Waste not,want not.!

This week we decided to make up another batch or two of raw packed turkey and vegetable soup , the same as I had made in an earlier post. This is really handy for me on the days that I am here alone, I know I can just grab a jar of soup, tip it out and microwave it in 2 minutes for a piping hot portion controlled ,nutritious,delicious meal.
We  bought another 12 kg box of turkey wings, and we normally use the meaty end for the soup.We trim the meat off the bone, de-skin and chop into bite sized pieces. The mid section of the wing we normally keep for treats for our blue cattle dog Tilly.
This time we had purchased a second  12kg of turkey necks just for her so we decided we would use the  mid wing bits to can for the first time in my Fowlers Vacola Jars. We were able to pack 3 wing bits into each jar(I had to chop off  about an inch off the top of all of them.

So after doing all this, I gathered up all the bits,bones(that I cracked in half with the big meat chopper),skin,little end bits and all the vegie peelings from the turkey soup. I put them in all a big stock pot  with variuos other bits and pieces, garlic, mixed herbs,sauces,salt and pepper, and simmereed the heck out of it for a few hours until it seemed to be ready.

I then took a jug and  poured the contents of the big stock pot  through a colander into a smaller pot.

This was not a fine enough strainer, but was good to remove the bulk. Next I poured the remaining liquid back through another finer strainer to remove the  less coarse  particles.

Then for a third time I strained again, but this time through a couple of thicknesses of muslin.

Next i poured this beautiful honey colored liquid into two big plastic containers and placed them into the fridge overnight so that any fat would settle on top and set so that I could skim it off in the morning.

When I checked this morning, this is what I found, something totally unexpected It had all gone very gelatinous .There was a very small layer of solidified fat which I removed.

I realized that I would have to empty the contents back into a pot and reheat to liquify before canning them.

I then started filling my + No 27 Fowlers Vacola  jars, only to realize that It wouldn"t  fit into the 6 jars that  I had allocated to it, so I swapped over to my No 20 Fowlers jars and was able to fill  15 of those.

The tops of my jars were then wiped clean with paper towel soaked with white vinegar, and the pre soaked rubber rings were placed on checking that they were not twisted anywhere.

Next the lids were placed on firmly and clipped down with two metal spring clips.

Although  I have been recently told that Fowlers information states that only one clip is needed, I like my mother before me have always used two, as do many other preservers I know and have never had any non sealing issues because of that.
 I then processed these jars in the pressure canner at 10 pounds pressure for 25 minutes.(These jars are a little larger than pints so I processed them according to the instructions for quarts).
While they were processing I also did a water bath load of crushed tomatoes in mixed size bottles.

So, here is the final result. I am very pleased with my work, worth every bit. This was the first time I had made turkey stock,I had made chicken and lamb stocks before, but this is by far the best and will not hesitate to make it again in the future. It will be well used in many future meals in this house.
My next preserving project will probably be pea and ham soup and I will post the  story of that down the track a bit.
Thankyou for stopping by, hope you have enjoyed reading a little of what we do,
so until we meet again,
Cheers,
Jane.

We have babies !!!

Since our last dry visit up to the farm, we have anxiously watching the weather, but alas we have had not a drop of rain in the last 3 weeks and we made the decision to make a hasty trip back up with a trailer load of  lucerne  hay for the sheep that we were able to purchase here in the Hunter Valley off a property near the river that irrigates.There is very little hay around  the farm area and what is there is ridiculously expensive, so it was cheaper for us to purchase some bales   on route and cart it  up there.

The sheep eagerly watched us arrive and waited patiently for Brian to unload the hay and give them some. Our next door neighbour does feed the hay out for us at regular intervals when we are away.

Our neighbour had sent us a message to tell us   that we had  babies, 2 single births and 1 set of tiny twins. we had decided to only put 6 ewes in with the ram as we were trying to  control our numbers,So far 3

ewes have had lambs, 3 still to go.They are just the cutest little babies.Looks like we scored three girls and one boy( but we left them alone and didn't do a closer inspection.

We really thought by this that we would have had some decent drought breaking rain, and under normal circumstances we would have done. So these mums and bubs will do it a lot harder  then they would have in normal times. Our neighbour has  agreed to feed out extra feed for them in our absence.
They were very grateful for the hay and  gobbled it up very quickly.

While were were there on our whistle stop visit I decided to spend a morning sorting out some of my  empty Fowlers Vacola preserving jars that I had stored down in the shed. They were filthy and in need of a different storage solution. So I washed them all up and sorted into sizes. ( We share about half of our empty jars with our neighbour(my husbands brother and his wife to preserve in as they have an orchard, but no preserving gear.)

