Yikes and Coronavirus

Maybe the CrossFit shake up happened at a good time? Most of our group of maniacs are finding small ways to work out in the outdoors doing WOD's and adding fun things like car pushing, feed sack carries, and other fun things.

Small groups of as little as two are doing work outs together when they ...can as we wait for the next step ...and there is something in motion for that.

Our Coach has sent out workouts to do at home with no equipment! Very cool stuff. It takes real dedication to do that.

But in the face of the Coronavirus epidemic, pandemic, or sickness.
Working out at home, working from home, staying home, are all choices we have to think about.
I am pretty darned lucky to be able at this time to stay home and we are lucky that we are 'isolated' in a way.
We live in a very rural area.
That is not going to stop me from hiking. It won't stop me from enjoying the outside as much as I can now that the weather is nicer. But it did make me look at how my mom and Grandmother always had food stocked in dry form, canned form, or frozen form.
I used to joke that our family could survive the 'worst' case scenario.

Mom had learned from WWII and rationing. I think Grandma understood it well too after living through the 1918 pandemic, the Great Depression, and WWII.

Am I over reacting? Possibly!
But we got notification that the Nursing Homes are in 'lockdown' locally. School field trips are being cancelled. So is it over reaction? I live with an individual with compromised health. The regular flu could kill him. So why not take precautions?

The local VA clinics and the hospitals now have patients line up in the parking lot as they do screening before you enter for an appointment. They are asking patients to do video visits for common colds.
Any time I walk through the VA clinics I feel a bit cautious for my hubby. So many people with masks and without masks, a person just needs to look around to see the large population of very vulnerable elderly veterans.

So what to do?
Well.
Simple, but not so simple.

I will try to carry on with my more or less normal life. Continue with Master's Class. I will ask them if they have prepared for this scenario.

And wonder. Is this Coronavirus being overblown? Is it not?
Prepare in case?

What will happen to our economy? What will happen to people like my son and his wife who can't work from home?

We are entering a new and uncharted territory.

Things could get very interesting.

Gardening and Dehydrating

Oh no! I didn't get dehydrated while gardening!

I got a new food dehydrator and went at it the past few days.

I tried drying herbs last year and some of those grape tomatoes. I still have some excellent dried Kale, Parsley, and onion bits from last year.
However, I used up all of the dried green peppers and basil I had.

My first experiments in dehydrating food were pretty straight forward. I didn't want to use the oven as a dryer so I'd bought a cheap dehydrator last fall. I was looking for an alternate way of preserving foods and not taking up freezer space this year as we have big ol' Black Bart just about ready for 'market'.

Here is the new dehydrator just after I filled up two trays with green beans and two trays with green peppers.

Here is the one tray of green beans after dehydrating.

I vacuum sealed the green beans and stored them away. Even I was amazed at how small these whole meals of beans were reduced to. However, I will more than likely use the frozen ones to go with a regular meal and the dried ones in soups and stews this winter.

Rich and I picked some of the 'wild' apples from the meadow. I found a recipe on line for cinnamon and sugar dried apples. I sliced the apples thinly and didn't bother with peeling them. I dipped them in some vinegar water [which works just like lemon juice to preserve the apple's color] sprinkled them with cinnamon and sugar, and then placed them in the dehydrator.

OHH how delicious! It is like having apple pie in your hand!

Shown also are the green peppers and onions. I will grind the onions into onion powder for a spice after I am done drying the rest of the onions.

So while I was letting the dehydrator work its magic, I went out to work on my east flower garden.
Last year it looked like this...

And now?

It is coming along!
[ I may change the shape to make it easier to mow around in the future. ]

Compared to how it looked when I started. Whew...

I put the finishing touches on it and stood back recalling what the pile of bricks, drywall, and nails looked like. The ugly eyesore on the east side of the house. Then I smiled and did a little happy dance.

I have the rest of this side of the house to finish, but that will wait until next year. I have some plants to transplant from a few friend's gardens that will go well with what I have now.
I do love my marigolds in containers, especially the ones in old maple sap buckets.
They are easy to move around. Just pick up the handle and go!
Instant rearranging is so much fun.

I heard my husband tell his daughter "She is out there playing with her buckets again, moving stuff around!"

Saturday was another busy day. We went to a farm in Genoa to get a truckload of hay and spent quite a while visiting. I went with the farmer's wife to admire her gorgeous vegetable garden. We talked plants, gardens, flowers, freezing veggies, and safflower.
I told her about my experimenting with dehydrating and had brought some samples of my dried apples. They all loved them.

