Fall Carrots (Yum) and Xmas Plans!

Hello! So last Spring we planted carrots..they didn't turn out so well. 

We tried again this year! You betcha they grew well...actually they grew great.
They are rather large..and are really delicious. So much better than those...store bought orange something...I can't really call the store bought carrots..carrots anymore.

                         We will be heading out to Massachusetts for Christmas! I'm really excited. Myrtle will be coming with us so we'll board her up in a nice place. She got all her shots(poor thing hated the poop sample part) and we just need to crate train her so she isn't all over the car. But then Plan B is we might have the house sitter that is planning to take care of Love can possibly take care of Myrtle.  Can't wait! 

 We are going to use the carrots in a Fettuccine Alfredo (which from taste testing is MUCH better than Olive Garden's and much cheaper). 

Happy Holidays!
-The Lawings

O! The Holiday Gingerbread-Women

 'Tis the season to be baking.
Using a delicious holiday
recipe for gingerbread-men, we've
made a Christmas must! No holiday
is complete without the perfect cookie
to go with it. 
Every year, my sisters and I look 
forward to the mass of delicious cookies we make with our Grandma. There is always 3 small bowls of M and M's left over for us and cookie dough galore!
We're not a Massachusetts yet
and so these were the items that 
would hold us over until the holidays.
Well, enough of me talking. Feast your
eyes!
Happy canning!
-The Lawings

Halloween!!

             Hey  everyone! Tomorrow is Halloween. Just finished with our costumes and our pumkin. Made a delicous pumkin bread recipe. One pumkin filed like four bread pans.

             A while ago we made some pesto. We stripped our basil plants bare and made a delicous recipe.

            To the right is the pesto recipe in process. It lasted us a while of pesto!

This is our pumkin. Naomi had the idea of using the guts. Can't wait to post what it looks like when it's lit.

Happy Halloween! Make sure you have pumkin and candy corn somewhere in all that trick or treating goodness!
Happy canning! 
-The Lawings

Pumpkins

Went to the farmers market today. We got 2 diferent kinds of pumpkins.

      Well, as you can guess we got Candy Roaster, which is really good for pies, and that big pumkin in the middle of the 2 in the front. We'll make a spooky jack'o'lantern out of that.
      We also got some more tomatoes for canning. We might make some soup out of that!! Or more crushed tomatoes.
       Our Ground Cherries stopped fruiting sometime in September and we still have some delicous dried ones!
Happy Canning!
-The Lawings
     

Preserving Apples and More

First off, what a busy weekend. First canning and then drying. A busy weekend is a good weekend.

The first thing we did, before lunch, was take a bag of raw peanuts, from Ingles, and spread some on a baking sheet over a pan and roasted the peanuts for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

The bag of Peanuts [Above]

And the aftermath [Below]

Since we had about half of a bushel of Mutsu apples from yesterday's canning, we made a delicious apple crisp with homemade whipped cream.

Then since we still had leftover apples, we made Daisy and Naomi's favorite recipe: dried apples.

We put the apples through the peeler and then broke them into smaller pieces to spread around in our dryer. They'll be done in a couple days, perfect for healthy school lunches.(I would post pictures but something is not letting me do it so, sorry.)

Recently we've been interested in selling some of our foods, whether it's salsa or jam, we don't know yet. But you can't sell canned foods taking a class and in the the NCSU Better Process Control School Announcement it explained a little bit about that.

The class is called Acidified Foods School for entrepreneurs. The class will be held at the Holiday Inn Asheville, Biltmore West. Registration deadline is Sept. 26, 2011.

The Lawings (us) may start a food business.

The North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumers gave us a list of options for what kind of business ours should be.

For ours kind of business it said:

"Packaged foods other than meat products are regulated by the NCDA&CS Food Division. Some can be produced in a home setting. No license required but inspection."

So we'll give you the heads up.

~The Lawing Family~

September Canning

Our goals for today:
-Can crushed tomatoes
-Can some Apple Butter

Went to the farmers market today and got one bushel of tomatoes(about 25 pounds. Biltmore variety)  and one bushel of apples (Mutsu).

So we started by taking the tops off of the tomatoes and then boiling them for 30 secounds to loosen the skins. Then we took this HUGE pot and mushed them slighty cooking them for a long time. We sterilized the quart cans and the lids and after we put the slightly smushed tomatoes into the clean cans we tapped the air bubbles out of the secound batch(the first was a practice and we forgot to de-bubble it) we put the 12 cans (first 7 in the pressure canner and then 5) we learned how to work the pressure canner. Interesting.

While the tomatoes were pressure can-ing we took the blossom ends, the worms, and the stems off of the apples. We boiled them in the same(cleaned out) pot and then put them through the mill to separate the seeds and the skins from the pulp. That took a LOT of time out of that.

So now all we have to do is add the sugar and spices and then can and put them into the pressure canner. I'm estimating that we will have about 8 or 9 pints of apple butter. I hope.

Good luck to you canners!!