Frugal Food- Canning Corn

Last year my sister in law showed me how to can green beans. I was excited to try to can on my own, and this year I was given a pressure canner from my husband's step mother. I have been waiting for enough food to come in this year to make it worth canning, and then all of my father in law's corn came in at once and they were gracious enough to share with us.

I pulled out the canner and inspected it, and since it had already been inspected by the local extension office I felt pretty confident using it. However I was still nervous as I have heard horror stories of the canners blowing up, but with instruction manual in hand I was going to give it a try.

It took a long time to get all the corn off the cob, and I am pretty sure I hurt my hand doing it. I would suggest if you try to can corn that you enlist help of others for this part, if nothing else to give your hand a rest once in a while. Also, lots of corn ears make a small amount of jars of corn. I had a normal size roasting pan half full of fresh corn kernels and I got 8 pints of corn out of that. Above is the corn before processing.
I thought I followed my instructions properly the first time, but I had not allowed the water to boil enough before putting the weight on and the canner just would not come up to pressure of any kind. I thought for sure I had failed. I let it sit to cool down with the intention of pulling the corn out of the jars when they cooled, draining and freezing them, but my husband being the great man that he is convinced me that maybe together we could figure out what went wrong and we tried again after resealing the cans. It really was something as simple as the water was not at a full boil before putting the weight on, but it was my first time canning alone, and I did not know that. So lesson of the day for me would be canning has a learning curve like any other task, and this will just take practice.

Here is the corn right out of the canner still hot. Do you can your own vegetables? Do you have any tips to share for a novice canner like myself?

This post is shared at the Homemaking link up

Frugal Food - Zucchini Fritters

We love these around here in the summer when the zucchini seems to take over, and they are easy which I love.

Ingredients:

1 medium/large zucchini (you want normal size not monstrous), grated on the large holed side of a box grated
6 oz shredded mozzerella or monterey jack cheese
1 box Jiffy corn muffin mix
1 egg
3/4 cup of milk ( Dry milk works fine in this if you have some you use for cooking, but you want 3/4 milk reconstituted not 3/4 milk powder.)
1 tablespoon oil, I used Olive oil
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp dry Italian seasoning mix

Mix all ingredients till well mixed in a large bowl or stand mixer. Preheat oil in a pan for pan frying, or coat an electric griddle with a bit of oil and heat to 325. When your oil or griddle is hot make your fritters/pancakes as you would cook normal pancakes. If you deep fry these, the batter is a bit runny, you may need to adjust milk content a bit to get the right consistency. They are better in my opinion on the griddle, but I wanted to give the option for those who don't have a griddle.
Makes 10-12 fritters, definitely enough for 4, maybe enough for 6 people. They reheat well if you have leftovers.
I usually serve this with fresh corn on the cob.

Price breakdown July 2011
1 zucchini- free from the garden (or about 50 cents right now at our grocery store)
1 box Jiffy mix - 50 cents
1 egg free from our BIL's chicken ( or about 16 cents from the store, if your dozen is $2)
3/4 cup milk (38 cents - milk is about $4 a gallon here)
6 oz mozzerella ($1.50)
The spices and oil are in too small of quantities to price

Total - $3.04 or 76 cents a serving at 4 servings

Served with corn at 4/ $1.00 which brought the whole meal to $1.01 per person.

This is shared at the Raising Homemakers Link Up

Take advantage of the season

Right now it is super hot here. It is definitely summer, with the high humidity and 95 degree days all week. I have been dealing with this heat all my life, you think it would not shock me when it goes from the gorgeous mild spring weather here to the "please try to find somewhere air conditioned for the afternoon and mow the lawn after 8 pm weather" in what seems like 1 day, but it does.
This early heat makes for good gardening though, you just have to hydrate- hydrate- hydrate, you and the plants that is. We are limited by what we can put in the ground, by where we live and the provisions of the housing community, but I have a thriving container garden that seems to have really taken off. I am so excited by this, not only because it cuts my grocery budget some, but I thought until this year that I may have inherited my mother's black thumb. The only thing I had managed to keep alive for any amount of time was an aloe plant that actually liked when I forgot to water it.
There is something in the southern woman psyche that makes us want to garden even in the oppressive heat. Maybe it is the connection to our grandmothers and their ability to feed an entire brood of children with stuff out of the yard, in my grandmother's case 10 kids a husband and whoever he brought home from work.

I love squash blossoms, they are beautiful to me. They can also be tasty stuffed with goat cheese and herbs... but since I want to have squash I am just going to let them do their thing. 

My first Romas, can't wait till they turn red!

The strawberries from a local farm. These were going to be jam, but we have chomped on them and now I think I will buy more for jam and freeze what is left of these. There is nothing like having summer's strawberries when there is frost on the ground.

Lastly, today I am making my first batch of sun tea for this year. Here are instructions if you have never made sun tea.  How to make sun tea

What are you doing to enjoy the summer? Do you have any plants producing yet? 

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The container garden, canning and the grocery game

Well, my container garden did not succeed. I have some watermelons that are still doing alright, but the beans apparently did not have enough drainage and some of the other plants just never really took off. I got three salads worth of lettuce, a handful of carrots and onions. I will do more research on container gardening and maybe I can have a more successfull late summer crop. Luckily the other family members in ground gardens are doing much better.

I learned to can green beans last weekend with my sister in law, and now I can't wait to get my own canner. I think I will try some water bath canning myself this year (we go through tomatoes like crazy), and then do my own pressure canning next year when the kidlet is old enough to preoccupy herself a bit more so I can babysit the pressure canner. I am also vacuum sealing produce for deep freeze, so hopefully we will be enjoying summer produce way into the winter.

I have been meaning to blog about the grocery game for a bit now, and just have not had a chance. This is a site http://www.thegrocerygame.com/
I am not in any way affiliated with this company, it has just saved me lots on my groceries and thought it may be useful to some one else. Essentially you enter your zip code, and pick your store(s) and every Sunday your stores lists are updated. The lists show you what you can get at a deep discount or even FREE using coupons, and store deals. It tells you where to find your coupons, and what percentage of a discount you get on the item so you can stock up on things you need for cheap. Since starting it, I have routinely gotten $150 of groceries for $75 or less.
The site of course can explain the service better, but I thought I would write about my experience. There is a small fee (it comes out to less than $2 a week for two store lists) but since it does all the work for me and the savings are so large it is worth it for our family.

Vegetable Garden Experiment

Today I finally got the container garden in the ground, well in the pots. I have green peppers, carrots, cauliflower, pumpkin, watermelon, onion, lettuce, yellow bush beans, regular green beans, strawberries and two kinds of tomatoes. I am new to gardening, but hopefully I followed the packet instructions well enough to get some crop out of it. I paid a total of $2.00 in seeds, and $10 for organic potting mix. The pots I am using were free from a friend who was moving and no longer needed them. I figure since I am experimenting this year with container gardening as long as I can get that $12 back in produce then I have done alright, although of course the dream is lots to freeze and can for the winter.
I will post pictures when I get something other than dirt in a pot to show you.