Mid-Month Grocery Shopping -- My Pumpkin Obsession

The first batch of apple and crabapple sauce fruit leather turned out great. I have 6 dehydrator trays. 

I cut each round into 4 portions, then rolled each up in waved paper. I'll keep these in the freezer until later this fall, when the fresh fruit from our trees is gone.

I made 24 fruit leather portions in this batch. Each one is the equivalent of a small dish of fruit sauce. My family and I sampled one of the trays, and we all thought it was good. I have a second batch of fruit leather now in the dehydrator, and I plan to do 2 more tomorrow and Thursday. I harvested all of the crabapples that I want this afternoon and turned them all into sauce for more fruit leather. And now I'm done with the food mill for the season. Yay! I can put one thing away.

On to the mid-month grocery shopping.

Do I really need two more pumpkins?

I made time last Friday to go down to WinCo. I could have waited longer, but I wanted to pick up a couple of large Jack o'lantern pumpkins before the rain rolled in. The bins of pumpkins sit partially out in the rain at WinCo, and I don't want to risk a mildew problem with the ones I buy. Our garden produced 8 smallish pumpkins, which we've been enjoying roasted. I wanted a couple of large pumpkins to turn into pumpkin puree for the freezer. Two should do it and get us through the year on pumpkin puree. I love pumpkin. And I love having a lot of pumpkin in the freezer. I eat pumpkin puree, as is, with butter and salt. I like a spoonful of pumpkin puree in a cup of apple cider tea. I love pumpkin-sausage-sage pasta. And I love, love, love pumpkin pie. Some years I can find canned pumpkin on clearance after Thanksgiving. But I can't count on that. So I'll ensure my pumpkin fix can be met with these two large ones to cook up in November.

It had been two weeks since my last grocery shopping, the one where I spent way more than I had expected and didn't have enough cash with me. I made sure to grab extra cash before I left this past Friday. I spent $120.80, and that includes some trick or treat goodies and a special treat for my husband.

Here's what I bought:

meat

pork breakfast sausage (my husband's favorite)
turkey breakfast sausage (my favorite)

1 pound sliced pepperoni (for pizzas)

pepperoni snack sticks (These are a treat for my husband. He enjoys them.)

dairy

block cheddar cheese

block mozzarella cheese

1 gallon milk

1 dozen eggs

fruits and vegetables

2 large carving pumpkins, a total of ~35 pounds

1 can frozen apple juice concentrate (for making spiced cider, blended with crabapple juice and spices)

4 avocados

6 bananas

6 cans corn

6 cans green beans

pantry

5 lb bag organic all-purpose flour (does not contain any barley or malt, so I can have foods made with this flour)

5 lb bag whole wheat flour 

10 lb bag unbleached all-purpose flour (for many of the treats I bake, especially if I may only have a tiny amount)

25 lbs sugar

bulk chili powder, about 1/2 lb

trick or treats

3 packages individual pouches cookies for trick or treaters, a total of 36 treats

Halloween is on a Friday this year, which ordinarily would mean we would get more trick or treaters. However, the weather forecast is for lots of rain that day. When it rains on halloween here, the trick or treaters give up earlier and go to fewer houses. I think we'll be safe with 36 treats. The houses in our neighborhood are far apart and set back from the street a ways. Most of the older kids prefer to go to the neighborhood next to ours, where houses are close to each other and to the sidewalk. 

I really didn't buy a whole lot on this shopping trip.  As usual, apart from my husband's meat snack sticks, I didn't buy any commercial snack foods. I bought basic foods from which we make many interesting (and some boring but tasty) things to eat.

I'm stocking up bit by bit on holiday baking supplies and some winter veggies that we like in canned form. The avocados were my impulse purchase. I allow myself a few dollars every other week for an unplanned buy. Everything else comes from my list. The unplanned buy can be a treat for me or someone else, or it can be something healthful like the avocados. Why the avocados this time? They looked good, were grown in the US, and were just 68 cents each. We've used 2 so far, and they've been perfect. 

I won't need to buy much of anything this next week, except perhaps a few bananas and coffee. I'll stop by Walmart when I'm out and about later this week or early next to pick those up. But I don't anticipate needing to do a major shopping until November. Now that sounds so strange to me. October is going by in a blur. I can hardly believe November is so close.

