Hearts Full of Joy

spring flings

some of the two hundred & twenty - something bulbs I planted last fall are peeking up and blooming. i have been looking forward to spring, and it is living up to my expectations. magnolias, tulip trees, cherry trees and my daffodils and crocuses are in bloom. everything is turning green, our early garden is planted, and the birds are singing.

a generous friend has taught me how to can chicken and dried beans, which i have been excited to learn. it is a tasty and convenient way to add protein to food storage, and are very handy to have on hand. i know that my dried beans in storage will get too hard to enjoy eating before i get to them unless i can them and use them. i never think far enough ahead to have time to soak and cook them for our meals, and so i always open a can instead of using my dried beans.
i have now canned 50 lbs of chicken, fit into 24 quart jars, and 56 quarts of beans. brock figures i have saved over $250 dollars on the cost of buying that much canned chicken from the store. i got this chicken in bulk at $1 a pound. and it is so useful and convenient to have it canned. the dried beans cost me the equivalent of 20 cents a can from the store, 40 cents for a quart jar (not including the cost of the jars, which i will re-use, and the electricity for the stove top canning). 56 quarts of beans equals 112 15 oz cans of beans from the store. the friend who taught me how to do this canning opened up her bottled beans and we taste tested them against bush brand beans, which are her favorite brand.... and we all agreed, the home bottled beans were much, much better. i am also amazed that the 56 quarts of beans barely made a dent in my 125 lbs of dried bean storage. so dried beans will go a long way, but they do get hard after 5 to 7 years and won't soften with any amount of cooking. so it's important to keep rotating them. beans are such a great source of protein, fiber, and many helpful vitamins. i feel much better after adding these items to my food storage.

my mom & SIL traci came for the nauvoo women's retreat last week, which was wonderful beyond words, both the retreat, and having them here for it.

the keynote speaker was mariama kallon, and to quote from the retreat info:

"The keynote speaker is Mariama Kallon, originally from West Africa, where she endured the horrors of a civil war, watching her parents killed, her brother taken and later killed, and her sister's legs cut off. Mariama will share her amazing story of how finding the gospel of Jesus Christ helped her endure loss and despair and become the happy, outgoing woman she is today."

that little blurb doesn't even begin to explain her story. her talk was truly amazing as were all of the presenters. it was all deeply spiritual and inspiring. i was surprised to find that this little retreat, in my opinion, far surpassed time out for women. i was expecting it to be a great experience, but not as incredible as it was. i'm so impressed by the talent of my friends in our ward who put it together.


lexi & my mom

we are savoring our general conference weekend, and our eyes lit up and exclaimations were made when we heard that katsumi kusume, our stake president in japan, father of lexi's first boyfriend, has been called to be an area authority seventy. so who will be the new tokyo stake president? we wouldn't be surprised if it is the father of our dear friend...

chihiro, (shingo's sister), who was married in the tokyo temple on march 28th. (shingo's face is obscured by the groom's in this photo.)

it's been a wonderful week.

thankfulness

believe it or not, i've been canning again. i was offered boxes full of free pears and apples, and although i had to talk myself into driving to carthage and picking them up, i felt that i couldn't let good food go to waste. i spent three days canning apples and pears in cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, pumkin pie spice, and combinations of the above, canning pears in apple juice with cinnamon sticks, canning and freezing apple & pear pie filling, and making more jam. i tried a spiced apple & pear jam and then tried adding apple & pear jam to a batch of crabapple jam....still have crabapples hanging on my tree.
 
spiced apple-pear jam, pears in apple juice with cinnamon sticks, & crabapple-pear-apple jam.

it feels to good, and so provident, to have almost 4 dozen more jars filled and ready to eat & enjoy. and somehow all of this canning has re-awakened the love of homemaking arts inside of me. i have always loved homemaking, until about 4 years ago when a darling and lovable little boy turned my life upside down, not allowing me time to do anything but try to keep up with his messes, which was impossible. so my house was dirty, i was discouraged, and too tired to enjoy cooking, cleaning, etc. my quilting kept me somewhat sane. but my zest for being a homemaker waned and vanished. now it is back, and i am grateful.

so satisfying

i was bitten by the canning bug after canning our own fresh & free grape juice last month. so after brock & i enthusiastically ordered 8 fruit trees and 6 berry bushes to plant in our yard this fall, i thought about how long it would take them to bear fruit. and then i thought about our crabapple tree. it was beautiful in the spring when we were house hunting, covered with blossoms,

and it has been beautiful in the fall, covered with little red apples:
i hadn't imagined it being useful in any practical way. but as i thought about fruit and canning, i remembered hearing of crabapple jam. i hopped on the internet and pulled up lots of yummy sounding recipes. and we started picking.
 
even tiny fingers could pick these apples

they piled up

and i started cooking. first i made a crabapple pie for family home evening dessert.

the flavor was great, like cranberreis, but better. but the texture left much to be desired...to many little seeds and core pieces (i just chopped them up like the recipe said....). plus it was very labor intensive. next i borrowed my friend's faithful steam juicer and went to work. i found that it is not at all necessary, or even helpful, to chop the apples first. just throw them in the juicer, stems and all.

with that juice, i made crabapple hot pepper jelly - very delish, and just plain old crabapple jelly - also yummy. for my final stage of testing, i made crabapple jam and crabapple butter. the jam was the winner because my family likes it the best, it was the least amount of work, and it gave the highest yield of finished product for the amount of crabapples used. but the hot pepper jelly is so yummy with cream cheese and crackers. i have made 4 batches of it so far, and given away much, much.

remember our apple picking day? we ended up with 7 boxes after two days of picking. 3 or 4 boxes were used at our relief society apple canning enrichment activity, and i used the rest.

with the help of sherry's juicer, these apples & their peelings made the loveliest rosy red juice and sauce.

apple slices, apple juice, apple sauce (nutmeg was my favorite seasoning for the sauce), crabapple jelly, butter and hot pepper jelly.

6 dozen quarts of canning later (including the grape juice), i feel very satisfied. to take something that i got for free, and would have gone to waste, and use it to make something beautiful, yummy, and useful that my family can enjoy is very fulfilling. after mia had her first after-school snack of toast with crabapple jelly, she asked if she could run outside and pick some more crabapples. a little while later, she came back with another boxful. and i knew it was all worth it. i have many generations of this kind of pioneer practicality bred into me, and i am grateful.

as we were picking our crabapples, two neighbors stopped by and made disparaging comments about my little round red fruit friends. unfair. and so in their defense i offer their good points:
1. birds and bugs don't like them, so you don't have to spray. this saves time, energy, money, and pesticides in your family's airways and stomachs (i hate pesticides, and all of our canned fruit this year was pesticide free - another benefit of gathering free fruit that no one planned to use) 2. the fruit is small and branches are low, so even little ones can help pick. 3. fruit flies don't like them either. i wish that was true for grapes and apples. 4. they have a really yummy tangy zip in jams & jellies. 5. they grow in abundance with no effort.

i have enough picked crabapples (and many more still on the tree) left to make another batch of jam....and i think i will.