Farmer's Market Trip= salsa and sauce

A couple of weeks ago, hubs and I headed out in the drizzling rain to go up to the local farmer's market. It's close enough to walk, but we were being babies about the weather. :)

Can I just say it is super easy to spend all of your money at the market??? I remind myself that I am supporting local farmers when I realize I am all out of my cash stash that I brought. It goes quick!

We did get some meat and dairy, so that ate into our little farmer's market budget quickly. So worth it! We bought this really yummy mozzarella filled pizza sausage from Green Vista Farms, and some drinkable yogurt from another grass fed farm. We were leery at first, but yum!!!!!

We brought home this beautiful haul, and got out everything to make tomato sauce and salsa. Some of this stuff is from the garden, too. I snapped the picture after we got out everything for cooking.

Then hubs made this beautiful, yummy salsa.(That's him in the background looking up recipes.) He has the patience to chop everything very tiny. My salsa would be a lot chunkier. I made some tomato basil sauce, and we ate it with our yummy, sustainably raised pizza sausage. De.licious.



Linking up at: Gastronomical Sovereignty, Sew Chatty, Skip to My Lou, Ninth Street Notions, A Bowl Full of Lemons, Frugally Sustainable, A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa, A Diamond in the Stuff,

{urban homestead}

I read this great article from A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa about the movement of urban homesteading. I thought she presented beautifully the balance between this busy life, living simply, and being good stewards of what God has given us. Check it out, I think you'll like it as much as I did!

little house in Ohio.

I've been busy with what I like to think of as preserving our harvest this week. In reality, it is probably 25% our garden success, and 75% grocery store produce to supplement. Because what seems like an awful lot of peppers and tomatoes isn't really when you start cooking it down. :)

On Monday, I had the opportunity to work at home. I had beautiful visions of working all day in half hour increments and slowly cleaning my house and doing my freezer cooking. In reality, I spent my day here:

Yes, that is an enormous pile of laundry to be folded. No, I didn't even get to that. The state database that I use for work  is the bane of my existence, and usually keeps me from doing a long list of important things while I am at my desk at work. I wanted to see if working at home would help that problem by allowing me to just concentrate. Nope. It sucks anywhere I go. I think I should come to terms with my loathing of that particular system.

Anyway, I did manage to make this for dinner:





I am so proud of this pizza because it is so very whole: homemade rosemary crust (with rosemary from our garden), homemade pasta sauce (with half store bought and half garden tomatoes, and basil from our garden), and topped with fresh mozzarella, basil (garden), and cherry tomatoes (garden). It was so yummy!

The rest of the week was spent doing a little cleaning and cooking after work each day, except for a church meeting on Tuesday and coffee with a friend on Wednesday. I am almost finished working through the huge box of organic apples that the hubs brought home. I turned them into 5 quarts of sliced apples (ready to turn into apple pie filling this fall!) and 2 pints of apple butter. I have one more "layer" of apples from the box to go. Ideas????? Below are a couple of pictures of my canning success. I hope. We'll know for sure in a few months!

That was pretty much how my week went! I am finding out that preserving food  is an ongoing process! No end in sight! 



abundance.

I was briefly watching the news the other day, and they were talking about the drought across America, and how it will soon affect food distribution. It's incredible to me that there are millions of people starving because of a real food crisis, as in, there isn't ANY food, but we choose to pay attention as soon as our grocery store prices may hike up. That's when we take notice of starvation.

But anyway, I don't want to rant on and on about the American attitude. I really want to talk about food. I read this article, which I thought really explained the chain of events that the drought will cause. What amazes me is that the solution to the problem that the government has laid out here was to a) throw money at it, and bail governments out of what could be a global food crisis, and b) genetically modify our food even more to withstand floods and droughts. This is an incredible contrast to the way the people handled drought, flood, and famine in the Bible. Repent, pray for rain, and settle in with your storehouses for some famine. And pray some more.

This has motivated me not just to try learning more things like canning, but also to start focusing on things like eating and buying local. I am not an expert in agriculture or economics by any stretch of the imagination, but if you think about it, the Midwest of America having a drought is going to cause a global food crisis. One region of one country. And do you know why? The corn and the soybean crop aren't prospering. Two of the ingredients that go into pretty much every processed food out there. And this will affect our beloved beef and dairy industry, because our cows are fed with corn. Which is bad for them, and bad for us. Can I just say yay for the farmers who grass feed their cows? Sustainable farming is called sustainable farming for a reason. Because the other way is not, in fact, sustainable. You will eventually have a global food crisis. Again, this is the simple version. I do not know all that there is to know about farming and food distribution around the world. And I am not downplaying the impact it will have on the world's truly hungry. I am saying we should be conscious of our food choices.We are so accustomed to going to the store and getting absolutely ANYTHING that we could imagine or desire. Wow. We won't know how to survive if we have a food shortage.

