Strawberry jam!

Saturday, May 18

I have been wanting to make strawberry jam for a while now but by the time I had some time to do it the strawberry price had gone back up.  When I was at the store on Friday they were on sale again so I bought some to make jam.  And then luckily for me it ended up being a very rainy Saturday so I wasn't able to work in the garden.  After Kitty's very soggy soccer game in the morning I came home and started making the jam.  Blondie was a great help with hulling the strawberries and washing them for me.  Then on Sunday I made some homemade bread to go along with our dinner and we all enjoyed the bread with strawberry jam on it.  Definitely a family favorite in our house!

Canning

The kids have been off-track for the last 2 1/2 weeks (with the exception of M&M who is now in middle school). Last year I canned peaches at my parents' house and they turned out to be a big hit with our family so we decided to do it again this year - and more this time. So last week we ended up spending four days at their house canning peaches and making peach jam. The kids were helpful to varying degrees and MJ cooperated most of the time. Probably our biggest help was Blondie who did a great job peeling the skin off the peaches. Luke helped with cutting up the peaches for jam and then M&M was able to come over with us on Saturday and was a big help then. It was a lot of fun but also a lot of work. I will be heading back over there again in the next couple of weeks to can some applesauce.

Strawberry jam

A couple of weeks ago I was at the grocery store and they had an AWESOME deal on strawberries that I just couldn't pass up. I decided to buy a whole flat of them which had 8 - 1 lb containers. My family loves jam and I decided that this would be the perfect opportunity for me to try and make my own homemade strawberry jam. Unfortunately I am very busy at this point in my life and I had no materials for canning anything with. So, with great intentions I found a recipe that I wanted to use, and then I finally made it back to the store to buy some jars and pectin. I still didn't have any canning supplies, such as a water bath canner, but I was able to figure out a way to do it without a special canner, just using a large pot that I already have. (I used some of the metal screw bands that I had to form a grid on the bottom of the pot so that I could set the jars on top of them and it would allow water to circulate underneath the jars during the boiling process.)

So a couple of days after buying the strawberries I finally took the time to make some strawberry jam and can it. Unfortunately, a few of the strawberries were starting to go bad by the time I got to canning them, but I had enough to make 8 - 1/2 pint jars with some leftover. There was a little bit of the jam leftover that wouldn't fill a whole jar so I put it in the fridge and my family gobbled it up that first day. One of these days I will get to making some homemade wheat bread to eat with the jam - that is my favorite!!

Bosch mixer

This is the present that my husband gave me for Christmas, the Bosch Universal Plus mixer. One of the reasons we decided on this particular mixer is because you can buy a wheat grinder attachment that works with the mixer motor or with a hand crank. We have a pretty good supply of wheat in our basement but up until now we have had no grinder to grind the wheat with.
We tried out the grinder attachment the day after Christmas and it works great. I then made several loaves of wheat bread with it and have been substituting a little bit of wheat flour in place of white flour in some of my cooking.

Family canning

The last time I went to the dry pack cannery (in August) I asked about canning our own food. A couple of months ago one of our local grocery stores had a huge sale on bulk items. After doing some calculating I figured out what would be cheaper to buy at the store instead of at the cannery and we bought several 20 lb bags of rice, 25 lb bags of sugar and one 50 lb bag of quick oats. The cannery used to allow people to bring in their own food and can it there. About a year ago they stopped allowing people to do this. The church cannery does own 3 portable canners that they allow people to check out for free for one day at a time. So I decided to sign my name up for one of the canners so that we could can the food that I had bought. The problem was that each of the canners was already scheduled for 2 months out so the earliest day I could sign up for was in October. The worker at the cannery told me that I would be called and reminded when my day got closer.

I forgot exactly what day I had signed up for (for some reason I was thinking October 13th) but I knew that it was getting closer. Then on Tuesday after lunch I took Baby K to J.C. Penney's to get her 6 month pictures taken and when we got back home there was a message from the cannery saying that I had signed up for the canner for that very day and had to have it returned by 11 a.m. Wednesday morning. AHHH!! I called my husband at work to let him know what we would be doing that evening and then called my parents to see if they were free in the morning and if they wanted me to bring the canner over to their house for them to use. I quickly had to put off everything else that I wanted to get done that day and get the kitchen counter cleaned off completely so that we would have room to spread out the cans there. I then had to sit down and figure out exactly how many bags of everything I had bought and how many cans and lids and oxygen packs I needed to buy to can it all.
As soon as M&M and Luke got home from school we loaded everyone up in the car and drove over to the cannery to pick up the canner and buy the cans and things that we needed to can with. That evening right after dinner the kids pitched in to help us out. I would pour the sugar or rice into the cans and then I had Luke banging them on the counter to get all the air out and then Blondie & Kitty helped to fill the cans to the top. Then they helped put the oxygen packs in the cans (not in the sugar), put the lids on and put labels on the cans while DH sealed the cans using the canner. The oats were a little bit harder to do because the bag was so big and heavy that I couldn't really lift it up to pour into the cans. So I had the kids hold the empty cans for me while I filled them with oats that I scooped out with a bowl. We ended up canning 40 cans worth of food. M&M had tumbling that night so she was only able to help at the very end when we were carrying the cans to the basement.
Then on Wednesday morning after the three older kids left for school I drove over to my parents' house with Kitty, Baby K and the canner and helped my parents can some of their food storage as well. We finished pretty quickly over there and then I took the canner back to the cannery and made it back home before Blondie came home from school.

