drank the leftover syrup from the brandied pears, and I thought I'd share them with everyone.

So, it's kind of an exciting week here.

I'm making plans to have a bunch of people over to make applesauce and learn canning basics late in October.

I'm working on plans to get a weekly Stitch N Bitch going.  I finally finished both of the baby afghans.

We're little by little getting some pretty major household projects done, and the sauerkraut seems to be working out much better this time around.

We've been out and about a lot and my work schedule has been pretty unpredictable, so there hasn't been much cooking happening, but at least we using things we've canned.

We need to decide what we're doing with our pears, too, so if anyone has any ideas, let us know.  We're thinking pear sauce and brandied pears, but I need to find out if I can preserve either of those because we'll have enough pears, until all is said and done, that we'll need to do something to save some of them for later.

Any ideas?  Let me know!

Bok Choy Fridge Pickles

We've been making loads of pickles this year.  Mostly cucumber fridge pickles.   Some processed ones.  A couple jars of pickled onions.  Then I saw on the Fresh Preserving Website...

BOK CHOY!

Bok Choy?  Really?  I like bok choy.  Let's try it.

So, I made it up as I went and this is what I got.

3 clean Pint Jars
1 head Bok Choy
1/3 tsp Chinese 5 Spice Powder (per jar)
1/4 tsp Crushed Red Pepper (per jar)

2 cups White Vinegar
1 cup Water
1 Tbsp Sugar
1 Tbsp Pickling or Non-Iodized Salt
1/2 piece Fresh Ginger Grated
2 cloves Garlic

Chop the Bok Choy stalks into roughly bite-sized pieces (save the leafy parts for stir fry!), and pack into pint jars, leaving about 1/2" headspace.  Add 5 Spice Powder and Crushed Red Pepper

Combine remaining ingredients in a small saucepan and heat until boiling.  Pour hot liquid over Bok Choy in jars, leaving about 1/2" headspace.  Make sure to distribute garlic between jars.  Add lids and refrigerate for a few days.

Enjoy!