Happy Friday! This week I tried my hand at drying cherries. I just love dried cherries, but they are so expensive, usually around $10 per pound! My son and I picked cherries this week, with my mom at a local orchard. Since we’ve had a lot of rain recently, it seems that cherry season will be rather short here, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to pick again this year. We’ve been eating fresh cherries at meals, but I wanted to dry some. My friend found a brand new food dehydrator at a garage sale for me earlier this year for only $6! What a deal! I made strawberry fruit leather the other week from my freshly picked strawberries. I made 3 batches, and I preferred the last batch, since it was thicker. So yesterday, I dried cherries and made some cherry leather. The cherries turned out well, although I didn’t make many, since I wasn’t sure if they would be good. And since they shrink, you have to dry a lot of them to get a decent amount. The cherry leather got too dry, so I had to throw that out. Oh well, I am still learning. Since I still have cherries, I may dry some more, as well as freeze some.
Yesterday, I picked my first zucchini from my zucchini plant. It’s a bit funny looking, but I’m sure it’ll taste fine. I have two zucchini plants and two yellow squash plants. Both plants have small vegetables coming, so hopefully they’ll yield more. The squash plant had some larger ones, but they rotted. Since I am not a gardening expert, I don’t know what the problem was. Hopefully that won’t continue to happen.
My two regular tomato plants (in the ground are doing well), and I have two cherry tomato plants that also seem to be growing well, the latter were started from seeds, to it’s neat to see how big they are now. The four tomato plants I planted in pots, upside-down are not doing as well. One plant died. Although the other three are much smaller than the ones in the ground, they do have small green tomatoes on them, which is encouraging!
I have several bush pickle plants in containers on my deck and they have small cucumbers on them. I am hoping that they can be used for pickles, since it’s called a bush pickle. I have three of those, and one regular cucumber, although they all look the same…
If I have time, I’ll try to take some pictures of my garden and post them today.
Here is a list of links I want to share this week:
Strawberry Bread at HeavenlyHomemakers.com
Salad Dressing Recipes at HeavenlyHomemakers.com
What’s On My Food at WhatsOnMyFood.org
Healthy Summer Recipes and Menus at EatingWell.com
The Simple Dollar Podcast on Food at TheSimpleDollar.com
Healthy Summer Potluck Side Dishes and Desserts at EatingWell.com
Protect Your Freedom to Eat Nourishing Food and Support Small Farmers Against HR 875 at TheNourishingGourmet.com
Whole Grain Bread with soaking instructions at PassionateHomemaking.com
Peanut Butter Baked Oatmeal at LynnesKitchenAdventures.com (This sounds great! I’ll probably wait to try it when fresh fruit is not in season though.)
Buttermilk Syrup at LynnesKitchenAdventures.com
Nutrition in a Nutshell at KeeperOfTheHome.org
Simple Affordable Bread at KeeperOfTheHome.org
Frugal Sweetener: Organic Raisins (thanks to The Nourishing Gourmet for this link. I have a chocolate cookbook where many recipes call for prune puree, but since prunes are so expensive, I haven’t tried any of these recipes yet. I think I will give them a try using a raisin puree.)