... and a carpenter to boot!

This is the HUGE, AWESOME project that my husband has been working on the last few weekends, Labor Day and he even took off work yesterday so he could finally get it finished: storage shelves for our food storage cans. They are designed at an angle so you can put a can on the top of a set of two shelves and it will roll from the top shelf to the bottom shelf so you can remove the oldest cans first (FIFO design).

One of the dilemmas that we have had lately in our house is how to best store our food storage. I try and go somewhat regularly to the dry pack cannery that the church owns so that we can make an attempt at having a rotating food storage system, but we don't really have a good way to store them once I get them home. We have been storing them in boxes but then it's hard to get to the older boxes once you pack newer boxes on top and we can't really move all the boxes out each time so the new ones can go on the bottom. So my husband decided to design his own shelf system so that we can easily put the cans on a shelf and have the older ones easily accessible.

In addition to my husband's talents with the computer and car repair, he has always loved working with wood. Unfortunately this is one hobby that requires a lot of time and money (read: expensive tools). Over his last two birthdays I have given him some woodworking tools so that he could hopefully, one day, do more with his hobby. (So finally, after almost a year and a half, he now had a need for the compound miter saw that I bought him - plus I bought him a stand for it this year so he could use it.)

After drawing up some plans and buying a few more tools, DH built a small scale prototype with some scrap wood. He then made some modifications to the plan and figured out how much wood and screws he would need to buy. After a lot of HARD work, trips to the store, more changes to the plans, lots of cuts and splinters, and several late nights working in the garage and storage room, we have not just one, but TWO wonderful, working storage shelves! Now we can move the cans out of the girls' room downstairs and back into the storage room!

I need to get a picture of M&M with the shelves because she helped her dad out a lot on Monday when he was putting the first shelf system together. The picture with the other kids is the one time that they tried to help out by handing their dad screws - while M&M was at tumbling. And Baby K was AWESOME again on Monday so I could get a lot of work done as well, such as moving all of the cans and boxes out of the storage room to begin with.

And with that, I will now open up the bidding for a sneak peak at these top-secret plans:
starting bid at $100 :)

Tiring day!

On Tuesday I dropped the kids off at my parents' house and then went to the Dry Pack Cannery in Sandy. It has been a while since I've been there so I did quite a bit of canning: 36 - #10 cans plus 2 for my parents. We are trying to get a year's supply stored and trying to rotate as well. I did quite a bit of wheat since they have had limited supplies recently and I don't know if they will have any the next time I go. Thankfully Baby K was great for my parents and didn't cry at all!

After I got back from canning I ate some lunch at my parents' and fed Baby K and then my dad and I took the 4 older kids to the swimming pool. We had a lot of fun and I am a little bit sunburned today (not too bad). This was our first trip to the pool this summer. It's just too hard (or impossible) for me to go by myself with the 5 kids. I wanted to take them before Saturday because M&M is having a birthday party Saturday with some friends and we are going to the pool, so I wanted the kids to get a little bit of practice in before the party. M&M and Luke are getting to be pretty good swimmers. It's nice to not have to be watching them every second they're in the water. I taught M&M how to do underwater somersaults and we worked a little on breathing to the side while doing the front crawl. I took my camera but completely forgot to take any pictures. We'll be sure to take some Saturday though. Baby K slept the whole time we were at the pool. :) She's such a good baby!

After we got home I made dinner and M&M, Baby K and I went to Toys-R-Us. I was pretty exhausted at this point in the day but there was one more thing I needed to do before M&M's birthday the next day. I have been looking for a new bike to buy M&M for her birthday and have been having a very hard time finding one that isn't too girly for her. Unfortunately she is right in-between two sizes of bikes and we finally decided to buy the bigger size, hoping that she will grow over the next year that she will fit it better next summer. We finally decided on one at the store and took the little item tag up to the cash register and they only had that model preassembled - which is 10 extra dollars. So I decided that I didn't want it and we left the store.

Well, M&M was quite upset because she really wanted that bike and it had taken us a long time to finally decide on one. We had a couple of options on what to do next and we finally decided to try another Toys-R-Us in the valley. I was trying to remember exactly where it was since I didn't have the address with me and luckily I found it right away. We went into the store and walked to the back where the bikes are and they had the same model there. We took the ticket up to the front and within 5 minutes they were bringing the box out to the car for me. At this point it was getting close to 9 p.m. and Baby K had had enough. She cried almost the whole drive home and was very upset when we finally got there. Poor baby! :'-(

Lots of helpers!

Today DH & I went to the dry pack cannery to can some more food for our food storage. When we got home we decided that we needed to reorganize our food storage so we can better access the food for rotation. At first we would do it all ourselves but then we thought, certainly M&M & Luke can help move the cans around for us as well. The next thing we knew, Kitty came down to help too and then Blondie joined us.


It was really cute because even little Kitty wanted to carry the cans from our storage room to the "clubhouse" so we could organize them (and some of the cans are pretty heavy). We ended up having to make assignments for the kids because they kept getting into each other's way and fighting over the cans. We assigned Blondie & Kitty to carry the cans to the clubhouse and then M&M & Luke would organize the cans into piles according to what was in them.

It's funny how things that look like hard work can end up being fun for kids...