I then had a thought.. we had an old defunct chest freezer and I mentioned to Brian that it may be useful storage for some of my jars.

This held about 110 jars, could've held more but I kept sizes separate. I put the bigger taller 4" jars in a pantry in my laundry room. Our Fowlers are a little more bulky than mason jars and therefore take up more storage room.My laundry room is already crammed full of empty and full mason jars.
While there we also decided to dig  the small potato crop that we had put in. We  suspected that we would get nothing much from it as  there had just been no where near enough rain, but even so were still disappointed with the outcome.

At least it is enough for a couple of meals. We realize that we are really at natures mercy  until we live at the farm full  time and can control the water situation onto the gardens.
Often as we sat on the verandah  or were going about our jobs, we would see the sheep standing at the fence, looking wistfully(or should I say enviously) at bits of green inside the yard around the shrubs where the water  drip system works. I feel really mean, but if you let them in they would devour any and everything in sight.

Also doing a lot of verandah guard duty is my blue mate Tilly, she sits a lot these days as she gets older. She has been suffering a bit of conjunctivitis in her eyes this week, We will have to keep a watch on her.

When we woke yesterday morning ,ready to head off, the sheep looked like they were relaxed and had full tummies.I never tire of this sight.

Brian threw out 2 bales of hay for them to make sure those mums with bubs had  a chance to keep milk up to those precious bundles. It looked like they were taking turns at baby sitting. At this point the mum with the tiny twins seemed to be watching after all four babies.

As  I was shutting the gate at one point I noticed that the sheep are cutting deep ruts into the dry ground., Brian said he will run the ripper along them when we return next time ,to make the sheep walk around them to reduce further damage to the paddocks.

We said  farewell to our little place for the time being, hoping to return for a month long stay(which will be wonderful) in about 4 weeks time. Hopefully there will have been rain by then.
On our trips to and from the farm we always stop at the same spot. It is a four hour run, so we stop roughly halfway off the road in the pretty spot to give Tilly a toilet break and a run around while we have morning tea/lunch/afternoon tea, depending on time. We really love this spot, nearly always green no matter how dry it is, and it has these two really unusual rock formation. Totally natural and apparently only seen in a couple of places in Australia. This off road picnic area is called "Battery Rock"

As we got nearer to home at an old disused service station, we noticed a pile of 1000 litre plastic water cubes for sale, so we called in.(we have been looking for some more of these locally and at a reasonable price but hadn't found any)We decided to purchase 4 of them at $75 each and loaded all four up onto our empty trailer and strapped them down. We have brought them back to the coast and will take 2 at a time up to the farm at a later date. Our next trip up will probably  require us to take up  another load of hay.

So , hopefully  there will be rain soon,(nothing predicted though for the next week), But who knows, Mother Nature works in mysterious ways.
So until we meet again, hope everyone stays healthy and happy,
Cheers,
Jane.

Green Beans and carrots.

I have preserved food in one form or another for about 30 years now. When my Mum first passed me on her Fowlers vacola preserver and her bottles(jars) I mainly did peaches, plums and apricots along with tomatoes. One year we grew a bumper crop of green beans and I preserved those too, the only problem was that to do green beans in the Fowlers vacola System you had to Water Bath them in a brine solution for about an hour and  then 48 hours later re-water bath them again for 45 minutes. The outcome was a very soft, very salty jar of beans.
We haven't grown a lot of beans over the last 20 years, just enough to eat fresh or freeze a few, but this year Brian has grown another lovely patch or three of green beans.
We picked three buckets full about two weeks ago and  took them up to the farm and pressure canned  them, great result.
We brought the canner home the other day as we knew we would have a lot of canning to do over the next couple of weeks before we get a chance to return to the farm.

Early  this morning he picked me another bucket of beans , and I prepared them  ready to can.

I also had  a heap of carrots left over from some soup I had been making(I had got the carrots on sale at Harris farm) I chopped them up two and was going to do half the canner  load of each.

Brian then suggested that it may be a good idea to mix the two in each jar. I agreed that this would be very practical, as there is just the two of us, it would be sensible to be just able to open one jar and have both vegetables.So I filled the jars half and half approximately  with the beans and carrots.I did not add any salt to mine but some people do, and I then filled  with water  leaving about 1 inch headspace, I then de-bubbled and adjusted the water levels in the jars.

I then wiped the rims with paper towel and white vinegar,placed on my lids that i had previously simmered in hot water and screwed on the rings finger tight.

After they were all lidded and ringed, I then put them in a double layer seperated by the rack into my pressure canner. Up at the farm I have a gas (propane) stove, but down here on the coast I have a flat glass topped stove  which I am unable to use as I have a  Big 930 AA canner and  it is not recommended  to use it on it.
So we have purchased a gas burner designed for cooking crabs and prawns ect, and decided to use our canner on that outside in a sheltered spot .

