Moolie - Happy Thanksgiving :)

[moolie]

Thanks SD I'm glad my journal is interesting and helpful in some way.

I've never actually thought of myself as very skilled when it comes to cooking, I'm the type to think of a recipe as a guideline and I wing most things as I go. I don't wreck too many things

I have 30 meals ready to go (well 22 in the freezer plus 8 pints of ground bison that are quick to make into pasta sauce/chili/etc.) as a result of two-days worth of cooking and pressure canning.

I probably could have done all the meal prep in one day if I had skipped the canning. I still have a few meals frozen from the last time I did this, plus I have frozen meat and fish for when I do have more time to cook. I've been doing this off and on for years, up till recently I would just do up one type of meat at a time (say 10 chicken dishes or pork or ground bison etc.) to keep meals in the freezer.

We are a busy family with various evening activities (my daughters and I are long time Girl Guides (same as Girl Scouts), my girls are involved with our church Youth group and Youth band, as well as various school sports teams, and they have taken piano lessons for years), and some days my husband doesn't get home on time due to transit issues or a meeting that runs late and it is just nice to have something ready to go if I've had a busy day (I own my own business and work at home). Knowing I can pop a casserole into the oven at 4:30pm and have it ready to eat in an hour is wonderful. Some of the meals that are frozen in freezer bags can also be popped in the crock pot in the morning if I'm going to be out during the day.

 

[savingdogs]

Very impressive! My goal is to be more like that.

 

[Denim Deb]

Very impressive! My goal is to be more like that.

Same here.

 

[moolie]

I started out by cooking meals from one type of meat at a time.

Say chicken is on sale, find all your favourite chicken recipes, buy a bunch of chicken (the day before you cook) along with any other ingredients you need that you don't have on hand, and go at it.

Most of my chicken recipes call for being frozen raw in some sort of marinade or cooking sauce and then thawed and cooked/baked/crock-potted on cooking day, so all I do for those meals is cut up the chicken (or buy parts already cut up) and portion amongst the zipper freezer bags with the sauce (I just dump the ingredients for the sauce right into the bag, them smoosh everything together with the meat before pushing out the air and zipping shut.

(Label the bag with date and contents BEFORE you add anything, LOL, it's difficult to write on a bag full of chicken and sauce! And it's difficult to tell what that frozen mess of chicken and sauce is after it's frozen )

Or do a hamburger day. Pick out a bunch of meals that take ground meat (we buy bison because we have a ready local source and we like it better than ground beef) and do your shopping the day before. Get out your biggest heavy bottomed pot and brown it all in batches. Meat sauces, chilis, stuffing for cabbage rolls or stuffed peppers can all be whipped up in the pot, casseroles like shepherd's pie can be mixed in the baking dish and then covered with foil (or a rubbery plastic lid like some of my Pyrex dishes have) and then labeled and popped into the fridge to cool, then into the freezer.

Check your local Value Village (one of my favourite shops for used books, most are $1.99) for Once-A-Month-Cooking type cookbooks. I think a lot of people try it and then give up, because I see a lot of these books there. But other cookbooks are good as well, recipes for one-pot meals and casseroles as well as crock-pot meals can all be adapted to having all the ingredients frozen together in a zipper baggie or casserole dish prior to cooking. Saves a ton of time some evenings

 

[moolie]

Or, a lot of people start by cooking two meals when they make one. Say it's lasagne night--make two instead of one and freeze the extra. It takes a little more time, but once you are on a roll it goes pretty quickly. I think you can fill your freezer pretty quickly with this method as well, and it doesn't actually double the time you spend cooking.

I've never managed to do this very successfully, whenever I've made two of something I've put the extra into the fridge to cool and then we end up eating the extra one a couple of days later because I've forgotten to freeze it. My way does still save time when I need that meal, but it makes for a boring week if we have lasagne twice so close together

 

[savingdogs]

Your last post is more the way I have been doing it, making meals that feed us several times and then storing it. But nothing I've made feeds us 30 times!

 

[moolie]

Stupid snow, this is what we awoke to this morning after a day of rain yesterday--4" of heavy wet white stuff

Time to start posting photos of my seed-starting progress to get me back in the spring mood! Saturday I picked up a bag of potting soil, some cool new coir "plantable pots" to try instead of peat this year, and planted 12 Roma, 12 Sheboygan (Paste) Tomatoes, 12 Yellow Pear Tomatoes, 12 Italian Sweet Bell Peppers along with some Basil, Sage, & Rosemary.

I'm a little behind this year, but the weather people have called for a late cool start to summer (and the snow this morning is pretty obvious evidence that they are right) so I think these will be ok for planting out by the end of May (our last frost date is pegged as May 20th but I never put anything tender out until June 1 based on personal experience).

Been taking lots of photos for this journal, so here we go:

Saltspring Seeds

New coir "plantable pots" I'm trying this year. I also have plastic pots that I recycle from year to year.
These coir pots are quite thin, hope they stay together for the next 6-8 weeks!

Potting soil in, ready for seeds!

I used popsicle sticks as plant markers.

What our setup looks like with the lights on. We have a black wire shelving unit in the corner of the kitchen that we use for seed starting (and storage throughout the year).

 

[moolie]

The second story of our house is cantilevered to overhang our back deck by a good two feet, so I start my early peas, beans, radishes, carrots, and lettuce in pots on the deck under the overhang.

They are easy to cover with a blanket on cold nights, but I'm thinking of getting/making some cloches and perhaps stealing Wifezilla's "Redneck Wall-o-Water" plan this year

 

[moolie]

Sunday morning after a busy Saturday getting kids out to sell Girl Guide cookies and then my younger daughter to and from a birthday party, and the bright sunshine coming into the bedroom didn't allow me to sleep in past 7am Oh well, got a few things done before the hungry hordes get up in a bit to get ready for church.

I kept the two smaller chunks of my kefir grains going while drying the bigger chunk into 4 fairly even-sized pieces (they are fully dried now and ready to mail, one is spoken for but I have 3 more if anyone needs some--I'm happy to mail if you PM me your address!)

I keep the remaining two smaller ones in one jar together on days I don't need a lot of kefir, but run two jars if I want more--it's been working well and I think my grains are super-charged because they make a very thick rich kefir in just 24 hours.

 

[moolie]

Been doing a lot of planning for my garden now that I've got some seeds started. We've only been in this house for 2.5 years, only 2 growing seasons, and so far we have only grown a container garden in big pots on the deck (tomatoes, peppers, lots of herbs, lettuce, peas. beans, carrots, radishes etc. and a few pots here and there of marigolds, nasturtiums, and other flowers we like.)

This year we are building raised beds (2x8') like what we had at our old place. We'll still grow things in the deck pots because they work well--they are up against the SE side of the house under the second story overhang so the pots stay quite sheltered. Probably a few tomato and pepper plants, herbs and flowers again--the rest will go in the raised beds.

Reading up on companion planting because I've forgotten most of it other than planting carrots with onions to keep their respective pests away. First year we grew carrots we got those fly larvae that dig black tunnels in the carrots so we never planted carrots in that bed again and learned to plant them with onions.

But since it has been snowing/raining on and off since Wednesday night (that snow melted on Thursday but then it started up again yesterday and now the ground is white again) I don't think I'm in too much of a hurry to get the beds built and put anything in the ground

I'd really like to build a pvc pipe and plastic sheeting (we have an almost full roll of thick mil house vapour-barrier in the garage) greenhouse this year to extend our season, so let's see if I can actually pull this off