Saucey!

 

Howdy!

Funny story; at Thanksgiving, Hubby asked for apple sauce to go with our turkey dinner.  Apple sauce?  Where did that come from?  He has never asked for apple sauce before, homemade or otherwise!

Apple sauce is so easy to make - simply boil down apples with cinnamon, brown sugar, white sugar and a little bit of water.  When apples are soft, put the mixture through the food processor until it is smooth!

All joking aside, it took Derek twenty years to ask for apple sauce with his holiday meal... am I really that scary?  hahaha

Jeanette

Leaves and Chlorophyll

     I love AUTUMN!

    While raking up (and jumping in) leaves earlier this week, my girls and I began chatting about the different colours of the leaves and why they turn the colours they do.  I won't ruin any science exploration you might be thinking of doing but lets just say it includes cooler weather trapping sugars in the leaves of the tree.

    But a handful of trees still wore robes of green - which prompted my girls to try and remember why leaves are green in the first place.  The answer to that is chlorophyll.  This led us to do a quick experiment to find out which leaves had the most chlorophyll.

    We gathered five leaves from five different trees; a walnut tree, a birch tree and three maples (one sugar, one Japanese and one 'regular old maple').

    We then brought the leaves into the kitchen and tore them into small pieces.  We put each pile of leaf pieces into their own glass jar and labeled each jar.  We then poured rubbing alcohol into the jars until the alcohol just covered the leaf pieces.  To help the alcohol take up the green colour of the leaves, I put the glass jars into a tray of hot water and covered the whole thing with Saran Wrap.  After about 15 minutes we replaced the water with fresh hot water and after about 30 minutes, each jar had GREEN rubbing alcohol.

    When the alcohol was green we placed strips of coffee filter into each jar.  Taping the end of the filter to the wall, with just the tip of the filter immersed into the alcohol.  And then we waited.

    After about 90 minutes, the green had travelled up the coffee filter.  We put the coffee filters in an order from least amount of yellow and green to the most amount of green.  This told us which leaves held the most chlorophyll!  Our sugar maple had the most chlorophyll while the oak tree had the least!

    An impromptu (albeit anticlimactic according to Sammy) learning adventure!

Jeanette

Harvest Succotash

 Hello there!

    While learning about Canada's First Nations last month, we learned that the Iroquois people, being farmers often prepared a dish called Succotash.  Sammy and Krista wanted to know more about it so we took a little wander around Pinterest and sure enough found a youtube video of an 18th century recipe.  When the girls realized the dish highlighted the "three sisters" of   beans and squash... vegetables we had planted in our veggie patch, they were determined we must try it too!

    

Soooo... the first ingredient would be bear meat.  We do not have access to bear meat, but our friend in the youtube video assures us that a good cut of sirloin tip beef will work well and thankfully we still have a few cuts of grass fed beef at our disposal.

   

    

 It took a full afternoon for our succotash to simmer as we used the wood stove that we were burning on that cool damp 5 degree Friday.  The slower cook was well worth it though when we spooned into ourmouths the first delicious bite of garden fresh buttercup squash, beans, corn and meat.

    We enjoyed our succotash - it is much like a stew without the heavy stock.  

    We all agreed we would make it again!

    Bon Appetit!

    Jeanette

Happy Fall Y'all!

Okay, so Autumn doesn't officially begin until tomorrow according to the calendar, but the apples have been ready for picking for about a week now, so I'm welcoming in Fall a day early with a whole lotta Apple talk...

... and not the iPhone 7.  ;)

There are many apple trees around our property and our neighbour's.  We spent a glorious Sunday afternoon out picking apples together, laughing as the grasshoppers jumped on Sammy's legs and Krista found the tiniest "baby apples".  Erin is now just about taller than me, so she's a blessing for picking those way up high apples!

Our collection of apples were a nice mix of sweet and tart... some of the things we made from them?  

Classic apple pie of course... about ten of these, and a large ziplock freezer bag of apple pie filling in the freezer!

Apple cider vinegar from the peels.  These are mixed with honey and water and left to ferment... That recipe can be found here.

I also made a few jars of this apple pie jelly using the juices boiled off from the skins and cores in place of the store bought apple juice in the recipe.  It turned out very nice - we had some on vanilla ice cream; it was like pie a la mode, but upside down and backwards.

The smaller apples were cut and boiled with cloves, cinnamon, water and a little bit of sugar to make apple cider.

And lastly, tasty apple fritters!  I doubled this recipe and prepared the diced apples in a syrup of white and brown sugars, cinnamon and nutmeg (much like apple pie filling) before adding them into the batter.  Very, very tasty.

 And that my friends is just one week and one and a half bushel baskets!  And let me be the first to wish you a

Happy Fall Y'all!

Jeanette

Connect with me on Pinterest to see more yummy apple recipes!





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