Hearts Full of Joy

well, of course i can...

i love to can. and i'll tell you why.

canning has always been a way to save money, be thrifty, and a way to prevent waste - preserving garden produce that would other wise spoil before it was eaten - or, in other words, provident living. and i do love provident living. it seems to be in my genes.

today there are even more reasons to can, at least as i look at it. when i can, i have control over what goes into the jar - so there is no msg, no high fructose corn syrup, no articficial colorings or flavorings, no chemical preservatives. and i control the salt and the sugar content. i love that. and i am generally using my own home grown, organic, non gmo produce - hooray!

there is also a great deal of satisfaction that comes from making a dinner mostly from things i have canned myself - chicken, black beans, salsa for example. and a happy feeling when my kids prefer my applesauce over store-bought, and when they get excited about helping me with the process.

finally, it is a way of making cooking last. i like to do things that last, which is one of the reasons i love to cook and sew. i tend to not feel that way about making a birthday cake, or even a wonderful dinner. i work and work, and then it is eaten and gone. but with canning, i can see the rows of shiney jars on the shelves, and i know it will last...at least longer than tonight's dinner.

....oh, and i almost for got one of the most important reasons - it tastes better than store bought - delicious yumminess!

a sampling of this summer's canning:

roasted tomato sauce, dill pickles, pickled beets, french cut green beans, pickled banana peppers, and mandarin (or sweet & sour) sauce.

 

i hoped for bumper crops of green beans and tomatoes this summer, and we got them (to be honest, i prayed, and my prayers were answered). we followed the expert gardener in our neighborhood's advice, and never watered our garden once, even though it was hot and dry - not raining for a month and a half. he was right - it gave us an amazing tomato crop. i never imagined i could fill as many jars as i have. i've lost count, but it's much more than 100.

this summer i've canned (asterisk means it's a first time for me to can it):

strawberry jam

dill pickles

*japlepeno jelly - we usually make crabapple jalepeno jelly, which we like even more, but we had huge amounts of jalepenos that were going to go bad, and our crab apples won't ripen until next month.

green beans - 46 quarts, all french cut

beets & pickled beets

tomatoes

*tomato juice with 5 vegetables (V5 juice)

*roasted tomato salsa

*roasted tomato sauce - base for pasta sauce and tomato soup

*sweet & dill pickle relish

*mandarin (sweet & sour) sauce - 21 quartes!

*pickled banana & jalepeno peppers

 

and i'm looking forward to canning:

green tomato salsa

green enchilada sauce

green tomato ketchup (?)

green toamto chutney (?)

apple juice

applesauce

 

last fall i looked for ways to use the huge amount of green tomatoes that we had, and now green tomato salsa is our family's favorite salsa we've ever had. it's amazing what you can find on the internet. the friend who recommended the sweet & sour (thank you!) also gave me the green enchilada sauce. i will report. and i am interested in green tomato ketchup and chutney recipes that i've found.

my two absolute favorite new canning recipes from this year are:

1 - roasted tomato sauce - lexi found this and recommened it. i can't say enough good about it - our house smells like an italian restaurant while it roasts with the balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and garlic. here's a link:

http://goddesshobbies.blogspot.com/2009/08/preserving-food-roasted-tomato-sauce.html

(i love this girl's blog!)

2 - mandarin (or sweet & sour) sauce. a friend recommended this, and i am in love. i've made three batches for a total of 21 quarts. and each time i've made a batch, it perfectly filled 7 quart jars (the numer of jars that fill a canner). that never happens. it's the perfect recipe. here's a link:

http://idahofergusonfamily.blogspot.com/2010/09/sweet-and-sour-sauce-for-canning.html

 

i'm also enjoying this one, because we have a bumper crop of banana peppers. it is a little too sweet for me, next batch i make i will cut the sugar at least in half. but it is easy and fun (and very pretty). i added a few jalepenos into each jar i made. it's a very small recipe. i tripled it and filled 6 pint jars:

http://www.food.com/recipe/sweet-pickled-banana-peppers-17254

 

if you have favorite canning recipes, i'd love for you to share!

