The little jar is what happens when you shred zucchini, take 6 cups of the stuff and dehydrate it. Supposedly it keeps better when trying to use for zucchini bread and the like in the winter. (Better than freezing). I am going to fluff this up and give it a whirl. If it works as it’s supposed to, I will dry LOTS of it for later use.
The big jar (quart) is just to show by comparison how little the little jar actually is.
Yes, they all sealed (according to Tom). You will notice that there is a lot of syrup at the bottom and the fruit is at the top. I filled the jars like it said. Then it said “cover with syrup. Failure to cover fruit completely could cause failure to seal.” Hmmm. Sounds like a lot of failure. So I took out fruit thinking that I could cover the rest. Um, nope. I just ended up with less and less floating fruit. Finally I quit, and this is the result! Yum.
Yup, I canned. And froze. It took about 3 1/2 hours, but I got 7 quart jars canned and another 3 in the freezer, vac-packed. Pretty impressive right? Now if the seals would just “ping” for me. Haven’t heard any and that is worrisome.
I know what you are thinking. Is there no end to her planning for the day when we have no electricity and must survive with our own resources! Or maybe you are thinking that Zelda has gone over the edge. In any event, this contraption is a combination of several internet articles about building your own solar oven. This “oven” consists of 2 main parts. A $3.97 car windshield screen and a sewing pin. The other components are jury rigged and could vary slightly. The “product” is a perfectly baked peanut butter-chocolate chip muffin, courtesy of Bubbles.
It amazes me still, but this WORKED!! (And worked well). The shield is folded into a funnel shape and pinned in place. Set it on an oven rack in a 5 gallon bucket (or waste basket, or bowl, or pit). Place the item to be cooked in a dark pan, put the pan in a glass bowl. (The pan cover was removed for this picture. There is nothing special about it except that it is black.) Aim the funnel towards the sun and move it if necessary as the sun shifts position.
I left it and checked about an hour later, perfection. The other implication of this aside from the obvious (and fun/amazing cooking) is the ability to pasteurize water. This cooker can easily boil water and hold it for the 8-10 minutes required to kill yucky things that might be in it.
I am going to assign the kids tasks of measuring things for successful and practical use of this devise, ie time needed, temps generated, etc. Should be fun.
This is Freddie being really, really brave. He is sitting about 20 feet from Rocko, the huge, scary bichon frise next door. This is as close as he has come until today. Just after I snapped this he got really brave and went to the fence. They greeted each other with brave sniffs and that was it.
But check out these ears. Yesterday they sort of inflated, going up a little more as the day went on. Today they were totally up except for a tiny corner of one ear. He is so precious! I walked with Freddy and Bubbles and Merlin this morning and Freddie did an outstanding job.
You are probably getting tired of this particular bucket, but it amazes me. It was picked from a friend’s trash heap, then I planted a huge, awesome looking cucumber (which turned out to be a pepper plant). Next, I planted pretty flowers on top to keep moisture loss down. Then, I added used up jiffy pots as another moisture keeper. Except that they weren’t used up. It turns out that some lurking seeds were waiting to sring into action. Here you see a Delicata squash with 2 huge fruit growing off of the top. The peppers are growing well too. Four new babies are growing from the bottom.
Just to the left of this bucket is a 4 gallon bucket with a grape tomato on the bottom (very prolific, already given about 50 tomatoes), and on top is a bird house gourd and red basil. These are all part of my experiment to see how much is too much. How much one teeny container can grow without committing suicide. We are still weighing the produce. For all of June our total output was 15 pounds. We did that in about 2 days for July.
OK, I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not that Jesus. Seven years ago when we moved here and were homeschooling all of our kids plus oldest granddaughter, we decided to get fish for our classroom. I did some research and found out that our 5 gallon tank would accomodate 1 inch of fish per gallon. Five gallons, five inches of fish.
