Just Another Wednesday...

As I mentioned, Chris and I are venturing into the realm of canning and baking these days. Add that to our chickens, Chris' love of composting and my need to rescue every plastic bag and can and bottle from a sad life in a land-fill and we're starting to be referred to as "those people" on our court. But, as Chris says...he doesn't mind being labeled a hippie as long as he can shower whenever he wants to. Silly Chris :)

We made this delicious peach pie filling from the organic peaches at the you-pick "Impossible Acres" farm just down the road and decided to make the pie crust and crumble topping this evening.

We loosely used the peach pie recipe from the blog pete bakes! (http://www.peterandrewryan.com/baking/2009/06/peach-pie/).

I bake much like I craft as I look at recipes as loose suggestions. I know...I know...baking is an art and it matters how much of each ingredient you add...but we haven't had any major disasters so far from my "oh that looks like about a cup" measurements :)


The first time we made this pie we had a bake-a-thon over at our place with some good friends and we created 3 peach pies, 3 blackberry pies, strawberry jam and apricot jam. Now that we know how to do them ourselves we can't seem to stop!

The strawberry jam recipe we borrowed from Cake on the Brain (http://cakeonthebrain.blogspot.com/2008/07/homemade-strawberry-jam.html) and the apricot jam is from The Kitchn (http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/recipe-3day-apricot-jam--089449).


If you haven't had a chance to try canning yet it is no where near as complicated as I originally thought and we don't seem to have made anyone sick yet! There are a million fantastic tutorials out there so I won't add one here (I probably don't do it right anyway!) but there is something elementally amazing about knowing exactly where your food is coming from and what is in it. We now have about 8 jars of apricot jam and about 4 jars of strawberry jam. We might call that good enough for now and move on to raspberry and blackberry.

As we speak, this loaf of organic wheat bread (made with local honey from a friend's bee hive) is baking in the oven. Home-made bread and home-made jam. Yes, please!



Happy Eating!