We had a lot of cooking apples in our orchard this year, so I canned some apple pie filling. My brother-in-law loves apple pies, so this will make a nice Christmas gift for him. I used the recipe from the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning.
We like to have homemade pizza at our house every Sunday night. So, we make use of some of the extra tomatoes in the summer time and cook up some homemade pizza sauce to freeze.
I use the squeezo to get the tomato juice, then cook it up and freeze it into ice cube trays. [...]
We dug up the sweet potatoes a couple of days ago. We like to get them out of the ground before it frosts because a frost will kill the vines. Most of the big potatoes are concentrated around where the sweet potato slips were planted, but we also found some smaller ones in [...]
You can have tomatoes in November and December. Just bring all of your green tomatoes inside before it frosts. Then store them in a cool, dark place (like your basement) and cover them with a layer of newspaper. Check them every few days to pick out the ones that are ripe and [...]
I have a small herb garden in my backyard. It has chives, mint, oregano, thyme, chamomile, and parsley in it.
To dry the herbs for use in the winter, I cut some stems, bundle them together and hang them upside down to dry. It is best to do this early in the morning after [...]
I wanted to make and can enchilada sauce this year with our extra tomatoes, but I couldn’t find any recipe that sounded suitable. So, I decided to just can tomato sauce. It is much more versatile anyway. Now, I can make anything I want out of it.
Here’s how I made [...]
Every summer, I cook up our fresh tomatoes, peppers and onions into a delicious, versatile spaghetti sauce and freeze it for winter. It makes preparing spaghetti, lasagna, or any recipe calling for a jar of spaghetti sauce a snap. I also love it because I know how much better it is for us [...]
I seem to miss the occasional zucchini in my garden and it gets really BIG before I find it. I like to use these in recipes that call for shredded zucchini. Here’s how I freeze the shredded zucchini to use later.
Wash, and cut up zucchini.
Then, shred it in your food processor.
Measure it. I freeze mine [...]
You could just slice your peppers and freeze them, but I have several recipes that call for a can of green chilis, so I fix my peppers up this way to use in those recipes instead of buying a can of chilis.
I grow anaheim peppers, but this would work with any hot pepper. Be careful [...]
If you want to save seeds from year to year, you must plant heirloom varieties of plants, not hybrids. I grow Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach. When it starts to get hot in the early summer, your spinach plants will bolt and get quite ugly looking. Don’t pull them! If you leave them, they will produce [...]
