Dan and I think of winter as "soup season." Our favorite cold weather lunch is soup and grilled cheese on pumpernickel rye.
The soups are always delicious and never the same from day to day. This is because all summer long I put our leftovers into peanut butter jars that I keep in the freezer. I add to them daily and fill the gaps with leftover vegetable water, cooking broth, gravy, etc. To make soup, I defrost a jar and add a pint of homemade bone broth. What's left goes back into the fridge and is added to the next day. Always a winner.
Evening meals have been a lot of one-pot meals.
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| gnocchi and meatballs |
The gnocchi is made from my goats milk ricotta. I made a gallon of it or so last summer and froze it. The sauce is is canned from garden tomatoes. Sprinkled with a little homemade mozzarella and served with a greenhouse salad, it's a 75% homegrown meal.
Winter is also when I like to do some of my canning. I used to make and can pizza sauce in winter, but I've changed my recipe and no longer have to store tomatoes in the freezer. Now, it's mostly fruit that I freeze for jams and jellies. My most recent batches were muscadine jelly, blueberry jam, and red raspberry jelly.
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| Making grape jelly from frozen muscadines |
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| Making blueberry jam from frozen blueberries |
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| Making raspberry jelly from frozen raspberries |
The yield was 11 pints of jam and jellies. Even the raspberry jelly turned out dark, even though the berries are such a pretty red.
So, I'm staying warm and being productive too! How about you?
23 comments:
You are truly an inspiration. I need to start doing this for winter soup. I did make a pot of green beans and ham last summer and even though I strung the beans they still had strings in them. So I put them in the blender and blended them until everything was smooth and froze it for soup stock. Reading about what you do has really inspired me for next Summer's vegetables because soup is wonderful in the winter. At the price of groceries we certainly can't afford to waste anything.
This is a great post! Thank you.
Connie, thank you! I put almost everything into those soup jars: leftover veggies, cheese, pasta, rice, meat, casseroles, biscuits, stale tortilla chips, I even once added a small piece of pumpkin pie. I glaze the pans of anything I cook to fill in the cracks, along with vegetable water and leftover gravy or broth. The only thing is, you have to have room in the freezer for the jars. But it feels great to not waste anything. :)
Now that the kids are all moved out, I think the idea of saving bits of leftover soup in jars and freezing them is a great idea. I take it your old peanut butter jars are glass ones? The only glass jars we can buy anymore come with metal lids. Do your jars themselves fair well in the freezer? Our raspberry and blackberry bushes do not give us enough to freeze, but I may purchase some to freeze this summer, as I do with strawberries and blueberries. Winter is a great time to make the jam, and stay warm at the same time. Your finished jars look great.
That all looks great. I do the same with bits of leftovers, and since starting that practice, vegetable soup has definitely been tastier. Vegetable broth was canned this week, and garbanzo beans last week. It's nice to be creating warmth and steam, when one can really use it.
We never have enough freezer space so I tend to preserve in the moment, which isn't as bad these days as it used to be. I have a very powerful exhaust fan to extract the heat caused by the preservation process and really, the sun it to hot and intense to want to spend much time outside in the middle of the day anyway. About the only canning I do this time of the year is to turn dried beans into canned, heat and serve type beans for soups, salads and other dishes as we run low. Dried beans are a lot more compact to store than their canned cousins, so I prefer to do those on an as needed basis and just do a canner load at a time.
What a neat idea! It also reminded me that I have some frozen “tomato water” left over from canning last summer. I still have frozen tomatoes too. At the end of the season, they come in at dribs and drabs but I have several gallon freezer bags of them to deal with still. Not sure what I’m going to turn them into.
I love those one pot wonders. FYI, the Budget Bytes and Skinny Taste blogs have several of them. Monterey Chicken Skillet is one of our favorites. Just cook the bacon bits in the skillet first and then use the drippings to continue. One less pot to clean!
Kristina, yes, glass jars, Smucker's All Natural is the only one I think that comes in glass anymore. Wide mouth quart canning jars would work well too. I was just trying to find an excuse for not throwing the PB jars out, lol.
Laurie, that's very true about the warmth and steam! I've never canned garbanzos though. That would be so handy to have in the pantry. Maybe that will be my next canning project.
Ed, freezer space is the challenge, for sure. Of course in winter, cooking a pot of dried beans also adds welcome warmth. I also read about someone who saved a bunch of leftovers, made a big pot of soup, and then canned the soup. One of these days I may try that.
Katie, thanks for the blog recommendations! Sounds like my kind of people. I have some canned tomato water that I sometimes use instead of soup stock for my soups. That's really tasty for soup too.
Well...I'm keeping warm ;) And my freezer is just about down to half-full stage, so a clear out will be happening soon on a cold day. Surprise Suppers, coming up !
Quinn, gotta love those surprise suppers. I can't tell you how many times I've found something and thought, 'gee, I forgot all about that.' :)
Some of the best soup I've made has been from leftover sauces and other bits, frozen till I use them with homemade broth. Since everything had been seasoned the first time around, there's plenty of flavor. No recipe though!
Liz, I think that's exactly why soups like this are so good; all those good flavors meld together. No recipe, but always a treat.
Are you sure you don't have an unmarried sister? Soups like that and grilled cheese sandwiches are the bomb!,
Kevin, I think grilled cheese and soup in comfort food! A lunch favorite when I was a kid, except the soup was always tomato. With a dish of canned pears for dessert. Tomato soup just doesn't taste the same any more, but this is a yummy alternative.
Oh my goodness, the soup and grilled cheese look heavenly! Nothing like soup and sandwich on a cold day. Typically, we have had a warm spell here in Middle Tennessee after a rather cold January and a good snow. I expect it will get cold again before spring arrives. I enjoy the seasons, so don't mind the cold, but enjoy the break when we get it.
Bob, we've got our midwinter warm-up going on too. Very welcome! We're still eating those grilled cheese and soup though, with occasional salads for fun. :}
Lots of soup making here as well. So simple, but so tasty and satisfying. Home made tomato soup and grilled cheese on home made bread yesterday for lunch. Make the soup early, and simmer it on the woodstove all AM while out and about. It smells so good when you come back into the warmth.
Rosalea, somehow, cooking soup on a woodstove makes it taste all the better. :) I think tomato is the very best soup with grilled cheese. But I never make it.
I make most of my jam in the winter. It's more leisurely and less hot and humid. I freeze the fruit in the summer. Tomatoes though I put up whatever the weather is when they're ripe because we don't have freezer space for them. I'm a soup person, but I don't make it often enough because others in my family sadly don't see it as a whole meal. I make myself quick soups for lunch, using leftovers and broth, which is almost as good and very fast.
Nina, Dan doesn't see soup as a standalone meal either. He likes it best with half a sandwich or at least bread or crackers. But you're right that it's a great lunch.
Good evening! How old are your standards? For instance it is fruit , in this case peaches have been frozen in a "relatives" freezer. 2022-2023. What is too long?
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