 

 

 

the simple life

doing domestic, thrifty, and down-to-earth things makes me really happy. and i'm glad it does. i recently had a sweet elderly lady in our neighborhood bring me a lovely antique dresden plate quilt to mend so she could give to her grandaughter. it was a simple fix, and although i didn't really have the time, i was happy to do it for her. then she said something that rubbed me a little wrong, "i come form a long line of southern women who would just as soon have someone else do it for them, so i'm having you do it for me". it almost made choose not to do it. but as i thought about it, i felt gratitude that i come from a different line of women...the "i can do it, or at least i'll give it my best try" type of women. i treasure that heritage, because even though it isn't the easiest way of life, it is satisfying.

this summer, for the first time, we have been harvesting and drying our own herbs. after drying, we vacuum seal them in canning jars - i love this new discovery, vacuum sealing in jars - we can preserve so many things this way - chocolate chips, rasins, nuts, grains, even granulated things, like salt, -and they last for 20 years or more. the photos above shows kale (green leaves), calenduala (orange, similar to marigolds), and echinaccea (pink cone flowers). red clover flowers and japanese shiso are in the jars. i hope to use them to make healthy herbal tea and other fun concotions. shiso is also wonderful sprinkled on rice - furikake, as the japanese call it.

i also really love hanging my laundry to dry. i love feeling the sun shine down and the breeze blow on my and my alundry as i hang it, and the wonderful feeling of saving electricity, and lengthening the life of our clothes. i even enjoy color coordinating the laundry as i hang it....making lovely color patterns and combinations - when i have time. it must be the quilter in me.

 

 

 

"i think the world is beautiful and lovley as can be"

i was so excited when i saw the first buds appear on our blackberry bushes!

just because they meant berries to me.....i had no idea they would be so beautiful!

 

they are huge!....2 to 3 inches across. i took these photos on lexi's graduation day.

i am so grateful for the wonders and beauty of nature, and my yard.

asiatic lilies and blue hydrangeas

shasta daisies...from free starts that a friend dug out of her garden last summer - one of the very best types of gifts.

one more from the garden

a favorite flower pic that i had forgotten
 
the bees loved the allium (flowering onions), and so did i!

flower magic

after much patience, coaxing, and some fertilizer, my flower bed is reaching for it's full potential, and we are blessed by their beauty.

my free flowers from the temple gardener, mixed with marigolds i planted earlier.

dahlia

another dahlia

dinner plate hibiscus - so excited that the dahlia's and hibiscus are perennials!

note: i will not be posting photos of the vegetable garden. it was not as successful as the flower garden, and is not photo-worthy.

life on the mississippi

the flora along the river has been so lovely that i stuck my camera in the car last week so that i could stop and snap some photos when i got the chance.

across from davids chamber:

behind the red brick store:

where warsaw st meets highway 96:

happy 4th of july!

 

free flowers!

more blessings from the overflow of the temple gardens:

this is an extra blessing that i didn't anticipate that living near the temple would bring. tuesday i brought home and planted about $250 worth of free flowers - extras from the temple flower beds! i arrived on the scene of the flower give-away later than most, and i wasn't absolutely in love with what was left for me. but i do hate waste, and as i was the last one left to gather the left-overs, i brought home more than i initially planned on, and even brought home some that i didn't really like. but once i got them all planted, i loved everyone of them! some were a little scraggly and stressed, but i am giving them extra care in hopes that they will make a beautiful comeback. lots of zinnias and floss flowers, and some that i don't know what they are. i planted them among my marigolds, snapdragons, allysum, etc., and hope they are bunny-resistant. all of the beautiful salmon pink and ruby red double petunias i planted a month ago have been nibbled to ground, never to return. and just after getting all 170 new flowers planted and bringing brock to see the results, we found a baby bunny hiding in the zinnias!
i have also planted a japanese maple, two hydrangeas, six "dinner plate" hibiscus, and five dahlias in this front garden, plus shasta daisies and sedum - the last two free from a friend's garden! brock pulled out two shrubs to make room for the maple and hydrangeas. we also planted two more hydrangeas and miscellaneous flowers in the back yard. the hydrangeas are all the new ever-blooming variety in red, pink, and blue. i want to eventually get this front garden filled in with perennials, but for this year, $250 worth of free annuals will do!

usually i feel that my flower photos are lovelier than the real thing, but this time i couldn't take a photos that i felt did these new flowers justice. they are really more pretty than this photo woud lead you to believe.

the mulberry experiment

i abhor waste. i keep ridiculously small scraps of fabric, carefully saved in ziplock bags. i can't bear wasted food, or wasted anything. i suspect it was bred into me by my pioneer ancestors.
whatever the reason, i love to find uses for things that seem less than useful.

we work and work and work to get certain fruits and vegetables to grow, and then some are just given to us without effort. the second type tend to go unappreciated, and fall to the ground unnoticed. i so enjoyed (and am still enjoying the rewards of) my crab apple project last fall.

this spring/summer mulberries have been the unappreciated fruit that i felt determined to make into something yummy and useful.  first i made a batch of mulberry syrup - yummy! next, a batch of mulberry jam - very yummy too! my syrup turned out a little thick, and my jam is a little runny, so they are similar consistencies...but both are delish!

