It's mid-autumn at Moat Cottage and the sunlight hours are decreasing rapidly,
daylight savings has ended so it gets dark a fair bit earlier than only a few weeks ago.
Managing the larder pantry, preserving the summer and autumn harvests and sowing the
winter vegetable garden are all priorities for this time of year. Refilling the pantry jars is
done every couple of weeks. I pull out the jars that need topping up, remove any food that's
still in the jar then fill the jar up with new food and topping it with what was originally in
the jar in the first place. Obviously we also fill up the jars as we go if we use something up, but i
find by doing this it keeps everything in order and it makes cooking and creating food more fun
when you don't have to be filling up jars while you're cooking and being creative in the kitchen.
Obviously home-grown food is seasonal so i fill up the jars with homegrown food as
the seasons allow but the staples i always make sure i have plenty of stock in backup,
in the backup pantry so that i can bring it into my larder at any time that i need it.
this also means that we never run out of anything, so if you're in the middle of creating a recipe
you can create what you want because we have the ingredients
and we know we'll have backup. This way of living has also been very
beneficial in these times where there are shortages and you can't get certain foods.
In Australia the government recommends we have at least a two-week supply of food on hand at
all times and that's not two weeks on the day we've just got back from shopping and you have
a two week supply because then you're using it and then you don't have a two week supply.
You don't have to be a doomsday prepper or even a homesteader to realize that you do need a supply
of food at home. Just here at my house in the past two years we've had devastating bushfires,
the pandemic as everyone has and i live in the state that had the most lockdowns
of any place in the whole world and we even had the worst earthquake on on record for our
area - which is not normal for us, so i really like to have a lot more than two weeks supply
and that's not even what's happening in other places in my country
and around the world. So think about getting a few buckets and storing a bit of extra food.
These beautiful juicy pears have ripened up perfectly so they are ready to make pear butter
Thank you for all your suggestions regarding the canning lids, i'm confident we can find a
solution to the canning lid drought here, i will update you on this in the future.
The pear butter recipe i make is in the 'Ball blue book guide to preserving"
it's a water bath canning recipe and it's very
easy except that you have to stir it for about an hour, but it's definitely worth it
if you're a fellow canner you know how rewarding it is to get jars straight out of the canner,
all that hard work of growing the food, creating the food and then
canning the food has finally paid off and you have your beautiful jars
In my slow cookers i have beef bone broth
and in the pressure canner i'm pressure canning chicken breasts
i've got my bone broth cooling down so that i can place it into the jars
and let it cool down enough so i can remove the fat so it's ready for pressure canning
washing your can jars and then labeling them and putting them away or at least finding room
on the shelves so that you can put them away in some sort of order, all takes time and it's
another thing that needs to be done so that you can stay organized in your pantry ladder.
Luckily for me, it's something i enjoy doing,
however i've spent the last few days in the pantry and i'm really ready to get outside in the sun
the winter seeds have started to sprout, these turnips are all coming up and they're way too
close together so they need to be thinned out so there's enough room for them to grow.
This can be a really difficult job actually pulling out and killing seeds, but look,
it looks so much better and now there's room for the turnips to
grow. I'll probably have to come back in a week or two and see how we're going
because more may still come up and they still are probably a bit too close together
if you pressure can fat with your bone broth it will only last for about six months and
then the fat may go rancid so i like to place the jars into the fridge for about an hour so
that the fat sets on top and i can just pull it straight off, then it's all ready for canning
and once it's pressure canned without the fat in, it it will be shelf stable for at least 18 months
my freezers were completely full of summer harvest produce so i'm working my way through and canning
what's in there so that i can have space in the freezer to find the things that i've made like
soups and the food that needs to be eaten out of the freezer and not just stored in there.
These tomatoes, i'm going to make a tomato soup and can it up
and i'm dehydrating the skins to make a tomato skin powder
This tomato soup recipe is also out of the 'ball blue book guides preserving' i'll
leave the link in the description below if you haven't got that book yet, it's definitely a
beneficial book for if you want to get into pressure canning and water bath canning.
This is a water bath canning recipe but i made too many jars so i decided to
pressure can it, the only thing is i didn't allow for the headspace change,
i got sidetracked and i had half inch headspace which is what you have for water bath canning and
for pressure cutting you need one inch headspace. Luckily for me most of the jars sealed and the
ones that didn't we will be having for lunch and that's not a bad thing because it is delicious
i love seeing the shelves so full at this time of year,
heading into winter with all of that sunshine bottled up....
so rewarding, thanks for watching i'll see you in the next video