... and using those sausages

Hello again everyone,

This is sort of a continuation from yesterday when we made all those sausages.

Because we used venison meat that had been in the freezer we could not re-freeze them unless they were cooked first.

I made us dinner from 5 of them. Nothing fancy, just cooked up with some gravy and served with mashed potatoes and beans (frozen from last years garden). Who does not love Bangers and Mash?  :)

We still had quite a lot left so Frank cooked all of them on the BBQ. They did smell wonderful. When they had cooled I put them on a cookie sheet and froze them. After which I popped them into a zip-top back and back in the freezer. 

That is it for this post. Back shortly with an update on the veg plants.

 ~ Melanie ~

... making sausages

Greetings everybody,

It is a rainy day here in eastern Ontario so we could not get out to work in the garden so we decided instead to make sausages. 

We had a bag of venison in the freezer that needed to be used up so we combined that with the last of the bacon from the pig we had ordered last year.

Frank put all the meat through the grinder attachment on my KitchenAid stand mixer. It occurred to me after we had begun this process that perhaps this would make a good blog post so we ran to get the camera and started taking photos. 

After the meat is all ground we added the herbs and spices and mixed it in really well.

Then we have to deal with the sausage casings. We do not like the "fake" casings. We like to use real hog or sheep casings. If you are the squeamish type you may not like to know that basically they are the animals intestines. They are thoroughly clean and I pick them up at the butcher shop in my nearest town.

When you get them home you soak them in some warm water with a wee bit of vinegar added. It makes them nice and soft and pliable. 

The next step is to wash them. This is a little bit like filling a water balloon.
First of all you have to find the end and then get it open. 

I fit the end over a funnel so I can run the water through the funnel and give the insides a thorough washing out. It is a little bit like making water sausages. :)

After that we fit the casings on the sausage stuffer attachment on the mixer. They generally slide on pretty easily.

At this point Frank begins to put the meat into the hopper and push it through the mixer with a plunger. I handle the casings and gently move them along the funnel as the sausage meat begins to fill them. It does not take all that long to get the hang of it. When you have filled the length of casing (we never make it more than 4 feet long), then you twist them into individual sausages links. 

We managed to make quite a nice pile of sausages. Some we gave away to friends as they all need to be cooked as the meat was previously frozen. There is still far too much for us to eat in one sitting but we will cook all of it tonight and then we can freeze the cooked sausages for later use.

That is it for me for today. Thanks so much for stopping by. I would love to know if you have had a chance to try sausage making for yourself. Leave me a comment. Cheers.

 ~ Melanie ~

... leeks and tomatoes

Hello again everybody,

It is the beginning of April and although it is still cold and we still have snow on the ground here in eastern Ontario I have been thinking about the garden for some time now.

Back in February I started off two pots of Leek seeds. The variety I am growing this year is "Large Musselburg". They started off quite well and have never looked back. They are doing simply splendidly. In the past I have trimmed them down but have not done so this year.

 I am planning a new method of planting them, one that Eliot Coleman uses and I am hoping for great things from the. I will do a post on the planting when the time comes.

In March I stared seeds for 11 varieties of Heirloom tomatoes from seed that I saved from last year. All of them germinated quite quickly and did very well.

As soon as they had their first true leaves I pricked them out and transplanted them into individual cell packs. I will transplant one more time into larger pots for their last 3-4 weeks of growing before they go into the ground.

As you can see from this photo, they took it very well with no shock and have already put on some growth just in the last couple of days. I will follow their progress as the season advances.

That is it for today. Thanks for visiting. Have a wonderful weekend. Cheers.

~ Melanie ~

... update on last years squash

Hello everyone,

I wanted to stop by to give you an update on the varieties of squash that we grew last year and how well they are keeping.

We have been keeping them in the boot room which is on the north side of our house and it has a stone floor with no heating in the room. This is where we piled up almost all the squash when we harvested it in October.

