Welcome to Autumn in Spokane!

 

 

 

Autumn means canning, preserving, putting up, whatever the term is you want to use. I know that for me it means rearranging the food room to find space for all the food stuffs we've preserved. That's what I'll be doing this afternoon.

We purchased 40 lbs. of chicken from Zaycon and it's now all in canning jars. I've got to find a spot for that! So I spent $84.00 on chicken in October plus $18.00 at Rosauer's this morning buying a roast and 10 lbs. of margarine that was on sale. I'll need it for holiday baking. So for October I spent $102.00 on groceries. Dad gives me $100.00 a month now because I said to put the other $100.00 he was giving me towards the 2nd mortgage which will be paid off this month!!!! I'm going to try to show my monthly expenditures because it's good for me to be accountable about my shopping.

Now this doesn't include things like dish detergent or other non-food items. This $100.00 is just food. My goal is to reduce that by half and live off what we canned and froze. Don't know if it will work but I'm willing to try. Our food room is full as is each of our freezers. Now to enjoy the bounty. Whoops, I forgot I still have pumpkins to can! I hope I have enough canning jars!





 



 

I love the Harvest Season!!!

 

Yes, this baby was grown in our garden out at Grandma Joyce's! We've never had a watermelon grow so big in a garden. All that heat did great things for our produce!

 

 

It looks like it isn't ripe but it was very sweet and delicious!

 

 

 

These are a couple of shots of our pumpkin harvest. Counting the 3 we have in the front for decoration, we grew 70 pumpkins!!! Oh My! The ones on the left are the pumpkins that will be flying their way to sweet grandchildren soon!

 

 

You can't really tell from this shot, but we canned 80 quarts of spaghetti sauce from the tomatoes from our garden. It takes about 25 lbs. of tomatoes for every 10 quarts of sauce. We had quite the tomato harvest, thank you very much!

 



 



We stored our onion harvest in the basement bathroom shower because it's cool and dark. This is only what's left after using a lot of onions in making the spaghetti sauce!

 

Blessings!

Yesterday we went to Green bluff and bought apples for apple pie filling that I'll can this week. And afterwards we went to Grandma Joyce's and Grandpa Dale's to harvest the pumpkins. We found a row of onions that had been hiding under the pumpkin plants! Our harvest this year has truly been bountiful. Grandma Joyce wonders if it's because of hard times ahead? I do too! But no matter what comes we're excited to plant another garden next year. Just maybe not so many tomatoes! I love this season of the year and express my gratitude for all blessings I've been given!





 

 

Adapted recipe!

 

Sorry there is no picture but trust me, this is a great recipe. And I changed it of course, to what I had in my kitchen. I found it online and it's called Easy Cheesy Zucchini Bake. I went to visit teach a sister on our route but discovered she was at her daughters who is also in our ward. So Beth and I went to Robins home. They were doing chalk drawings in the front yard and as we were chatting Robin showed us her little garden on the side of her home. A great example of utilizing all the available space! She picked about 6 zucchini and gave Beth and I one each. When I got home I thought, I'm going to use this for dinner tonight. So after checking for recipes I found this one and here you go!

 

 

Grandma Mitchell's Zucchini Bake: My version has about 4 servings.

 

 

1 zucchini, cut into slices

1 Tbls. basil (calls for fresh but oh well)

1/2 chopped red onion (it calls for green onion, but I had a red onion from the garden)

1/2 tsp. thyme

3/4 tsp. garlic powder

1 cup mozzarella cheese (it says to use 1/2 c. when you mix it but I missed that and added the whole cup to cook. I like it that way)

1/2 cup parmesan

salt and pepper to taste

 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray an 8x8 baking dish with oil or Pam. In a bowl mix sliced zucchini, basil, onion, thyme, garlic powder and cheeses. Mix until zucchini is coated and herbs are well-distributed. Season with salt and pepper. Put mixture into prepared dish and cook for 25-35 minutes. With my oven I cooked about 10 minutes longer. When zucchini is nearly cooked through sprinkle a little more cheese over and bake 15 minutes longer. This was great and Dad really liked it too. I served it with a green salad and garlic bread. Oh My it was good!

 

 

 

 

 



I tried a new and easy recipe tonight. It needed to be easy because I'd spent over 3 hours at the endodontist today and wasn't in the mood for a time-consuming meal. But I looked on one of my food storage blogs healthyfamilycooking.blogspot.net and found this recipe for

Simple Ravioli with Toasted Walnuts!

