Canning, a "Family" Tradition

What�s a busy mom to do? As the master of all multi-taskers, moms are always looking for ways to stay healthy and to create lasting memories for their families. One of the best ways to accomplish both of these goals is to preserve your own food at home.

For myself, I remember working alongside my family every year. Now, as a mother of five, I have made sure to pass the tradition of home canning onto my own children. Every year, we gather to work together, and to laugh together. As the jars fill up and are processed, I know I�ve provided quality bonding opportunities and fresh, wholesome food without preservatives. I also take a little time each year to appreciate my own mom and the love and care she provided for me.

For myself, I remember working alongside my family every year. Now, as a mother of five, I have made sure to pass the tradition of home canning onto my own children. Every year, we gather to work together, and to laugh together. As the jars fill up and are processed, I know I�ve provided quality bonding opportunities and fresh, wholesome food without preservatives. I also take a little time each year to appreciate my own mom and the love and care she provided for me.

Author: Linda VanDyke

Beau's Sweet-Sour Chicken Wings

My pal Beau's famous chicken wing recipe has never failed to leave mouths drooling in eager anticipation. Put Beau's wisdom to good use today and find out for yourself just why hordes flock to this grizzled foreman's ranch every Summer just to get a nibble of his legendary sweet-sour chook wings.

Making tomato juice will be easier if you use a food strainer sauce maker to puree the tomatoes. There are several on the market that are good and there are extra screens and spirals you can purchase to puree berries, pumpkin, and make salsa. You will also need a heavy stock pot or pan to cook your tomatoes before you puree them. Along with the sauce maker and stock pot, you will need a container to catch the tomato juice as it comes out of the sauce maker, long handled instruments for stirring, a few scrapers, and a cup or small pan to transfer the cooked tomatoes to the food strainer. To cut down on the kitchen and house mess, I like to do my juicing on my patio where I can hose it down when I am done. That way I do not have to be so careful, but I have done it all in my kitchen in the past.When growing mushrooms at home, cereal grains such as wheat, rye, millet, maize, amaranth, quinoa, etc. can be used as a vehicle to expand your substrate mass into bulk substrates. If you�ve mastered half-pint jars, making grain spawn is the next logical step. When a jar of grain is completely colonized it can be used to inoculate other jars of grain using what�s called a grain to grain transfer. G2G for short. Paul Stamet�s explains that 1 jar of colonized grain can inoculate 10 more jars of grain. Each of these jars in turn can inoculate 10 more jars and finally those can inoculate 10 bags of bulk substrate each. Do the math and you are expanding your mycelial mass up to 10,000 times the original jar. (Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, 2000).Beau's notes:* After discarding chicken spurs, wash hands with very warm water and Dial soap (and follow up with isopropyl alcohol rinse); wash all utensils with bleach. (One should always regard chickens, even if processed in USA or inspected by USDA, as unclean! USDA inspectors are notoriously less than thorough, and U.S. packing houses often neglect basic hygienic rules in working with chickens, especially in dealing with their entrails, waste products unexcreted, etc. And one should not expect much better from out-of-country chickens.)� Use the colonized grain to inoculate any of our 3 lb Substrate Spawn Bags. In most cases these can be fruited directly using our grow chambers or a humidity tent.Blend all ingredients except chicken and Tabasco (or an alternative hot sauce) until a fairly even consistency is achieved, with no large chunks of ginger or garlic.

* After discarding chicken spurs, wash hands with very warm water and Dial soap (and follow up with isopropyl alcohol rinse); wash all utensils with bleach. (One should always regard chickens, even if processed in USA or inspected by USDA, as unclean! USDA inspectors are notoriously less than thorough, and U.S. packing houses often neglect basic hygienic rules in working with chickens, especially in dealing with their entrails, waste products unexcreted, etc. And one should not expect much better from out-of-country chickens.)

Author: Luke Indran

Homemade Tomato Juice � How to Do It Right

The biggest problem I have run into in making and bottling my own tomato juice is how to get the juice to not separate in the bottles. If you have ever bottled tomato juice or other puree juices, you will know what I am talking about. The thick part of the juice seems to separate from the watery part. So, how do you keep it from doing that? It can seem to be a little tricky, but it is possible. First, I want to talk a little bit about tomatoes.

