Townhouse Homestead Tuesday

I don't know where to start today. It's been a busy first week to the new year. We've been organizing to make it a good new year and more efficient. The holidays were wonderful. My daughter gave me a Presto pressure canner. This has been on my wish list for almost two years now so imagine my surprise when I opened this gift. When I was raising my family I always canned and preserved and when I down sized I gave away my canner and most of my equipment. We took a trip to the store for jars and it was immediately put to work.

New years eve day was quite a productive day. After eating our share of Christmas ham and serving company ham and cheese sliders I began by making a pot of split pea soup from the bone and leftover ham. The result for this day was three pints of ham alone and nine pints of split pea soup.

Since it had been many years since I had pressure canned anything I was a bit nervous about my results. The worry was for nothing because everything sealed and I felt good about not wasting food. I couldn't fit any more in our tiny freezer so I would have ended up throwing or giving it away.

On new years day the canning continued and I put up nine pints of ham, bean, and carrot soup. This finished up most of the ham leaving a few pieces to put in breakfast sandwiches. So moving on to the small freezer and how full it was it became clear that I needed to keep going and use up what I had been tossing in there. 

I made triple berry pancake syrup as Christmas gifts and had plenty of fruit stored up to make more. I wasn't aware that it would make so much, but I ended up with seventeen (17) cups of triple berry syrup. I know it's a lot, but it is preserved and will keep. You must understand that my daughter and I are always taking trips to the wonderful state of Vermont and we have always purchased a bottle of this syrup at $8.99 for 8oz. It is wonderful that now we can use our adventure to discover something new in Vermont.

It was a busy three days, but it is all labeled and put away so we can move on to the next adventure.

I also received for Christmas my favorite book to take out of the library. How excited I am to have this in my personal library and to be able to take it out and just glance through it whenever I want. 

I know that a lot of us are on tight budgets and trying to eat better and this butternut squash soup has become one of our favorites. Easy to make, simple sage butter seasoning (made with the sage I grew this summer) along with salt and pepper to taste then add a few home made croutons from that leftover bread and you have a wonderful and inexpensive winter dinner. 

This is what's been going on here in the townhouse and 2015 is starting out in a very positive way. I wish you all a very good new year and thank you for stopping by.