Yesterday's Dehydrating - DONE!!!

Good morning Blessed Ones!!!       I sure  hope and pray that your morning is going splendidly!!!      I pray that as you look around you that you can see the many ways that God has blessed you and loved on you today.       If you woke up and are reading this, then trust me, He has already blessed you mightily.    I was looking out the back door and I seen a squash bug.      hahaha      As much as I detest them, I did have to just stop and thank God that He allowed me to see it, even though I wanted to squash it myself.  I didn't, just because I didn't have time.      hahaha      When I look out and see the beauty of Fall starting, again, I am so humbled and thankful for His blessings on me.       First of all, He got me up this morning.     Then, I'm thankful for my sight to see all the beauty now, with the understanding and hope of even more beauty in just a couple more weeks.      No one paints a picture quite like our Father.      He is original Master of All Things!!!!      And I do love the beauty He blesses us with.      Another thing I'm thankful for is my hearing.      It's not as good as it once was, but praise Him, I can still hear some of the lovely sounds just out side my door that nature has to offer.     I'm thankful for the harvest that I've had and still getting from my little deck garden.      Yes, I would just have to say that we serve an awesome God and I'm thankful for all His blessings on me.        I pray that you can say the same thing.

Yesterday I shared some pictures of what was on my dehydrator.      Well, this morning I took all those goods off and they are now jarred up and ready for the cupboard.      I took some pictures to share with you how I store them.       I save all my glass jars with metal lids.    They are perfect for storing your dehydrated goods.     While we do NOT want to do proper canning; water bath or pressure canning; in them, these jars are perfectly wonderful to use with our dehydrated goods.       I save all my jars, no matter the sizes.     They are all perfectly suitable and usable for something.      As I fill a jar, if it gets full and I need another jar, I just label it and start another one.      At some point in time I may realize that I can actually combine the 2 jars into a larger jar.     That's a good thing.     It frees up a jar, plus it frees up space to put another jar when I get it filled up.     Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pictures and see something you like and maybe want to try it.    

This first picture is of all 4 different products I took from the dehydrator.       You can easily see the jars and varying sizes that I keep and use.        Starting on the left is the shishito peppers.      I actually have 2 jars there.     The next little jar is the kombucha fruit that consists of mango, pineapple and ginger.  That will either go in a hot sauce ferment, or I'll powder it.      The next jar has pineapple in it.     I think I estimated that there is about 6 and 1/2 cans on dehydrated Aldi pineapple in that jar.     And all the juice goes in to my yeast bread.      The final jar has got ginger in it.      This ginger I done yesterday I peeled it, the ginger already in the jar wasn't peeled.      It all goes into my kombucha, so it doesn't make any difference.       When I make fire cider, it won't make any difference for that either.

This is a closer up pic of the shishito peppers  and the kombucha fruit.      If you click on the pictures, it should take to you to larger picture and you may be able to see them better.   Just a little more and I'll have 2 jars completely full of those delicious peppers.       That tickles me too.     I'm worried that it will frost early this year.      But I'm supposed to be getting some frost covers to hopefully prevent that from happening too soon.      I'm hoping that I can put a few of my peppers in my little greenhouse to save them even further into the fall.    We'll see if that happens.                                                                             

This is my pineapple and ginger.       I have a good sized plug of ginger in the fridge, but I really don't think it fill the jar so I'll probably get another one next time I'm at Aldi and work on getting that jar filled.       Ginger is so good in so many things.                                                                               

This is a sourdough bread starter that I just started.      I took out my old started and cleaned the container up and just started fresh with 1/4 cup of rye flour and a 2 tablespoons of warm water.      It is sitting in the oven with the light on.       I'll have to feed it for a few days and do the discard.      That's why I just started a small batch.      I can't stand waste, so hopefully I can do this and keep from having a boatload of waste.     But I am looking for good discard recipes though.     I'll try to remember to take pictures as the sourdough progresses and share them later and some of the bread that I make with it.    If it turns out half way decent.      That is one thing that I'm not confident in, my ability to make a sourdough starter.      We'll see how it goes.                                                                              

Well, I thank you all for joining me this morning for a few minutes in my kitchen.      I love sharing with y'all and I hope I can stay motivated to keep sharing little snippets of what I'm doing.      Maybe it can be a time of inspiration for y'all.     Not necessarily what I'm doing, but maybe you'll be inspired to give something a try that you have been wanting to try or thinking about trying.      My word of encouragement would be to "go for it".      I find that even if I have a failure it's not a complete loss if I learn something.