We left with our load of hay, a huge bag of sweet corn and safflower petals to dry.

Safflower is the poor person's saffron. I spread this out on the counter overnight.

Then I went to work on processing the corn. I blanched and vaccum sealed about 8 bags for the freezer.

Farmer's wife wanted some lemon basil.
So...instead of running the dehydrator for just two trays of herbs, I decided to see how corn dehydrated.

Well? I bet you are wondering how this all turned out?

I'd call it a success!
My next step is to put a portion of green beans in with the corn and some peppers along with some spices in a vaccum sealed bag and label it 'soup stuff'. I could just grab a package and toss it in a beef broth.

Next up. Apples. More apples!
The cheapskate in me doesn't want to waste all of those superb wild apples growing in the meadow.

Crab Apple Preparation for Jelly

I know, I know. I am the last person to really blog about...ewww....cooking!

I don't consider canning, prepping food for the winter, and making jelly cooking.
As in the type of cooking I dislike. 
Cooking is a derivative of cook a 4 letter word just like bake is.:

Years ago I created a t-shirt. It has a mule head on it and says below:
Cook and bake
are 4 letter 
words
While 
Ride
Is Not!

I picked nearly 4 gallons of crabapples from a tree near work. I had permission and every other year or ... whenever I can get to the tree, I pick crabapples for making jelly. The process itself is very labor intensive, but the beautiful pink jelly that is created is worth the effort.

First I picked. Then I picked over and removed stems while washing them.

I went over this batch pretty carefully. We'd had a bad storm the day before with high winds and some hail, I picked through and tossed the bruised apples.

I'd gone to the garden early to grab any more tomatoes and veggies I could find. The NOAA had predicted storms again for the evening hours so I wanted to make sure I got anything that might get damaged.

I had a huge amount of 'grape' tomatoes along with several romas and beefy tomatoes. Not sure what name those big tomatoes were called, but I washed and sorted out the little ones, the big ones, and the ones that were ripe...and the ones that needed to ripen.

I had Kale and Parsley bunches washed and set aside.
I decided that since I'd be spending the day in the kitchen with the crab apples, I may as well do as much as I could.

I don't like to do all of the apples at once. So I started a batch. I put about a cup and a half of water in with the little red beauties and started them. I get them to simmer until they are mushy and I can crush them with a hand held potato masher.

I looked up different ways to do this and many websites suggested a juicer, or to use a blender to chop up the apples and then squeeze out the juice.

I decided to do it the OLD fashioned way. The way my Grandmother and Mom did it. Besides, I'd always had good results doing it the way I knew best. 

It was going to be an all day project and nothing was going to change that. 
I had all day.

While the crabapples were started, I got busy and put the parsley and kale on the drying trays. I also cut up and onion and sliced grape tomatoes.

I decided to try out a dehydrator. Apparently you can dry tomatoes and the grape or cherry tomatoes were good candidates for drying. I sliced everything up and put it together.

The kale and parsely came out great. I crushed the leaves and put them in containers for soup flavorings this winter.

Now that I know it works well, I'll go out and get more. I may even visit the Farmers Market and find some more spices. 
It is fun to provide for yourself.

Meanwhile the first batch of crabapples were ready. 

The smells in the kitchen were a bit wild. Imagine, onion, kale, parsley, and an overpowering smell of tart apples!

I used Grandma's method of straining the pulp from the juice for the first batch.

Hands down, you can't get more beautiful clear juice doing this any other way. I know folks use cheesecloth, but for pure juice, this is the best.

However I had a time limit and had another batch to do, so I used method number two which also is labor intensive in a way, but allows a bit more pulp to get into the juice.

I took this shot after I'd measured out at least 2 cups. This was towards the end of the 'juicing'. 
Viola!

I ended up with 7 cups of beautiful pink/red tart juice all ready for jelly making!

During my wait time for things to drain and dry, I continued to clear coat the Wainscott wood in the dining area and caught up on laundry.

Busy day, but when it was done, I marveled at the beautiful crabapple juice.

What amazes me is that people rarely plant these trees any more and most folks don't even know that you can create wonderful jellies from this fruit.

I guess it is easier to just go to the super market and buy jelly.

Well I haven't done that since...well...
forever. Once you get a taste for homemade, nothing compares.

Well. Next adventure is to hunt down some wild apple trees and perhaps get some grapes from either the Farmers Market or find someone I can trade some jelly for ... grapes.

Today? 
More food prep.