A practical guide to living a simple and competent lifestyle
Learning how to make tomato powder is one very useful skill when it comes to getting the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to tomatoes. Whether they are tomatoes from your own garden or tomatoes you purchased from the store. This recipe will help you to be able to make use of the entire tomato and for there to be no waste.
Did you know you can easily make sun-dried tomatoes? Yes, you heard us right, you can easily make them yourself. You might be thinking that they have to sit out in the sun for days to dry but we have come up with a much easier solution. You can achieve the same drying results using a food dehydrator. By using a dehydrator you also have more control over the drying conditions of your tomatoes. In addition, it is really quite convenient to add them to your dehydrator and forget them right from the comfort of your kitchen.
Yes you heard us right, we said applesauce that is better than Mott’s. Growing up we only ever ate applesauce that came from a jar from the store. What we learned when we made our own applesauce was that we were truly missing out. Making your own homemade applesauce is really the only way to go. In fact, after you have homemade applesauce you will probably never go back to store bought applesauce again.
In a recent canning session, we had a canning failure. While this failure is common for many, this was the first time we experienced it. This occurred in our canning session for bread and butter pickles which we shared recently on our blog. This was disappointing but we tried to remind ourselves that it can happen to anyone. And no one, not even the most experienced canners are able to avoid this completely.
To help summer go out with a bang, we had to replenish our supply of BBQ sauce. We don’t just barbecue during the summer but all year long and we also use BBQ sauce as a condiment for other meats or add it to other dishes to contribute to the overall flavor. We make it worth our while and can enough BBQ sauce to give us a one year supply. In fact, the great thing about canning it at the end of the summer is that you won’t have to do it while you are in the midst of summer and have your supply to carry you through. Then as summer winds down, you replenish your supply once more.
We have made just about every recipe we can think of with zucchini. We have sauteed zucchini on the stove, we have cooked them on the barbecue grill and have even incorporated them into other dishes. We have made several different breads, cakes and desserts. As much as we love the beloved zucchini, we are running out of not only ideas but the appetite for zucchini. If you are like us and continue to harvest zucchinis from your garden and would like some other ideas, you can preserve zucchini for future use. Here are some of the best ways we have found to store zucchini.
We harvested another round of cucumbers from our garden and wanted to bring you along in our process of canning bread and butter pickles. We decided to preserve these as bread and butter pickles since we previously canned dill pickles. We weren’t able to find a recipe in the Blue Ball Canning Book for these pickles and therefore had to review several recipes online and develop our own bread and butter pickle recipe. As you scour the internet, you will find many variations to this recipe. We found many recipes where people made refrigerator pickles and did not can the pickles, however, we wanted to find a canning recipe so that we could add these pickles to our long-term food storage in our pantry. The great thing is that any pickle recipe can be canned.
Making and canning your own chocolate sauce couldn’t be any easier. As long as you have the ingredients on hand, canning supplies and are comfortable water bath canning, you can easily make chocolate sauce to add to your long-term food storage at a fraction of the cost. This chocolate sauce is very versatile and can be used to top ice cream or other desserts, to make chocolate milk or hot cocoa or any other way you see fit.
We would like to share our tip on the best way we have found to store blueberries for long-term food storage. We picked these blueberries over the last two weekends and have eaten quite a few of them, however, a few blueberries still remain. We decided to freeze these blueberries. In order to freeze them, we thoroughly washed the berries and lightly dried them. We then spread them out on a cookie sheet in a single layer so that they will freeze individually. Once they are completely frozen, we move the frozen berries to a Ziploc bag and place them back in the freezer. This method is so much better because it allows you to grab just a handful of berries as needed without berries being frozen together. Just to give you an idea, this bucket of berries fit on two cookie sheets and these two cookie sheets of berries, fit into one gallon sized Ziploc bag. This way we will have blueberries for smoothies, yogurt, and other recipes all year long. Thank you for stopping by and visiting Sunup to Sundown!
One of our first harvests from our garden this 2018 garden season has come from our cucumber plants. We will admit that these were hidden under large and abundant leaves and grew a little bigger than would be ideal for pickles but we were so pleased with how visually appealing they looked stacked in a wide mouth mason jar. We harvested 8 large cucumbers and canned them as dill pickles.