How we stay warm while we delay turning on our furnace

Maple-Pecan Cookies

I tend to bake and cook more often this time of year than even in the dead of winter. This week I've baked cookies, a pan of cornbread, 2 coffee cakes, a 3-loaf batch of wheat bread, roasted a whole chicken, cooked beef stew and 2 pots of soup, made a pan of baked beans, and kept the dehydrator going with plums and tomatoes all week, on top of using the stovetop for quick-cooking. I'm doing all of this house-warming cooking because it adds a bit of heat to the house in these last few weeks before we turn on the furnace.

Italian Prunes, halved, pitted and dried

It may still be warm during the day where you live, but for us in the maritime northwest, the daytime highs have cooled substantially. A daytime high of 62 degrees F feels chillier  to me when the temperatures drop off in the early fall than when the cold winter yields to spring. To compensate, we're putting extra layers on our bodies and extra layers on our beds.

I've never calculated if using the oven more to add heat to our house is more cost-effective than just turning on the furnace. But I do know that I can tolerate cooler indoor temps better if I'm moving around in the kitchen. And putting on a sweater or an extra blanket is the time-proven action that pairs with turning the thermostat down a degree or two. In addition, my family loves all of the extra baked goods and comfort foods they're getting right now.

Anyway, for every week we put off turning on the furnace, I'm sure we're saving at least a little money on utilities.

Want to bake some Maple-Pecan cookies?

Here's how I make mine:

I use a chocolate chip cookie recipe as a guide, substituting maple flavoring for vanilla extract and chopped pecans for chocolate chips. I use real butter as the fat and increase the flour called for in the recipe. Otherwise, the Maple-Pecan cookie recipe is pretty much like the basic chocolate chip cookie recipe on a package of chocolate baking chips.

Here are the ingredients and measurements:

1/2 cup butter, softened

3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon maple flavoring
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1  1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup chopped pecans

Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the egg and flavoring. Mix in salt, soda, flour and pecans. Chill the dough for 30 minutes. 

Drop dough by teaspoonful onto ungreased baking sheet. Bake at 375 degrees F for 9-11 minutes, until browned and crispy-looking around the edges. Remove from baking sheet right away.

These cookies baking in the oven not only warmed me up, but definitely made my house smell like fall.

Do you use your oven more in fall to help warm the house, too?

What one fall food are you most looking forward to?

One daughter and I finished picking the apples from our three trees on Monday afternoon. It's actually kind of fun to pick apples -- like a game, trying to snag apples high in the branches using a picker tool without knocking them to the ground. We knocked 2 out of the trees, which I chopped up promptly and put in a bag in the freezer for making crisps, pies, cobblers, and spiced apple chunks later this fall or winter. We now have a produce drawer that is completely full of apples for cooking, baking and fresh eating.

While we were harvesting the apples, my daughter asked me what fall food I am most looking forward to. Hmm, that's a hard question to answer. Fall offers so many great flavors. Choosing just one fall food is difficult. There's pumpkin-spice everything, hot apple cider, roasted squash cubes, beef stew, chili con carne, gingerbread cake, pecan pie -- I couldn't decide what I want most.

Then this afternoon (Tuesday), I was taking a short walk with my other daughter and we both noticed the beautiful palette of colors on the trees' leaves in our neighborhood. This is my artist daughter. She and I often notice colors and patterns when we go for walks. The talk of fall foods came up with this daughter as well. Again, the consensus -- so many delicious foods to enjoy in fall. After all of this fall food talk, I decided the one food I am most looking forward to this fall is apple pie.

How about you? What one fall food tops your must-eat list this year?

Not having the right tools can make chores so much harder

I needed to clean the dryer lint chute this morning. Loads seemed to be taking longer to dry. And I know it can be a fire hazard to have a build-up of lint in the chute. We clean the screen with each load, but lint falls down beneath the screen. Speaking as a non-contortionist, that fallen lint can't be easily seen.

Anyway, I need to buy the right tool to make this job easier for me. But for today, the "tools" I had to work with were a wire coat hanger, lots of duct tape, a cardboard pasta box, and the vacuum cleaner. I improvised an extension for the vacuum hose with the pasta box and some of the duct tape. And I made one coat hanger/duct tape attracting tool after another to pick up loose lint and dust that the vacuum attachment couldn't reach. I did get the job done, but it took me about an hour and a half and lots of frustration.

