Canning Green Beans

This year we were blessed with a bumper crop of green beans. We typically plant bush beans, but for several years we've struggled to get a good crop. After tender care of our plants and lots of hopeful waiting we ended up swimming in beans!



So, what to do with all of them? I love raw and cooked green beans, but there's only so many you can eat in one summer. We choose to can our green beans. It's a great fresh veggie to have all winter long and it makes for a simple side dish to throw together.



After harvesting your beans, you'll want to snap the ends off. Just the very tip of the end is all you need to pull off. As you can see by the picture, little helpers do tend to remove a little more than necessary. But it's always great for them to help out. And beans provide an excellent way for little ones to stay busy.



Once the ends are removed, wash your beans well. Then snap them into 1" sections. It's not necessary that they be perfectly even. But the more uniform they are the more evenly they will cook. These were snapped by my 2 year old. (I evened them out later!)



Once the beans are all snapped, pack them into jars. We use quart jars, but if you have a small family, pints may work better. You can really pack them in tightly.

After getting your jars filled, add in 1 teaspoon of salt per quart. Use 1/2 teaspoon for pint jars.



Fill the jars with water leaving about 1/2" headspace.



Screw on your lids and rings. Place in a pressure canner and process at 10 pounds pressure for 25 minutes (quarts) or 20 minutes (pints).



Remember: DON'T open your pressure canner until the pressure returns to zero. Otherwise you'll end up with burst jars.

Happy canning!

Rhubarb Desserts

Rhubarb season is quickly drawing to a close. Tonight I used up the last bit of mine by making two of our favorite rhubarb dishes. One we enjoyed for dessert and I sent the other along with Josh to his Bible study tonight. I sure hope there's a bit left for me to enjoy once he gets home!

Both recipes came from dear friends at our church. I love to think of them whenever I bake these delicious desserts.

Barb's Blueberry Rhubarb Crisp

2-3 C blueberries (frozen or fresh)
2-3 C rhubarb
(I rarely measure these. I just dump until the bottom of a 9x13 pan looks full)
1/2 C flour

**If you choose to just use rhubarb and no blueberries use 4 cups of rhubarb, 1/4 cup of flour, and 1 cup of sugar. With the blueberries you really don't need any sugar.**

Mix flour and fruit in a greased 9x13 pan.

For the topping:
1 C brown sugar
1 C oats
1 1/2 C flour
1 C butter

Mix the ingredients together with a pastry cutter until crumbly. Sprinkle over top of the fruit.

Bake at 375 for 45 minutes. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

Grandma Mary's Rhubarb Cake

1 yellow cake mix prepared according to box directions.
Spread cake mix in a greased 9x13 pan.

Over top of the unbaked cake mix spread the following mixture:

2 1/2 C rhubarb
1 1/2 C sugar
1 C heavy cream

Mix these ingredients together before spreading over cake batter. If desired you can include a little cinnamon or nutmeg.

Bake at 350 until the cake tests done. This will typically take a little longer than the box indicates.

The rhubarb will be on the bottom of the cake. And the cream will have created an incredibly moist cake.

Strawberry Freezer Jam

So many people have asked how I make strawberry jam. If you have some extra freezer space this recipe is my favorite. It stays a beautiful pink/red color and is a taste of fresh strawberries throughout the year.

I simply use the recipe for freezer jam found in the PINK box of Surejell. I always buy the pink box because the resulting jam isn't overly sweet. Strawberries fresh from the garden are sweet enough on their own.

Clean and remove the tops from about 4 cups of strawberries.

About one cup at a time, mash the strawberries with a hand masher. Jam should have chunks, so don't worry about getting your strawberries completely mashed.

Continue to add berries and mash until you have EXACTLY 4 cups. Measurements are very important in making jam if you want it to set properly, so measure carefully.

In a bowl combine 3 cups of sugar and one package of the surejell (pink box). Mix well. Then pour it into a saucepan and add 1 cup of water. Place on medium high heat until the mixture begins to boil. Be sure to stir CONSTANTLY throughout the cooking process. Once the sugar water begins to boil, time it for 1 minute, stirring all the while.

After the minute is up, remove the pan from the heat. Add the berries and stir for one minute.

Ladle the mixture into jars and cover with lids.

These jars will need to sit at room temperature for about 24 hours before going into the freezer or fridge. This will ensure that the jam sets up well.

The jam can be frozen for a year or kept in the fridge for 3 weeks.

If for some reason your jam doesn't set up, you can always use it on ice cream or in other desserts. Don't throw it out! But if you follow these directions, you really shouldn't have any issues.

Hope you enjoy it!

A fresh bit of summer all year long!

I LOVE strawberry rhubarb pie. In fact, I think it's my absolute favorite kind of pie. I always get a little jealous of my family members with June birthdays because they can choose it for their birthday dessert. But my birthday is in December and every year I long for the taste of summer on my special day.

Until this year I hadn't found a good way of preserving strawberries and rhubarb. I've tried freezing the fruit separately, but both end up watery once defrosted. I've been leery of canning the pie filling because the recipes I find are so different from my tried and true pie filling. Plus, in the pictures I've seen of canned pie filling the fruit is always a little off color.

This year I stumbled across this blog on pinterest. The author claimed that creating the pie filling and then freezing it fully prepared in a ziploc bag would work. I was a bit skeptical, but decided to try it.

Oh my, delicious!

