Preparing For Our Children's Future

Last week, King Ed brought home two huge packages of pork roast (two large boston butt pork roast in each pack), from the store. He said one was $14 and the other was $12, so he could not pass them up. It was a good week to can, since we were in between just finishing Kindergarten and starting 1st Grade! Here is the first roast. Remember there were 4 of these to do! Two bowels Full! Yippee! I had to cut out a lot of fat. If I had been making sausage, I would have left more of it, but for canning chunk meat, I cut a lot out. Here was the bowel of fat and the 4 bones, one out of each roast.

Everything you need for canning meat!

Here are the 16 quarts with the meat in them, and 1 tsp. of salt in each, ready for seals and rings and to go into the canners.

Since the meat was cool, I bring my canners up very slow. Takes a while, but I do not want to crack any jars!

Since I had 16 quarts, I put 6 in each canner the first round and then I ran the last four after those were done.

I ran each canner 1 hour and 30 mins. on 10 lbs. pressure.

Here are the finished jars! Yum! It smelt so good when I opened the canners!

And below is a close-up!

All said and done it was a productive day! Especially if you consider that I did some house cleaning, and cooked a huge supper of sausage, gravy, biscuits, fried eggs and hash browns, etc! =)

This is hard for me to believe, but my oldest baby has completed Kindergarten! And she did so well! We are so proud of her! Her daddy is just the most intelligent and smartest man in the whole world, so I know she is taking after him! She is her Daddy’s girl too! So sweet! Well last week end we had a little graduation party for her, to celebrate her finishing her Kindergarten books! She was excited to pick what kind of cake and picked chocolate with chocolate icing! That made Daddy happy! Lol! He dislikes the pink cakes we usually have on birthdays!

We invited our Nonnie and Papaw Steve over for supper ("adopted" grandparents)! And Nonnie’s mom, "Granny" was out that afternoon mowing, so we walked over to the pasture across the road and invited her! She was very happy to be here too! It was great! We had the 2 women over who have had a big hand in her education too! "Granny" teaches phonics at a school near were she lives and has given us some great phonics pages that we are using, and Nonnie has always given us educational books, toys, etc! We had marinated chicken, noodles, sweet peas and mashed potatoes for supper, and cake and vanilla ice cream for dessert! I printed off a Kindergarten diploma for Princess S. and she is very proud of it! Now we are going to start 1st grade next Monday, Lord willing! Wow! Anyone else have a 4 year old in 1st grade? =)

God is Good!

for their future

~Hannah

P.S.

Here is the link to the diplomas if anyone needs some!

Okay, I think this is my first step-by-step blog post! Yippee! And sad since I have almost 200 blog post! Oh well! As I mentioned, the other day, we went and picked up two bushel boxes of Gala apples! So yesterday, I canned a bushel of them! It took most of the noon and afternoon, since I did them by myself and had to do other things along, of course, but they turned out very pretty and I am soo happy to have that many done, and to think I have about that many more to can! Praise the Lord!

I just washed them off in the sink, (since I was going to peel and boil them) The peeling and slicing by hand took the longest, since I do not have one of those neat cutters, or and Apple Peeler/Corer/Slicer!

Well, at least I only had two bushels! =)

The clean jars and lids, and some apples in the jars, as I filled them:

I some how forgot to take a picture of the apples boiling in the Extra-Light syrup! Sorry! But you can see the pans in the picture above! I followed the Ball Blue book, of course, but used less sugar then they said, and lemon juice to help keep them from turning so brown!

The apples in the hot water bath:

The finished/cooled jars of apples! Uh, and here is what is left to do! =) Not quite another bushel, so hope to get at least 14 (+?) more!

I hope to have another post as a follow-up, after I am done with all of them! Hope that will be soon!

God bless!

My family bought a small "Baker’s Choice" wood cook stove right before we moved to TN. Actually, I think Dad did some bartering for it! We used it in the small 10"/50" trailer house that we lived in. We soon learned we needed more and found someone, believe it or not, right down the road who had bought one for Y2K! This was a Large Pioneer Maid and I loved it! They are my favorite to this day! =) I wish we could find one or afford one now!

 Here is a picture of my family’s Pioneer maid, with my sister beside it:

Last autumn, (I believe it was) King Ed found us a small "modern maid" cook stove down in GA. for sell and went and bought it for us. We brought it in the house finally and have it set up for the winter! the other day he got it going to see how well it will do. It did great! I had decided to make a huge batch of rolls that day, so used it for keeping the dough warm to raise. Here is that picture:

It has been great for keeping the chill out on evenings that have been cool! The girls have enjoyed helping bring the wood in! It is great to have them grow up around this. Last Monday, I put a pot of pinto beans on the stove, since he had it going, and boy did that smell good, with a big ham bone in it! I also tried the oven out on the rolls and it did great! I hope it helps our electric bill this winter and will not be soo worried about the electric going out now! God is Good!