Happy Thanksgiving!

I know you're thinking that yesterday was Thanksgiving, and you're right, but we were busy working on our house all day yesterday, so we decided to celebrate today (Good choice since the wind decided to blow all day today).  On Thursday we finished getting our south roof completely sheathed and tar papered.  It really looks nice and now we are finally ready to install our metal roofing on the south side.  Here's what it looks like now.  See, completely closed all the way to the top.

You think that looks good, just wait until you see the next picture!  To celebrate Thanksgiving I made a home-cooked feast that was absolutely the best Thanksgiving Dinner I have ever prepared .  Since my tin oven is rather small, I opted for a whole chicken instead of a turkey.  I found a small blue-speckled roasting pan that fit in my tin oven perfectly.  I stuffed the bird with delicious stuffing and surrounded it with potatoes, carrots and onions.  My tin oven gets placed on top of our wood burning stove and then the blue-speckled roasting pan is placed in the tin oven and four hours later-- wal-la -- the best Thanksgiving dinner ever!!  (WARNING!!  Only view image below on a full stomach or you'll get REALLY hungry.  Our cabin smelled so wonderful, too!  Maybe technology will be available someday to put scents with your pictures??!!)

Here we are after our feast breaking the wish bone.  Guess what I wished for??

Jam Session

We haven't done any work on our house this week because my contractor caught the flu. So, today I got to do something I enjoy (besides working on the house)--make some apple butter.  I have recently learned how to can and I really enjoy making delicious jams & jellies. So far I have made grape jam, chokecherry jelly, raspberry jam, and now apple butter.  The really awesome thing about all my jams and jellies I have made is that the fruit has been grown by local gardeners and not purchased from a store.

Anyway, I thought today would be the perfect day to can because there was snow predicted and I figured I wouldn't overheat the cabin.  Wrong!  It never snowed and I had to open all the windows.  My sick contractor kept complaining it was too hot!!  I think it only got up to 80.  :o)

The recipe was very simple and easy to make.  I found it at Heidi Swanson's blog called "101 Cookbooks". The only things I did differently was I used some cloves that a friend from work grew, dried and gave to me (same friend who taught me how to can-- "Thanks friend!"), then I ground them myself--which was REALLY hard.  Probably because I don't have a mortar & pestle.  And I've seen "Julie & Julia" tons of times--Julia Childs cooking instructor at the Cordon Bleu says, "You must have a mortar & pestle!".  I guess I just didn't listen!!  Here's my pretend mortar, pestle, and ground cloves.

(By the way, I had store bought ground cloves in my pantry, but wanted to use the home-grown cloves.)  The other thing I did differently than the recipe is I didn't blend the apples.  I just cooked them and smashed them a bit.  I left some chunks--very yummy that way!

Since this is my blog, let me take just a minute to go off-subject.  Has anyone besides me noticed how much food is coming from other countries?   In purchasing apple juice for this recipe I had a hard time finding juice from the USA.  I finally found Tree Top, which said it was 100% USA apples.

If you are looking for juice from the USA, be sure to check on the plastic bottle too.  Some of the brands didn't say where the juice was from on the label, but had printed on the plastic bottle where it was from.

Anyway, after heating up our cabin to over 80 degrees, I ended up with lovely apple butter we'll enjoy all winter long.

I used our Jotul woodstove to cook the apple butter

and our Coleman cookstove to process the jars

This stove was given to us by my Mom & Dad.  It originally belonged to my Grandma & Grandpa.  I bet they never thought their granddaughter would be canning apple butter with it in 2011, in a cabin!