Our garden is doing very well this year, minus one annoying groundhog that is eating our tomatoes at an alarming rate. In older, simpler times, this would mean a good year for us. Also, we could just shoot the groundhog. And probably eat that, too. We wouldn't be relying on corn growing in Indiana to feed the cows in Wisconsin, so that we could have meat here in Ohio. We would either have a cow, buy meat from someone who had cows, or eat something different. We would not have a crisis based on another part of the world, or even of our country. The thought of how far we have come in our "progress" blows me away.

So, anyway, that is my tangent about food. I'm sure there are many more intelligent and informative things to be read about it, from many perspectives. I hope you do read about it, and share your thoughts. I hope to read more as well, and continue to make small changes in my life to decrease my reliance on the crops not faring well in the Midwest. I'd really love to read some opinions from sustainable farmers. In the meantime, let's pray for rain for these farmers with failing crops!

apple butter and small accomplishments.

So hubs brought me home 40 lbs. of organic apples yesterday. For $2! What a steal! He works at a produce distributor, and so he can get the "seconds" for practically nothing. Most of them are fine to eat, just have a spot here or there, so they get left out of the store orders. And even the ones that are a little spotty or over ripe are perfect for cooking. I hope that what doesn't get purchased by employees doesn't get thrown away! What a waste that would be!

Anyway, here are my apples....there are so many!!!! I started on a crock pot of apple butter, but that only used up like one layer. I am thinking of applesauce, apple pie, apple jelly, and frozen apples for cooking later.

I took Friday off of work, and on Monday, I am working from home to do an enormous stack of data entry that I want to plow through without being interrupted. Seriously, it's huge. I have really been enjoying this long weekend and focusing on my home, food, and my hubs. It's like a mini wife-cation. :) I know it might be silly, but I always feel so much better and ready to start the work week when I have a clean house, groceries, and something that I got done that I wanted to do. And I literally sleep better knowing the living room is vacuumed. Hubby thinks that it's in my head, and that it doesn't actually affect my sleep. But I'm sure he's wrong. :) Small accomplishments recharge me and motivate me to keep it going. I'm one of the few nutty people who think being exhausted at the end of a day off from doing all of "my" stuff instead of work stuff is awesome. Am I alone?

I'll let you know how the apple butter turns out!

Linking up at: A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa

Hopefully I am back to stay.

I got motivated to start blogging again, after settling after our move. Then our computer bit it. {Of course, backing up my pictures and documents was something I had procrastinated  on.} So, we decided to wait and save up to pay cash for a new one. It was hard, but worth it. And so, I come to you on my new laptop, with my new wi-fi hookup, feeling very up to date and techy, indeed. :)

I hope I am back to stay- blogging just got a whole lot easier with this laptop, let me tell you! I function a lot better when I can multitask!

I had the day off of work, and I spent it doing the wifey, housy stuff I want to do, but don't really have time to do. We have a pretty healthy garden going, so with peppers, tomatoes, and zucchini flowing in, I had a lot of freezer prep and preserving to do.

These are pictures of our garden about 3-4 weeks ago; it is a lot bigger now!

I bought about 10 lbs. of peaches clearanced out at Buehler's for $4, and needed to use them up right away. I decided on sliced, flash frozen for half of the peaches, and made the rest into crock pot peach butter. And it is delicious! The jar in this picture is what I set aside to go ahead and eat instead of can. I also froze 8 cups of zucchini, a bag of whole cherry tomatoes, and diced apples.

And, speaking of canning, this is my first time ever trying it! I used Ashley English's book, Homemade Living: Canning and Preserving with Ashley English. It was really helpful, with big, easy to follow pictures and instructions. I made tomato basil pasta sauce and then the peach butter for canning. The sauce only made 1 medium and one small jar! I definitely thought it would be more! The peach butter made 2 small jars for canning, plus the small jar I kept aside for the fridge.

That was my day! I love my job, and I know I would get bored fast being at home alone all day, but I absolutely LOVED how much I got done today by powering through and focusing on my home. I hardly ever get to do that!



Linking Up at:

Skip to My Lou , Sew Chatty , A Bowl Full of Lemons, Time Warp Wife