* Use vinegar which has been used to keep a supply of bird's-eye peppers.There are many lid designs that can be used with your quart jars. We recommend drilling four �� holes as you normally would in half-pint jar lids. Then drill one larger hole in the center. This will be filled with a High Temp Gasket sealer to create a self-healing injection site. If you are using the quart jars for grain to grain transfers you can leave out the injection site.Load your pressure cooker with the jars and fill the it up to the desired water level. Now, take your jars back out and preheat your pressure cooker water to boiling. This will help prohibit more grains from exploding during the heating process. After the water has started to boil, load the pressure cooker again and place the lid on. After the pressure cooker starts to sizzle at 15 p.s.i., set your timer for 90 minutes.Depending on the size of your pressure cooker you will want to adjust the amount of ingredients to suit how many quart size jars you will be able to sterilize at one time. For each quart jar measure out 200g or 250 ml of organically grown rye. You can use the quart jars for measuring. Simply pour the rye into each jar to the 250 ml level. We will need to set a pot large enough to hold enough water to cover all of the rye grains put together.When a Quart Rye Jar is fully colonized it can be used to inoculate up to 10 more jars to expand your mycelium and increase substrate mass thus increasing yields. Inoculating a grain jar with colonized substrate is faster than using a Liquid Culture because there is more mycelium to reproduce and proliferate. The procedure is fairly simple. The main concern is sterility when opening the uncolonized substrate jars.

Homemade tomato juice is one of my favorites. If you garden, you will want to know how to preserve those extra tomatoes for use during the cold or hot season when you can�t grow the fresh ones. Tomatoes are one of the few foods that have healthy nutrients in them that are better for you when cooked. Enjoy your glass of tomato juice or tomato soup knowing you are getting good nutrition.

Author: Lee Ann Orton

Growing Mushrooms at Home Using Grains

Creating Grain Spawn

Continue with the rest of the jars. Remove the lid, quickly inoculate with rye grain and replace the lid. The less time the lid is off the better. Incubate your jars the same way you did the first one. After these have colonized you can do several things with the grain.Feel free to use this article for your website but please leave the document intact, including the link section. If you use our article, send us an email with a link to your site. We might just add your site to our links page!Fill your pot with enough water and heat to boiling. Immerse your grains in the water and then lower the heat. Keeping it up high will cause the grains to break open and this can lead to contamination later on. We want to steep the grains for one hour stirring now and then. For my stove I lower the heat from level 8 to level 3 when putting the grains in and then on down to level 1 after twenty minutes. Your stove will be different but I included these settings to show an example. The grains will start to swell from absorbing water as time goes on.Place 3/4 of sauce in pan. Roll wings in sauce; remove wings to broiler pan (with slotted top). Bake at 325 degrees F. for 20 minutes. Remove from oven and spoon about half of remaining sauce on top of each piece; broil for 5 minutes. Add Tabasco or other hot pepper sauces to taste and serve.When you are sure colonization is complete you will need to break up the grain so that you can inoculate your other substrates. Using a tire is perfect for this. Just make sure there are no cracks in the jar or it could break. You should also use safety goggles when doing this. After the grains have broken up, place it back in your incubation area and wait 24 hours. This will help rule out contaminations. The next day, mycelium should be growing again. If it has not within 24 hours the jar is considered contaminated by bacteria and should be thrown out. If you use it then you are potentially contaminating all of your new substrate jars.� Use the colonized grain to inoculate Pasteurized StrawGrain to Grain TransferHomemade tomato juice is one of my favorites. If you garden, you will want to know how to preserve those extra tomatoes for use during the cold or hot season when you can�t grow the fresh ones. Tomatoes are one of the few foods that have healthy nutrients in them that are better for you when cooked. Enjoy your glass of tomato juice or tomato soup knowing you are getting good nutrition.Allow the pressure cooker to cool to room temperature before removing the lid. Shake the jars when removing them to mix up the grains. The grains on the bottom might be more moist than the rest and will need redistributed. Allow the jars to cool for 24 hours before attempting to inoculate them.20 Chicken wings
7 1/2 ounces Tomato sauce (half can)
2 tablespoons Orange marmalade
1 tablespoon Honey
2 teaspoons Ginger -- minced
2 teaspoons Fermented chili sauce -- (Summit brand)
2 teaspoons Pepper vinegar
4 Garlic cloves -- peeled
1 teaspoon Salt (scant)
2 teaspoons MSG
1/2 cup Water (more as needed)First thing. You should wait approximately 1 week after the jar has colonized to ensure the interior has colonized as well and allow the mycelium to digest the substrate in preparation for fruiting. A rye jar usually colonized in about 3-4 weeks. Sometimes this can take longer if the temperature is not between 82-86 degrees during incubation.The first thing you will want to do with your ripe tomatoes is wash them. You don�t need to core them or cut them if they are small, but check them over and make sure they have no bad spots on them. The juice will only be as good as the produce you use to make it from. They key to making juice that will not separate is to get the tomatoes from the whole, raw state to the cooked state as quickly as possible. When you cut through the cells of the tomato it crushes the cell walls and starts the separation process of the juice from the pulp. The less you can cut it and the faster you heat it the better the juice will be. I begin to cook a few tomatoes in the pan while I am cutting the larger ones and I just keep adding and stirring them as I cut. You do not want to crush by stirring too much, but you also do not want the tomatoes to stick on the pan and burn. Cook the tomatoes until they are soft clear through. You do not need to take the skins or cores out because they will be !When you inoculate your jars, it is best to work in a clean area to prohibit bacteria from contaminating your substrate. Cleanse the area well and nuke the air with Lysol. Using a culture syringe, insert the needle through the self-healing injection site and administer 1 cc of solution per jar. Shake up the grains to distribute the solution and incubate at between 82-86 degrees F. After five days, you can shake the jar one more time to aid in speeding up colonization time. If the jars have not colonized within 14-21 days the jar is most likely contaminated or the temperatures are too low.The Procedure: Reshake the colonized jar to break up the grains. To inoculate the new rye jars, remove the lid from your colonized jar and the lid from the fresh substrate jar. Shake some colonized rye grains into the fresh substrate. There should be enough to divide the 1 colonized jar into 10 new ones.separated when you put them through the food strainer. Now it is time to put them through the food strainer sauce maker. When this is complete, bring your juice back to a boil, ladle it into the clean, hot bottles, add your acid and salt or other flavorings, clean the lip of the bottle and put the hot canning lid and ring on and twist on tight. You are now ready to process your tomato juice. Check with your local Agriculture extension agent for recommended amounts of acid, times and methods of processing at your altitude. To acidify you can use citric acid or lemon juice.� Use each jar to inoculate 10 more jars eachThe following day when you are ready to inoculate your jars, you should clean your work area, table and air with some cleaner. Any automatic air should be turned off one hour before the procedure. This helps calm the air and reduce the risk of airborne contaminates entering the jar when you open it. Ideally, you should be working in front of a Flow Hood but a Sterilized Glovebox will work as well. If you are using a glovebox, load the jars at this time.Douse in Tabasco to taste (or some other hot pepper sauce). Cut off spurs from chicken wing-tips and rinse chicken wings. Place in pressure cooker with water; bring to pressure and cook at high heat for up to five minutes. Remove from pressure cooker and place cooked-out fat in wide-mouthed, tapered jar for other uses.It takes a lot of time and money to conduct the tests to set the processing times and methods for each food. For this reason, the Agriculture Extension Service has recommended that we acidify the tomatoes back to near what they used to be and also cook them for longer periods of time or at higher heat so they will be safe to eat right from the bottles. Many people do not heat tomatoes up right out of the bottle, and because of this they must be processed long enough to kill potential botulism spores that may be in them. Botulism toxin is odorless, tasteless, and can be deadly if ingested. If we simmer bottled food for 20 minutes after opening the bottles the toxins will be destroyed and the food will be safe to eat.� Fruit the mushrooms right out of the top of the jar (depending on your species; not all mushrooms fruit directly from grain)

