Holidays – How I Can Do That

Comfort In a Jar

Hello Fall. Hello Soup Season.

I won’t even say what else comes with this season. Let’s just say that as a mom of three young children, I’m fully aware of what the change of season means. And this past week, that came and knocked the energy out of me. Shoot I didn’t know I had any more energy to be knocked out! I thought my kiddos drained it from me to fuel their never ending supply of energy.

And yet, I was so grateful to have this soup already canned up and ready to go in my pantry. The chicken stock I make, I add antiviral herbs to it. Let me just say that Lemon Balm is my new favorite antiviral herb to cook with! (In a few weeks I’ll share more with you everything I put into my Chicken Stock. You’re going to love it!)

I want to share with you this recipe for Chicken Soup that is perfect for those days where you need healing chicken soup but don’t have the time or energy to make it from scratch. You will absolutely love this because it takes only 5 minutes to warm up–the same amount of time it takes to make condensed soup from the grocery store. BUT it has less ingredients and more immune boosting goodness. And even if your sick days are few and far between, this soup is quicker to heat up than going through a fast food drive through. Plus as the added bonus of being that IT item to use up some leftovers you have sitting in your fridge on the day you crack open this jar of soup.

Yields: 7 Quarts of canned soup

Clean your jars and lids.
Prep your ingredients.
Cold pack your chicken, split evenly between all 7 jars.
For each of your ingredients, split evenly between all 7 jars. Start with the larger cut ingredients and end with the smaller peas and lentils.

(It’s easier to shake the smaller ingredients down into the cracks of larger ingredients than to shove the larger ones in on the smaller.)

Fill each of the Quart size jars with about 2 cups of chicken stock.
If you have Kosher or Sea Salt, you can season your soup now. Otherwise, do not put in your table salt or iodized salt. You will season your soup when you open you jar before serving.
Clean the rims of your jars with vinegar and then place lids and rings, finger tight.
Prepare your pressure canner.

Follow your canner’s directions for the correct process of canning with your canner.

For example, I am Sea Level – 1,000 foot elevation so I can the Chicken Soup with 10 lbs of pressure for 90 minutes in my weighted canner.

Once time is complete, turn off the heat and let your canner naturally release pressure.
When you can remove your lid, let the cans sit for an additional 10 minutes before removing them from the canner.
Allow your jars to sit 12-24 hours to seal. Then remove the rings and clean your jars before storing.

With new lids preserving your canned goods for up to 18 months, you have plenty of shelf life for this soup.

There are many options you have for this Chicken Soup.

You can season it and eat as is.
If you have left over rice or noodles in your fridge you can add those ingredients and still have rice and chicken or chicken noodle soup that is ready to eat with a 5 minute warm up on your stove.
With adding a thickening agent (slurry or corn starch) you can turn this into chicken and dumplings or a pot pie filling.
Maybe you have other small amounts of leftover meat, like Italian Sausage. You can use this meat to bulk up the soup, add some kale and parmesan and have a Tuscan style soup.
Or maybe you’re looking for something Latin in flavor. Grab some tortilla strips, grated jack cheese and add in Latin American seasonings and you can have Tortilla soup.

These ideas are a far cry from being authentic cultural cuisines. However I want to give you a few ideas on how you can turn one of your canned soups into a blank slate for some variety.

Looking for a gift idea for this Holiday Season?

This is soup is perfect for the new mother getting use to having baby at home, an elderly family member who retired their pots and pans, someone who is an avid camper or loves cooking by camp fire, or anyone else who can benefit from a quick home cooked meal without all the fuss.

Maybe you’re the type of person who loves gifting food to a neighbor, friend, or family when they become ill. Here is a quick way of gifting all that healthy goodness without your schedule batting an eye.

I highly recommend this recipe for everyone!

Do you need another gift idea?

This one is personal and doesn’t require you to have a master’s degree in art to make!