We found that this worked brilliantly, although we had to keep a fairly close watch on it to keep to the required 10lbs pressure. We  processed the bean /carrot mix to the carrot  times as they required the longest preserving time.After the  25 minutes had elapsed, we turned the gas off and allowed the canner to cool down, removed the weight, waited a few more minutes and removed the lid.
The result was 19 lovely colourful pints of green beans and carrots.

I have left the jars  on the towel on the bench to cool completely overnight, each one made that sweet ping to tell me that it has sealed and in the morning, I will remove the rings, check seals,wash the jars and rings and store the rings away for future use, label the jars and store them away  in my pantry.
It  always feels good to put a little away, These little jars will be a very handy item to have in my pantry. There is nothing better than  having your own home grown produce  on hand.
I am very tired as I type this, we have had a few very big days of canning, some of which will be included in another entry soon, and I am  nearly ready to call it a night,
So until we meet again,
Cheers,
Jane.

A glut of citrus

As Usual at this time of year we have a glut of citrus. I gave  a lot of citrus  away as I just didn't have the time or the need to preserve  it this year as I already had a wonderful supply of marmalade from last year.
So this year I only kept  the tangerines and ruby grapefruit and I only had a few lemons and limes as the trees are only new.
I decided to attempt jelly which I have never made before, My Mum( and after speaking to my cousin this morning,) my Aunty Belle  used to make quince jelly when I was very young, but I barely remember.
I borrowed my sons big Breville  juicer which he has in storage at our house and took it up to the farm with me.This sure saved me a heck of a lot of time.
I had two  shopping bags of tangerines to juice , and i ended up with 9 litres of tangerine juice,and one litre of ruby grapefruit juice,and a cup full of lemon juice and a small amount of lime juice.

I kept four litres aside to make four batches of jelly and decided to attempt to can the remainder of the juice to use at a later date. I have never canned any juice before so this was a real trial for me..will let you know how it goes.We simmered the juice for 10 minutes,then strained through several layers of muslin,placed back into pot,added the pectin and reboiled for 1 minute, then added the sugar and reboiled for another 1 minute.
I made four individual batches as I wanted to try a variety of  additives, in one batch I did I added lemon juice and the 4 1/2 cups of sugar and the pectin another I added no lemon juice and less sugar and pectin and the grapefruit I added lime juice. This was purely all experimental for future use.

We prepared our jars, rings lids ect according to instruction filled to within a quarter inch, removed any bubbles and sealed. We then processed them in a double layer in my trusty old Fowlers Vacola water bath preserver for 20 minutes. We decided to set it up outside this time  so that we could run a lead to the generator to run it.
As our property is off grid,  we only have limited amounts of electricity, and on a fine sunny day we would have been ok to run it off our batteries, but we had had several overcast days and so we didn't want to add the extra drain onto the batteries on top of regular household use.

We removed the jars after processing and left on the towel covered table overnight to cool completely and seal which they did.
I then removed the rings, and washed the jars. I had already pre-labeled the jars  as they had been different things and needed to know which was which.

The colour was quite good, though  the jelly not quite as clear as I had thought it would be, maybe the straining process needs to be more thorough. The taste of the tangerine jelly was good, although quite tart, but that suits me. the ruby grapefruit jelly was quite bitter, we think because the lime juice we added was from Kafir limes and not the sweeter  tahitian limes, and I think that may have affected it.I would use the ruby grapefruit again  but omit the limes...the colour of it was beautiful.
So my next attempt at jelly making  will be with a sweeter fruit, either pomegranates or grapes or mulberries,or what ever I happen to come across. I have been contemplating purchasing a steam juicer for this purpose.
The canned juice colour seemed to keep good, although the juice has appeared to have separated slightly.Whether this  all comes together again on re-opening the jars remains to be seen. Will  keep you informed when the time comes.
While we were up at the farm this time I went around and took a few house photos for record keeping and history purposes as we are planning quite a few changes over the next year or so as we make more serious  progress towards living on the farm full time.
So I thought below I would pop in a couple of pictures of my old workhorse of a kitchen. Nothing glamorous but it has been fairly practical.

We arn't sure what we will do exactly but that big brick chimney that leaks water everywhere every time it rains will go and be replaced with big glass sliding doors out to our later to be covered entertaining area,It has created a huge chain of events, each relying on another job to be done before it can be...I am sure we will be living in chaos for a while but it will eventually all be worth it.
So until next time,
Regards to everyone,
Jane.