Feel free to use this article for your website but please leave the document intact, including the link section. If you use our article, send us an email with a link to your site. We might just add your site to our links page!

Author: Stephen Penn

Reader Voices: Pushing beyond a self-centered life without

There have been times when life seemed to be a pressure cooker -- a never-ending treadmill that just kept going endlessly and attempting to step off would have been difficult and perhaps even catastrophic.

Jesus tells Peter that the duties that now follow upon his commitment of faith and love will rob him not just of his time and leisure but the plans he had made for his own life. Duty robs us of our supposed freedom, our time and our very life.1: Check your refrigerators temperature settings. The recommended temperature setting for fresh foods is about 38 degrees and for frozen foods it's about 0 degrees.All of us seem to have similar episodes lasting not days and hours, but weeks, months and even years.4: Use a microwave or a pressure cooker or an electric plug in grill when possible. A conventional oven uses considerably more natural gas or electricity than electric grills, pressure cooker and microwaves.They finally "get it" (what is really important) and acknowledge it.Stepping off really never was an option, but in our minds and bodies we seek peace and rest wondering when that day will come. If you are like me, during those difficult times, I beat myself up thinking, "How could I have let things get so out of hand that I found myself in this difficult predicament?"5: Turn off the oven about 5 to 10 minutes before the recommended cooking time. If the temperature setting is 325 degrees or even higher, the left over heat will be sufficient enough to last the remainder 5 to 10 minutes and finish off your roast. I�m getting hungry again.2: Check the door latch and seals on your refrigerator. If the latch needs adjusting then grab a wrench and get to work. Replacing old adhesive seals will also provide the original air tight fit and seal.We have hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment it is completely useless. There is a time a season for everything. These experiences are not without value. We learn that indeed we do need to take better care of ourselves, learn better time management and to give ourselves room to slow down, to savor the moment and the time we spend with others, our mates and families.In popular culture, I hear people say, "No regrets" and I think to myself, how sad. I believe there is value in regret. The sacrifices we make in life, when we deprive ourselves making sacrifices for others, also have the possibilities of moving us to a deeper understanding, a deeper spirituality, a greater love and maturity and sometimes it does not seem it was freely chosen.A marrow bone is the traditional symbol of a treat for a dog, and he obviously appreciates it. It may be too big and hard for small dogs. In fact, large breeds generally handle bones much better than small ones. Bones that are mostly cartilage, such as spinal and shoulder bones of veal, knuckle bones, and soft rib bones, are good chewing material that can be entirely consumed.When I was a small boy, my mother was often so busy, it seemed impossible to get face time with her. She worked at home typing dissertations for doctoral candidates at the university. As kids, even though she was haggard and busy, we discovered that when she went to the bathroom we could line up sitting on the bathtub and just say "Hi" or whatever was on our mind. Even though the pressures of her own home and the constructs of her personal world bound her feet, we made her make time for us, even though she was unable to herself.At the end of John's gospel (see John 21:18), Jesus says to Peter, "When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst wither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shall stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not."

