Pink Applesauce and more!

Yep, my applesauce really did come out pink!  It's a blend of pink fleshed and white fleshed apples from our trees, and we ended up with 18 jars!!!.

Now we don't just have apple trees, we have a variety of different fruits, but they're really just baby trees that are starting to produce more than we can eat fresh, so I have to find more ways to use and preserve them. Before making the applesauce above,  The pears were getting way too ripe, so I made spiced pear butter and spiced pear sauce, and before that it was the pickles, so the cupboard is getting filled up!

Today was the day to make something with Asian pears, so I tried the recipe - Asian Pears in Honey Syrup from The Joy of Jams, Jellies and other Sweet Preserves.  A couple ginger slices are at the bottom of each jar and the syrup has not just honey in it, but also lemon, so it's not too sweet and there's plenty of lemon flavor in there.  We'll let these sit a little while to soak up some of the ginger flavor and then they'll be ready (of course, they're ready now, but time will blend the flavors better).  After two batches, there are now eight quart jars cooling on the counter!

Have a bit of cast-on-itis, since this month is Plucktober, celebrating Plucky yarns in their Ravelry group.  Of course I had already picked out about four projects to work on, but then some people started making cute sheep hats and I had to make one too!  It's called the Baa-ble Hat.

Picking and Jamming

This weekend had such beautiful weather for picking our harvest and making Jam.  Usually, when the fruit is ready, it's too hot to really have fun in the kitchen, but this was perfect weather!  We picked tomatoes, cabbage, plums, corn and blackberries, and I don't have pictures of the last two, because we ate them before I got my camera out - oops!

These are little Italian plums - very sweet and tasty!!!

Blackberries are the most fragile, so the first thing I made was a batch of blackberry jam.  But there were more berries, just not enough for a full batch of cooked jam, so I decided to make a batch of freezer jam (first time for that), and it is totally yummy, way more of a fresh fruit flavor!

And still there were more... but not enough for a batch, so I decided to use the remaining crushed berries to plums and make a combination recipe.  Even though there was less than a cup of blackberries in the batch, it has lots of blackberry flavor in it!

Bread and Cheese

This weekend was cheese making weekend, with a bonus of bread which used some leftover whey!

Italian Feather Bread:

Feta made with goat cheese, which tasted great with the bread!

Mozzarella - oh this batch of mozzarella came out so much better than my first try!  It's so buttery tasting and the texture is much softer than my last, overcooked batch.  Was wonderful eaten with the bread, but hope to have some left for pizza.  Well, I guess I can always make more :-)

Home Made Pasta, Yum!

My husband recently found a supplier for '00' flour for pizza dough, so we took a little field trip on Monday and what a store we found!  It's called Big John's Pacific Food Importers, and it's in Seattle.  Along with the pizza flour, we bought their pasta blend of '00' flour with semolina for pasta, semolina by itself, special risotto and paella rice, as well as some other supplies. 

Tonight was pasta night!  I mixed the pasta dough, let it rest, and then my oldest son cranked the pasta machine while I guided and caught the dough, and finally, the noodles.  We were working in limited space, and I think we should have thinned it one more notch on the machine, but they were great with my home made spaghetti sauce!

Pasta just after cutting:

The yummy spaghetti we had for dinner!

Baking Bread

Ahhhhh, the scent of home made bread, and just like the Little Red Hen, I ground my own wheat (the whole grain part, anyway)! I can't say I grew the wheat, and I did have the help of kitchen appliances like the grinder and a new mixer, but must say it smelled so good when I took it out of the oven, it was hard for us not to cut into it right away:-)

Christmas Baking

There's been lots of cookie baking going on around here, and then making trays and delivering them.  This year my friend Ellen came over to help, and of course, she went home with some too, as I could never have made as many without her help!  The dining table was covered with kitchen towels for a larger cookie cooling area, and the bins at the end of the table grew, as the baking continued.  Many of the recipes are the same 

ones that my mom and grandma used, and a couple were my great-grandmothers! 

For frosted sugar cookies, I love the "Old Fashioned Vanilla Sugar Cookies" recipe, from Sugarbakers' Cookie Cutter Cookbook.  They don't just look beautiful, they taste great too!

Coffee Chips are an unusual cookie recipe that I got from my grandmother. Luckily I saw her make them, and remembered to ask for the recipe, because I've received many compliments on them!

This year, I made my great-grandmother's sugar cookie recipe with margarine, and the touchy batter was even more difficult to roll out, so they are a bit thicker than they should be, but taste good anyways.

Thumbprints are a family favorite, and my family has always filled them with frosting after baking, instead of jam, as many recipes say to do.

Some of the open cookie bins:

Happy Holidays!!!

A Little Jam

Yep, it's that time of year, and this year I wasn't going to miss my opportunity to make stawberry jam!


I guess I got a little carried away, but you know it's easier to make a lot on one day, than get everything out for smaller batches. Besides, we need to have enough to last until next year!