7 jars of jam and our new stove.

 Chance and I made 7 jars of Strawberry Rhubarb Jam using the the recipe in the link from yesterdays posting. As you can see in the photo below we ended up using the Canning Kettle because we doubled the batch and could fill the canning kettle.



Round one of canning on our new stove.

   Somehow I forgot to blog about us getting a new stove.Well,it's not New but something even better to us,it's Vintage. Our old stove sucked overall and we never knew if what we were baking would burn or not.It was still working so we could not justify buying a new one any time soon.But my Mom was gifted this stove and didn't need it. Knowing we were disgusted with our stove Mom re-gifted the stove to us.For once re-gifting was the perfect thing to do.We have a love of the vintage stoves since they tend to be work horses and easy enough for Chance to repair.Just the fact that its repairable makes this stove a treasure to us.So many appliances these days can't be fixed easily or at all,what a waste of a lot of money.

Now back to the jam.Chance is home way before me on my work days so before I got home he prepped as much of the jam ingredients as he could.This made for a quick session of canning once I was home.I think all together it took about an hour to put the jam up.The division of the work and the ease of a smaller batch has insipred us to think about more small batches.Like my Mom said to me we might be able to put up more from our own garden this way.Chance also pointed out we could end up with a bigger variety of things,that sure would be the spice of life wouldn't it?




Strawberry Rhubarb Jam

  This morning before work I was cruising around online and came across this recipe for Bacon Jam Hand Pies.In my pre-coffee haze I thought the recipe was for Bacon and Jam Hand Pies but as I read through it's for Bacon Jam. Oh My Goodness,Jam made from Bacon. And what is sitting in our fridge curing waiting to be smoked next week? Bacon,made by that handsome man of mine.I had Chance look over the recipe and of course he said "Let's do it" I am not overly interested in the Hand Pie part but once we make the Bacon Jam and have tasted it I may make it into the pies.Unless we figure out another way to use it.It is Jam,couldn't we just smear it on toast?

Finally, I am announcing this here for all of my readers first so if you want to snag a spot you can.Chance and I will be teaching a Chicken Butchering class here at Hrafinstaad  Friday Aug 19th at 6 PM.The cost of the class is $30 , you bring your own chicken to butcher then take home and one sharp kitchen knife.We limit the number to 10 so there is plenty of time to give help as needed.The closing date for sign up is Monday Aug 15th. Email us if you are interested- hrafinstaad at aol dot com.Please feel free to spread the word.

I am feeling so much better about how things are going around here.Seeing the back garden growing rapidly has given me much hope that we will carry on.Also reminding myself that there is actually a nice list of veggies that we can plant in the coming weeks for winter gardening has put some get up and plant in my feet.Speaking of winter gardening.Chance picked up some free window glass so we can build a couple of cold frames for a winter garden.I'll post more when we start the building.

Rois