Now on the flip side, having a good tool will make a job go so much more smoothly. After about an hour I grabbed a good flashlight so I could see down the chute and identify the remaining pile of lint/dust that was within my primitive tool reach.

An interesting thing -- we had been thinking the element on our 28 year old dryer was wearing/burning out, as loads were taking longer to dry. After cleaning the chute today, I put a load of sheets into the dryer, went to heat up a bowl of soup for my lunch, took my lunch break (which is only long enough to eat a bowl of soup), and came back to the kitchen to wash my bowl. Was I ever surprised when I couldn't hear the dryer operating! My load of sheets finished drying in about 3/4 of the more recent dry time.

I will be ordering the proper tool this very week. I could have used that hour of work time on a different project. Sometimes being cheap costs more in other areas.

Because a photo of my dryer is not terribly interesting, I also thought I'd show you one of my other projects from today -- a plum coffee cake for my family. I'm told it is delicious (contains milk, so I'm abstaining).

6 Jars of Kosher Dill Pickles This Year

These are about the last of the fresh cucumbers for us from the garden this year. Homegrown cucumbers have such a great texture and flavor. I miss them all winter long. We eat as many fresh as we can in summer. Then when the glut occurs, I make dill pickles.

I make my dill pickles as chunks instead of whole or spears. I find I can get more pickle matter into a jar by cutting the cucumbers into chunks in lieu of wholes. In addition, I can make the chunks relatively uniform in size. Whereas my whole cucumbers are all sizes, widths, and irregularities. When we want sliced pickles for sandwiches and burgers, the chunks slice up just as nicely as the wholes do.

So this is it for our family's dill pickles for the year -- 6 jars, five 20-oz and one 16-oz.. Let's hope no one goes on a pickle-feeding frenzy before next summer's cucumbers are ready.

I'll be making sweet relish with green tomatoes later next week. We go through a lot of sweet relish over the course of a year. I hope to make several jars when the tomato season comes to an end and leaves me with lots of small green tomatoes to use up.

Will you be making pickles or relish this year?

Easy Fresh Tomato Soup

Our weather is turning cooler. Our tomato plants are still providing an abundant harvest. We've been eating loads of tomato salads, sandwiches, vegetable medleys, and pasta sauces. And now today for lunch I turned about a dozen tomatoes into a pot of fresh tomato soup.

I used the blender to puree the whole tomatoes, skin included. Then, heated the puree in a saucepan along with fresh garlic, salt, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese until warmed through. Delicious and fresh-tasting, with a bit of natural sweetness. And very, very quick and easy.

What are your favorite ways to use up fresh tomatoes?

Assessing My Breakfast in Terms of Time and Cost

What I made for breakfast this morning

Sometimes my curiosity about a past version of a product takes me down a rabbit hole of cost comparisons. This a 1970s Cheerios box, from worthpoint.com. Notice it's a 15-ounce size. There's no indication on the package that this is a "family," "economy," or "large" size. It might have been considered "large" as I also found 7 and 10-oz boxes of Cheerios dating from about the same time period.

This photo of a box of Cheerios was taken from Walmart's website this morning. The 18-ounce box is labeled "Family Size." It sells for $4.93 and contains 13 1.5 cup servings at 38 cents per serving, not including milk. (A 1.5-cup serving is according to the package nutrition label.)

The regular size of Cheerios at Walmart is the 8.9-ounce box, priced at $3, containing 6  1.5-cup servings. Each serving, then, costs 50 cents, not including milk.

If one adds a cup of milk to the cereal, the cost per serving plus milk increases by about 15 to 20 cents.

Stores also sell house brands for substantially less. Great Value brand Toasted O's sells for $1.67/12-ounce box, containing 8 servings. A 1.5-cup serving, then, works out to 21 cents for the cereal alone, and 36 to 41 cents if a cup of milk is added.

Our family is not big on cereal-eating at breakfast time. Most of my family choses to have cereal as a snack. But for breakfasts, I was curious about a cost comparison between what we normally eat and the cost of a serving of cereal plus milk. A typical breakfast in our house is an egg, buttered slice of toast, and a small glass of juice. An egg currently costs us 12 cents. A slice of bread plus butter adds another 10 cents. Adding a small glass of orange juice (from frozen concentrate) tacks on 15 to 20 cents, for a total cost of 37 to 42 cents per breakfast. Our cost for an egg, toast and juice breakfast is comparable to the cost of generic toasted oat cereal plus milk.