 

 

I fixed a watermelon-blueberry-raspberry fruit salad and we also had a kale-chard-lettuce-spinach-cucumber salad as well. It was all delicious! The recipe calls for cheese ravioli but all I had was beef ravioli and we loved it.

 

Simple Ravioli with Toasted Walnuts

 

14 oz. ravioli

1/3 c oil (they say EVOO) I just used what I had

1/4 tsp. garlic

1 c. walnuts, roughly chopped

2 tsp. lemon juice

salt and pepper to taste

1/4 c. parmesan, I forgot this but it turned out great anyway.

 

1. Cook the ravioli according to the package directions. Drain, but reserve about 3 Tbls. of the water
2. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a medium skilled over medium heat
3. Add the garlic and walnuts. Cook until nuts are lightly toasted and fragrant. Do not burn, and keep stirring
4. Stir in the lemon juice, salt and pepper and the reserved cooking water from the ravioli
5. Add ravioli and toss to coat. Serve with parmesan sprinkled over top 

 

This morning I went up to Knapp's Orchard to pick strawberries! I was there about 10 minutes after they opened at 7:00am and yet I was still almost the 30th car there. You can tell it's the end of strawberry season. But I got some great strawberries and it was beautiful and they had a great view. And yes, I went by myself. When I get peaches I'm hoping Dad or my friend Michele can come. After I got home I packed some strawberries for Dad and dropped them off at his office. Then I headed to the Spokane Farmer's Market on 5th by Sacred Heart hospital. It's a small market but I managed to find some new items to try. Dad needs to eat more greens so I bought some chard and Kale to see if we like it. If we do, we'll plant our own next year. I also got a few peaches, a little fresh honey for Dad and pea pods for me. Oh my goodness they're sweet! So all this accomplished by 11:00am. I think I need a nap!

 

 

 



 

At our last Relief Society Meeting, Amanda Lee taught a class on bread making. She makes the best bread and she shared her Only-takes-an-Hour-Bread recipe. So I tried it but it didn't work for me. So today I went back to my tried and true recipe from the  everyday food storage.blog called, EZ Whole Wheat bread but I used white flour. Here's what I got!

 

 

Seriously, isn't this beautiful? Can't wait to try it with homemade strawberry jam!

It's amazing how each person has their 'special' recipes that work on a regular basis for them but not for others. It's good to try other recipes, but it's even better when you have a recipe that is consistently a success for you.



 

I truly did not realize it had been so long since I'd posted here. Wow! Where does the time go? So as most of you know Dad and I planted a garden out at Grandma Joyce's and Grandpa Dale's place. They have a huge amount of land and graciously shared since our neighbors were using Rondo's garden space. We planted onions, pumpkins, tomatoes, cukes and watermelons out there. The watermelons aren't looking too great but the pumpkins look huge! Hopefully we'll have cute pumpkins to share with the grandkids. We brought home some huge onions from the garden to use already! They are delicious! At home we have blueberries on one of our 3 bushes. Hooray! And the raspberry starts from Rondo's finally have started producing. They are great and I am enjoying them a lot.

 

Looks pretty good doesn't it?

 

My strawberries also are coming on great and Dad puts them in smoothies. He is an awesome smoothie maker. He uses bananas from the freezer, watermelon cubes that I froze last year and whatever other available fruit there is. You should ask him for his recipe. Trust me, they beat out any smoothie you could buy. We also planted lettuce and spinach which means we are eating a lot of salads and that is so great. I even made a strawberry, chicken, lettuce, spinach and homemade crouton salad for lunch! Fast food places can't beat that. And my flowers look amazing! I'll try to get pictures of the yard and garden soon.

 

So lastly, I had finally had had enough of the pantry. Why I didn't paint the inside of the pantry when I painted the kitchen, I'll never know. But Dad found a quart can of Antique white interior paint that was marked down to $4.00 at Wal-Mart and I started my latest project.  I cleaned out the pantry and painted and rearranged the items in my kitchen. I also threw out a lot of old spices and put the keepers in quart jars in my baking cupboard.

 

I used a dry erase pen to mark the jars, so the jars can be reused.

 

So now my pantry is clean, pretty and useful!

It's amazing what a little paint can do. I love this pantry now.

 

So long for now. I'm sure there's a project waiting for me somewhere!