Putting Food By...

We had a lot of fun on Friday...

Both fuzzyscribble and I had taken Friday off-- we had been working too much lately, and had been tossing around the idea of going out to one of the U-pick farms about an hour outside of Chicago to spend a day in the sunshine, and pick up some produce to enjoy, and possibly can/experiment with.  She had looked through some stuff on the web, and picked one called Susie's Garden Patch, located between Marengo and Belvidere.

Friday came, and we got our usual slow start.  We left sometime around eleven, and had an uneventful drive.  Susie and her husband were pretty low key, chatting with some locals when we got there.  We asked what there was to pick, and were told basically pumpkins.  She said, "There are tomatoes and peppers as well, but that whole section is kind of a mess."  Well, about two hours later, we were ready to pull out with our haul.  We had twenty pounds of tomatoes (basically seconds), twenty five pounds of peppers (mostly hot), our pumpkins (of course), a half dozen winter squashes, and three eggplants.  Our total?  Forty dollars.

We wandered around town some more, picking up some canning supplies, and looking at this and that.  Picked up some roasts to cook for Fuzzy's mom and a couple of friends today.  Decided to leave town the long way and drive around some more.  We stopped at a vegetable stand and picked up some more random produce, and after we left the stand, saw a sign for an orchard close by.  There, we picked twenty pounds of  Johnagold apples, and bought a bushel of Honeycrisp seconds to make applesauce with.  We also bought two quarts of local honey.

Now, I realize that having a car made this possible, but that was over a hundred pounds of produce for right at a hundred bucks.  It's not necessarily more expensive to buy produce and feed yourself, you just need to work at it.  Luckily for me, this kind of work is fun.

So far this weekend, we've canned pickled hot pepper rings, made homemade barbeque sauce, made jalapeno jelly, and chili-tomato jam.  We still have to make a lot of applesauce, and Fuzzy has an apple chutney recipe that she wants to do.  I still have to get some sauerkraut pickling in my pots.  Time to get to work!