I froze two pie fillings. I then waited a week before defrosting and baking. The pies were amazing. The first one turned out a little watery so with the second I simply drained off a little of the excess liquid. It set up so well and was incredibly good. Today I made five more batches to save for winter. I can't wait to pull them out of the freezer and enjoy the taste of fresh summer fruit in the dead of winter.

Here's how:

Step 1: Harvest your rhubarb and your strawberries.
(You really don't want to wait too long to get to your rhubarb. If it has holes in the insides of the stalks, you've waited too long. It can end up with a "woody" taste if you wait too long.)

Step 2: Chop your berries and rhubarb into small pieces. About 3 cups of each.

Step 3: Add in the sugar and flour. Allow the ingredients to maserate (mix) for about 20 minutes. You will no longer notice the sugar and flour as you stir, but instead will see a bit of syrup forming around the fruit.

Step 4: Place the mixture in a freezer bag. I highly recommend getting a vacuum sealer like this one. Ziplocs work but will allow freezer burn after an extended time in the freezer.

Step 5: Once ready to make a pie, simply defrost your bag, remove a little bit of the excess liquid, make a pie crust and bake.
(For best results, allow your pie to set overnight. The filling will thicken and you'll have a perfect pie in the morning.)

(photo credit)

ENJOY!

Here's my recipe for AWESOME STRAWBERRY RHUBARB PIE:

3C strawberries, cut
3C rhubarb, cut
2/3 C flour
2 C sugar

Mix the ingredients in a large bowl. Pour into prepared crust.

Top and Bottom Pie Crust:

2 C flour
1 stick + 2 T butter (not margarine!)
1 t salt
6 T very cold water

Mix all with a pastry cutter or by hand. Divide in half and turn out onto a floured surface. Roll out a bottom and top crust. Place bottom crust in the pie pan, fill with pie filling, cover with top crust. Turn excess crust under around all the edges to seal the pie. Flute with a fork or spoon. Poke a few holes in the top of the pie.

(It's always a good idea to bake a pie on top of a cookie sheet in case any filling oozes out.)

Bake at 425 degrees for 55 minutes.

A Room for the Lego Enthusiast

Little plastic bricks of varying shapes and sizes. Red, yellow, green, blue, gray, black, and white. Hair pieces, heads, weapons, legs, and head gear. Wheels and gears, windows and doors.

If you know what I'm talking about then you must have at least one lego enthusiast in your home. I have six, counting my husband and not yet counting our youngest child! Lego has exploded in my home. My children save money to buy lego, they ask for it for gifts, and a visit to a lego store is like stumbling upon the holy grail.



With so many lego enthusiasts, we decided to swap out our guest room for a lego room. About a year and a half ago we made the switch and I have never done a better thing for my sanity. For the most part, we let the kids go wild in there. They rarely clean it, and aside from our board games and a file cabinet, the room is completely devoted to lego. Lego is expected to stay in the lego room. No more vacuuming little pieces, no more death by lego for unsuspecting feet.

We began by putting a large table in our lego room (see pic above). It was our old kitchen table. We figured the kids would be able to use the surface for building and keep most lego off the floor. Wrong! Instead, they all fought over the space on the table. One would start a big project and then the others wouldn't have room for their buildings. We have now moved to a different solution.

We purchased six of these end tables from Ikea for $7.99 each.



To spruce them up a bit, I painted each child's initial on a table. That way we can avoid all the squabbles over who gets to build where. Each child now has their own place to build.



Originally, we had also put up a long shelf in the lego room. This was for those special projects that the kids just weren't ready to tear apart yet. Our kids are really into Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and The Hobbit. So naturally they have purchased many sets from those movies. Instead of building the sets once and then tearing them apart, we allow them to keep the sets on the shelf and bring them down for play. As they find they don't play with particular sets, they can pull them apart and place the pieces in a labeled ziploc bag. That way each kid knows which sets are theirs and they also keep all the pieces together. As adults they can either bring those lego sets to their own households or they can choose to sell them online. (We also keep the original boxes flattened in storage in case the kids want to sell the sets someday.) We found recently that one shelf was not quite enough, so we added a second.



Now, here's the part that really is up to individual preference. How do you store all the lego?? We used to keep our lego in a giant rolling toolbox. The special pieces went in the top compartments and the rest was in a big jumble. Our kids grew very frustrated wanting to find specific pieces but having to look through such a large mass of lego. In setting up our lego room, we decided to organize by type. We went to Menards and bought this wall system.



Originally we used double sided tape to place a piece of each type on the front of each container so the kids would know where things went. Those pieces have long since fallen off, but the kids still remember where the pieces belong. They have sorted them by size (1x4, 2x1, 4x4, etc) and by type (windows and doors, people, weapons, gears, etc.). It works well for us and is actually the way the professionals sort their lego.



We also have this little set of drawers to keep specialized parts in.



Lastly, we keep binders full of the directions that come with various sets. Without a specific place for these, we found that direction packets would often get trampled underfoot and end up ripped or crumpled. That just results in frustration for everyone!

We love the function of our lego room. And as a mom, I love the creativity that I see in my kids through what they build. If allowed, our kids would spend hours upon hours playing with lego. It has cut down on our kids' desire for video games and other less-healthy play. And it allows their imaginations to run wild.



Do you have specific ways to deal with the lego monster at your house? I'd love to hear about it!