Here are some supplies that you will need:

Canvas
Paint
Paintbrush
Clear Acrylic Spray
Chalk pen/crayon, Paint pen, Pastel, or like craft item you can write with
(Optional) Sponge, Paper towel, Napkin, or Tissue
(Optional) Embellishments such as pre-cut vinyl design

Paint a design on your canvas. You can do whatever design you would like. Here are some examples of canvases that I already have on hand. There are the canvases that my boys made 3 years ago.

And these are the ones that I have in the prepped stage for various projects that I have in the works. You can use coordinating colors, monochromatic colors, are shades for an abstract scene.

Let your canvas dry.

Spray your canvas with Clear Acrylic Spray and let dry. This step is important, because accidents happen and sometimes you want to “erase” a mistake. I’m a phonetic speller and sometimes I just get a word wrong. No worries. By having the acrylic spray dried before you start writing with your crafting pen of choice, you have the option of wiping away the mistake with a wet cloth. The only writing medium that gets to be a bit tricky is acrylic pens. That one you may not find having an “erasing” quality. Chalk pens and most pastels will generally work for excessive editing.

With your writing medium of choice write your message, series of quotes, words of encouragement, or whatever you’re inspired to say. When I made these gifts for nieces and nephews, it took about 7 quotes that I pulled from online to fill the 8×10 canvas with medium small print from top to bottom. You can write as large or small as you would like. Just be aware that the writing medium you choose to use will help you decide how small you are able to write. I used a chalk crayon that had a relatively large nib, so I wrote as small as I could and the words were as tall as the width of my pinky.

Files used today

Spring Triple Panel comes with all you see here. Or you can select individual elements.

Jelly Fish element from my Jelly Fish Collection

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International Women’s Day & Crafting Month

Created to Make

It really is amazing to think about how much of our world and lives are all about creating something. Sometimes the first thing we think about when we hear “National Crafting Month” are the classic artistic skills of painting, quilting, sewing, crochet/knitting, needle point…everything that you would step into a crafting store to build your supply lists. Maybe you say you’re NOT a crafter because these classic forms of crafting feel as foreign and difficult as learning a language from a country on the other side of the world from you. But there is so much more to crafting.

Crafting is what we learn from others.

In my case I learned how to craft from my mom. She learned from her mom. She learned from her mom. And I’m not sure how far back that goes. So when people ask me, I’m at least a third generation crafter. I learned the old crafts. It’s what my matriarchs knew and passes on.

And while I move forward with new crafting technology and techniques, I’m also mindful of how things use to be done.

For example, the inspiration for what I’m writing today is birthed from current events, what every day women have done for centuries, and how to be creative in unifying these ideas.

For many years, my family has been taking care to learn how to grow a garden. One I have fond memories of my grandparent’s garden. My mom even off and on grew a garden.

I mention gardening because of the events unfolding in Ukraine, worldwide fertilizer production has been drastically cut back. In fact, many farmers around the world who depended on fertilizers to produce food for their local and global markets are not going to have the supply they will need. In fact, it is still uncertain if Ukrainian farmers will receive their wheat seeds in enough time for a spring planting. If they do not, many countries around the world will not have wheat to import, because Ukraine has been their wheat supplier.

Now I’m not a farmer. I don’t supply food for other families. However, I’m mindful of what is going on around the world market because I want to be aware. Knowing what I know, now, it’s becoming important to me to grow more for my family right not. Yes, inflation and the cost of groceries plays into that. It play into any first world country family who is living on a budget. And it’s ignorant of me to ignore the fact that so many other families, in areas not as prosperous as the place I call home. So to honor those families, where I may not have as much influence to change what they are facing, I’m making conscious decisions to change how I’m doing things right now. If I grow more, and use more of the resources that my two hands can produce for my family, than that frees up resources for others to provide for their families. I learned how to grow a garden as a child. Not all families around me learned that skill set. So I use my skills to provide for my family, so there’s less strain on my local market, which has a trickledown effect. If enough local families relieve the food chain, it relieves on a regional level. This in turns frees up resources on a national level. And in an ideal world, governments would not be wasteful and they would take these excess resources to relieve the food vulnerability in other countries.

And that would take me in a new conversation away from what I want to focus on today.

