Apples, apples everywhere

There's a little produce stand here in Ogden called Carlos' Produce.  It's owned by the same people who own the Sacco's stands, and it's open year-round.  I've meant to go in since moving to Ogden four years ago, but didn't make the time until I was driving by a couple of weeks ago and saw the sign;

"Local apples, 49 cents/pound"

I stopped immediately, and came out a few minutes later with a bushel of Gala apples, and another ten pounds or so of red delicious and Fuji apples.  I then bought a peeler and a corer/chopper, and went to work.

Kezie was my good helper; she peeled dozens of apples for me and make everything go much faster.  After a night of work, we had about eight quarts of applesauce, and twenty of apple slices, all canned and lined up in the pantry.

A week later, I went back for more apples.  By then, I had bought a Foley food mill with some Amazon gift cards, and hoped that would make the applesaucing process go faster.  It did not.  That was $30 I wish I had spent on something else.  I prefer peeling and coring the apples before cooking them, rather than removing the seeds and pulp in the mill later.  It's faster and it tastes better.

Kezie and I settled in for another night of apple processing, and I was hoping for another dozen quarts of applesauce, hoping it would turn out as well as the first batch.  It did not.  It had the weirdest texture; it tasted like apple-flavored pudding with lumps in it.  Trust me, no one wanted to have to eat it.  It was the same  method I used before, so I have no idea what went wrong.  I was not throwing out all fifteen quarts, though, so I came up with the solution; apple butter.  I've wanted to make apple butter for years, ever since becoming addicted to it, served on a piece of fresh bread from the campus bread bakery, my freshman year.

Crock put apple butter recipe

In a nutshell; put applesauce in crock pot with sugar and cinnamon.  Cook for a really long long time, stirring occasionally.  When it's cooked down to about half the former volume, add more sauce and sugar and cook some more.  Remove from slow cooker.  Eat, refrigerate, or can immediately.

The result: the kids love it.  The weird texture applesauce worked perfectly for apple butter.  Now I have thirteen pints of applebutter in my pantry.  Total cost: $22 for apples, sugar, and cinnamon.  This does not count the waste of $30 for the food mill, or the $35 for the peeler and the corer/chopper, which was money well spent.

Finally, tortilla success

Managed to make edible homemade tortillas today.  Also discovered a pretty good homemade enchilada sauce.  If only I had discovered these things while I wasn't in the middle of a weight-loss competition.

Homemade tortillas (Food storage only!)
4 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 T baking soda
Whisk these together.  Add
1/2 cup shortening.  Mix this in with your hand or a pastry cutter.  Mix very well, until the mix looks like moist crumbs.  This will take a few minutes
Add about 1 cup of water.  Knead until mixture forms a soft dough that isn't sticky (you may need more water).   Break dough into small balls, and use a rolling pin to flatten.  Cook on frying pan until browned on each side.


Enchilada sauce
1 small can tomato sauce
1/4 cup roasted red chili sauce
Cumin
Chili powder
Small can green chilies

Mix the ingredients together, and use in place of enchilada sauce.
I am tired of buying enchilada sauce, especially since my favorite brand never goes on sale.  As soon as red peppers go on sale, I'm roasting them and canning this sauce. 

Food Storage Meal: Chicken and Rice Soup

Chicken and Rice Soup (food storage edition)


1 onion (or dehydrated onion)
2 stalk celery (or dehydrated celery)
2 carrots (or dehydrated carrots)
1 can chicken breast
2 cups chicken bullion
3 cups water
1 1/2 cup rice
Oregano
Pepper
Salt

Cook celery, carrots, and onions in oil until soft.  Add chicken and broth from bottle.  Add broth or bullion, water, rice, and seasoning.  Cover, cook for twenty minutes.  Add more water if necessary.

It's not pretty...

 It's not pretty, but it tastes good

Chicken was only $1.39 this week, so I decided to try canning it.  I've been wanted to plug the giant meat-shaped gap in my food storage.  I also figured that it would be nice to have a bunch of cooked chicken around, and I just don't have a the freezer space for very much.

It's not hard to bottle: cut chicken, put chicken in jars, pressure cook.  I found the instructions here:
http://lovehugsandgiggles.blogspot.com/2008/11/canning-chicken.html.   (I did not use salt).

I have to add that this was made possible through the loan of a pressure cooker from Mom and Ted (thanks, guys).

I've used this chicken two days in a row, now.  It's unbelieveably convenient; I plan to can the rest of the chicken that's in my freezer as soon as I have the time.  It also increases my food storage possibilities, so I look forward to coming up with new storage-only meals.


Since I was canning anyway, I decided to try bottling apple slices.  I had about twelve pounds because they were sixty eight cents a pound this week, and I knew I'd use them somehow.  I peeled, sliced, blanched, bottled, and boiled.  We'll use these for pies, or for rice and apples, or over ice cream

I love  that pop the bottles make when they seal.  My girls love it, too; they kept giggling every time they heard it, and would hang around while I pulled the bottles out of the water so they wouldn't miss it.  In a couple of years, I think I'll have a couple of little helpers.


Additonal:
I've been doing some research, and you can can include sauce in the bottles before you cook them, to flavor the chicken.  Monday will find me at the grocery store buying another box of chicken and some Italian dressing.

Note to self: buttermilk freezes.  Poor, neglected ice cube trays could be put to work to accomplish this.

Amazon subscribe and save

So, this is cool.

I'd heard of Amazon.com's subscribe and save service, but the last time I looked at it (for cloth diaper detergent) it didn't have much that I was interested in.  I hear their prices on diapers are amazing, but since I don't use them, I haven't looked into it.

I was cruising a bargain blog today, and a price caught my eye.  Shawn takes Omeprezole (Prilosec) twice a day, which gets kind of expensive.  The cheapest I can get it consistently is $19 for 42 tablets at Target, and once or twice I've found coupons for other store brands and paid $18 dollars.  This means $30 a month for his medication, and leaving it out of the budget isn't an option, for a lot of reasons that I won't go into (if anyone is actually reading this, you should thank me for not explaining.  Trust me.)

The Subscribe & Save price for name-brand Prilosec is $17.30, and you get $3 off your first purchase.  My plan is to order three, then set up my next order for six months from now, and see if the price drops before then, so I can get it cheaper. Still, the current price is fantastic, and shipping is free. 

I've been looking around the website for other deals, and found a pretty good price on toilet paper.  Sun liquid dish soap is a pretty good price, about 97 cents a bottle, but I usually wait until it drops below 90 cents to stock up.

This is kind of exciting.  Buying this sort of thing online means I get a great price, and I don't have to go to the store, which means I don't make impulse buys.  Win!

Wheat flour

I've been waiting for wheat flour to go on sale at local grocery stores for six months, and it hasn't.  It's at least $12 dollars for 25 pounds at the store, which is way too much.

I went up to the Honeyville store in Brigham City last week and bought 100 pounds of wheat flour for $27.  Their store prices are so much better than their website prices.

At the Honeyville store, I also picked up some freeze-dried mushrooms, peppers, and onions.  I hope that we don't get to the point that we can't buy fresh fruits and veggies, but I plan to be prepared if we do.