I took all five kids to Walmart with a ruler and a task covertly related to our math curriculum. And it is a teensy bit of a challenge to accurately measure live, moving fish. But as best we could, we sized up 3 fish whose combined length added up to 5 inches and paid .33 each. Their names: Mary, Crystal, and Jesus. I debated the Jesus thing. But they (the kids) were so sweet. To them, naming a fish Jesus was the ultimate honor. They loved him (Jesus) so much that it was really important to name their fish after him. Sweet.
Mary and Crystal died within a few years, way after the inch per gallon rule was blown. At some point, the kids decided (without coaching) that having a fish named Jesus might be irreverant, so they changed it to “Justin”. Justin aka Jesus, grew to be over 5″ himself. He was a lively thing, especially at feeding time. Sometimes he jumped out of the water when the top was off for cleaning.
He grew dimmer and dimmer recently, less concerned with his food. And then he died. Seven years is a long time for a goldfish. He was a good one and we miss him. We discussed his permanent resting spot. He was too big to flush. He might well be dug up in the backyard. And it was trash day. Which kind of easily lead to the final solution. Freddy took him out in a bag, and the city dump truck took him away.
Freddy is an 8 week old GSD, seen here sound asleep in Bubble’s arms after a good scrub in the tub. He came home today after a two day debate over whether we could afford him, who his mommy would be, and if he presented a danger to Merlin. Ultimately, our hearts were softened, Bubbles will be the mom, and the kids kicked in $50.00 from their savings accounts towards his cost. He is beautiful, sweet, laid back and very smart. He is sitting in my lap as I type so he might be a lap dog as well.
The alliteration in the title is courtesy of Bubbles (the “mom”) and Freddy, my son. The whole naming thing does present a dilemna as we now have “Freddy-the dog” and “Freddy-Zelda’s son”. Actually, Freddy the dog is going to be known as “Sir Frederick”, “Freddy” for short. Freddy, Zelda’s son, is really not named Freddy, so it might only be confusing for Zelda. But she is not real so it might be just the reader who is confused. Oh well. We kind of like it because way back when I got married (16 years ago this month) I brought a dog (July 16 update- don’t you hate it when posts justs stop mysteriously?) named “Jackie” into our family which now included a daughter named “Jackee”. Confusing? Yes it was. Chance (who bye the bye, actually made it out of boot camp and into advanced training) used to differentiate by saying “Jackee-my-sister” or “Jackie-the-dog” when referring to either one in conversation.
Now we have “Freddy” (the human, my son, whose real name is not Freddy anyway) and “Freddie” the dog. So pay attention to the spelling or you may be confused!
(But I am!) This one has the following ingredients from our garden:
Lettuce, spinach, sweet basil, red basil, celery, carrots, green pepper, summer squash, broccoli, grape tomatoes, cucumber. That’s ELEVEN things! Wow!!! I used to hate the very concept of gardening. Forced as a child to labor and all. And thanks to Tom, this is all ORGANIC too! Double wow!
Lest you be too dazzled, I need to point out that there is a fair amount of iceburg lettuce mixed in. The next batch of “my” lettuce won’t be ready for a few days. Still, this rocks!
Today I made cucumber pickles with my container cukes and the huge green pepper from my upside down pepper grower. I could have used our own onions but they are not quite ready. Can’t wait to try it. Also, last night in a fit of desparately not wanting to waste perfectly good sourdough bread that no one was going to eat, I cut it up and made croutons. They were delicious. I will make a salad tonight with them. I also picked a pound of broccoli this morning. Tom wants that for dinner.
Monday I used the dehydrater to dry summer squash slices (some with popcorn seasoning, some with salt and pepper), the rest of a can of mushrooms, and some grape tomatoes (very prolific, also from upside down planter). The tomatoes were awesome! So sweet, chewy, like little Starburst (which I hate), but tomato-ish. Yum. I can’t believe these words are even coming out of me.