But wait, what about the time savings with eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast? I thought about that and decided to time myself making an egg, toast, and oj breakfast. From the time I turned on the stove until I was walking away with a plate of breakfast, it took 6 minutes. And I had 15 seconds in there to give the non-stick skillet a quick wash and set it to dry on a towel next to the sink.

My conclusion in all of this is that if cold cereal is someone's breakfast "thing," then a bowl of generic-brand cereal won't cost more than an egg, toast, and juice. However, if the morning fuel you need is the latter breakfast, you really won't be spending an extraordinary amount of time frying or scrambling that egg and making toast, and it will cost just about the same as the cereal breakfast.

Just the rabbit hole I found myself in this afternoon.

Hi Friends!

Just a quick note. Wednesday I felt the beginning of a cold coming on. I went to bed and slept most of the day. Today was a day of half up and around, half resting. This was just a mild cold, and I'm definitely on the mend. I'm just resting this evening and will be back to posting very soon.

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend!

Bargain Family Holiday Celebration #479

Did you have a good Labor Day? Was it a restful day or one filled with activity? 

These Monday holidays throw me off schedule for the remaining days of the week. Today feels like a Monday, but I know when I wake up in the morning, it will be mid-week.

Our holiday celebration was once again, a frugal one. I'm not sure we have it in ourselves to do a spendy celebration. This is just our nature. It was just my husband, myself and our two daughters for this holiday. Early in the day we picked and processed plums, completely filling the 6 dehydrator trays. I'll be harvesting and drying more plums tomorrow. Later we played some croquet, badminton, horse shoes, and ping pong. Our ping pong table is damaged, so we used a large folding table in its place, marking where the net would go with painters' tape. This large folding table, by the way, was retrieved from a free pile 2 summers ago.

For our evening meal, we had a cookout over a fire using our own property's wood for cooking. About a month ago, I came across some hormone/antibiotic-free, uncured, no fillers, all-beef hotdogs on clearance for $2.85 a package. I had a coupon I could use up to 5 times for $1 off this brand. I found 4 packages of these marked down hotdogs. So I bought all 4, paying $1,85/package for some otherwise pretty pricey hotdogs. These normally sell for $6.29/package. When I bought these, they were nearing expiry, so I've kept them in the freezer since.

I didn't feel like making buns. I don't use a bun, so I scrounged the freezer for 3 bun-like bread products. I found 2 pretzel rolls and 1 dinner roll. Oddly, all three of my family members wanted the dinner roll. But dad got to have it, as he's the dad. To go with the fire-roasted dogs I heated a can of sauerkraut, sautéed some garden kale and carrots in leftover bacon fat from earlier in the week, made a tomato salad with garden tomatoes, and sliced up part of a watermelon (the only thing I bought specifically for the weekend, at 48cents/lb). We were out of sweet pickle relish, so I chopped up some sweet and spicy watermelon pickles for an impromptu relish to go with the mustard and ketchup. For dessert I found some graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate chips in the pantry for s'mores over our fire. All in all, a tasty, easy, and cheap holiday dinner for the 4 of us.

We sat outside under the repurposed Christmas mini-lights for a couple of hours in the evening, listening to Spotify music on my daughter's phone and reminiscing about the highlights of each of our summers. School begins tomorrow for the district in which both my daughters sub. Today I replaced the summer kitchen table runner with the harvest-themed table cloth. Summer is fading fast in my neck of the woods.

Whether frugal or not, I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Does it feel like summer is about done for you, too?

Happy First Day of September!

And just like that, August is over. Happy September, friends! Just a quick photo to show you what I was up to this morning.

About 6 weeks ago, I started mache indoors. Mache, also known as lamb's lettuce, is a cold tolerant salad green. Today I planted the mache seedlings into one of the three garden troughs kept on our deck. All three of these troughs now contain cool season veggies, with easy access from the kitchen. So on rainy days, I only need to pop outside for a minute to clip some mache, pull a turnip or two, or cut some Swiss chard.

I have one more set of veggie seedlings to plant out for autumn harvest, some kale starts that will fill the bare spot left by the harvested garlic. And then I'm done planting for our fall and early spring harvests. 

I'm a little late on these plantings this year. Harvest time overlaps with late-season planting, and sometimes I fall behind in one or the other.

On the Monday holiday, we'll have a hot dog cookout over the fire pit, with watermelon, our own corn-on-the-cob, a tossed garden salad, and s'mores.  Do you have any plans for Labor Day? I hope you don't need to labor on Monday and can just relax.

