Introducing Preservation Peeps

At long last we have chickens! Again!

If had told me two years ago that it would take us this long to be ready for our first Preservation Acres flock I would have slapped you and wept for days.

Y’all setting up a farmstead at the age of forty while working full-time and raising teenagers is no quick matter. Rather it is the epitome of a “long obedience in the same direction.”  It is doing a lot of not-fun things, things that involve a lot of sweat, money, and time, compromise and creative solutions, in exchange for some very basic rewards like food, and some delightful rewards like fields of flowers.

Preparing for our chickens was a little bit of it all.

A lot of compromise (a temporary house/run set up), a lot of sweat (mostly by Sweet Man), a fair amount of change (portable electric fencing isn’t free), and pure delight (chickens!!!) and here we are at last – our Preservation Peeps are here at last!

And they make me sooooo happy.

Like stupid goofy-grin happy.

Not like this, which is me when I discover there is no coffee in the house.

But like this, which is what I am like at Baptist church potluck.

I love hen hinnies. They are so fluffy!

The Dominique’s are by far the friendliest.

Vintage Nesting boxes. I had thought about putting these in our kitchen for storage, but the shelf size is a little limiting.

A lovely retired friend at church raised these for us. She was ordering some for herself and another friend. She over ordered to make sure she would have enough and we got the excess. Amazingly she didn’t lose a single chick! That is one great chicken grandma!

I think this is the one Miles has named Angel.

One of the Gilmore Girls ( we have three – Lorelia, Rory, and Sookie.)

Temporary digs until winter when we can clean out an overgrown shed (too many creepy crawlers and stingers in there right now) and convert it to a proper chicken palace.

Lucky the Rooster. So far he is a decent fellow, not mean or heartless. And his crow is such a fun thing to hear in the morning!

 

We have 10 hens and 1 roost.

Our flock is a mixture of Welsummers (beautiful dark brown feathers, chocolate-colored egg-layers), Dominiques (black and white,) and Ameraucanas (green and blue egg layers). No eggs yet, but soon!

 

So there you have it! Preservation Peeps are on the farmstead at last! A lovely bright spot in a rather rough summer!

Adventures in Preservation – Canning Pasta Sauce

Do you remember that scene in Anne of Green Gables when Matthew buys all that sugar because he is too embarrassed to buy Anne the dress with the puffed sleeves?

Do you remember when Marilla is dividing the sugar into smaller bins and says, rolling her eyes and huffing,

20 pounds of raw sugar, she says, her voice full of exasperation and admiration all the same time – do you remember that scene?

Well, that was me when I realized that we had planted 69 tomato plants.

69 tomato plants, I said, my voice full of exasperation and admiration.

What in the world would we do with the bounty of 69 tomato plants?

This right here is just one morning’s harvest on a lite day. Crisper drawers, baskets, and window sills have been spilling over with tomatoes. I have eaten more tomato sandwiches this year than I have eaten in total over the past 41 years and Nathan takes at least with one with him everyday to work.

We have given away tomatoes, made jars of the best salsa, and now, finally, it was pasta sauce making time.

I have made jelly before and Nathan has made refrigerator pickles, but this was our first time canning together and Nathan’s first time to hot can.

We began by standing in the canning section of the store, staring at the shelves, trying to decide – did we want to make sauce or can whole tomatoes? Did we want to freeze or jar?

In the end we decided to go with a simple sauce based on the recommendation of a seasoned canner who was also standing in the store aisle trying to decide what to buy, our decision weighed heavily by our desire to save time down the road.

Each of the boys cooks one meal a week, and Wylie’s usually involves popping open a jar of sauce to serve with frozen pasta, so we decided that during the buys school year  the chances of using pre-made sauce was greater than the chance that we would be making sauce from scratch on more than a few occasions.

Decision made! Pasta sauce in jars it was!

Here is the very complicated recipe we used:

Step 1: Buy this packet.

Step 2: Follow all it’s directions.

In total we used 2 packets of mix, countless tomatoes and canned 12 pints of sauce.

The total process took about 5 hours because Nathan was the only one coring and peeling the tomatoes and he is very methodical. I think if we had all been on that part it would have gone a lot faster.

Also we should have started boiling the canning water a lot earlier than we did because that huge pot took FOREVER to get hot.

But maybe there is something to be said for the slow, methodical, potentially meditative work of coring pounds of tomatoes a few at a time, then placing them in a steamer basket, and gently slipping their skins off before beating them to a pulp in the food processor, and maybe there are spiritual lessons hidden in the time it took for the enormous pot of water to start a rolling boil, lessons about patience and Slow Living.

Maybe. Or maybe not. I honestly couldn’t tell you as I am suffering from SSHCS – Severe Summer Heat Cranky Syndrome.

It’s so hot here that I think God may be on vacation in Colorado.

One thing we forgot to do, that our lovely canning friend suggested, was to add some tomato paste to the mix to help thicken the sauce up a bit, and now that we have made a batch I agree that it is pretty thin, so we might add a small can of paste to each jar as we use it.

Other than being a bit thin, the sauce was really fresh and delicious, and much better than the jar sauces we buy.

We even gave it an official try over “Wylie’s Pasta” (as we now refer to bags of frozen ravioli and tortellini’s,) and Miles who tends to lean more towards cream sauces, gave it two thumbs up.

And there you have it – We have put up our very first batch of Preservation Acre’s Pasta Sauce! Another farmstead first! Hurrah!