Canning Season ~ Beans, Beans and More Beans !

 It is canning season and we are beyond abundance ( is there such a thing as beyond abundance ?) in beans !

 My husband is an amazing gardener and tends his vegetable garden well.

 He planted, grew, and tended beans quite successfully this year. He grew some yellow beans along with green beans. The yellow beans taste the same as the green beans so I was excited to can the yellow beans along with the green beans because I think the jars of canned beans are pretty with the yellow.

 These are quart jars of primarily yellow beans with a few green beans ~ however, most of my quart jars of canned beans are green with a few yellow beans in the mix.

I have canned about 60 quarts of green / yellow beans thus far. It is a good thing my husband & I love green beans, and no doubt we'll eat them all. Now onto carrots ....

Canning season is the time of year I  love and dread. The abundance of produce is a blessing but it all comes at once leaving me no time to do anything but can and preserve the harvest my husband has worked hard to provide during the hottest time of the year. That is where we are at here at Laughing Dove Farm ~ preserving our hard earned produce. I am thankful ( but tired) for all God has provided ~ praise Him !

Spot on A Great New Cook Book and Cooks

This is my birthday present from my daughter and her family and I love, love, love it! I thoroughly enjoy Jamie Oliver's cooking show on the Food Network, but as it is now on very early in the morning I do not get a chance to see it. Our daughter's family DVR's it and we watch it together at a more ( to my way of thinking ) reasonable hour. Even better, I usually have a grandchild or two in my lap as we watch Jamie..oh joy! My husband is the "foodie" in the family and I thoroughly enjoy doing the table setting,being the go-for, and clean-up help when he prepares delicious meals , quite often, for friends and family. After all, my reward is that I get to eat fine food and drink fine wine and visit with people we love. Such a small price ...but I digress. My daughter asked what I wanted for my birthday and I suggested maybe a DVD of Jamie Oliver, not realizing he had a cookbook published. What a cookbook! It surpasses his show. It shows pictures of his gardens, him hunting, cooking outdoors, and much more...all done very practically too. As the wife of a hunter, it is refreshing to have a healthy view of such a much-maligned endeavor. Well prepared game of any sort is a rare thing now-a-days. I cannot say enough in favor of this cook book, and I will be reading it from cover to cover...and I have only read one other cookbook that way...might write about it later. All this to say that my husband suggested I cook through this book and blog about it like the movie "Julie, Julia". Nope, not going to do that, but I have decided I will blog every Friday starting next week about recipes from Jamie's book, and cook my way through it. Jamie's book is orderd seasonally and I will prepare his recipes accordingly. I will start with Autumn recipes and hopefully my husband will give me a LOT of help and we will have opportunities to share these meals with friends and family . I have been very, very busy preserving the harvest and bounty of the garden my husband so lovingly prepared, planted and tended. All he asks is that I do not let the fruit and vegetables go to waste. Until this year , my poor husband's labors have oft been wasted or ended up as chicken food because I am at the fairs from mid- August til the end of September and when home am too exhausted to do much canning, freezing, etc. Then I am ashamed for the waste and sad for my husband's hard work for naught. No more! I have canned pickles, jams, and tomorrow will can Tomato Jam, a recipe I found on this wonderful blog: One Perfect Bite* ( click here). I am excited about trying this jam out on broiled French Bread with a dollop of goat cheese on top. Another book my daughter and her family have ordered for me is by Nigella Lawson*( click here). I have seen a few of her shows ( Nigella Bites) on the Food Network, but she, too, is now on way too early for me. There is just something so pleasant about a woman who loves to cook AND eat too! I watched her prepare a few egg dishes awhile ago and thought I could get excited about cooking like that. Can't wait for my new cook book by her! Meanwhile, because I have been busy canning produce I have been making easy breezy dinners. That is O.K. with my husband because he has been coming home from work and straight-way working on finishing his new Honey house / pump house. It is looking good and we have been needing a new pump-house and water pump for a long time. It has room for all my husbands' bee-keeping equipment, and also has been prepared for extracting and storing honey. Yay! Dinner tonight was sliced ripe tomatoes, with baked chicken, toast and FETA PEPPER DIP , thanks to Noble Pig *( click here)! It is good, try it, you'll like it! "Here is what I have seen to be good and fitting: to eat, to drink and enjoy oneself in all one's labors in which he toils under the sun during the few years of his life which God has given him; for this is his reward." Ecclesiastes 5:18