Wishing you a lovely Labor Day weekend. I'll be back on Tuesday.

Recents Failures and Success At Last With Bread-Baking

I've been baking bread from scratch for 35 years. You'd think I'd know a thing or two about making good bread dough. Apparently, that's not the case.

I don't have any photos of the failed bread batches, but I'll tell you briefly what's been happening with my dough. For the last few batches of bread, my dough has been sticky, requiring extra flour, and has failed to rise completely, showing signs of falling back before a full rise. The resulting loaves baked up pale, flattish, and chewy (according to my husband). I had run out of my white flour at about the same time my bread took a downward turn, one month ago. 

Last week's bread was no different, and I noticed I had to add quite a lot of extra flour to achieve a dough that I could form into loaves without sticking too much to the counter or my hands. I thought I was beginning to lose my mind. The recipe I had always followed was suddenly not working. I was thinking I'd lost count of the cups of flour or mis-measured the water, or didn't add enough sugar (effecting browning), or, or, or. . .

Today I started another batch of 3 loaves of part whole wheat, part white bread (per the recipe). I paid much more attention to amounts and counted precisely. I was definitely needing to add lots more flour. I had very carefully measured the water, so my thought was the flour was holding moisture grabbed from the air while in storage in the paper sack. So I added lots more flour, extra sugar, salt, and yeast. Since it was the white flour I thought may be causing trouble, I went heavy on the whole wheat flour in my additional amounts. I added the sugar, salt and yeast in proportion to the extra flour amount, based on the original recipe. A recipe that calls for 8 cups of flour ended up using more like 10 1/2 cups. So for the last month, I've been baking bread with flour out of proportion to the salt, sugar, and yeast, and loaves with more white flour than whole wheat.

The final result for these 3 new loaves can be seen in the photo above. These are well-developed, fully-risen, browned loaves. I'll have to wait for my husband to give me the critique on texture and taste tomorrow, when he cuts into the first loaf.

Anyway, this frustration and experience prompted me to look into causes of sticky dough and poor rise with bread dough. Not only has moisture content of the flour likely been an issue, but the protein content of the white flour used may have played a part. Good bread dough relies on flour with a protein content of around 12.5 to 13+% protein. 

My white flour is all-purpose. The white flour I ran out of a month ago was a bread flour of much higher protein content. With my wacky diet, I'm not using much of our all-purpose flour, and we now have a surplus. I thought I'd use some of it in the bread. In years' past, I've made successful loaves of bread with half all-purpose, half-whole wheat bread. So I thought this would be okay. Only, I had used a different, more expensive brand of all-purpose flour than what I currently have on hand. And with recent loaves, my family had expressed interest in less whole wheat, more white flour bread. 

After doing a bit of math, I determined that my current all-purpose flour is about 10% protein. So, what I was doing was trying to make good bread with an average of about 11% protein content flour, between the lesser whole wheat and more all-purpose. The combination of added moisture drawn into my flour and a lower than ideal protein in the flour just sort of doomed my loaves.

Going forward, because I still have a surplus of all-purpose flour to use up. I'll have to reduce the water I add to the dough and use a 67% whole wheat, 33% all-purpose flour ratio for my bread. I hope that next week's bread doesn't throw me any more curveballs.

I'm fortunate that my family isn't terribly picky about my cooking. Even though the previous loaves of bread were dense, flat, pale, and chewy, they still ate it all. I'm very grateful for that, and the fact they don't complain about my cooking and baking failures.

You know what's really great about having a small success like this batch of bread? One single small success seems to blur the memory of about 30 small failures. Life feels less frustrating, and I am encouraged to do more.

Wishing you all a wonderful Thursday!

Dinner at the beach (or cheapskate dining out)

our view from the bench

We've skipped this family favorite tradition the past few summers. Prior to the Covid shutdowns, my family has taken dinner to the beach one night during summer. 

In case you missed it, summer is running out of time. When this occurred to all of us, we decided to do a dinner at the beach right away. We had fabulously warm weather over the weekend, with Sunday slightly warmer. My daughters wanted to swim, so we chose high tide in the late afternoon. (High tide allows for less hazardous swimming at our local beach.)

my dinner 

We made burgers at home, washed some of our tree apples, filled a jug with water, and packed supplies like cups, plates, napkins, and a fork and knife for my bunless burger.

