Easy Food Preservation ~ Canning, Drying, and Freezing #everybitcountschallenge

Hello friends this is Jessica from Three Rivers Homestead and I'm coming to you from our little slice of land here in northwest Ohio if you're new here I am married to Adam and we have eight beautiful children ranging in age from almost 16 all the way down to eight months and as I mentioned we're in northwest Ohio we have a little Homestead where we purpose to grow as much food as possible and it's the time of year where this Garden is looking a lot like a jungle things are getting a little out of control here and I am starting to get busy with preservation projects that's sort of the nature of gardening around here in my zone is that the month of August we're just so busy preserving the Harvest that the garden work kind of has to be set aside and the garden looks a little worse for the wear but it's okay because we're still harvesting food and the garden is pretty forgiving and we'll just continue to sow seeds for the fall garden and just see what we're able to harvest even if we neglect weeding and some other maintenance chores a little bit but I also am in charge of the every bit counts challenge that is a food preservation challenge that we do every August where we try to preserve something every day of the month no matter how little and by the end of the month if you do something every day it adds up to a beautiful diverse pantry and so in this video I'm going to show you some of the ways that we were able to preserve the Harvest this week so we're going to start off with a simple freeze drying project we have little bits of okra starting to trickle in and if I'm not using them for a meal on the night that I harvest them I like to slice them up and freeze dry them they're just beautiful when they come out of the freeze dryer I also had a little extra mango and pineapple from a meal we had some green pepper and carrots and then these were cooked potatoes that I was experimenting with freeze drying we went ahead and salted these and I'm hoping that we can use them just for snacking kind of like potato chips in a way and this was just a small batch as I mentioned one of my favorite ways to preserve okra is by freeze drying I think that they're perfect in soups they look so pretty um the little shapes of the okra our batch here was done after just one overnight session here in the freeze dryer these cooked potatoes actually tasted pretty delicious so I was excited that that was a success but to my little boys here the biggest success of all was this plate of freeze-dried fruit if I freeze dry fresh fruit I can't even get it on the shelves the kids will eat it as fast as I can freeze dry it so once I get to the point of the Year where I'm done preserving Harvest from the garden I will start going to the store and finding good deals on tropical fruits like this mangoes and pineapple that I can't grow or Source here locally and I will just start filling up the freeze dryer to try to fill the shelves with that because it makes really great snacks for my kids in the winter when we don't really have fresh fruit available other than our storage apples and whatever we have frozen in the freezer something that I like to mention whenever I bring up the freeze dryer is that most of these foods and these projects that you see me doing with a freeze dryer if you don't have one and I know a freeze dryer is a big investment you can do a lot of these things with a dehydrator before we had our freeze dryer we used our Excalibur free um dehydrator and I did the same projects here things like sliced okra or dried fruit I would dehydrate it and you can also get delicious results I'm using a dehydrator so the next project that I accomplished on the following day is tackling the rest of these bulk carrots that you saw in my last video and so I'm going to preserve these a little differently in the last video I canned them and I feel like I have enough canned carrots now to get me through the winter so the next thing I'd like to do is dry some for winter baking so when I want to make things like carrot cake or carrot muffins or carrot bread how having some dried shredded carrots then you can just rehydrate and add to your batter is really handy so all I'm doing here is chopping up the carrots and putting them into the blender and I didn't need to peel these because we aren't canning them we're just freeze drying and they will be just fine with the peels on the peels actually contain nutrition that I'm happy to keep on the carrots in this case and then as you saw the blender is just chopping them up pretty finely and we're spreading the a pretty thick layer of that on the freeze dryer trays as I mentioned you could also do this in a dehydrator if you don't have a freeze dryer and you'll also get great results in a dehydrator so this is what those carrots look like when we got them all chopped and onto the trays I have my girls here watching Little Miss Hannah turned eight months old this week and she was in the kitchen so I thought I'd let you see my big girl girl here we go this is what our um freeze-dried shredded carrots look like so this is mylar here we are going to store these carrots in mylar and I get the question quite often why do I need to use mylar couldn't I just use my vacuum sealer and seal them up in plastic and wouldn't that work well plastic actually does Leach in oxygen over time so it isn't ideal for long-term storage mylar however will not let the oxygen in so long as you seal them properly so that is why we use the mylar with these freeze-dried foods and if we do it properly they will last in storage for 20 years and these are the oxygen absorbers that you want to put inside of the mylar to help with the longevity of that storage so we just put one little oxygen absorber per bag here and then once they're all in there I had a couple left over I wanted to show you that you can still save those I put them right back in the plastic bag that they came in and I went ahead and used my sealer that I'm going to use on the mylar bags just to seal the oxygen absorber bag back up this is the um heat sealer that came with my freeze dryer from Harvest right as you can see once it's heat sealed that is good for storage so we got quite a few little bags of these shredded carrots and I kind of portioned them out for a good amount for a baking recipe just getting those labeled with what is in the bag and the month and year and they're ready for storage okay the next day was going to be a big preservation day we were going to tackle sweet corn and I'm starting with some Tomatoes here yes I'm using tomatoes in my sweet corn