Mel Borup Chandler and his wife Sandra lives in Newbury Park California Newbury Park Stake. Mel is a lifelong member and his wife is a convert to the LDS Church.

Author: Mel Borup Chandler

Bones For Your Dog - Delicious Treat Or A Deadly Snack?

There is a difference of opinion among canine experts as to whether bones should be given to a dog raw, cooked, hard, or soft, and even whether they should be given at all. On one point, however, there is total agreement, never give a dog splintering bones from chicken, pork, fowl, and rabbit, (although chicken bones that have been cooked in a pressure cooker until they are very soft can be quite nourishing and safe).

3: Don't forget to defrost your freezer. Frost build up is not only unsightly, it's inefficient. Don't allow the freezers frost to build up more than one quarter of an inch.What is the best policy to follow with a dog of your own? A teething puppy between four and six months of age should always have a bone, real or imitation, to chew on. You might give an adult dog a suitable bone as on occasional treat - for example, once a week. It will give him enormous pleasure, will help to keep his teeth clean and free from tartar, and will occupy him for several hours. But a nylon bone offers the same advantages without the risk!

What is the best policy to follow with a dog of your own? A teething puppy between four and six months of age should always have a bone, real or imitation, to chew on. You might give an adult dog a suitable bone as on occasional treat - for example, once a week. It will give him enormous pleasure, will help to keep his teeth clean and free from tartar, and will occupy him for several hours. But a nylon bone offers the same advantages without the risk!

Author: Randy Jones

Energy Saving Tips - 6 Home Conservation Ideas - Kitchen

Consider these 6 no cost home energy saving tips and conservation ideas for your kitchen. I think we all can agree that the kitchen is one of the most visited rooms through out any home. Whether it's the task of preparing food, grabbing a quick snack or the inviting smells from a delicious dish or roast; the kitchen is unavoidable.

6: Periodically clean your oven range tops and reflectors. This ensures that the range heat will be reflected more effectively and efficiently.Have you ever asked yourself, "Why?" when someone is on their deathbed, they never say, "Gee I wish I had spent more time working, more time playing golf, more time away from my wife and family."I realize that all of the duties and demands that robbed me of time, those pressures of life that kept me from peace and rest, formal prayer and deeper more meaningful interaction with others, were not all bad. In fact, there were beneficial aspects and lessons to be learned.The real danger is intestinal compaction, especially in small dogs, if the masticated bone has not been mixed with other residue in the dog's stomach. A small amount should cause no trouble if it is given right after a meal. Chop and steak bones are more dangerous. Careful eaters simply clean off the meat and fat, but greedy gobblers run the risk of internal injury from jagged bone splinters. The same is true of a leg of lamb bone.During those times, friends, bosses and even spiritual confidants and leaders recognized my stress and discomfort and chastised me for not taking it easy or slowing down and remembering to take better care of myself. I berated myself for not having the hours in the day and the self-discipline to schedule regular time with my wife, family, personal prayer, exercise and leisure activities.But at the same time they push us beyond a self-centered life. They take us beyond our own agenda. If we can learn to accept these personal intrusions without resentment, we can see more clearly God's plan, and even though at times it seems our symbolic belt or girding is pulled as was Peter's, against our will, it can lead us to a deeper, more mature place.

6: Periodically clean your oven range tops and reflectors. This ensures that the range heat will be reflected more effectively and efficiently.

Author: Ibrahim Saeed