the down side of working with mulberries: removing the stems is somewhat labor intensive, and they have lots of seeds.
upside: they grow abundantly for free, and they taste really good.

i enjoyed my jam making enough that also i made some fresh freezer jam from strawberries that needed to be used - really, really good! my family is enjoying all three efforts, and that is satisfying....and good for the kids who got tired of gathering mulberries, but now feel a sense of accomplishment as they eat the mulberry jam and syrup.

reunions

this is an interesting few weeks for me. as we are packing up and saying goodbyes, we are also reuniting and saying hellos to friends we haven't seen for years & years. we had two reunions over the weekend. our moving truck pulls away one week from today. and we have two more reunions before we leave twelve days from now. i'm so grateful that we get to see people before we leave. not only is it wonderful fun, but it keeps our life from being completely consumed by boxes.

on friday & saturday we had a fabulous time getting together with my siblings, their spouses, and their kids. all but 1 of the 33 of us were there - 21 cousins. there's nothing like being with family and seeing the cousins play. living next to cousins, even briefly, has been such a treat!noahhaley-boo
on monday we  got together with friends from our english ward in tokyo. our friendships there have been some of the most amazing of our lives. when we made the decision to move to japan 13 years ago.... in fact, we were in tokyo for brock to interview for that job 13 years ago this week, as he was graudating from grad school.... we expected to have amazing cultural experiences and make lots of japanese friends. what we didn't expect was the incredible bond we would form with the member of our english speaking ward. we didn't even plan to go to an english speaking ward, but after a few weeks of complete japanese submersion, i realized that i needed to be able to speak english, at least on sunday. after 7 1/2 years in our english ward (probably the happiest time in our life so far - lexi & tashi think so too), we did make the move to a japanese ward, which became a branch, and then became a ward again. that was an amazing experience too, in different ways.
i guess something about being in a foreign culture with a foreign language and having no family in the same hemisphere helps people to to appreciate each other. we needed each other, and we would do anything to help each other. i learned from example how to really serve and really love, how to really share the gospel, and really fellowship, and how to really be a friend in this ward - from the examples of these friends. and i learned how to overcome cultural and language barriers. at one point we had people from 13 different countries, who spoke 10 different native languages in this ward. members traveled (by car, bus, or train) up to an hour and a half to get to church, and up to two hours to do visiting and home teaching. people sacrificed for each other and for their testimonies.

but it was more that just the need for each other. the people in this ward were exceptional, some of the best people i have had the privilege of meeting. truly. and i love them.

to me the most amazing thing is that we can get together with these friends, no matter how much time has passed - 1, 6, or even 9 years, and pick up again where we left off like no time has passed, nothing has changed - except our kids getting older. some of us are still in japan, some have been in thailand, england, taiwan, turkey, canada, and many are back in the u.s. it doesn't matter where are are or what we have been doing, we still connect and understand each other. we have known most of these teenagers since they were in nursery & sunbeams with lex & tash. it was so fun to see them back together again.

even if our life in japan hadn't been an amazing experience, and we hadn't gotten our mia & noah.... even if i hadn't loved japanese people & culture (most of it anyway), i would still be grateful for japan just for these friendships that we have made.
these girls were my lifeline. and the memories are so fun.....crazy karaoke, train trips, scrapboking while our kids played, costco shopping (american food at close to american prices = heaven), trips to hong kong, etc. if only more of the girls could have been there with us. five of my blog links (to the right) are bloggers from this ward: gloria, jeni, mary, mcintyres, & val. only val is in the picture above.


seeing the hansens & their two oldest (plus nick, who jumped in the photo - dang you nick! :) ) was a highlight! we haven't seen them since we visited them in nagoya nine years ago this week, and celebrated the 4th of july & parker's 7th birthday with them. they have stayed at our home (two different homes in Japan) twice since then, but both times we were in the u.s. and didn't get to see them. the second time they stayed in our home they were on their way to live in thailand. their kids were lexi & tashi's first friends in japan. tashi wanted to marry parker. i told her it was ok with me.

another highlight was when friends who were in this stake, but not this ward, stopped by because they saw the "tokyo reunion" sign posted. they adopted a japanese son that is lexi's age. i had long talks with them about how they adopted in japan, and it was such a "fluke" (blessing) that they had gotten that baby, that i feared it could never happen for us. the agency they worked with wouldn't even work with us because we were "too young" (still in my 20's) and already had two kids. but it did work out. it was wonderful to see them!