preservation I decided to cut these and core them have them and get them under the roaster in the oven the next step was to go out to the garden and find some green peppers and hot peppers we're going to turn our corn into a Southwestern veggie soup but the first thing I need to do is make some tomato juice so I have these roasted tomatoes under the roaster I did this just because it's a really easy way to remove the skins and to make some juice we're going to use our old-fashioned food mill here this was an antique Mill given to me by an elderly friend who no longer uses it it's really handy for making things like tomato sauce and also things like applesauce if you're ever in an antique store or at a thrift store or something and you see one of these definitely grab it is one of my most useful preservation tools for sauces and juices so all we're doing is taking those roasted tomatoes and putting them through the top part they pressed down and just kind of work it through the mill and the juice drips out of the side and it's a really easy way to collect that whenever I'm using a new Gadget like this I pull it out of storage it always draws a crown and the kids are really excited to come down and try it out so they were kind of taking turns helping me turn these into juice we need 12 cups of tomato juice for the canning recipe I'm about to do today and I was grateful that I had just enough tomatoes that were ripened on the windowsill to accomplish that so we started out the day making that juice and then we set it aside and Adam brought home from work three bushel bags of sweet corn so you may be wondering why we don't grow our own sweet corn and that is because I've mentioned in many videos that we downsized our garden several years ago we cut our total Garden space in half and in doing so we had to kind of make decisions about what was the best use of the smaller space that we had and to grow a Year's worth of sweet corn for our family Tate would take up so much of our limited Garden space that I've decided if I if there are items that I can Source locally from other Farmers for a good price I will go ahead and let those people grow it for me and I will save my garden space for the items that I can't Source locally so sweet corn is one of those things that I'm happy to purchase from a local Farm they run a great deal where it is buy two bushel bags and get one free so if I purchase in this big bulk amount it ends up being a lot cheaper than if I purchased you know just one bushel bag or two and typically I'll do this twice throughout the year I'll do two sweet corn preservation days so this was just the first day and I'm going to show you three ways we're going to preserve this sweet corn but first Adam and the kids got busy husking all of this corn shucking all of this corn I'm sorry for me and they're saving all of the husks and putting them in the wheelbarrow and then setting aside the corn cobs I have some silly little boys that are having fun in the process this was all of the Corn that we ended up with here and then we have these husks that will not go to waste now we could save these for things like tamales or something but instead we're gonna feed these to the animals you're probably wondering why I didn't save the corn silks and I would if it was homegrown sweet corn but I know that they do do a low spray on this corn and so it's not something I feel comfortable saving the silks for tea in that case if it were organic I would definitely save those silks or if it were homegrown I would do that but in this case um we're just going to let the chickens have that and as you can see they scatter those husks all around those will compost in the chicken run and they ate all of the silks from out of there and definitely benefited from that so now what we need to do is get all of this corn into the kitchen thankfully since we removed Our Deck from The Cellar project now we can just walk it right up to the kitchen door until we decide um what deck to add on to the back of the house next year with the excavators we're actually not allowed to put any permanent structures around the house for at least a year until that excavation work kind of settles but thankfully the kids got all of the Corn inside now let's move on to preserving it this is my favorite corn preservation tool this is a Pampered Chef corn decabber I'm going to link a similar one in the video description what you can do is just take your bundt pan and take the end of the Corn and stick it in the hole and just run that decabber down the side the pan will collect all of the Corn now it does kind of make a mess and as you can see some of those kernels were will kind of fall outside of the pan but overall this is a really easy way to do it because you can kind of stand that corner up in the middle of the pan we're going to dump that in now we're going to make our soup we measured out 12 cups of the corn in a pot the next thing we're going to do is add approximately one quart of cherry tomatoes I'm kind of deviating from the ball Southwestern veggie soup recipe we're adding two cups of chopped carrots here as I mentioned this is a deviation but you can find the Ball canning recipe in the ball blue book that I will link below I feel comfortable making a few substitutions and deviations but pretty much overall this is the same soup that in the Ball canning book we're also going to add two cups of chopped onion next we are going to add approximately four cups of chopped peppers we are using all green peppers because that is what I currently have available in the garden and look how beautiful all those colors are in the pot it's just gorgeous next thing we're going to do is chop up these hot peppers if I had to guess it was approximately maybe a cup a little more than a cup of total chopped Peppers these are Sugar Rush Peach Peppers now we are going to add four teaspoons of chili powder next we're getting out our black pepper and we're going to add two teaspoons of black pepper two teaspoons of salt and then we're going to add that 12 cups of tomato juice that we made earlier and set aside to that we're adding two extra cups of water and then we're going to get that all stirred up and get that on the stove to just kind of warm up for about 15 minutes when it is all done this is what that looked like after about 15 minutes on the stove and our next job is to get these into these washed jars we are making this is actually two batches of the Ball canning recipe and it made us a little over seven quarts which is perfect it's about one batch seven quarts equals one batch in the pressure canner and then that extra soup we were able to