OK, a question. When blanching the potatoes, the directions I have say to put them in boiling water for 2 min. But when I put them in the water, of course the cold potatoes causes the water to stop boiling. So my question is, (and I guess this goes for blanching in general, not just for...
Thank you for your replies! One more thing to look forward to this winter... More canned garden goodies! I'm thinking that along with my canned beef, carrots, string beans, frozen sweet corn and onions, a jar of these potatoes will make a great quick soup or stew. I'm kind of excited about it...
Has anyone here canned potatoes? My red potatoes that we harvested this fall are starting to sprout and get a tad soft, so I have peeled and diced them tonight and plan on canning them tomorrow after work. For those of you that have tried this, how did they turn out? Did you like the flavor and...
After two nights of killing frost, we decided to dig up the sweet potatoes. They turned out fairly well, I think, considering I had no idea what I was doing when I planted them. We ended up with about 2 dozen of them out of 6 plants. They started out well, but then my squash overtook their spot...
We dug up one hill of sweet potatoes out of curiosity today. One nice sized one, and several that were what I would call dill pickle sized. (Probably about the same size as the one in So Lucky's hand). No black widows in with our sweet potatoes, though, thank goodness! We don't have those here...
I know, Bay, packets from the store when I have garlic, onions and celery from the garden is utterly shameful! :hide I try to make as much from scratch as I can, but I get lazy sometimes and it's faster. Open the jar, mix in the packet and it's done.
I do have a dehydrator and just dried 4...
Hmm, it never occurred to me to hide it like that... I have been forbidden to ever grow the stuff because my MIL used to just boil it and serve it that way. Needless to say, it's not a family favorite. But my mother grows it and is always trying to get rid of the stuff. DH is harvesting wheat...
Yesterday I canned 23 pints of tomato sauce. My canner only holds 9 jars at a time... So, for the second batch, I just kept the sauce warm on low. put the cover on so it didn't cook out too much and let it be. The third bunch of jars, i shut the heat off, left the cover on, and waited. I don't...
Sorry, Ridgerunner, I wasn't very clear. I meant dehydrating tomatoes themselves - not the juice. Sometimes I type faster than I think...
It's mostly hot spices that DH can't handle. He can do onions and garlic. Last year I just used the spaghetti seasoning packets from the grocery store and...
With the abundance of tomatoes I have in my garden, I'm thinking I'd like to make some spaghetti sauce and some chili base (mild - my DH has a wimpy gut). I could just buy the packets at the grocery store, and that's certainly an option, but I thought I'd check here first. I canned 23 pints of...
Bay, I have some Old German tomatoes - do you know if they're similar? I don't think any of them are ripe yet, though. They need to hurry - it's getting late in the season and we sometimes get frost by the end of the month.
I've been having a blast this year! I grew up eating store-bought tomatoes (er, trying to avoid them, actually, because I didn't like them). Single, full-time working mother didn't have much time for gardening. Anyway, married my farmer, moved to the farm, and started growing tomatoes. I thought...
Nope, not kidding. Give me any other creepy crawlies you can think of - I can handle them. Snakes, lizards, bugs, even bats (although I don't like those indoors). Spiders, not so much. The little ones aren't so bad, it's the big, fat barn spiders the size of baseballs (OK, maybe not quite that...
Our basement is finished and has floor heat throughout, so it wouldn't be a very good cold storage place. That's why we're considering the upstairs closet. Our old house (we lost it in a fire 11 years ago - it was built by my DH's great-grandfather in 1872) had a root cellar, but I never went...