English Muffins

I've been thinking a lot about life back when ... 

... when I was actively trying to homestead, just a decade ago.  FB regularly reminds of things I was doing to make our lives more self-sufficient.  One of my recent memories reminded me of the year that my goal was to can 200 jars of *something*.  I wasn't too terribly picky about what went into the jars.  What I mean is that my goal wasn't:

x jars of pickles
x jars of applesauce
x jars of soup stock

The goal was to have 200 jars of home-canned food with the logic being that 200 jars would give us one jar of something preserved per day for the winter.  During the summer, we have the garden and stuff we can forage, but without some preserved food, if we lose access to our on-demand supply of groceries, we'd be very hungry.  One jar a day would keep us fed, if not full.  

That said, not all jars of food are created equal.  That day when the jar was pickles, divided five ways, would be a much hungrier day than the day when it was canned chicken.

Of course, THAT said, the ultimate goal was also to have 200 jars of home-canned goodness AND a pantry stocked with dried goods, like rice, pasta, and baking supplies.

I thought a lot about that time recently, when I had occasion to visit my ancestral home deep in a hollow in the hills of southeastern Kentucky mining country.  I spent some time with my uncle, who is still homesteading the old homestead, and I brought home six quart jars of his home-canned tomato sauce, a bowlful of Chinese chestnuts we collected from the path under his chestnut tree, and a huge clump of Hen of the Woods (maitake) my uncle and I foraged from his woods.

I didn't can any tomatoes this year.  In fact, I didn't even process any tomatoes for the winter.  I only grew grape tomatoes this year, and we ate them almost as quickly as I could get them off the vines, which were incredibly generous, but rather than preserve my harvest, like I should have done, I gifted a good portion of my harvest to a local friend.

Looking at those jars of tomato sauce from my uncle and thinking about my very poor preparations this year had me kind of nostalgic for the way my life used to be ... before I started working a job outside the home ... when my JOB was the home.  

In those days, most of what I fed my family was homemade in my kitchen, including the bread stuff.

I haven't made a lot of bread recently.

I missed it.

So, today, I did. 

There's a loaf of applesauce bread cooling on the back of the stove, and these English Muffins will go into a lightly greased pan to fry until golden brown, as soon as they've had a second rise.  

Then, instead of running to the store for breads, I can make Deus Ex Machina his daily breakfast sandwich for the rest of the week, with a couple of muffins leftover for both of us to have sandwich before music class on Saturday.

Making homemade bread is time-consuming.

It's, kind of, funny that my kids grew up and moved on, no longer needing me to facilitate their education or chauffeur them hither and yon, and some how I wound up with less time to do all of those things that I used to just do, because that's what we did.  

Don't get me wrong.  I still cook, from scratch, more nights than not.  Eating out is very expensive, and we're saving up for retirement :), but also, as a loved one recently observed - when one learns to cook, especially if using fresh, local, in-season ingredients, the food just tastes better.  No offense to all of those restauranteurs out there, but the food I prepare at home is better.  It's always exactly what I want, exactly the way I want it, and I know what's in it, which means there's no chance of getting contaminated with ingredients that can make Deus Ex Machina's body hurt.  

I still have my garden, and my chickens, I still make my own soap ... but I just don't spend as much time or energy doing the homesteading things I used to do - like canning. 

The first thing I learned to can, back when I first started down this path, was applesauce.  There's a bushel of apples in my kitchen, picked when my son and daughter-in-law visited at the end of September, which will end up sauced and dehydrated.  I figure, perhaps, going back to my beginning might get me back to where I was before I veered off the trail, when I started working outside the home five years ago.

With the way things are going in the world, kick-starting my prepper life is probably not a bad idea.

And home canned applesauce with pork chops from our pig share and oven roasted potatoes, just tastes better than anything mass produced and sold at the grocery store.

What about you?  As life ebbs and flows, do you find yourself falling off of and climbing back onto your self-sufficiency path?  Do current events have you revisiting all of your homesteading efforts?