Of course, with this beautiful, end of the summer weather, we weren't the only ones who thought to make an excursion to the beach on a Sunday evening. One pass through the packed parking lot told us we'd have to park up the hill in town and walk down. Fortunately, once at the beach we found a nice bench available to eat our dinners and to use as home-base for our seaside activities. Fun swimming, wading and a little sand play as a bonus to our waterside meal.

You already know this about my family, we rarely eat in restaurants. Eating in our own kitchen. dining room or on the patio can feel repetitive and mundane after a while. Taking our dinners someplace else is our way of combatting home-meal fatigue, without spending extra $$ on the meal.

I'm really glad that we restarted this favorite summer tradition, even if it was just in the nick of time. Summers fade quickly in the PNW. 

What are your must-do end of summer plans?

What foods are you canning, freezing or dehydrating this month?

6 pints of blackberry jam, 3 made on Saturday and 3 made on Sunday

I don't normally labor on Sunday afternoons. That's usually my time to rest and restore myself. This past weekend, however, found me making jam both Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Saturday, my jam-making was definitely a to-do item on my list. I had a bunch fo blackberries to both freeze and turn into jam. But Sunday afternoon was a different story. I wasn't planning on making jam this day. I was going to have a restful afternoon. Those berries were enticing. So fresh and plump, full in sweetness and flavor. I wasn't in a rush to get anything done. I simply felt called to make more jam.

The kitchen was uncharacteristically quiet on Sunday. It was just me and the berries. I took my time, allowing the berries and sugar to heat slowly on the stove. I inhaled the deep berry fragrance as I leaned over the pot to take a taste. You could say I was in the groove. My relaxing Sunday jam-making felt so different from my hectic, got to get this done, Saturday session. I wish every time I preserved or prepared some food for my family I could feel this same sense of ease and enjoyment.

So blackberry jam has been my most recent food preservation effort. With the winter's jam now made, I'll move on to making blackberry juice later this week.

How about you? Are you preserving any foods for fall and winter enjoyment? 

Your Favorite Multi-Purpose Kitchen Tools

not related to this post but a favorite lunch or dinner for me these days -- 
tomato, basil, garlic, Parmesan omelette

It's blackberry harvest season in my area. Every day there's another batch ready to pick and freeze to use in fall, winter, and spring. I have these two jumbo zip-loc bags that came in grocery shipments during the lockdowns. Each is about the size of a standard bed pillow when filled.

My family's part is to do most of the picking and I rinse and freeze the Barries on trays then add to the jumbo bags once frozen. One bag is now completely filled and I'm about 1/3 of the way on the second bag. 

This morning as I was rinsing today's batch of berries, I thought about how useful this large bowl has been over the years. Twenty-five years ago, my little family's bread consumption exploded. I had been mixing the dough by hand in my largest mixing bowl, which meant I could bake 2 loaves at a time. In order to keep up with my family's appetites, I needed a much larger bowl. I bought a large, shallow stainless steel bowl at Target just for mixing bread dough. This bowl is so large I could not only mix the dough but also knead the dough in the bowl, making enough for 4 to 5 loaves in one go. I used this bowl for bread dough for 15 years, until I bought a stand mixer to do the dough mixing and kneading.

What I discovered was this oversized bowl also makes a great basin for washing and rinsing. When we were redoing our kitchen, I used it as a portable sink for dishwashing. And when I've needed to rinse produce from our property, this bowl has been just the right dimensions for that purpose. I can rinse 2 quarts of blackberries at a time in this bowl, or large leaves of kale or chard or heads of Romaine lettuce.

I do still use the bowl for mixing dough, pie pastry dough. I can mix a batch of pie dough enough for 5 single crusts at a time in this bowl. In addition, this bowl is our popcorn bowl. When our family of 4 to 5 wants popcorn, our appetites aren't exactly dainty. We make a gigantic bowl of popcorn, oftentimes having some leftover for snacking the next day.

I think I originally spent $7 for the bowl, and out of that I've gotten a bowl to mix large batches of dough, a popcorn bowl, a kitchen sink, and a produce rinse container.

There's another favorite multi-purpose tool of mine, the serving spoons that came with my stainless flatware. Along with forks, spoons, and knives came a large slotted serving spoon and a non-slotted serving spoon. I had intended to buy things like mixing spoons for cooking, but I never did get around to it. All these many, many years of marriage, I've used the serving spoons as mixing spoons. When I mixed bread dough by hand, it was one of these serving spoons that I used. 

