Fruit and fun

I've got quit a bit of catching up to do, and what better way to do it than sitting on the beaches of Kauai? (ok so I didn't get very far updating from Kauai because now I'm back home)

The original cause of my lack of blogging was all the fruit I was processing over the summer.

This summer my peach tree actually produced buckets and buckets of beautiful peaches. It wasn't due to anything I did, just pure luck. It was my first descent crop. I thinned them out, but I never thin enough and so I wasn't sure they were going to be very big at all. My apple tree didn't fair as well and I got lots of apples but they were tiny and inedable. Major bummer!  I did have to share the peaches with the birds and they took their fair share (that square bucket is how many I lost to them)

I also amped up my preparedness game and started making some different kinds of heat sources. The one on the far left with the toilet paper roll inside has rubbing alchohol in it. I forgot to remove the cardboard middle, so it made it pretty hard to squeeze it in there, but I got the job done. This type of candle is perfect for putting in your car or using inside since it is a clean burn. (btw, it's in a paint can) The one next to it is a gasifier. You need a paint can, a progresso soup can and a drill to make it. There are lots of videos on-line showing how to do it, I think the method I went with is the best one and we tested it and it works really good. This one you would use outside and you could cook over it. 

 

Next up is the tuna can cardboard and paraffin wax. Pretty cheap. I did discover that you've got to either leave a cardboard wick or scrape down to the cardboard to get it to light. Because the wick is everywhere it gives off a nice amount of heat and light- although you would want to use this outside.

If processing all my peaches and getting ready for seminary to start wasn't enough to keep me busy, I got a call that I could have some pears. How could I turn that down? I can't see perfectly good food go to waste. The pears were small and they were filled with worms (theres a pic of them) and they required a lot of work to process. I lost some skin on my hand from holding the pear while using a potato peeler. It was a lot of work because there is no easy way to get the skin off and there was a lot of waste per pear due to damage. Sometimes I ended up with 1 pear slice from an entire pear. They looked beautiful canned though and I used a light syrup. Ethan has been enjoying eating them.

What do you do when your friend has a grape vine? You beg for grapes. Emma and I went over and retrieved the glorious grapes before they went to waste. We ended up going over when no one was home so we felt like we were on a grape heist. It was pretty fun. We ended up crawling into the massive vine to retrieve the grapes. It was so much fun and it was really hard to stop because we kept seeing glorious bunch after bunch that makes you want to pick them. I brought over what I thought was a large bowl, but we ended up using our shirts to collect more. The one downside to picking grapes - spiders! They were everywhere. On the way home with the grapes there were at least 5 loose in the car. While we were going through the painstaking process of removing the stems we released several more. Emma was on spider suck up duty. We ended up freezing snack size bags of grapes for enjoyment and I also dehydrated some. 

I had no idea what I was in for when I decided to make raisins. Just getting them off the stems is a massive undertaking. Then I went with a method of blanching the grapes so that they would burst the skins- making dehydration faster. Here's the problem with that method. It adds lots of time to the process. It adds lots of water to the grapes. It makes the raisins really sticky because the inside of the grape is now on the outside! When I say sticky, I mean really sticky! Raisins by nature are a little on the sticky side, but this was bad sticky. Raisins also take hours and hours to dry. After that initial batch I decided that the grapes were small enough that I would just put them on the trays as is without blanching them. This added a few hours to the drying time and I had to do a lot of tray juggling in the dehydrator to get everything processed evenly, but I liked the results much better. 

If processing my own grapes wasn't work enough I had my friend bring over some more so that I could process them for his family- after all, they were their grapes. They might as well get some goodness too.

What did I do with all those peaches? Well I made lots of pies. My favorite to make is peach raspberry. I found an amazing country crust that you just press into the pan which made the cupcake pies possible. I used those for visiting teaching and thank you gifts. I also made a big pie for the lady that got me quilting. I had a little pie miracle with that. I had also made a pie for our family. We have a family that comes to dinner at our house every Sunday and when we got the extra pie out that I made we realized that it was still soup. I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. The friend suggested that I just put it back in the oven. We did and it turned out perfectly. Here's the miracle part- if saving my pie wasn't enough. I had gone to deliver the other pie to the quilt friend not knowing that it was soup as well since I baked them together. Had she have been home when I went to deliver it, she would have been given a tin of soup and I would have been mortified! I was able to cook the pie again knowing that it would work and turn out fine before delivering it to her the next time. My brain finally turned on and I realized that there are 2 baking temperatures and times for the pie. You start off at a high temp and cook it for awhile then you lower the temp and cook it for the rest of the time. I had only done the 1st cooking time in my haste to get the pies cooked while I was doing a million other things at the same time. When I do too much at once I get sidetracked and careless. So my little pie miracle saved me from total embarrassment.

Along with dehydrating and making pies with the peaches, I also made some fruit leather. While I was making said fruit leather, Emma decided it was the perfect time to clean out her nasal passages in the kitchen sink. Why? Who knows! She wanted to gross us out? Get too close to my fruit leather with her nastiness? It's a typical night in our house captured in a picture. After the nose cleaning, Nate gathered everyone up for their back to school fathers blessings. 

OK, this picture below is from Monday. I added it here because it fits. So I had a lot of dehydrated peaches and grapes. They weren't being eaten fast enough and I was worried that they were going to go bad. I was getting ready to see how freezing them would go when a friend told me about her latest obsession- oven canning. It was the solution to my problem, so I had to give it a try. It totally worked. I had to help the cans seal by pushing down the lid, but if it stays down instead of popping back up, you're good to go- which is what happened on all the smaller jars. Now I've got my raisins and dried peaches and fruit leather sealed up nice and tight in jars to be preserved until we can eat or use them. How totally awesome is that?