With all that holiday baking and homemade gift giving I’ll bet you ran through a fair bit of vanilla extract. Good news! If you start a new batch now it will be absolutely perfect for the 2015 holiday season. Homemade vanilla extract is about as simple a DIY as you could hope for, and the…
Food Preservation
How To Make Canadian Bacon At Home
One thing above all others makes my kids happy: Canadian Bacon and Pineapple Pizza. (I’ll admit, I’m fond of it, too.) So, confident in my general bacon-making abilities I embarked on a Canadian Bacon making experiment. I’m happy to report that homemade Canadian Bacon is, if anything, even easier than belly bacon and tastes great in…
How To Peel A Lot Of Tomatoes Fast
If you’re like me, you are in the thick of canning season. Over the past three weeks or so I’ve gotten something like 240 pounds of tomatoes turned into sauce, chopped tomatoes, salsa, various relishes, savory jams, etc. So it’s fair to say I’ve peeled many, many tomatoes. At this point, I think I’ve honed the…
Do You Need To Heat Milk For Yogurt Making?
I recently chatted with my friend Margaret Roach on her radio show, A Way To Garden, about yogurt making. One of the things we discussed was if home yogurt makers can skip the traditional step of heating the milk to 180-degrees and then cooling it back down to 110-degrees for culturing. As it turns out,…
Reader Question: What Foods Should I Preserve?
My wife and I are newer to the preserving game and are super pumped on it. Last year we preserved a lot of food but it wasn’t really conducive to living off of. We canned mostly jams, jellies, some pickled veggies (cauli, beans, asparagus, etc) and then did a lot of peaches! What I hope…
How To Make and Freeze Guacamole
I was at the store to pick up milk before heading into the April Eat From The Larder Challenge and there was a screaming good deal on organic avocados. At $5 for 6 avocados I’ll admit I did sort of stock up. A dozen ripe avocados later, it was guacamole time. Even someone like me, a girl…
How To Make Beef Jerky At Home (With Four Recipes)
Jerky is a favorite snack around here. The kids will eat it as willingly as sweet stuff like muffins or cookies, and it’s easy and lightweight enough to carry around in a jacket pocket or mom purse. The only issue we have with jerky is the price – have you costed out grass-fed beef jerky…
How To Make Salt Preserved Meyer Lemons (The Easy Way)
It’s Meyer lemon season and I’m going nuts. (Meyer lemon curd, anyone?) Regular readers probably already know how much I love salt-cured lemons. They are an essential condiment around my house, worked into salad dressings, braises, rice pilaf, fresh salsa and more. Last year, I ran out of salted Meyer lemons in July, with months…
How To Make Quince Paste
Quince is an interesting fruit. It’s hard and dry and astringent when raw, but floral and delicate if cooked. If you put your nose into a bag full of ripe quince, the perfume of the fruit shows its promise. Quince paste (often called by it’s Spanish name, dulce de membrillo) is a popular spread in…
Meyer Lemon Curd, A Love Affair
My mom used to make me a special cake on my birthday. It was a four-layer white cake, each layer filled with lemon pie filling. The cake was frosted with Seven Minute Frosting – which is basically like marshmallow fluff – and coated with sweetened shredded coconut. I loved this cake. It went down like…
The Freeze-Fill Line (How To Freeze Food In Mason Jars)
Here’s a quick tip for knowing how much to fill mason jars with food for freezing. Most straight-sided mason-type jars are made with something called the Freeze-Fill Line. This line shows you how much food you can safety put into a glass jar without risking a cracked jar when the contents freeze and expand. Look…
You Can Make Bacon At Home. And It's Delicious.
In about a week you could be eating the best bacon of your entire life. You could be holding in your hand a glistening mahogany slab of perfectly crisped pink, tender, juicy meat streaked through with succulent fat. You could be proclaiming to the world: “Behold what I have made! It is bacon and it is sublime!” Instead…