Here’s the inside scoop on really neat tricks to make you fall in love with your freezer even more:
When you harvest elderberries, pick the whole stem, freeze the whole stem inside a plastic bag, and remove the berries frozen. You get more juice into your recipe and less running down your elbows.
If you have a problem with fruit not ripening all at once, freeze the early pieces and combine them with the later harvest for your larger recipes.
Save juice for jellies, frozen in recipe size batches, in freezer safe cartons, until sugar is on sale. Allow 24 hours for a gallon to thaw at room temp.
Start a sourdough bread business, offering a discount on frozen surplus.
Make your own brown and serve rolls out of any favorite bread recipe by baking the rolls at 275 degrees for 40 minutes, instead of the usual directions. Cool, bag, and freeze. Or if they are individual rolls, freeze on a tray, first, then bag. Then use as needed, right from the frozen state, baking on a cookie sheet at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes.
Rescue cheese by grating and freezing it. Use frozen grated cheese straight from the freezer in recipes.
Freeze milk while on vacation. Leave 2 inches for expansion.
Okay. You know you’re here for the RECIPES!
That Exquisite Dish
1 chicken, cleaned and skinned
2 qt. Pure water
½ c. fresh sage leaves
¼ c. fresh lemon basil leaves
2 stalks celery, chunked
1 onion, chopped, divided
1 T. salt
1 cayenne pepper
2 c. brown rice
½ stick butter
½ c. whole wheat flour
salt to taste
8 oz. mild cheddar cheese, grated
1 pt. “rotel”, mashed in juice
Simmer chicken in 2 qt. water, sage, basil, celery, ½ onion, 1 T. salt, and cayenne, until meat separates from bone. Drain, reserving broth. Refrigerate broth until fat congeals. Remove fat. De-bone chicken. Chop meat slightly, to make bite-sized pieces. Chop cooked seasoning vegetables finely. Mix with meat. Do not mix meat until it disintegrates – just stir some.
Bring one qt. broth and rice to boil. Cover and simmer until tender.
Cook remaining onion over medium heat, in butter, until clear. Remove from heat. Add flour and stir. Mix in carefully over medium heat with wire whip, enough broth to make medium thick sauce. Add water if necessary, salt to taste.
Layer in 9×13 glass casserole as follows:
rice
chicken
sauce
cheese
Repeat.
Pour jar of mashed Rotel over all. Bake at 350 degrees until lightly browned and bubbly. Or cover tightly and freeze no more than 3 months. Uncover, place in 350 degree oven, bake until brown and bubbly, about 45 minutes.
Serves 12.
Watermelon Ice
½ leftover watermelon
1 lemon
honey
other fruit (opt.)
milk or condensed milk (opt.)
Remove seed from melon. Puree fruit in blender. Add other pureed fruits or milk if desired. Add juice of lemon. Add honey to taste. Freeze in shallow glass pan or bowl. Stir twice while freezing. Or try freezing in sealable bag, kept upright in freezer, and mashing instead of stirring. Serve as sherbet.
Frozen Dampened Laundry
1 bu. assorted shirts
1 c. powdered soap
2 tubs water, divided
1 unpredictable day
1 unbelievable week
Mix shirts, soap, and 1 tub water. Heat and stir well. Drain. Place shirts in second tub water. Stir well. Drain. Hang shirts to dry outdoors in sun. After 5 hours, condensation will form and fall from a small cloud immediately above shirts. Remove laundry when only slightly damp. Fold and roll as for French pastry, bag, and freeze. Keeps indefinitely. Calories: minus 560.
So, what else can we do with a deep freeze? Plenty.
My favorite trick with it is freezing hamburger meat.
Cooked.
That’s right, I cook ground beef and then freeze it.
Whenever it is on sale, I buy however much I can afford, stir and fry until crumbly, huge pans of it with onion, salt, and pepper. Drain it well, box it, and freeze. One pint fried is about one pound raw.
This serves a couple of wonderful purposes.
First it is a money saver, in that it allows me to cash in on sales.
Second, it is a time saver if I want to make spaghetti or chili in a hurry. While the liquids are heating, I put in a box of frozen, cooked ground beef and once all is hot, the meat is thawed. Or pour a dab of water into a small pan and add a pint of this meat to warm on low until thawed, while you do other things. Then stir in your favorite sloppy-jo ingredients and serve. Fast and easy.
Actually the deep freeze is great for saving money, stocking up on many sale items such as meat, bread, flour, and garden seed. It saves money on ice if you make your own ahead and store it there. It saves money on bulk foods, because you do have room for it all.