Blessing to you on the rest of your day.     Find some time to thank God for His blessings on you.      Till we meet right back here next time, take care and just know that God loves you.    He want's to be right relationship with us thru the shed blood of Jesus Christ, our Risen Lord and Savior.     It's all up to us.    We accept Christ or not.      I hope you have already done that.    Tell someone you know that God loves them too.     Blessing be yours.    God loves you and so do I.     hugs and love, patty 

Surprise Surprise A few pictures and some fun

Good evening lovely and faithful friends.      Yes, it's been a hot minute since I shared a post.     I sure haven't meant to my ignore blog, but it just seems like life gets in the way some times and I also think I needed to rethink what I want to do with my blog.      For now, I'm keeping it like it is.     Not many people look at it and I've decided that it's the worlds loss for not checking it out.     hahahaha       Well, it is.      Because I think it's pretty good myself.      It's not loaded with ads that take hours to load.      There are not annoying popups.      The only agenda I really have is trying to show you Jesus and then a few micro seconds into my days and what I'm doing.      So, there you have it.     What my blog is about in a nut shell with a nut typing all this.     hahahaha

I sure hope everyone has been doing well.      We have been.      I'm so thankful for the watch care of Jesus Christ.      I hope you are too.       There has been a lot of sickness and I pray that y'all have been able to miss it.      I would encourage you to get your vaccines if you haven't.       I would also encourage you to think about other people.      That's all I'll say on this subject matter.    I could say more, but today, I want my post to uplifting and encouraging.       So, dear ones,  I'll tell you that Jesus loves you.  Those are the most important words you will ever hear in your lifetime.      Jesus loves you!!!!      Jesus loves you!!!       Please let those words sink in and rest on your heart as you read the rest of my post today.

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Well, if you've read this far, you may just be crazy enough to want to hang around and see what I've been up to.     hahaha

So, this first picture is of my dehydrator trays filled with the goodies that I put on this morning.      I have 1 tray with ginger and you can see beside the the trays on the stove that there is one on more huge chunk of ginger to get on next time.      I put 3 cans of pineapple tidbits from Aldi on 2 trays.     I drained all the juice from the pineapple and even took a flat potato masher and mashed them to get even more juice from the them.     From the 3 cans of pineapple, I got a quart of pineapple juice, and it's in the bowl beside the trays also.       That will go wonderfully in my next several batches of homemade bread.      I make all our bread and use everything I can to make delicious bread.      This will be delicious bread.     I also have 1 tray of kombucha fruit.     That consists of ginger, pineapple and mango that I have used to flavor my kombucha.        That will be dehydrated and then used in homemade hot sauce.        More on that in a  minute.        Then the last 2 trays have shishito peppers on them.        I split them down the center and dehydrate them.        I grew these this summer and they are a wonderful pepper.       Not many of them are hot, but about 1 in 10 is hot.      They are delicious thrown in a skillet and blistered.       I have learned that I can throw them in the air fryer with what ever else I have in it and blister them  and they are delicious.       I don't like pickled peppers.    I don't like frozen peppers.      So, dehydrating is the way to go for me.      It maintains the flavor better than any other method of preservation.      I can take a couple of pieces of this pepper and crumble and sprinkle it on something and it's as close to the fresh pepper as it can get.      I haven't tried rehydrating a piece yet, but I will, just to see what it will do.       I will do my own assessment of dehydrating, how I dehydrate, why I do what I do and like, in a future post.      So, be on the look out for that.

 

The next picture is of a Honey Garlic ferment.          I forgot to take a picture as I was getting it together, but, I did remember shortly afterwards.        I used raw honey and 6 huge honking garlic bulbs.   hahaha  Can you say stinky hands????    Well, I can and I did!!!    hahaha         My raw honey was blond in color and as thick as margarine, so I had to heat some water and sit my jars of honey in it while I was getting the garlic peeled and smashed.      Since the honey is raw, and that's what you need to use in a ferment, you don't want the honey to get too hot in the hot water or it will become pasteurized and that  will kill off any good bacteria in the honey, rendering it useless for this application.     Once I got the garlic in the jar, I poured the honey in with the help of a spatula.     The honey, over time, pulls the liquid from the garlic and that liquid then thins the honey down.       This ferment will take between 6 months and a year.      The honey and garlic will be almost chocolate brown when it's done.      It will bubble and need to be burped for at least a month, on a daily basis.     If I fail to do this, the jar can and will explode.      So, I keep it sitting where I can see it every day and can release the the gasses that have built up.       It "STANKS"!!!!!       Let me tell ya, stank is worse than stink.  hahaha       It's really bad.     Kinda takes a strong stomach to burp it.       It is, after all, 6 huge bulbs of garlic.      1 clove is bad enough, but 6 whole bulbs!!!!!!!!       That's some crazy stank going on right there.     hahahahaha       But, it will be yummy when this process is over.      Watch for more pictures as it progresses.      The first 2 pictures was taken the same day.      I turned the jar over so you could see how blond the honey was and how thick it was.      The 3rd picture is of the ferment a few days in.  You can see that the garlic has shrank in size a little and there is more liquidy space on the bottom than in the middle picture.     I am expecting the garlic to shrink even more.      And this will still be a raw product when the ferment is done.      This is a very good way to get healthy probiotics in you.      That's what fermenting is all about, the probiotics and keeping the food raw.