We are now down to a smaller pile which includes two Kabochas, 6 Butternut and that last of the massive Hubbards. I got on the scale with this monster today and it weighed in at 28.8 pounds. 

Although the seed cavity will be very large, it will still provide a great deal of flesh. We have been cutting them up and steaming or roasting all the flesh and then storing it in the freezer. Frank took a photo of me with it and I could barely hold onto it.

The Butternuts are keeping perfectly and we will use them last. At the rate we are using it, we should have squash to eat likely up until June at least.

I have already worked out this years planting plans with regards to the squash and considering how very well they did this year, we will repeat again for this season. I would like more Butternuts though so will plan accordingly.

Thanks for stopping by. Will be back with a post about leeks and tomatoes.

Cheers.

 ~ Melanie ~

... reduce food waste with meal planning

Hello there everybody,

Before you get all worried, no, I am not going to rant on about wasting food. Instead, I have a plan to help you to STOP wasting food.

I find for myself that I like to work with a menu for the coming week. I have posted about this before. I usually make up the week's menus on Sunday and then I will grocery shop on Monday or Tuesday.

As I have said before I like to have a quick look in the fridge or the pantry to see what is there before I start. It is usually a good idea to try to use up what you already have on hand rather than just simply go buy more.

In an effort to accomplish this in a better way I have begun to make a list on Sundays of what I find in the fridge. The food in the pantry is not perishable so it is not as critical to use it up.

Open up your fridge. Have a look in there. 

What we are concerned with is the fresh produce, cheese, leftovers, etc. We are not concerned with jars of jam or condiments or the maple syrup. All of those things keep well. They should of course be used up in a timely fashion and not forgotten.

However, it is all the lovely fresh veg and fruit and the cheese and certainly the leftovers that can go on you in the blink of an eye.

If you make a very quick list, you can make sure that you use it up before it becomes something that has crawled out from a swamp.

My list for this week went like this:

- 3/4 head of green cabbage
- bag of baby carrots
- 1/2 head of broccoli
- 8 stalks of celery
- 1/2 package of mushrooms
- 4 anchovies
- 1/2 pork and ham pie
- assorted pieces of fruit, 2 apples on the verge
- bowl of cut up squash pieces from another large Hubbard
- 1/4 container of Hummus
- 1/3 large English cucumber

My solution to this is as follows:

Last night's dinner consisted of Squash Soup (saute a chopped onion in butter until softened, add all the cut up squash and both apples, cored and peeled. Add stock, cook until softened, blend and enjoy), the re-heated remains of the pork and ham pie and a plate of crudite (cucumber, broccoli and baby carrots) served with the Hummus.

That one meal alone took care of a lot of the stuff that could have gone west very quickly. I have a bit of soup left which I will have for my lunch today. There is a tiny piece of the pie left and that will be for lunch tomorrow.

Tonight's dinner will be a beef stew with anchovies. The recipe does not call for the mushrooms but I will toss them in there anyway. Serve this with some buttered egg noodles and some steamed cabbage and carrots. 

You can see what I mean here. I have found that the very simple act of writing it down makes it so much easier for me to decide what to make in order to have nothing go to waste.

If you have any sensational tips along this line, please do leave me a comment. I love to hear how others are managing to keep the grocery bill down and reduce the amount of food that they waste.

Thanks for stopping by today. Hope you have a wonderful day. Cheers.

 ~ Melanie ~

... squash soup

Hello there everybody,

My last post was all about finally breaking into the first of our stored massive Hubbard squash. I received a request for my recipe for squash soup. I am sorry there are no photos but you will get the idea.  :)

I must tell you that most of my soup recipes are of the "fly by the seat of your pants or kitchen sink" variety.

If you read my blog regularly you already know how I feel about wasting food. It is something about which I feel very strongly.

