Humble Beginnings

New Dehydrator

I picked up the "new" dehydrator yesterday from our local freecycle group.  It's a Magic Chef 6-tray dehydrator in VERY good condition.  I'm quite pleased.

I tested it out last night and dehydrated a bunch of James' jalapenos and a cayenne.  I plan on dicing these up and using as a spice in our soups or venison sausage this winter.  It worked great and James was so excited that we tested it out on his peppers.

Today, I canned up 7 quarts of vegetable soup.  Our local grocery store had chicken on sale so I was able to make chicken stock this morning and from that chicken stock, I added some potatoes, carrots, corn, green beans and some canned tomatoes from last year's garden and made a veggie soup.  It smells really good so I can't wait to try it out.  I even had extra left over that I'll end up freezing (but the remainder is mostly chicken stock with a few bits of veggies).  I'll just strain those and use the stock, though.

We rec'd the latest issue of Countryside magazine (our absolute favorite) earlier this week, so I've been devouring it.  They had a great article on "lasagna" gardening that I'm going to try for this fall's garden.  Basically, you take newspapers, layer on top of that peat moss and organic material, then you water it, and repeat the layers until you've got about 7-8 layers.  From there you simply plant in the layers.  I'm hoping to try it for this fall's garden.  From what I can tell you don't even have to till!!!  Wouldn't that be wonderful?!

Oh!  I also forgot that I bought bacon on sale yesterday at the store for $5 and it was almost 4 pounds of bacon.  I usually buy a pound for $6.99 (it's the nitrate/nitrite free).  However, with the cost of food these days I can't afford that.  So, I bought the ends/pieces bacon for extremely cheap and it should last us the next 2 weeks, if not longer.  I re-packaged it when I got home so that I can just pull out a package when we're ready to use it.  I think I have 5 packages in the freezer and then we used the 6th this morning (along with homemade buttermilk biscuits).

I tell you what ... this is a time for creativity, frugality and thriftiness.  It's time to put into practice all the things I've been reading about.

Anyway, I hope y'all are having a wonderful afternoon.