Today's efforts

I spent most of today in the kitchen. I didn't mind because it's cold and rainy outside!

First, I fixed the sour cherry jelly, according to the blue book instructions for fixing jelly that didn't set up properly, which I posted previously. This time, it's starting to set up even before the jars are completely cool, which is a good sign! (I fixed 4 cups at a time, so I did 4 batches.)

I also took the not-set cherry pulp spread and put it into the small crockpot and let it cook for several hours, then canned it as cherry butter. (YUM!)

Then, I took the jar of apples soaking in rum, puréed them in the small blender cup, cooked it with some added pectin and sugar, poured it into hot jars and processed them in the steam canner. 

Next, I took the jars of dates and craisins soaking in port wine and did the same thing.

Meanwhile, I ran the dishwasher twice (and I think I'll do it one more time as soon as it's done running), and ran a load of laundry, too. 

I also put one of the "Slow Cooker Aldi Dump Freezer Meals" into the crock pot and it's happily cooking away. Tonight we're having "Caribbean Citrus Chicken", the 2nd-to-last meal left from my January meal assembly session. (We have one more meal after this: Chicken Noodle Soup.)

What is a "Slow Cooker Aldi Dump Freezer Meal"? Well, back in January, I bought an e-book of slow cooker freezer meals because I wanted a low-cost, easy way to make dinner. I was not disappointed. The author has a shopping list and charts that show how to assemble the 20 freezer meals (10 recipes made twice) in a logical manner. She has a number of these e-books, but I chose the "Comfort Food" book, because it seemed to have the most recipes we'd actually eat and enjoy. 

The first time I made them (back in January), I made them strictly according to her recipes (I didn't make her chili recipe because I make Cincinnati chili -- it's the only kind I like!). They're really good and we have enjoyed eating them -- but as we ate them, we decided there were a couple of tweaks we wanted to make to the recipes.

This past Monday, we went to Aldi, shopping list in hand, and bought what we needed to make the meals again -- we didn't need everything, because we had some stuff on hand because I bought extra stuff (such as tomato paste) to have on hand last time I was there. One of the things we changed was that instead of using chicken thighs and legs in a couple of the chicken recipes, we decided to just use boneless, skinless chicken breasts for all the chicken recipes. A bit more expensive (though not by much!), but it's so much less work when you don't have to skin the legs & thighs. Another thing I did this time was eliminate the potatoes -- they're good, but I need to get back to eating more low-carb than I have been lately -- AND I also found Italian sausage with no casings (just bulk ground sausage meat, packaged like ground beef is packaged) which saved SO much time because I didn't have to take the casings off of all the sausages to put the ground meat into the meatloaf and the Sausage Kale Soup! We also changed up the order of assembly a little bit (for example, putting the meat into the containers first, instead of 4th). After we were done, I made a note of all the changes we made so we don't have to re-invent the wheel next time we assemble the meals! 

Back in January when I made these meals, I used one-gallon ziplock bags as the author suggested, but I don't like the waste generated when I use the meals, so between now and then, I bought six of the 4L Cambro round containers with lids. These things: 

They also come as square containers, which I think would save some space in the freezer, but I know that the frozen contents of of the round one will fit perfectly in my large crock pot when the contents are laid down horizontally. (I don't think that's true for the square ones.) Thankfully, we have two upright freezers in the garage, so we've got plenty of room. We've had one of the freezers since we moved to Southern California, and the other one was given to us last year by a lovely lady at our church who was downsizing her possessions after the death of her husband. We use one for "ingredients" (such as chicken broth or tomato sauce) and one for "ready-to-go" meals (such as these).

I only bought six of the 4L containers because that's all I could afford at the time. I used these containers when assembling the meals, and used the one-gallon ziplock bags for the rest of the meals. After we were done, we decided that six of the 4L containers is all we need, and we could replace 10 of the ziplock bags with 2L round containers. (We'll still use the ziplock bags for the meatloaf because the loaves fit better into bags than into these containers.) Based on past experience, I figure I've got a couple of months to get the 2L containers, so I haven't bought them yet. I should go check at the local thrift shops to see if they've got any there....

Anyway, I feel good having gotten so much stuff done today (in addition to a few other things such as contacting tech support to fix a problem on my web store, mutter).