Self-Esteem

Sometimes I read blogs of women who work full time, have children, cook much more adventurous dishes than I could ever dream up, actually use research while writing posts about food, and know how to take amazing pictures on camera phones. And then I, a part-time housewife with no kids, who started this week with three days off (but only ended up having two) write a post whining about having too many vegetables in my fridge that I can't use. Those days I feel like a big underachiever.

Other times, I add an extra work day to my schedule, send two kids to in-school suspension, come home and make chicken stock. 100% local chicken stock, with organic pastured chicken from the farmers' market (8 lbs of backs and necks), carrots from my garden, local shallots and onions from the CSA and my grocery store, and celery from the CSA. (Okay, okay, so the salt and pepper were not local. Sorry!)
8 lbs of chicken backs and necks did not fit in my stock pot. So I used three of my biggest pots and tried to divvy up the ingredients accordingly.
Stock!
Leftover vegetables and chicken meat. (I actually went through this for an hour after the stock was chilling in the freezer and picked the meat off the bones so I can turn it into chicken noodle soup this weekend.)I made close to 20 cups of chicken stock, and froze it in a variety of sizes. I'd love to say I froze different amounts so I could easily use the stock in different recipes, but that would be a lie. These were the best freezer safe containers I could find in my cupboards.
I went to bed feeling pretty good about myself on Thursday night.

And sometimes I work a regular shift at the museum in which I end up screaming in terror three (!) times in one day due to run-ins with the local wildlife, then invite my mom up to make cranberry relish and applesauce. (I actually let her carry five pounds of produce into my kitchen. I must really love my mom. I did make her take a jar of pickles home with her, though - and the three pounds of cranberries we didn't use.) I went apple-picking with a dear friend on Monday, and came home with about $9.00 worth of 60-cent-a-pound windfall apples and something like 5 or 6 dollars worth of 90-cent-a-pound apples I had actually picked from the trees. (My friend opted to pick all of hers from the tree, not the ground, and ended up with over 30 lbs of apples and a headache - some trees were so full of ripe fruit that when she grabbed one apple, three or four came off the tree.) On Thursday my mom picked up 5 pounds of cranberries fresh from the bog in near her brother's house in northern WI. (The orange we added to the cranberry relish is fresh off a plane from Australia. Maybe not the freshest fruit in the house, but it smelled really good. I miss oranges.) Her cranberries, according to the farmer, were not store-quality, but we think they taste pretty darn good.
My mom portioned the apples out into four-pound groups and we had 16 lbs here on the island. The rest of the apples from Monday went to my uncle's house and became a pie.
Three green apples went into this cranberry relish.


(My mom heats her jars in the oven instead of in a water bath. This is a particularly good idea with my water bath canner because my jar rack is really more a chunk of rust than a rack at this point. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that next canning season. Or for the rest of this canning season, if there is any . . .)

We thought we could seal the cranberry relish my grandma's way - without a water bath, just by letting it sit on the counter after ladling it into the jars. But after maybe 30 or 45 minutes my mom got anxious that the jars would not seal and we'd have to put them all in the fridge. These jars are not made to go in the freezer. Earlier we had debated running out to K-Mart and buying freezer-safe canning jars in the event of this exact situation, but had decided against it. Still, we wanted to be able to relish the relish over a period of months, not days or weeks, so I decided to put it in the water bath before the applesauce went in. It worked. Two of the half pint jars fell out of the rack in the canner, but they did not seem to be harmed in the process. All 7 jars sealed.

Earlier, while the relish had been cooking down into a thick gel, we'd been getting the apples ready for applesauce.
Quartering, coring, and peeling apples sure goes faster with two sets of hands.
But twelve pounds of apples is a lot.At this point I was asking myself, "Are we really only going to get three or four quarts of applesauce out of all this?" (Yes - three quarts, one pint, and another 3/4 of a pint that didn't go into the canner.)Next time I will mash the apples instead of pureeing them with my immersion blender. The sauce tastes really good (a little too sweet) but it is literally the consistency of baby food.

Unfortunately, while it is the right consistency, I think the apple sauce is too sweet to feed to my youngest niece at Thanksgiving. But her big sister will probably like it. And the relish will go very well with my local, organic, pastured turkey.


Productive, fun days like these make me feel much better about myself. Thanks for your help and your cranberries, Mom!
Good thing too, because I still have a lot of work to do in my kitchen! (And right now I need to get some sleep.)