Digging Out

The finally tally is 24 inches of snow at my house, and more expected on Friday (hopefully, not that much).   My husband spent the morning getting the driveway and the sidewalks cleared.  I used this day to haul out the pressure canner and get various things canned, getting more things out of my freezer in the process.  First I made a batch of vegetable stock using the frozen vegetable scraps in my freezer.  This made 8 pints of vegetable stock, which were processed for 30 minutes in the canner.  Then I moved on to the beef and barley soup I made yesterday.  After taking some out for lunches, I canned 5 pints (75 minutes at 10 pounds).

Lastly, I made a batch of chicken noodle soup from the chicken I roasted yesterday.  First I made the chicken stock with the chicken bones and some frozen onion/celery/carrot scraps and a bay leaf.  Then I strained it, sauteed carrots, celery and leeks (from the farm, which had been chopped and frozen) and added the stock back in.  I chopped up about 3 cups of chicken meat and put that in the soup.  Just before I serve it for dinner tonight, I'll add a package of egg noodles.

The bread I made yesterday is gone, and there are very few cookies left!

Upping the Ante

I see you, Blizzard of 2015.  I see you conspiring to trap me at work for three days (unsuccessfully), to make all my plans for the next few days completely meaningless.  You may have buried my house in two feet of snow, but I was prepared.  I raise you:

Two loaves of whole wheat bread, 1 batch of beef and barley soup, 1 batch of chocolate chip cookies, 1 batch of yogurt, and a roasted chicken.  And that's just today.  I even got all the laundry done before you buried the dryer vent.

The soup used a 2 pound beef roast I had in the freezer, plus some frozen "osso buco" leftovers from 2 separate occasions, and a little more frozen steak leftovers, with 2 pints of tomato sauce provided from our mason's wife.  I even pre-cooked the beef in a vinegar and water solution to make it more tender.  I am debating whether or not to can it. We ate one of the loaves of bread with the soup for lunch, and will have the other loaf tonight with the chicken.

As far as the cookies go, I had shortening but not enough butter, and they came out tasty but flat.  I'll go back to butter next time.

Tomorrow I expect to work on chicken soup and maybe vegetable stock.  Then the freezer will have more room in it for other things!

New Year News

From the food perspective, not a lot has been going on.  I've been eating more than I've been cooking.  (So says the scale, anyway.)  Today I am making a batch of yogurt, with a new cup of starter.  Not too exciting.

However, the news of the season is that I am changing jobs.  I'll still be working as a doctor, but closer to home, with better hours, and only part time.  I'll be doing something completely different and, once I get settled, I plan to go back to school and learn some new things.  (More on that when it happens, of course.)  I hope to finally have my weekends back and to be home for dinner almost every night.  And to do a whole lot more cooking and baking.  And sleeping!  As time had gone on, the job I had began to consume more and more of my time.  I miss being home with my family.  I have mixed feelings about leaving, though.  I have worked 18 years at the same place, first as a resident, then as a moonlighter, then part time, then full time as the director of the pediatric emergency department.  I shall miss my colleagues, the patients, the type of medicine that I do there.  And, yes, I shall miss the adrenaline rush that comes from not knowing what is coming next, the chaos of a busy emergency department.  But this is the right thing for me.

There is a different sort of adrenaline rush to doing something new, and I'm going to enjoy the ride.

Reduced by Seventy Percent

Over the summer I accumulated a lot of tomatoes, which I froze until I had a full day to make them into sauce.  Today I pulled 5.5 gallons of tomatoes out of the freezer.  They took up a lot of space.  (5.5 gallons of space, to be exact...)  I brought them all to a boil and then ran them through the food mill, getting about 25 pints of tomato juice and puree.

This simmered on the stove the rest of the afternoon and cooked down into a nice, thick sauce.  Two pints were canned with Persian spices and the other 5 pints I left plain.  I would have made more jars of the Persian spiced sauce but I ran out of ground lime and didn't want to grind any more today.  We had a lot going on in the kitchen, as my husband was also roasting three ducks while all this was going on.

From those three ducks, we rendered almost five pints of duck fat, which is good because I used up all the fat from the last few ducks to make that confit yesterday.

The dishwasher is on it's 3rd load today, and we have at least one more, maybe two, before we'll have the kitchen cleaned up.  Now I'm going to go put my feet up and rest!

Happy New Year!

Let's start 2015 off right, by making a pie!

Pears, cranberries and apricots, with 2/3 cup sugar, 1 T. lemon juice and 1.5 T. cornstarch.  One cheese tart and one beach plum tart.  I used my new pastry mat and it was the easiest pie crust EVER.

Mmmmmm.