I have noticed many bloggers have been posting about trying to plan meals utilizing foods from their freezer and pantry.
This week I have been cleaning out and organizing the contents of my freezers. I have two refrigerators with freezers on the top. We had a large upright freezer in our last house which we sold before we moved. The previous owner of this house left the stove and refrigerator so we put our refrigerator in the garage.
Sometimes I wish I had a bit more freezer space but most of the time this is enough for the two of us.
I went through everything this week, got rid of a few things, consolidated a few things, and made plans to use a few others. I then made an inventory on the computer of what is in both freezers. Hopefully this will help me keep better track of what I have and what I need.
Today for lunch I made vegetable soup using vegetables and ground beef from the freezer.
I try to keep a small container in the freezer to keep little odds and ends of vegetables which can eventually become soup. I also found some okra from last summer's garden and it went into the soup pot as well.
There were three bags of blackberries in the freezer which were cooked and made into juice last night and then into jelly this afternoon. I found a book at the library this week called All about Canning and Preserving by the authors of the Joy of Cooking cookbooks. I followed the directions in this book for making this jelly with just the juice and sugar - no commercial pectin.
It seemed to jell nicely, but I'll let you know when we try it on some fresh biscuits!
I thought I'd better use up last year's blackberries because it looks like we have a bumper crop of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries in the garden this summer. The Lord has blessed us with an abundance of rain this spring and the bushes are loaded with fruit.
The abundance of rain has made it difficult to plan certain outside chores for the last few weeks. We had a dry sunny day today so another chore was washing the quilt from my bed. I like to dry it outside and today was the perfect day for it.
The cooler, rainy weather has also helped preserve some of our flowers this spring, including this Clematis which is growing on our mailbox.
Rob has learned that if he cuts it back late in the summer it will bloom again in the fall.
Tonight we are going out to a Japanese restaurant to celebrate our DIL, Katie's birthday. It will be a nice ending to a busy day.
Hope your weekend was blessedly busy as well.
Becka

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