Grocery tip for tight budgets -- have a dollar amount in mind (and stick to it) for any impulse or unplanned purchases. If I'm too strict with sticking to my shopping list, I begin to feel deprived. $3 won't break the bank for us, and it gave our whole family a nice and unplanned healthy treat to add to meals. And because this is how I chose to spend our "unplanned" money, I was able to walk right past the very tempting boxes of Junior Mints (my favorite candy) at the checkout. BTW, I do often buy avocados, just not usually until later in the fall. It was a surprise to find them for 68 cents each so early.

So that was my mid-month grocery stop. I could have saved $13 if I'd skipped the pumpkins. But then again, I use the pumpkins as food. And at 38 cents per pound, that's a great price for a veggie.

I hope your budget is stretching as far as you need it to this October.

Two new ways for me to use some of our crabapple abundance

Crabapples are the overlooked fruit of the orchard, like stepchildren in the family of cultivated apples. They're usually too small to be considered for fresh-eating. Many varieties are quite tart and require the addition of sweetening to make them palatable. And small fruit size means the harvesting is a lot more work than their larger cousins. 

However, they do well where cultivated apples sometimes struggle. They're loaded with vitamins and antioxidants. And they're often quite prolific. You know me, I try to make the most of what we've been given.

It looks like there are more crabapples than I had thought. So far I've done 4 major pickings and there are still many more on the tree. Today I did a little pruning of this tree, as I had with the fig tree. I figure it can take a little pruning, if it's producing so well. I thinned out some crossing branches and areas where branches were building up moss, a sign the tree is too dense. As I pruned, one daughter and I plucked the crabapples off those branches. My daughter had about a half-hour before she needed to get herself ready to leave, and I really, really appreciated the help and companionship while I worked. Having help does more than just save time. It makes tedious tasks more enjoyable.

So far I've made crabapple sauce, crabapple juice, and crabapple jelly. I'm eager to find new uses for all of these crabapples.

In order to motivate myself to do another batch of these beauties, I decided to do something different with what we  would harvest today. 

I made a batch of crabapple cider vinegar followed by a batch of crabapple and applesauce fruit leather. I won't know for a few weeks if the crabapple cider vinegar turned out. And I won't know until tomorrow if we like the fruit leather. I'll make another batch of fruit leather if we like the taste of this one.

From what I read, making apple cider vinegar is a two-step process -- ferment the apples in a water/sugar/apple cider vinegar with mother (the clump of living organisms that works like a starter for batches of vinegar) solution to an alcohol stage, then strain out the apples and continue the fermentation process until the alcohol turns to vinegar. 

If this really works, I'll have a new supply of apple cider vinegar for pennies each year. I had a bottle of vinegar with the mother already, so no cost there. And the sugar was just a couple of tablespoons. Crabapples are free for me. 

I don't have a way to test the percentage of acidity, which means that homemade vinegar would not be a safe choice for making canned pickles. But it certainly can be used in refrigerator pickles (the overnight kind), salad dressings, marinades, ketchup and BBQ sauces, to add flavor to soups and stews, as well as for household cleaning and hair rinses.

After using a couple of cups of the crabapples in the vinegar, I cooked the rest as crabapple sauce. I blended the sweetened crabapple sauce with unsweetened homemade regular applesauce. It's a combo that we find pleasing. Some crabapples are actually on the sweet side. Not ours. Ours are quite tart and astringent. To eat as sauce, I blend it half and half with regular applesauce. The full-strength crabapple sauce (once sweetened) is, however, fine in applesauce-raisin bar cookies and applesauce cake, where the other flavors in the baked goods mute the astringency of the crabapples.

This evening, I have 6 trays of fruit leather drying in the dehydrator. If we like it, I have several new quarts of crabapple sauce, made today, to turn into additional fruit leather. Fruit leather will take up less storage space in the freezer, doesn't require additional freezer containers or canning jars, and will provide fruit servings when our fresh apples and pears are gone.

The rest of the harvest

I picked, washed, and wrapped the last cabbage head today. The carrots and their greens are now tucked away. I would like to do one more harvest of unripe figs and one more harvest of crabapples. And that just leaves one more meal of Swiss chard, the turnips and beets, and fresh radish greens, kale, and Brussel sprouts to use as we want this fall. And then I can dust the 2025 dirt off my hands for good.