We have a diabetic friend who must eat wild meat, so he hunts. When he bags a deer, he hires the meat all ground. His wife then makes it all into patties which he spends a whole day grilling to “near done”. They freeze these and have instant grilled burgers all year. They say to warm them takes only a few minutes and the taste is like it was just off the grill.
Probably everyone has heard of cooking casseroles on a monthly basis to save cooking time, but if you even make one extra or double entre whenever you cook, you can reduce your kitchen time nearly 50%.
The freezer certainly saves much frustration by allowing you to prepare ahead the food for guests and have it ready to pop into the oven so you can enjoy visiting in a relaxed manner.
I have cooked ahead when I knew I’d have no help after childbirth. It was so easy for my family to dip into the freezer while I was resting.
I’ve cooked ahead when my best friend’s mother was coming for dinner – an exquisite dish that takes hours to prepare. It was no hassle, because I prepared it a couple of days earlier, when I had the time to spare.
I have cooked ahead when my husband invited his best friend for supper the same night I had to be gone. My teenagers baked that big dish with a teenage flair that brought delight to the guest and joy and pride to Dad.
However.
Did you know your freezer needs a little tender loving care? More tomorrow.
As I said, yesterday, you do not put that much corn in jars in the canner. That would take roughly 15 hours just in the jiggling, plus heat up and cool down times, and the other processing of shucks,silks, etc.
Nah. Not that.
We freeze it. Frozen corn tastes better, anyway, and for us, frozen off the cob is best, most like fresh from the garden.
Here’s how we did it.
My husband went to the garden with a wheelbarrow, picked the corn, shucked it right there, and placed it into the wheelbarrow. When one was full, he started on the other one. If it filled, too, he took out laundry baskets and buckets until all was picked and shucked. Later he would till in all the debris.
Meanwhile, I sharpened knives, heated water, and covered countertops with towels.
Once the first wheelbarrow came to the house, I began trimming, de-silking, and washing all that corn, over a sieve to catch the garbage for the chickens.
Whenever a found a totally perfect ear, I set it aside for the Pastor. That was one very important aspect of teaching children how to harvest that we never wanted to omit.
After the washing, the blanching could begin. I put seven ears for 4 minutes into a 16-quart pot of boiling water. Then I transferred them to a cold water rinse to stop the blanching action. While I blanched, all older family members carefully sliced the top 2/3 off the blanched and cooled kernels and then scraped the pulp from the remaining one-third, all over big wash pans or large bowls.
Some people do the cutting indoors, but that is messy to clean up. Others do their cutting outside, but that is buggy. A screened porch solves both problems if you can hose it off later.
I know people object to blanching because it is a warm job, but I’ve learned it’s easier if we aren’t overly dependent upon air conditioning. We do perspire some, but it is summer, after all, and I have found it doesn’t hurt a thing to do so. What makes it so warm is that the water will not boil with a fan blowing on it, so only exhaust fans will work.
Once the corn is cut, I pack it into the trusty ol’ boxes, label, and freeze.
What happiness to notice the boxes piling up on the countertop! What awe to watch your daughter learn to count while she sits beside that ever-growing stack of boxes! What fun to take the Pastor three dozen absolutely perfect ears of (you know it’s the best) corn! And what excitement each time you eat it, all the long winter, as wonderful as the day it was picked!
So the freezer has kept our harvest for us for years. Can it do anything else? Yes!
When our firstborn was about two years old, we bought a brand new deep freeze, on sale, for about $100.00. That was a large sum for us, just starting out, but through 40 years of service it has never caused us one moment of grief and has quietly kept literally tons of food rock-hard, safe to eat, and almost-like-fresh.
That’s at $2.50 per year.
It has had a place of honor in most of our homes, either in the kitchen or in the baby’s room. (It did double duty as a wonderful changing table.) I also bought several sets of rigid plastic freezer cartons, to save the waste of plastic bags. They were also on sale but nine dozen or so cost me around $50.00. Most of those dear little boxes are also still chugging along just fine.
That’s around $1.10 per year.
Every year I froze 75 quarts of blanched corn-off-the-cob, 75 quarts blanched spinach and/or beet greens, and all the fresh blackberries I could get my hands on.
We also tried freezing applesauce, whole carrots, whole peppers, whole apples, whole tomatoes, halves of beef and pork, bread, cookies, cakes, flour, dried beans, corn meal, excess fruit juice, chocolate chips, dog biscuits, dampened laundry, and more.
Oh, I forgot chickens, turkeys, fish, and the last snowball of each winter.
Oh, yes, there was leftover garden seed, too.
And ice cream.
Are you getting the picture?