The slotted spoon is not only handy for serving foods that you want to drain a little, like veggies that have been cooked in liquid, but it has also been my slotted spoon for deep-frying, when needing to remove fried foods from the oil while leaving most of the hot oil in the pot. 

I've also found the size and the rounded edge of these spoons to work well when cooking in my non-stick pan. We have a non-stick spatula for those pans, but it's so old it's quite warped. The rounded edge of a spoon also works and doesn't scratch the finish. 

It's funny -- when my son and daughter-in-law were asking for hints for a Christmas gift a couple of years ago, one of the first things that popped into my mind was a mixing spoon. I really have always intended to buy one. But now, in looking back over my many years of home-cooking, I haven't needed a mixing spoon, the serving spoon has worked just fine.

When I first married, I thought I would need so many tools and gadgets to outfit my kitchen. As it turns out, I didn't need nearly as much as I had believed. It reminds me of how simply many folks lived up until the second half of the 20th century. Tools often had multiple uses. take a 19th century washpan, for example. The washpan was not only used for dishes, but also for laundry (to heat the water and wash the clothing) and for bathing. Now that's versatility!

These thoughts got me to wondering what you've found to be your favorite kitchen tools, ones that you've used for much more than you originally thought you would. Do you have favorite multi or dual purpose kitchen or cleaning tools?

Update on a growing project, plus my new growing experiment

 

This is one of several primrose plants that I started from seeds my daughters gave to me for my birthday this year. The plants are now the size I would buy from the store in early spring, just without any sign of blooms. I suspect they need a cold dormant period before they would flower. I will find a spot in our yard to plant them where I will see them blossom in early spring next year. I'm so tickled with how well this worked. I didn't start all of the seeds, in case I needed a do-over. But now that this worked so well, I'll start the rest of the seeds later this week.

And here is my latest experiment. These are apple seeds from one of our tree apples. I've got them wrapped in a damp paper towel in a loose plastic bag at the back of the fridge. Apple seeds need a cold and slightly moist period before planting in soil, known as stratification. After about 6 weeks, I'll pot these seeds in soil and see what happens. They won't produce fruit that is true to the tree the apple came from, as apples use cross-pollinators to produce fruit, and each resulting apple carries characteristics of both the fruiting tree and the rooster tree. But I think this will be interesting nonetheless. If I can coax one plant to grow, I'll find a place in our landscape for this new apple tree.

That's about it from me tonight. I hope your week has been a good one!

Freezer Storage: Freezer Containers or Freezer Bags?

I was chopping and freezing Swiss chard and basil today. As I was trying to make room for the chard in the kitchen freezer, I had to smash down a whole bunch of bags. Miscellaneous containers just seemed to take up more space than the foods they contained.

As much of a nuisance as the hard-sided containers are, I do prefer those over bags for freezing liquids (blackberry juice, crabapple juice) and semi-liquids (pumpkin puree and applesauce). 

I'm now at the end of my supply of both containers and freezer bags, and I'm needing more for putting away additional garden produce. So I've got to decide what to acquire more of, bags or containers. 

So, I'm thinking this through. Maybe you can help by pointing out what I'm missing. Here's my pro and con list:

Starting with freezer bags

Bags -- pros

• store in small amount of space when not in use
• when filled and in the freezer, no additional airspace taking up valuable room
• with less air in the bag, less chance of frost build-up or freezer burn on food
• for loose foods in a large storage bag, like a gallon of peas or green beans, as the bag slowly empties, it can collapse and take up less space in the freezer 
• washable for reuse

Bags -- cons

• lack durability, can be used a handful of times each
• any holes in the bag or damaged seal could cause leaking when thawing frozen items for cooking
• if freezing semi-liquids or liquids, the bag will freeze solid in the shape it is in when placed in the freezer, possibly making it harder to stack with other bags in the freezer
• need to be washed by hand

Now for sturdy freezer containers

Solid-side freezer containers -- pros

• very durable, can last many years
• good for liquids and semi-liquids
• easy to wash in the dishwasher
• stackable in the freezer

Solid-side freezer containers -- cons

• depending on shape, they may not tessellate well with other containers in the freezer
• cost -- more expensive to buy
• if the food doesn't completely fill the container, the airspace not only takes up unnecessary space in the freezer, but frost can build up on the food
• frozen containers are prone to cracking and chipping when dropped
• bulky for storage when not in use

What am I missing? Do you have a preference for bags or containers? Do you store some foods in bags and other foods in solid-sided containers? Do you use glass jars for freezer storage? I personally have a fear of glass jars breaking in the freezer, even if that is rare.