This next picture is of a hot pepper, kombucha fruit, onion and salt ferment.       It will eventually be a fermented hot sauce.        I can't wait.      It's just about done.      Maybe another week.       This is my first ziploc vacuum seal ferment that I have ever done and so far, I would say that it is a 100% success.  I will go into more detail about this one a little later on.      After I get the hot sauce made.     I have released the gases from this one a couple times already.      The vac bag will swell almost to the point of bursting and I'll release the gases and then vac seal it again and then the process of forming the gases start all over again.      Oxygen does not get to this ferment, because it is vac sealed.     The bag will swell because of the good bacteria creating gas.        This is a relatively new idea in terms of fermenting, because vacuum seal bags are a relatively new item when it comes to home preservation.     Fermenting has taken place for thousands of years, but these bags are new to this generation.      Since I'm new to fermenting also, this should be a good experiment.      One thing about this type of ferment, it is a relatively fast process.      The vac seal bags keep all oxygen out and that speeds the process up.     So, we'll see how this goes.       Since I am new to fermenting, I certainly don't know much.       So before you do what I'm doing, please do your own research on the subject.      But, I will try to keep y'all updated on the outcome of this experiment.

So, my next set of pictures will be my "Cowboy Candy".        I have wanted to make this for such a long time, but I didn't have the peppers to it, until this summer.      Most of the peppers in my cowboy candy are my own homegrown peppers.      They are my fresno peppers.   I'm so stinkin' proud of them!!!!    I have struggled with peppers.      Heck, I've struggled with growing everything, but this year, it seems like my peppers have been my best crop.      I have several on the plants now and I'm just praying I can get them to the point of picking before they get frosted on.     We'll have to wait and see.     I do have some frost covers ordered for my green stalks and mr stacky and then some smaller one for my potted peppers.    Anyway, on to the cowboy candy.       Let me just say "YUM" right here and right now!!!

The first picture above is my peppers.     Did I say I'm kinda proud that I have raised these this year?   If I haven't I'll say it now.     I'm kinda happy with me that I had a small measure of success.      The top ones are fresno and a couple of jalapenos.       The bottom ones are shishito peppers.       These did not go in the cowboy candy.      I dehydrate these.        And if you look real closely you'll see 3 really small peppers that are purple, just under the left side of the fresnos.       Those are chinese 5 color peppers and I actually had all 5 colors this summer.      As of late, the only color I am having is purple.      That's ok, since my favorite color is purple, I'll just make the best of it.    hahaha

The above picture is the stems left and the bowl with the cut up peppers in it.      Did I say they were hot?     Well, they were!!!    I wore gloves and still got burned by them.     hahaha

This is a close up of that bowl hot goodness!!!      The smell of them burned my nose.    hahaha

The above picture is the syrup base that I made for the cowboy candy.       Depending on how much pepper you have will determine how much syrup you make.      The ratio is 1:2.     1 part vinegar to 2 parts sugar.       To keep this first batch simple, that's all I put in mine.      Once the simple syrup  was made, I put my peppers in it and let cook come back to a boil and cooked it all together for a few minutes.       The peppers will shrink, so if you are canning the cowboy candy, you get more peppers per jar if you put the peppers in the simple syrup and cook it for a little bit.       A lot of people will fill the jars with the peppers and pour the simple syrup over that and then process them in the canner only to find that their peppers shrank and the jars are only half full with peppers.      You can do it however you want to.     

This is what I ended up with.     Small jars, to say the least.       But I am so happy with it.      I will be getting more peppers and making a larger batch and will probably water bath can them.      These will last a couple months in the fridge as they are.     I gave the small jar to my Mom for her to sample.    She loves hot peppers, she just can't eat them like she once could.     But I wanted her to at least sample it and if for some reason, she can eat it, I'll give her more.      It is really good!!!!      I'm really happy that I tried this.      I already  know that if I'm still alive and able to, I'll have more peppers next year.  

Well, I hope and pray you hung with me till now.       If you did, you deserve a medal!!!    hahahaha       I really pray that I can get back into the swing of keeping up with my blog, no matter how few people look at it.      Hopefully it will bless me even if it doesn't bless anyone else.

I want to leave you with the most important thing you'll ever hear or read in your life, once again.    Jesus loves you!!!!!!      Let me say that one more time, Jesus love you!!!!     If you know this and have accepted Him as you Savior, praise His holy and wonderful name.     But you know people in you sphere of influence who hasn't heard this or who hasn't accepted this.     Please tell them what you know to be true about Jesus Christ.     If you haven't accepted Christ as you Lord and Savior, then why not?  Don't put it off.     Acknowledge your sin, believe in your heart that Jesus is who He is and confess your sins.      I pray that you'll do that while the day is still young.     Let me say it one more time, Jesus loves you!!!!     There is no other love that can measure with His.   I pray you have a blessed rest of the evening and a wonderful refreshing night of sweet rest and that you awaken with a new found fervor and love for Jesus and those around you.   Blessings dear loved ones, till next time, I love you.  big hugs, patty