Our Christmas Jam

 Actually, it's Christmas jelly, but thats a secret so keep it to ya self.

We made sixty jars of jelly this week. To tell the truth we made it in a few hours. Some of you may remember we take bits and pieces of fruit over the summer and freeze it then make a hodgepodge of jelly every holiday season, we call it "Christmas jelly." This was the week. We pulled out probably ten gallons of frozen fruit and dumped it in the juice steamer. This thing has changed our lives.

This years fruit includes:

Apple

Grape

Pear

Peaches 

Persimmons

Rhubarb

Cherry

Ground cherry

Blackberry

Blueberry

Raspberry

Strawberry 

Plum

Cranberry

Goji berry

Viking berry

Crab apples

Black Arkansas apples

And everything except the cranberries came from our own farm. We are blessed and we know it.

We had eight packs of sure-gel saved up, but it wasn't nearly enough for all the juice we had. So we decided to go ahead and juice all the fruit and save the leftover juice for next weekend. We think we have enough for another sixty jars.

Before we started on the jelly, we butchered up the deer from last weekend. We ground up another fifteen pounds of burger and added twenty more packs of backstrap and tenderloin to the freezer. 

Lawman has this backstrap fillet thing down pat

We don't know why people eat pig when they could be eating deer

We left out one batch of tenderloin, because tenderloin gravy is Cupcake's favorite 

We think a couple more deer, and we will be all set for meat this coming year. 

If you tuned in last week, you know we cut up the deer leg bones and made bone broth out of them. The broth wasn't dark enough to suit Cupcake, so we slow cooked it another 24 hours and Lawman canned it up Monday morning.

A full canner, 14 quarts

Before our hard freeze, we got our last fresh garden salad from the garden salad patch outside the garage.

We've still got a pretty good stand of spinach out there, frost won't hurt that, so we may have a few spinach salads left this year?

Getting into the spirit of the season, Lawman began his baking practice. This week, he made a from scratch sweet potato pie. He added pecans, because he knows Cupcake loves her some pecans.

Go ahead, say it's store bought crust

First use of our home made vanilla 

A little mouse sampled the pie before we could snap a pic

We ended the week with Cupcake wrapping Christmas presents, sweet potato pie, and naps. 

K&K