When it is time to make soup in our house (which is about once a week or so), I simply go through the fridge to see what I can use. When I made that Hubbard Squash soup I did the very same thing. Here is what went into it.

First of all, I usually make my own stock. As you could see from one of the photos, there is a carton of Organic Chicken stock there. I had run out of stock and also run out of chicken bones so had to resort to a rare purchase of stock. I did do a blog post some time ago all about making stock. It is dead easy and very economical.

We will assume that you have some stock on hand, either chicken or vegetable is you prefer not to consume meat, homemade or purchased.

In a large pot I saute an onion or two with a couple sticks of chopped celery and a couple of carrots cut finely in a bit of olive oil. Cook over low heat until nicely softened and just a tiny bit coloured around the edges. You do not want to really brown the veg as it will change the taste of the soup.

At this point I add the stock and give it a good stir around and bring to the boil. You want to scrape up all the yummy bits that may be stuck to the bottom of the pot. That is where all the flavour is. 

Since we were dealing with the squash I knew that was going into the soup. In my fridge I had a nice big bunch of rapini (or broccoli rabe). I used half of the bunch and saved the rest for a  pasta dish. Pick off any yellowed leaves and cut a tiny bit off the dried stems at the bottom. Give it a good wash, chop up and add to the stock, along with the squash which is cut into chunks about 1" square or so. You could use whatever sort of greens you happen to have in the house. I often use cabbage, broccoli, kale, chard or spinach. It all works.

I decided to add some egg noodles to give the soup some extra body so toss in a couple handfuls of that as well. It only takes about 10 minutes to cook and then dinner is on the table. Sometimes I use Orzo or even rice instead of the noodles. I even use tortellini once in a while as that really ups the body of the soup. 

The point of this soup is that it is dead easy to make and can use up all the stuff that would otherwise turn into a science project in the back of your fridge. And the best bonus of all.... it tastes fantastic.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a tremendous day. Cheers.

  ~ Melanie ~

... hubbard squash

Hello everyone,

We harvested a great deal of squash from our garden this year. Some were little acorn squash, some butternut and some were those massive big Hubbards. They are all mostly stored on the stone floor in our unheated boot room on the north side of our house which is also where our freezer is located. We try to keep that room as cool as possible.

We had been working our way through the smaller ones and the time had finally come to tackle one of the biggins.

My husband Frank was needed to cut it up as I was completely unable even to get a knife into it. This was one of the smallest. I think it weighed in at around 10 pounds.

Frank cut the ends off so he would have a level area to set the squash down and then got the knife through so he could cut it into two pieces.

I really like the flavour of Hubbard squash but as you can see, there is a substantial seed cavity so there is really a lot of wasted space in there.

However, even with that large seed cavity, there is still a great deal of flesh on one of these monsters. Frank cuts it up into wedges first for easier handling. He then removes the skin. On a smaller squash like a butternut we can usually just use a vegetable peeler but these ones need to be peeled with a knife.

After he gets the skin off the wedges I then cut them into chunks. We used some of it that night to make a pot of soup. That left us with about 80% of the squash with which to deal. I divided it into two piles. Half of it I steamed as you see here and the other half I put on a cookie sheet and roasted in the cookstove oven.

I then lay it out in a single layer on a wax paper lined cookie sheet and put it into the freezer. When the pieces are frozen they go into zip top freezer bags labelled appropriately. 

Because the squash has already been blanched or roasted it will be very quick to use in a number of different dishes. We like it in soups, casseroles, risottos and of course just eating it as a side vegetable. When we have used up these two bags we will tackle the next one. None of the squash will be wasted. At this rate the squash should last well into the summer. I have already planned out what squash I want to grow for this year. All the varieties we are now growing are open pollinated heirlooms so we can now save our own seed and be completely self-sufficient in squash. One less type of seed to buy and a bit more money saved.

Thanks so much for visiting with me today. Do leave me any comments you may have. Cheers.

   ~ Melanie~