Preserving Floyd: mmm....Applesauce

Making applesauce creates a scent that smells like all the ripe apple trees of Floyd condensed into one and spilled into our house.  I swear it has the ability to attract the neighbors who arrive at the door with spoons in hand!

Applesauce straight from the jar, applesauce dressed up with spice and cream, applesauce topping pancakes and waffles, applesauce baked into cakes and pastries, applesauce glazing ham or pork, applesauce cooked down into butter or leather.  So many uses for applesauce!

Cooking Floyd: Kale Chips

People are always looking for something to feed kids in place of potato chips.  Heck, I'm always looking for something to satisfy our urge for crispy, crunchy, salty-good snacks.  I think I've found it with Kale Chips.

Preserving Floyd: Drying Apples

Some of you may remember this very helpful gadget from last fall's Extreme Deep Dish Apple Pie post.

Well, it's time to break it out again!

Cooking Floyd: Butternut Ravioli...

...and the Basics of Making Pasta and Storing Winter Squash

Red Kuri, Butternut, Acorn, and Spaghetti squashes

This is the time to stock up on winter squashes.  Right now they are cheap, plentiful and there's lots of varieties. Winter squash are versatile and delicious from their simplest preparation roasted in the oven to soups, risottos, stuffed, and stuffings.  They are also the simplest of vegetables to store.

Eating Floyd: Between Road Trips

Cooking, preserving, gardening, foraging, husbanding posts have slowed down the past couple of weeks because we've been on the road.  When we've been at home I've been trying to catch up on all the things that have continued on their merry ways in our absence.

Husbanding Floyd: NIMBY

Michael and I just got back from 7 days spent on the Pennsylvania-upstate New York border.  The area is about an hour and a half north of where I was raised and where Michael and I lived for two years while he worked in Corning, NY.  It's very pretty country often referred to as the "Gateway to the Finger Lakes".  It's also an area that abounds in natural gas and when we bought a house there it was my introduction to mineral rights.  If there's something valuable under the ground, like natural gas, your ownership of what's under the ground may or may not convey to you when you buy that property.  For example, it may already have been bought by a gas company from a previous owner.  Or the owner you're negotiating with may want to keep the mineral rights but sell the property.  Or some other sort of configuration.  Anyway, there's a lot of natural gas in that area.  And that means a technique of mining it called fracking.  And laying pipeline to move it.  Miles and miles of pipeline being laid in wide swathes of clear cut forest and across farmland and your backyard.

Preserving Floyd: Concord Grape Juice - Drink Your Flavinoids!

When it comes to antioxidant activity, Concord grape juice rates right up there as one of the most healthful juices you can drink.  It is one of the easiest grapes to grow and the grape used in classic jelly and juice products found on store shelves since your grandparents were kids.

 The smell and taste of Concord grape juice is one of Michael's nostalgia triggers fostered by a childhood friend's mother who made her own and had a frosty glass waiting for him every school morning.