Pizza sauce

 It's canning again at the homestead today. The garden is probably at peak right now so we are actively harvesting and processing everything we can get our hands on. Today the job was pizza sauce. We use a recipe that my Great Aunt Nellie passed to my mom when my parents were first married.

Start with tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, onions, and garlic.

Chop and boil everything but the tomatoes until it's soft.

Cut the tomatoes into  manageable pieces.

Run the tomatoes and stewed vegetables through the food processor.

Dump it all into a pot with your spices and cook it down to about half. This takes a while. Like, all day basically.

Then it's a simple matter of jarring up the sauce and canning it. 

Pickled beets

 I'm a big fan of beets in nearly every form. But a special favorite is pickled beets. Our beets are ready for harvest this week, so it's the perfect time to do some pickling. 

 

the skinny ones, Cylindras, on top are the ones we'll use for pickles

 We use an old guide that my grandmother gave my mother when my parents were first married.

 

clearly, it's seen a little use

 

It's surprisingly easy to make pickled beets. First, boil your beets around 15 minutes, just long enough to loosen the skins.

Trim and slice the beets and fill your jars. 

 Then add your brine. Ours uses vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice. Top with lids and close with rings. Then put them in your canner, first for 10 minutes under steam, then 15 under 5 pounds of pressure.

And that's it! 9 lovely jars of pickles for winter.

Everything changes

 Today marks a significant change in my homesteading journey. Because today is my first day without a job outside of the home. After some careful soul-searching I determined that the time was right to make a go of homesteading full time. I'll be taking on some freelance work as well, so I'll be sharing what I learn from that as well. 

Wish me luck!

Learning canning

 Growing up, we canned vegetables every summer. If you had asked me I'd have proclaimed with confidence that I knew how to can. And now I realize that I really, really don't. So today I had my first canning lesson. We picked a small batch of green beans, enough for 14 pints, and broke them up into bite sized pieces. Then we divided the beans into jars.

Add a little salt and enough hot water to cover the beans, then top with a warmed lid.

Tighten on rings and stack them carefully in the pressure canner with water in the bottom.

Close the canner and heat it until it starts steaming. Then you add the weight. Bring it to pressure (10 pounds for beans) and cook it at pressure for 20 minutes. Then let it cool until the pressure releases and remove the jars from the canner.

Honey harvesting

 Our bees have been hard at work, so much so that all of the frames in our hive were full. So this weekend was harvesting day. We pulled the honey from one super (a box of 10 frames) leaving 2 supers still on the hive. 

 

a few frames waiting for harvesting

First we prop a frame up on a board and uncap it. They make special knives for this but we just use a big kitchen knife.

 

capped

 

uncapped

As soon as you cut off that wax, the honey will start oozing out. Of course, waiting for gravity would take forever. There are wax extractors but they are pretty costly, so we use a clean putty knife.

Once the honey has been removed, we take the frames back out and leave them near the hive. The bees will quickly clean up any remnants of honey and wax.

One super fills our stock pot with wax and honey. It will need to be strained and bottled, the wax cleaned and refined.

And what do you do with the containers that have traces of honey left in them after this process? We could just wash them but it's far tastier to make honey popcorn first. A batch of hot buttered popcorn swished around a sticky container makes for the best version of kettlecorn you'll ever eat.