How much garlic do you eat in a year?

The last week or so have found me at work in the garden bringing in some of the early harvest. My big chore on Saturday was to dig this next year's garlic.

Last October I planted 99 cloves from the 2022 garlic harvest. On Saturday I harvested 94 heads/bulbs of garlic. Either 5 heads have eluded me and will send up shoots in spring, or 5 cloves rotted in the soil over winter. Despite the loss of 5 heads of garlic, the 94 is pretty good, I think.

For the past several years, I've increased the number of garlic cloves I plant by about 10 each year. So my plan is to plant about 110 cloves this October. That will take about 12 or so heads, leaving me with around 80 heads of garlic for this fall, winter, and spring. 

The heads are not large ones. For this next year, I plan on amending the soil more completely before planting and increasing the spacing between cloves. I hope this will produce larger heads next summer, which would mean each head would cover more of our meals.

We still fall short of my goal to grow our year's supply of garlic. The 2022 garlic lasted until the end of May, at which point I bought garlic powder. So, how long will 2023's harvest last us? That's a good question. I hope the 80 heads last through June 2024. That will move push us closer to the goal. Perhaps in another couple of years we'll be able to grow as much as we need for a year.

It's interesting to think in terms of a year's supply of any one food, in relation to what we grow. In modern times, most of us only think about how much of any one food we may need for a week or perhaps for 2 weeks. A century or more ago, estimating on a year's scale is something most folks always did, at least with some foods. 

I'm guessing my family goes through 2 of my smaller home-grown heads of garlic per week. That would be 104 heads per year. It sure sounds like a lot. But maybe it isn't. How's does that compare to how much garlic you and your household use in a year? Do you have any foods that you procure just once a year, necessitating the estimation of a year's consumption?

Herb Seasoning Blends For Winter Cooking Using Garden Abundance

 clockwise beginning top right:
thyme, garlic, carrot leaves, celery leaves, oregano, parsley, sage

Those of us who keep gardens, whether small or big, try to use what we grow. One area that I have fallen down on this is in using all of the herbs that I grow. With both perennial and annual herbs I tend to use what I need in summer, dry or freeze the ones that we use most, then let the rest die off.

As I was watering the parsley this morning, I noticed that I really have an abundance of this herb. I also noticed the thyme was quite prolific, as was the sage. I decided I wanted to make sure we do use these herbs. I thought I could just cut and dry or freeze each, as individual herbs. But you know, I know myself, and I could just see all of that frozen parsley waste away in the freezer, neglected for the most part.

In another area of my life related to food, I can no longer use bouillon powder or soup base for flavoring when cooking due to allergens to ingredients.

So, a light bulb went off. I could kill two birds with one stone and make seasoning blends to store in the freezer with my surplus herbs. The seasoning blends would be allergen-free for me and they'd ensure I used what I chop and freeze because they would seem more handy to me than separate bags of parsley, thyme, sage, celery leaves, etc.

Here's what I made today. I made one all-purpose soup, sauce, gravy, bread or rice stuffing seasoning blend, using lots of garlic, lots of parsley, lots of thyme, some celery leaves, lots of carrots leaves, a little sage, and a little oregano. This will allow me to quickly season homemade chicken stock, a beef stew, a meatloaf, whatever. It should be full of flavor. I didn't follow a recipe, but I used roughly the proportions I would use in most of my basic savory cooking. And I made another bag of a poultry specific blend of herbs, celery, sage, thyme, carrot leaves, and a small amount of parsley. 

The difference between the two bags is a couple of extra ingredients in the all-purpose (namely garlic but also a little oregano), and proportions. When I cook American poultry dishes (like chicken and dumplings, chicken soup, bread stuffing, chicken pot pie) I tend to go heavy on the celery and sage, with a little thyme, if I have it, and a little parsley. So the poultry seasoning reflects my use of herbs in chicken and turkey dishes. I expect to have enough seasoning in the all-purpose blend for about 10 family-size recipes and in the poultry seasoning blend, about 8 recipes worth.

I'm looking forward to having the simplicity of adding a few tablespoons of a single blend to enhance my cooking this coming fall and winter. I'm doubly glad because I harvested and processed garden produce that I might have missed.