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Tag Archives: Alaska life

Well, Once in a While Canning is more appropriate.

Peter Piper picked a peck of sweet red peppers and gave them to us. So we busied ourselves and pickled them. They are the sweetest peppers I think I’ve ever had.

Lil Bit spent about three hours yesterday prepping them all, culling, washing & slicing. After work I helped her pickle them. We added some jalapeno slices and a small piece of habanero pepper to each jar for a little flair along with black pepper corns, dill seed, garlic & salt. We used 2 gallons of vinegar. She ended up with 8 qts of sliced and 3 qts of whole pickled peppers. (Because Mom broke one jar! 🥴)

This was her first time canning (with just a little direction from me) and she did a great job. She figured out how to calculate her brine using a ratio on her own too. She will be able to enter these in the fair! I’m pretty proud of her.

Besides all these lovely pepper pickles, we ended up with 8 or 9 qts in the freezer. What a bounty.

I haven’t been keeping up with our canning posts tho. Our rhubarb is looking great this year. Lush and green and full of thick stalks. We should have plenty for a big batch of wine. Last week the girls both pitched in and canned up a couple of cases of strawberry rhubarb jam with Thing 1 taking lead. They made some freezer jam, some regular sugar jam and some sugar free (keto friendly) jam. So that’s two big canning sessions in June already.

I guess it’s a good thing to be processing other foods while we’re normally processing fish. It’s been really strange being home and not living on the beach for this time period. And eating up our last few jars of canned salmon. Salmon burgers for the win last night, in the midst of making a wreck out of the kitchen. 🍔

Baby moose!! 🫎

After gardening in the greenhouse, I came up to the house to find this boy’s snout and front paws covered in mud.

Bath time! Which of course he “loves”. Lol

So thankful for a healthy, mischievous, playful pup!!

#huskylife

#thankful

Still valid all these years later. Blessed memory.
I draw on the windows to keep the spruce hens from flying into the windows and breaking them.
Vintage wallpaper in a bathroom. Late 1970s estimated installation.

It all started with getting that moose, losing our freezer drawer and needing to restock our lunch soup supplies.

But once I got started I couldn’t stop processing like a mad woman.

We had some pumpkins from fall decorations that kept well plus an extra one a friend gave us. I loaded a full canner, two cases worth, of plain pumpkin and then made a batch of pumpkin butter. Which is like eating pumpkin pie on your toast!

I had three turkeys 🤷🏼‍♀️ and some miscellaneous fruits from wildcrafting the last time Niki was here. Which I turned into Crabapple, rosehip & cranberry chutney. It’s so delicious!

With the turkeys I made 2 gallons of turkey broth, a few quarts of turkey bone-in meat and two cases of turkey veggie soups. And I even had a little bit left over to cook and eat for dinner. Along with the aforementioned moose stew, we have some great tasting lunch options now!

Since we’ve been trying to get better organized and had all our canning jars stored in one place the kids have been saying that we have too many jars. Ha. No such thing as too many jars! Now there are empty places on the jar shelves but no empty places in the pantry! What a great feeling!

(I canned a total of 13 cases plus a few singles over the course of the last 4 weeks. Time to restock lids and maybe buy some more jars!)

Shopping last weekend I scored a box of tomatoes at IGA so I made salsa and canned some raw pack tomatoes!

Recap of what’s in the pantry now:

Moose broth, moose stew meat, turkey broth, bone-in turkey, turkey soup, dog food, pumpkin, pumpkin butter, fiesta salsa, jalapeno salsa, cranberry-rosehip-crabapple chutney & tomatoes.