(We won’t discuss the pheasant skin.)
I am not the type to throw everything into the freezer just because it’s too much work to pressure can it. Yet the freezer is always packed.
Our garden has varied from a tiny, pitiful mustard patch, to a beautiful 50’ x 75’ plot of perfectly fertile sandy loam. In the big one, we planted 17 rows of corn each year. By the Fourth of July, those 17 long rows were ripe and ready. We’d hurry to get it all put up before nightfall and the huge fireworks display in the park.
Now. To get ¼ mile of corn put up in a hurry, you do not pressure can it for an hour per each ten pints! No! The only expedient way, given the necessary elements, is to blanch it briefly, slice it off the cob, and store it in boxes in the freezer.
Where is my post? Where is all that work? It was here, I saw it, and now it is gone.
This is my good friend Ed. I wrote a very romantic post about him and it posted. It was here. I saw it. Now it is gone.
I will attempt to reproduce what I wrote before. Sighs.
I encountered Ed and his fiance sitting close to each other on the sunny side of the street last November. As always, he had a hug and a lopsided smile for me.
Ed is a very kind and generous man. I once saw him give $100 to a friend as a going-away present. He earns his money by picking up aluminum cans off the roadside. Sometimes people give him their cans, too.
I have seen Ed weep when he hears the sweet old hymns sung, like “How Great Thou Art”. But he does not sing. He was born with a mouth deformity and cannot even talk well. Only his closest friends can understand him at all when he speaks, but he pantomimes well enough for me to understand.
I admire his spunk, to think of marrying at his age.
Someday I will write a fictionalized account of his life and I will be his co-star. 🙂
________________________
Okay. Posting again. Thanks for your patience, everyone. Sure do hope this is not something that happens often.
Motivations regarded most important for homeschooling among parents in 2007. Source: 1.5 Million Homeschooled Students in the United States in 2007 Issue Brief from Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. December 2008. NCES 2009–030
Every summer, it begins again: Some people must check it out — Are we really supposed to be doing this home schooling thing? Really? Are we sure?
There is a reason for that: They worry about their children’s futures. Of course, this is the function of parents, but because home schooling is so “new”, many are unaware of what the future holds.
With that in mind, I submit the following long post. Hope you enjoy it.
I have to say there is definitely a future for your home-educated child. Many predict that is impossible. They don’t understand.
I know, because I have been to the future.
My husband and I, together with what were to become some of our dearest friends, began home schooling about 30 years ago. Can you believe that? I almost cannot. It was nearly unheard of, back then. There were no home-school web sites, no support groups, no magazines, no newsletters, and almost no other people to . . . well, I guess you could say we are antiques.
Some thought we were breaking the law.
Our families would not speak to us.
We did not know where the adventure would go, but we did know where WE would not go. Home schooling cost us in many ways (but not much, monetarily) and we knew we could never throw away such a costly advantage.
That was enough to keep us going, back then.
Now days, though, people are seeing fruit. We’ve been there and done it and some of us have written the books. In some cases, we literally have helped the colleges rewrite their admissions policies to accommodate us. Our children have gone to college, passing CLEP tests, and earning scholarships. I relate this to show that entering college is much easier for home scholars, now, because schools court us.
Yes, in these days of crumbling social skills, the colleges still know how to woo parents.
Does this startle you? It should not.
Think for a moment: The national study that delineates what causes improved learning reads as if someone had been watching our home schools. Everything that home schooling parents do, from start to finish, is in that study. Unknown to us, or to them, ours is the only set of circumstances deliberately designed to enable the teacher to do everything right.
So, of course, our children are set up to succeed.
Then, surprise, surprise: another study, one that investigated who was doing best in college, found that it was not the public, nor the private schools, but home scholars, all grown up, crunching the books.
No wonder people want our kids.
Mention homeschool and you get the job. Have you noticed that? We have. In any imaginable field, what we are speaks so loudly, they do not need to hear what we say. It is the life-style, the diligence, and the discipline, which make us attractive.
People wish they could be like us.
Lacking that, they hope to hire our children. It is as if they are casting a vote for our way of life, by helping our children along. In this wrong, wrong world, they have found something that is dependably right, RIGHT, RIGHT, and they like it. So many people are so glad simply to see a clean, healthy young person who does not have a chip on his shoulder—it just makes their day, gives them hope, eases their worries a little.
It should.
You see, somewhere, deep inside every person, is the witness that the Lord’s ways are altogether good and right. Some people will never acknowledge that, but they cannot help but be glad when they see something they can recognize as good and right, whether they acknowledge it as coming from the Lord or not.
They have seen plenty of the other results, of the world’s ways.