International Women’s Day

The one thing I love about being in the Pacific Northwest is that I grew up in an area where I learned about and ate cuisine from different places around the world. And from these different cultures I’ve learned food preparation that I would not have learned in a less culturally diverse community.

And while the most popular women to honor on International Women’s Day are politicians and celebrities, I want to draw attention and bring honor to the more humble group of women–village mamas. It doesn’t matter if a culture’s history was spent mostly in a tribal setting, rural village, or small townships, Mamas were the ones who made the world turn and kept families alive. They passed down cooking techniques and recipes that kept their people alive through countless seasons and years of famine, blight, war… they put the food on the table. And boy do mamas know how to make food resources stretch.

This week I’m particularly been in awe of all the women who fed their families in a variety of ways with one crop, corn.

I’m not going to lie, I grew up where family recipes consist of cooking corn on the cob. And then you either eat it on the cob or cut it off the cob. Other than cornbread, that is what I inherited in my ancestral cook book. I will also be truthful and admit that corn is my least favorite. So yes, ladies around the world, please feel free to send me your favorite corn recipes. I will gladly embrace them, because I’m educating myself on the uses of corn to become less dependent on wheat for providing for my family. This fall, it is already on my books that I’m going to teach myself to make masa and tortilla from the corn I harvest this year. I have a general working knowledge and it will officially be put to the test.

And step one in my education, today, was shucking corn. Last fall I planted Strawberry Corn because it is a corn that can be popped and pop corn is one of my family’s favorite snacks. So I took my meager harvest that had been drying and doubling as fall and winter decorations, and I shucked.

As a historian, I’ve seen how village Latinas shucked corn by rubbing the ears together. Here is what I learned today….

There is a reason why these mamas use a basket or other larger vessel to shuck into. A soup bowl is not big enough. The kernels on the floor will be processed to germinate and put back into my garden this year. And I will have effectively doubled what I have previously planted in years past.

The easiest kernels to release are the ones at the ear tip. And those first ones take the most effort. Once I got seeds to release, I had a whole side of ear cleared in a couple of swipes. An up and down movement is what I found necessary to start the process. Once I was started a side to side movement seems to make the seeds drop much faster. Then on the last corn (with no other cob to rub against), I found that using my thumb in a downward movement (from the top of the cob), there was not much pressure that was needed to drop those last seeds.

Another thing that any mama in a resource scarce place will tell you is that you waste nothing.

We as human beings were created to be creative people.

I harvested my corn, but here is where National Crafting Month comes in. What am I going to do with the cob and husks that are left over?

I’m not sure if there was another generation that followed my grandparents in making husk art. I honestly haven’t seen any creations at farmer’s markets for the fairgrounds since my grandparents passed away. I’m going to have to make a husk doll in the upcoming days and show you because they’re not popular hits in Google image search. I have 4 cobs left to craft with. So I’ll try my hand at that and make at least a brief posting on how that turns out. And if you’ve never heard or seen of a husk doll, then I’ll have the pleasure of passing on a little history.

But for today, I took three of my cobs and turned them into fun Easter decorations.

This is one craft that I will definitely do again in the future. In fact, I will have my boys do it. This is a messy craft, so be forewarned.

There are some bits of information that you need to know, if you’ve never had experience with corn cobs before. The husks take paint nicely with no real preparation. However, the paint feels like it takes forever to dry. I tried to keep my paint thin and it still took upward of two hours before the husks were completely dry.

Now you will absolutely love working with the cob portion!

The cob will absorb paint like a sponge. Drying will not be instantaneous but it surprised me at how quickly it was dry to the touch. I had planned on putting my glitter on wet paint, but I had to go with option 2, glue. The dry time is completely dependent on the type of glue you use and it’s dry time. The glitter does not shed easy, but some will come off on your finger if you swipe it (when dry).

Bringing it back around to celebrating women, what is something that you appreciate or want to know from women different from you?

How can you turn that into a craft to celebrate what it means to be a woman?

In fact, please comment below something that you admire about women in a culture different from your own. I’m always looking for new knowledge and skills. If you inspire a creation, I want to give you recognition as well.

Happy Belated International Women’s Day!