I am in the midst of attempting to use up food. Luckily the weather has turned cold and rainy, which gives me a great opportunity to make some hearty dishes that use the items I need to get rid of. Those are:
Probably 25 percent of what's in my freezer right now, in order to make room for the Thanksgiving turkey, which we'll buy in another town and bring home to the freezer for a week or so. So the frozen 2014-15 harvest of carrots, chicken broth, onions and other items that I can use to make dinners now will get used quickly, to pick up a little freezer space in the chest freezer out in the garage. I won't completely decimate my stores of the above-mentioned items, just use enough up to create some space for a turkey.
And speaking of turkey, I actually got a summons for Jury Duty the week of Thanksgiving. This could throw such a wrench in the works I'm refusing to even think about it at this point. Keep your fingers crossed for going on stand-by, with no trips to the courthouse necessary.
I also have a LOT of tomatoes hanging around the pantry at this time (I know, "hanging around" makes it sound like they are loitering on a street corner, smoking cigarettes and harassing passers-by). But the truth is, I actually still have canned tomatoes on hand from 2013. Those, obviously, need to be used NOW....and ideally should have been used last year . That's because your water-bath canned goods should be used within 12 months of the canning date, but since I was the canner and know how careful I was, I'm comfortable doubling that time. But no more than double. As 2013 was a banner year for tomatoes, we'll be having quite a bit of tomato-based recipes in the days to come, like this goulash (above) I am making for tonight.
To riff, in a very respectful way, on The Book of Ecclesiastes, there's a time to can and a time to eat; a time to store and a time to draw down your stores. A time to raid the freezer and a time to fill it.
It's eating and drawing-down-the-stores time here at the homestead. Yum.
Sometimes your weekend can be pretty much summed up in what you Google:
1. What does Trouble Code 38 mean on a Subaru?
2. Can you freeze raisins?
3. How do you keep tarantulas from coming into the house?
Oh, and 3 1/2 quarts of relish happened too, plus a couple of days' work at the winery. It's definitely the busy season both at work and at home, but progress is still happening around the homestead and somehow I'm keeping up with the vegetables that are coming in from the garden. And the Red Flame raisins turned out amazing. Hmmm, maybe those tarantulas that keep finding their way in here are actually after the raisins.
And as if visiting spiders, canning relish, caution lights on cars and making raisins is not enough activity for one household, we should also have the pergola installed by tomorrow, so I will post some pics then.
So we are getting ready to harvest carrots and I only have one problem...I don't need any. Because this winter has been so unseasonably warm, we didn't make our usual complement of stews, lasagnas and other hearty dishes. We've been much more about salads than stews these last couple of months. So the upshot is that I still have several pounds of Spring 2013 carrots left in the freezer.
So what to do with this year's crop ...
Carrot cake? (Yum!)
Carrot wine? (Like we need more wine in the house at this point?)
Sauteed carrots (every night until July, at the earliest.)
Find unlocked employee car doors at the winery and slip bunches of carrots onto the passenger seats (I have actually done this with squash during summer.)
I don't know. The other issue is that because it didn't get very cold, the carrots are not as sweet as they normally are. Probably not noticeable to anyone but me, but I can tell.
Along with the years when something you really wanted to grow does not, there are the opposite years, when something grows so abundantly, or that your previous years' stores last long enough that it turns out you don't need it after all. All part of the gamble I guess, when Mother Nature is your business partner.
