Eggs what to do with the eggs.

I ran into an extremely good buy on some eggs. I purchased them for around 2 cents an egg. They usually run around 14 cents an egg. I purchased 15 dozen. Now when I got home my wife was initially not very happy.

We live in a small apartment with a small refrigerator. So what to do with 15 dozen eggs.

Recipe for pickled eggs:
hard boil 2 dozen eggs

Pickling liquid:
1teaspoon dry mustard
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon turmeric
2 teaspoons salt
4 cups vinegar
Bring pickling liquid to boil.

Place the hard boiled eggs in jars and cover with pickling liquid. Place in refrigerator for a couple of weeks to allow flavor to absorb into the eggs.

Freeze eggs
Jelly jars hold 4 eggs
break 4 eggs into bowl and mix do not whip but just get them mixed like you would for scrambled eggs, place in jelly jar leave 1/2 inch head space, place on lid, label and freeze.
good for up to a year in freezer.

These worked really well for a quick breakfast and to take to work and microwave.

Keep trying new things and old ideas in new ways.

Hang in there, have fun and enjoy.

Mark E. Johnson 

Canning spaghetti sauce

My lovely wife made a huge batch of spaghetti sauce.  She bought a number 10 can of tomato sauce at our local store a few cans of tomatoes and went to work cooking up some sauce.

I pulled out the quart jars. Our pressure canner will do 7 quarts, so that leaves a quart for dinner. We filled the jars to about a 1/4 inch from the top.

If you have not pressure canned, do not be intimidated by the thought. All extension offices have information that can help as well as the instruction booklets for the pressure canner itself.

My wife's sauce is a marinaria sauce so no meat is involved. A meat sauce would need to be processed longer than a tomato based sauce.

We put the rack into the pressure canner. We then added two quarts of warm/hot water. Then we placed the 7 quart jars onto the rack. We confirmed the rubber gasket was in good shape and in place around the top of the pressure canner. We placed the pressure canner lid onto the pressure canner and closed the lid. Then we place the pressure canner valve onto the lid. Under 2000 feet and we would use 5 pounds of pressure for our canning experience. We however, are just over  a mile high here so we increase the pressure to 10 pounds.

We put the pressure canner on the stove and turn it up between medium and high. The pressure canner steams, spits and sputters around the handle until it gets close to the pressure needed, then.... the handle drops down and locks into place. A few minutes later and the valve starts to jiggle. About twenty minutes later and the jiggle is vigorous. We start timing. We want to let the pressure canner operate at this temperature and pressure for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes we take it from the stove and let it cool down on some towels for about thirty minutes. After the cool down the lid is cool enough for the lock handle to release and be lifted off. The jars are then removed and placed on towels to continue their cool down. After another thirty minutes, pop, pop is heard the sound of the lids sealing off. We left the jars out on the towels overnight and in the morning a simple test feel of the lids showed them all to have sealed. We did both a spoon test, take a spoon and lightly tap the lid for a tin sound. And a feel to see that the lids did not move up and down.

So a #10 can of tomato sauce, a couple of cans of tomatoes and some spices that only my wife knows for sure. Two hours worth of work with the pressure canner, about thirty of involvement and the rest waiting. We have seven quarts of homemade sauce for about the cost of a quart of sauce at the store.

Seems like a pretty good deal to me. Thanks for reading and more will follow.

Keep trying new things and old ideas in new ways.

Hang in there, have fun and enjoy.

Mark E. Johnson

The direction this blog will take, I hope.

The concept behind this blog is so that I have a location to gather ideas about homesteading practices and implementing them in an apartment, condo, town home type environment.  We have moved to a point where not all of us will be able to have large gardens, out buildings, chickens, cattle etc.  There are however, homesteading concepts that we can implement while dwelling in smaller spaces.  The Scandinavians and Europeans seem to do a really good job of using space, so we will probably bring in some of their thoughts and methods as well.

A good example of what we are talking about here, is urban foraging.  This spring I was able to get out from my apartment and take a walk in one of our local open spaces.  In the process I was fortunate enough to find a few morel mushrooms that became part of our breakfast the following day.

Another good example, we have found good deals on dry beans at our local grocery store a 10#bag for less that a dollar a pound.  Regular dry beans in our location are usually around two dollars a pound.  Canned beans come out even higher.  My wife likes the convenience of canned beans but the cost of dry beans.  In addition she likes to be able to control things like salt and spices.  So we canned the beans we wanted and saved some dry in jars as well.

Thanks for reading and more will follow.

Keep trying new things and old ideas in new ways.

Mark E. Johnson