There is not a person on this earth, I hope, who thinks it is good that children are murdered at school. No one thinks that the children should be blowing up the schools. Who, in his right mind would approve of drug dealing in the hallways?
So we agree that we should go on with this home-school idea, although we do not feel like it, maybe. The days come, though, when we don’t think that we can do it, right?
Why not?
Some of us are undisciplined.
I have heard it so often: “I don’t have the patience (organizing skills, energy, time, or whatever) to home school.” We have always answered with, “Neither did we. But we wanted to acquire those skills, and home schooling taught us how.” Actually, though, it was the Lord teaching us new heights of self-discipline. He wants to do that for all of His children.
We need a new perspective on life in general, and on home schooling in particular. If God has given us children, for their sakes we must begin to concentrate on the after effects of our actions with them. We dare not come to the end of our schooldays saying,
“I just did not have my act together.”
Some of us are just tired.
As your children age, guess what—you do too. Bones hurt, and muscles weaken and stiffen. What would you do if you worked in a public school and your joints were bothering you? Would you still get up and go to work? Of course you would. If you did not even care about the children who were depending on you to teach them, you still would think about the principal, school board, and superintendent and their responses.
Well, now your husband is your principal, your support group is your school board, and God is your superintendent. You can go on. Otherwise you must someday say,
“I just grew weary in well-doing.”
Some of us are afraid.
We think we do not have what it takes to teach higher levels. I want to encourage you by saying that although I only made “B’s and C’s” in high school math, I could remember what I had learned, thirty years later, well enough to help my children puzzle out their problems.
The moral is that if you ever learned it, it probably is still “up there” somewhere amongst the clutter of your busy mind.
Actually, what I found, was that from phonics to geometry to history and beyond, I never really learned much in the state institution that I went to, and am just now beginning to appreciate and retain these facts. I never learned to write until after all my formal schooling was over.
Maybe it is just that you learn more when you teach. I know the home school methods have been “officially pronounced” the best for actual learning. You actually, probably do have all you need to teach your older children. The parts you forgot are about to be remedied—something you have needed for a long time. It will not be good to come to the end of the school journey saying,
“I gave up because I was afraid.”
Some of us truly did not ever study some subjects.
Perhaps you were in an institution that emphasized sports or movies, or did not teach.
Maybe somehow you escaped or fell through the cracks or quit or just could not grasp it.
Perhaps you had or have a learning disability yourself.
Mother, please, please do not think you are excluded or disqualified from the joy of finishing your older children’s education. There are several ways to make it happen:
There are entire courses of lecture available on video or audiotapes. You do not have to know anything except how to pop in a tape.
There are your friends at the support group. Ask and discover who is good in English or math. Realize that they probably would be, and rightfully should be, very glad to support you in your endeavors.
There are the people in your community, who want to cast their vote in your direction, as I was saying. One of my best friends, a college math teacher who has remained childless, delights to answer my questions, although they usually are way below her level of expertise. I try not to wear her out, but if I am stumped (which happens in algebra II) I call her. She loves it so much and we have a good conversation to top it off.
You can find this type of help, too. You dare not send your child back into the same system that failed you. There has to be a better way. Learn with your child. Otherwise, all you can say, at the end, is,
“I didn’t try hard enough.”
Some of us fear that we will somehow harm our children.
As long as you realize this possibility exists, and as long as you dread it, you are precisely the person who should be teaching your children. People who think they can do no wrong do not approach children with a good sense of dread of error. They are the ones who lead them astray, use them for guinea pigs in psychological experiments, and just plain teach them wrong.
I will not tell you that you will never make a mistake.
I certainly could not tell you that from my own experience.
If you care this much about your child, though, casting him into the public arena is what you must NEVER do. This is nearly guaranteed to harm your child. Keeping him near the life of God in you is what he needs. Even if you make mistakes, he can learn from them, too.
According to Solomon, those who fear harming the children are the ones who should raise them and not any others who could not be able to care as much. Do not plan someday to say,
“God’s grace was not sufficient.”
I am past fifty years old and (at the time of the original writing) still have two teens to finish schooling. Sure, I am tired, some days. (Who isn’t?)
Yes, I have to look up things or reread the teacher book, some days. (The same for cookbooks.)
Of course, I have to find someone to help me, some days. (With plumbing, with doctoring, and with schooling.)
And, I have, I have made mistakes, missed the mark, some days. (In possibly every aspect of life.)
Nevertheless, there is one thing I do every day—I look into the eyes of my children and see clear-headed humanity looking back at me, not mass-produced confusion. That is life—true life.
Home's Cool! 