use for something else so um these are going to process in the pressure canner for 85 minutes just getting those rims all wiped getting our four jars canning lids on top of the jars if you'd like 10 off your canning lids check the link in the description and you can use my code after 85 minutes those were done processing and they came out of the canner looking amazing I cannot wait to eat this sometime this winter while the soup was in the canner I worked on decobbing more corn and we're just gonna fill seven quarts with just the straight decobbed corn this is just going to be a plain batch we are raw packing this with water and that means we're just filling these jars up with water straight from our well coming out of the kitchen tap we're going to de-bubble those leave an inch headspace and then we're also going to get these in the pressure canner and these will also process for 85 minutes so both the southwestern vegetable soup and just the canned corn go for 85 minutes in the pressure canner I'm working really fast here and when I do I start to get a little sloppy and I'm knocking rings off the tops of the jars I need to remember on these busy preservation days to slow down so that I don't make mistakes but it's just kind of funny to see as I'm watching the footage so this is what those looked like after they were done processing in the pressure canner those will make great side dishes throughout the winter now I have a lot of cobs left over from these projects so what I'm doing is filling up my pot here with enough cobs to sort of fill it then we're going to cover it with water and get that on the stove and let it boil for a little while it was about 20 minutes that those cobs were maybe boiling now we're going to make some corn cob jelly I need some pectin for that though so I'm going to use pomonas pectin this is my pomonas pectin powder it comes with a calcium powder that you turn into calcium water and that's what's in this little jar here is my pomonas pectin cookbook and I'm just using the basic grape jelly recipe and you can use that grape jelly recipe and adapt it for any kind of other jelly I found just in place of grape juice we are using this corn cob juice so we're straining out that water from the boiled corn cobs and what we're left with is a really sweet kind of sweet corn flavored juice we're measuring out eight cups of that corn juice this is just such a great way to stretch your corn and get another use out of those cobs that would otherwise be wasted the next thing we're going to do is add eight teaspoons of that calcium water and then we're going to add one half cup of lemon juice that's what will make this acidic enough to be safely water bath canned now we have two cups of sugar there and we're adding eight teaspoons of the pomonas pectin we're gonna get those two ingredients thoroughly mixed together and then once the wet ingredients are boiling we're adding those dry ingredients slowly to it and stirring it in once they're in there we'll let it boil for about a minute and then we'll take it directly off of the heat that pectin is actually activated by calcium that's why you have to add that calcium water now we're filling up our little half pint jars we're going to end up with um I believe eight how many half pints do we end up with I can't quite remember nine we had nine here and so I'm wiping the sticky rims since that does have sugar in it it gets kind of sticky we're adding those four jars lids and then these are gonna process in the water bath for just 10 minutes and then we'll have some delicious jelly a lot of people ask what do you do with corn cob jelly well we use it just like any other jelly it's great on toast it's great on cornbread sun butter and jelly sandwiches it has a sweet flavor kind of like a a honey tastes like summer like sweet corn and honey I guess so very excited to have that in our pantry for the rest of the corn cobs that we have left over there's a lot of things you can do a lot of people like to make corn stock and you can can that up just like you would any other kind of stock but we decided to not let these go to waste and just feed them to the animals as you can see our heifers and steer absolutely loved the corn cobs we're careful not to give them too many of them but we definitely threw some in as a treat and they absolutely loved them especially Willie here our steer who's a little over a year old he was just chowing down on those like they were candy and then the rest of these we will take out to the chicken coop and the chickens and the Ducks will pick any extra kernels that I missed off of those will absolutely love it as you can see here none of that went to waste when I went out later on that evening all of this was completely gone then the rest of those cobs will just be composted down in the chicken run and go back to the Earth from which they came I was still left with about a bushel bag worth of corn so that night I took more off the cob and the next day's preservation project was doing just another small batch of the plain canned corn so we got that in the pressure canner and that was my fourth day's worth of work here this week I just needed an easy project on this day because we were heading out of the house to do some other things and it was great that I already had that corn off the cob the rest of it that was left will be eaten fresh in meals this week and I'll also take some off the cob and run it through the freeze dry you will probably see that in my next video freeze drying sweet corn is one of my favorite ways to preserve it it's great for winter soups to just pour some of that freeze-dried sweet corn straight into the pot so this is what the week's worth of canning looked like I'm very excited when I want to use that Southwestern veggie soup I'll make some taco meat and that will make some wonderful lunches for us this winter so all right that's about it for this week we'll be back on Wednesday with another video showing more projects I hope you're all enjoying this preservation challenge I'm enjoying seeing everything that you guys are coming up with on the hashtag if you haven't checked that hashtag out make sure you do so all right we will see you next time friends have a great uh week until then bye

Channel: Three Rivers Homestead

Views: 76,831

Keywords: homesteading, homestead, homeschooling, homeschool, unschooling, unschool, food preservation, canning, frugal, pantry, garden, gardening, freeze dryer, freeze drying, proverbs 31, homemaker, homemaking, large family, every bit counts challenge

Id: CXr8XovBoWo

Length: 21min 5sec (1265 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023