Dehydrated Apple Recipies

We had a great night! It was almost like a Thanksgiving Feast! So many people helped out and had great ideas. I want to express a huge Thank You to Dawn and all those who helped out. Through all their work, stress, and time, we now have some wonderful ways to use our food storage - and it was great fun tasting all the recipes so we know which ones our family will actually eat. Remember, one of the points of food storage is to store things your family will eat and are accustomed to.

To re-hydrate the apples - most resources suggest that you use equal parts of apples to hot water, such as 1 cup of apples to 1 cup of hot water and let it sit for at least 5 minutes. I like to let mine sit for longer. Then you can drain off the liquid or better yet use the liquid in whatever recipe you are making and it will add more flavor!

Michael Barr will be back on Thursday March 25th at 7:00 p.m. at the church. We have a few new sheets of info to add to the others that we have posted. These are demonstrating how to do laundry without power. Have fun experimenting!

Canning Meats and Butter

Dawn, Karen, and Lisa have done it again. They have made something I was nervous to do, seem so easy. I haven't tried canning meat yet, but I sure plan to as soon as some hamburger goes on sale. I did try canning the butter though. We did it for family night and it worked out great. I poured the butter in the jars, Sarah put the lids on, and Scott tightened them down. Then we all went in and watched a movie and shook jars. I didn't have enough room in my jars for all the butter so I put what was left of the butter in a tupperware type jar and we shook it with the rest of the jars. I wanted to have a sample of what it would be like with me doing it, since recipes turn out just a little different with each cook, to know if I wanted to can more butter in the future. Generally, whenever butter has melted and then sits, it tends to get that gritty texture and it just doesn't seem to taste right. But to my surprise (not that I doubted Dawn) the sample butter in the tupperware blended back together just fine and we have used it on our toast for the last week.

Just a few side notes from the meeting:

A cold-pack canner, some call it a water-bath canner is not the same as a pressure canner. If you buy or receive an old pressure canner or if you haven't used yours in a while, make sure to get the pressure checked just to be on the safe side.

A 22-lbs turkey cans about 9 pints.

Recommended book: "Pressure Perfect"

The Utah State Extention Office (4-H) is a great resource for canning. They are in Provo on Center Street and just off University Avenue.

When canning butter make sure to use salted butter.

All of them recommend canning with someone, especially if you are going to do a big batch. It sure helped to have three of us taking turns shaking the jars. You get tired after awhile.

Breads, Rolls, and Pie

What a fantastic night of delicious food!! We have such talented sisters in our ward and they all shared their tips and secrets. I must say that the best part of coming to these activities is the tasting of all the wonderful recipes. Diane demonstrated her recipe for pie crust and it's not temperamental at all. My recipe is picky if there is not enough oil, too much oil, or too much handling so I think I'll switch over to her recipe now. There's 6 pages of recipes here and they are all delicious. Okay I know I've used that word already but they really were delicious. Hope you enjoy them as well.