A few items to keep handy that make life lots easier.

I try to keep my indoor freezer, full of quick items that make my life easier.  Don’t you?  I just ordered some new fabulous containers for the freezer so I can use some of my glass jars in dry storage where I need them.  The new containers are fabulous because they are square and BPA free plastic, so they will fit my space so much better!  Never-the-less I thought we should start talking about organization as we approach the winter months!  It’s important because we will all be spending so much more time inside, and we really need to do things to make our lives better and more pleasant; treat ourselves like we’re on vacation!

Let me go ahead & explain what your seeing here and how it works for us…

Breakfast Cups – Tupperware single serve portions for a morning scramble for our daughter.  She wakes up earlier than the chickens, so she needs every easy step she can get!  Each one is a mystery to her and are filled with a variety of things like ham or sausage, banana or bell peppers in all colors, corn, carrot bits, a pinch of sweet onions etc.  Just enough to go with 1 egg in a 4″ skillet and give a boring morning egg a little fun & variety without slicing dicing or making a mess.

Pre-cooked 4 oz Sausage – I use these for pizzas & pastas mostly, and the occasional breakfast meal too.  It was like an epiphany to me one day when I realized I could freeze my sausage cooked already and instead of waiting overnight for it to defrost, and then have to make a sausage skillet mess when I really didn’t have time!  Already cooked drained & from the freezer to my plate in 10 minutes!  Since ground pork sausage is one of the few items we can buy that is preservative free & healthy, we eat a fair share of it, approximately 4-5lbs monthly.

Pesto Pints – Again, dinner in a flash helper but not just that.  I pull these out for a themed week, and we have Pesto & Angel Hair Pasta one day,  a spoonful or two on our pizza crust plus sauce, on another day I’ll toss a little of it with a vegetable potato mixture and finally if there is anything left, I’ll use it to marinade a piece of chicken before baking in a foil pouch!

Soups – self explanatory I should think.  These were not suitable for pressure canning for one reason or another and so they are in the freezer for a quick-ish meal.  DH can take one out the night before and take it to work, reheat in the jar.  Or I can anticipate the same for myself and take that meal to go!

Tomato Puree – This batch is from low acid yellow roma tomatoes and I’m not sure yet if they are safe to can.  So after pureeing & cooking down my garden goods, I just jarred them up.  I can take them out when I intend to make sauce, they are usable within a couple of hours and perfect for a last minute pasta sauce!  I also have puree in cans on the pantry shelf from traditional red tomatoes.

Berries – this batch is for tossing into everything, yogurt, smoothies, or for turning into sauces & jelly.  Sometimes there are Strawberries, or Blueberries, and right now there are Blackberries.  Super handy and I even toss a few out to the chickens on a really hot day; they appreciate a nice cold frozen berry when it’s sluggish hot.

Alright, so those are just a few of the ways my freezer door helps me out every day.  Your turn!  Take a pic and let me see.  It’s ok if you want to clean & organize it first, heck, I just gave you a good excuse to get that done.  Take your time, I’ll be here, but I DO want to see those doors!  You can post pics on my Facebook page easily or link to them in your comments below.

Cheers!

16 pints of Pea Soup, Chicken Soup & Lentil Soup and 5 Quarts of liquid GOLD (seasoned homegrown chicken stock).

It was a good weekend for canning here at home!  The pressure canner got a good workout and I even “double decked” my load…  that’s some home-canner jargon there for ya   I hope to get to the jellies now in the next day or two, which is new for me.  I learned in the opposite order that most folks learn.  Many people start with hot water bath canning and jelly or jam, but we never ate much of that stuff so I never really bothered.  For me, I’d rather have a cabinet full of food that does NOT require me to cook it and so my daughter or husband can easily fix dinner now, thanks to the simple, yet scary, steps of home pressure canning.

If your interested in learning more and eventually becoming a pressure canner yourself, there is nothing better in my opinion than creating your own ‘canned soup isle’ or instant dinners, you can get started at the National Center for Home Food Preservation: http://www.uga.edu/nchfp

"Double Decked" jars

3 pots at once make the procedure SO much easier!

And that means it’s time to make soups!  At my house, my extra freezer has a couple of wire bins/baskets for storage on the bottom.  One is exclusively reserved for bones, hence the name Bones Bin.  It gets full after a month or sometimes longer depending on what we’re eating.  It is comprised of things like leftover chicken carcasses, ham bones & skins, pork & chicken necks, some cooked, some raw, but all frozen solid.  When the bin gets full I go pick up a couple bags of organic celery, carrots & a bag of sweet onions and get to work making ham, chicken, pork broth for cooking!  If I can afford it, as I could this time, and have ham bones, I also pick up some Split Peas & Lentil Beans and make soups instead of just broth.  I use a few carrots & celery each, 1 onion & 1 garlic cloves worth in each pot, regardless if it’s ultimately soup or broth.  Using the food processor to make short work, 1 or 2 minutes, of the chopping & slicing of several pounds of raw vegetables, I just eyeball an equal division among the pots.  Fill with water & bones and beans if applicable and simmer for a couple hours.

$40 worth of Chicken Broth in the making! And most people throw these things away!

The chicken broth pot must have at least 8 bird carcasses in there, picked over dinner leftovers, some from when I filet breasts off the bones before cooking but don’t do such a precise job, and also several necks are in there from our last poultry harvest too.  It holds around 3 gallons of water and is packed as tight as it can be.  It should yield around 10-12 quarts of extremely tasty broth that makes store broth taste like salt water!  Not to mention a good broth costs about $4 for each of those quarts.  That means I have turned what most families throw away into about $40 worth of high quality broth, by only adding $3 maybe $4 worth of fresh vegetables, and you don’t even have to add those!  You can just boil down the bones by themselves and it’s still amazing!

I also had a ham bone & some skin from a big shoulder I purchased and divided up.  They make great soup and so I made Split Pea and Lentil soup.  Before I pressure can the Split Pea soup I will add several bits of ham from the shoulder, but I dont’ add that during cooking, I just use the bone.  The Lentil soup will be served meatless but has a great ham flavor to it due to the cooking with the skin & fat, which is easily removed still in one piece after cooking down.  Lentil Soup is really so great, super nutritious and when you do serve it, you can throw in whatever else you have on hand as far as meat or additional vegetables or add none! It’s VERY flexible!  In fact, you can at this point strain the lentils and serve them chilled in salads, and then use the lovely broth for other meals & soups too!

Lentil Soup using some pork skin from a shoulder roast. The skin is easily removed once the soup is done.

I’ll be sure to post once I have all my beautiful jars full of homemade goodness!  Hope you have a productive day!