|
||||||
 The Better Hens and Gardens proclaimed focus is “Self Reliance – Real Foods – Sustainable Living”; but what does the “Real Foods” part of that really mean? I’ve been pondering that a lot lately, probably because of what I recently learned about raw milk and beverages. It turns out that you can’t sell raw milk [...] Continue reading What’s Real Food?  I love this stuff – it makes one of the best quick appetizers around and an instant gift too. It seems that sweet and jalapeno peppers are abundant in the garden every fall as the frosts start, so it’s a good time to stock up. This is a recipe that we prepare by water bath canning. 1 [...] Continue reading Hot Pepper Jelly  It’s the time of year when there are usually excess vegetables in the garden that need to be taken in before frost destroys them. Many of these vegetables can successfully be stored for months if the right storage conditions are provided. Even without a garden, buying quantities of these vegetables while they’re fresh and “in [...] Continue reading Long Term (Winter) Vegetable Storage  This is the time of year when things are coming in from the garden so fast that it’s hard to keep up – I’m putting the corn, beans, squash, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, and raspberries into the pantry or freezer in various forms as fast as I can. So, sun-drying tomatoes is a nice method of preservation because it requires little [...] Continue reading Homemade Sun Dried Tomatoes (oven dried really)  pseudo-baby carrots This year, we’re going to concentrate on growing more of the things we enjoy eating every day; and one of those things is baby carrots – but as I was investigating how baby carrots are grown and marketed, I was surprised to learn what the baby carrots we typically buy in the grocery store really are. Most of the [...] Continue reading Baby Carrots – Well, Not Exactly  In the US today, we’re being offered more and more choices in food quality; and it’s because many of us are demanding locally grown foods that are antibiotic, hormone, and pesticide free. In terms of eggs quality, it’s not clear sometimes what the choices mean – here’s a rundown on the different types of eggs: Continue reading Choices in Egg Quality  We have a chest freezer, but I had no idea what was in there anymore. So, as part of a more organized New Year, I decided to organize it and keep an inventory. This picture shows what it looked like before – kinda scary huh?
For the inventory, I just used an Excel spreadsheet. The simple inventory set-up [...] Continue reading What’s In That Freezer?  I’ve been bragging that I could tell the difference between an egg from our chickens and one from the store; so I figured it was time to put some eggs out there and see if it was really true. Which one would you rather eat? That’s right – the one on the right was proudly produced by our chickens! Continue reading Store or Home Egg?  Every year it seems that there’s an overload of tomatoes in the fall, so I make and freeze this sauce to use up all those great tomatoes. It gets us through until tomatoes are fresh again next year. The recipe is adapted from The Victory Garden Cookbook by Marian Morash. 7 lbs. tomatoes 4 tablespoons olive oil 2 cups finely chopped [...] Continue reading Fall Freezer Tomato Sauce  I think this was the predecessor to catsup, and it’s much better. Catsup seems kind of bland to me – but boy do I like this stuff. We first tried it on hamburgers (and it completely ruined any chance catsup had of getting on my hamburger again). If using fresh tomatoes, make sure they’re big, bold, high [...] Continue reading Tomato Jam 
This year I planned to grow only heirloom tomatoes (Brandywine, Green Zebra, and Eggyolk), but in a crazed moment (what if the heirlooms don’t produce this year?) I picked up some Early Girl transplants at the garden center. So, I have two orange tomatoes ripening in the garden right now, Brandywine and Early Girl. The Early Girl tomatoes (picture on the [...] Continue reading A Tale of Two Tomatoes  When I think about “real” food, I mean food that doesn’t contain artificial ingredients, hasn’t been fed antibiotics or growth hormones, wasn’t genetically modified, isn’t covered with pesticides, and most importantly, tastes great. It can be hard to find “real” food today, and the pesticides used on much of the produce in grocery stores contribute [...] Continue reading Produce & Pesticides  I love summertime when the berries start to ripen; the home-grown ones just taste so much better than store bought (and cost a lot less too). As they ripen, and we pick, I make sure we have some of that fresh summer flavor preserved for those cold, dark winter days. And today, with the advent [...] Continue reading Vacuum Sealing Summer Berries |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2012 Better Hens and Gardens - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
Chicken Coop Cam
New Comments