Fun With...

Food storage? Yep that's right. I have a new hobby, a new love, a new obsession and it's food storage. Ok, so it's probabyly more of a hobby than an obsession or a love but it is starting to grow on me. We are really just getting started with it but suddenly I feel an urgency to get it done that I've never felt before. It's hard to tell if it's a prompting or just a little OCD kicking in.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when our ward had access to a canner. We could buy the cans for 60 cents each and bring whatever dry goods we wanted to put in them. When sealed properly, the shelf life of most dry goods is at least ten years, if not indefinitely. So we sealed up some powdered milk, sugar, and beans. The perfect ingredients to make, well... nothing really. But it's a start. It was cheap too. That day we stored about 75 pounds worth of food for about $50. Not too shabby.

(I keep saying that we sealed the cans but it was really Casey. He did the whole thing; getting the food, putting it in cans and sealing them up, while the kids were taking naps. By the time they woke up and I went to meet him, he was done. I was pretty bummed about that because I really wanted to see how the canner worked. He told me it really wasn't that exciting. I don't know if that's true or if he was just trying to make me feel better.)

The drive to increase our food storage only intensified yesterday when I had a windfall of peaches and didn't know what to do with them. I don't know how to bottle fruit so I decided to make jam. I know, the shelf life of bottled friut would be much longer than jam but as soon as I thought of making jam with said peaches, there was no stopping me. Now I have several containers of homemade jam and I want to learn how to preserve fruits/vegetables. I'm even planning my garden for next year according to what would be the most useful for food storage. I can't wait until planting season!


And here are 4 things that made me smile today:

1-Jace's farmer tan.

2-Alek getting up on all fours and rocking, then launching himself forward onto his chest when he really wants something or just gets too excited.

3-Camden calling his new book "mama moo moo" when the actual title is: Llama Llama, Mad at Mama

4-When I looked up the term windfall to make sure I used it correctly above, this is what I got from dictionary.com: "Something, such as ripend fruit, that has been blown down by the wind."