Dehydrated Pineapple

My dehydrator has really been getting a workout lately! I used to only use it to make jerky every once in a blue moon, but in the past six months or so I have been dehydrating lots more fruit and vegetables. I found pineapple on sale last week and bought a couple of them. After peeling them, I sliced them pretty thin and put them in the dehydrator. I love how these turned out, they are so pretty. I will eat them as snacks and some will probably be chopped to add to granola. 

One thing I have been doing is looking for marked down vegetables at the grocery store. The store I shop at most will mark them as a "manager's special" the day or day before the sale by date. When I am lucky enough to find mushrooms and other things like that I will purchase them and dehydrate them to be added to soups later.

Chicken Gnocchi Soup

So what am I doing with the gnocchi that is now in my freezer? The night after I made all of the chive gnocchi that is pictured in the post below, we had a big pot of Chicken and Gnocchi Soup. I made the chicken the same day that I made the gnocchi so assembling the soup and getting it on the table was pretty quick.

To make the chicken:

 I started with a whole chicken, put it in my crock put with 2 onions that had been quartered. 4 ribs of celery trimmed and cut into thirds, 2 teaspoons of salt and about the same of pepper, a teaspoon of thyme and enough water that fill the crock pot about 3/4 of the way. I let it cook on low all day. After I got home from work, I pulled the chicken out and separated the meat from the bones. I strained the broth, discarding the veggies because they were pretty much mush. The broth went into the fridge overnight.

To make the soup: 

I pulled the broth out of the fridge and discarded the fat that had congealed on top. The broth went into the soup pot along with about two cups of the chicken, 1 pint of cooked carrots, half a bag of frozen peas and let that simmer for a bit. I had about 1/4 a cup of some onions that had been chopped and sauteed so I added that too. If you wanted you could also add some sliced celery. I will add celery when I am making stock or cooking a chicken or something, but I do not like to eat it in anything. After all of my vegetables were warmed through, I turned up the heat until I had a good boil going. I dropped the frozen gnocchi directly into the boiling soup and let it cook for about five to seven more minutes.


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I often get remarks about how much time it takes to actually cook from scratch. In the case of this meal it only too me minutes to prepare the chicken to cook in the crock pot. My return for separating the chicken: I had enough chicken to make dinner from me and Kip, we both had this soup for lunch the next day, and one extra serving for my lunch. I also had enough chicken to freeze for one more meal, plus enough to make a batch of chicken salad for lunches.

It did take me a while to make the gnocchi, but the recipe made enough for Kip and I to have three meals featuring gnocchi.

The carrots in the soup had been canned in the fall and I knew I would need extra onions when I cooked dinner earlier in the week so I made a little extra so that I only had to cut onions and cook chopped onions once.

Do I spend more time in the kitchen than I used to? Yes I do. I try and make the most of my time though so that when I am pressed for time I do have a time crunch we still have healthy options. 

In My Freezer

I have really been trying to kick the fast food/drive-thru habit. I do plan all of my meals ahead of time and do a pretty good job sticking to the meal plan. Planning my meals helps me save time and money. I don't wander the store aimlessly grabbing things here and there and since I know what is for dinner, before I go to bed or leave for work I can pull whatever out of the freezer to defrost if needed. There are times though when my schedule gets a little crazy or I simply don't feel like cooking dinner. 

I have mentioned on here several times about my back problems and winter months are particularly hard on me. Some days I simply cannot stand on my feet long enough to get dinner cooked and a nice real food meal was almost always out of the questions on painful days. 

What had been happening too often was me calling Kip and asking him to pick up dinner on the way home from work. He can cook and will if I ask him. The biggest problem with that scenario is that he gets home kind of late and if we had to wait to eat until he gets home to cook then dinner would be around 9:00 p.m. Plus since I have planned the meals and bought groceries to go along with what I planned, what I plan isn't always something he knows how to cook.

Kip has joked ever since we were first married that I don't buy food. I buy ingredients. I think that's cute, but very true and even more so since we started to eat more whole foods.

I have been canning soups, chili and spaghetti sauce so that I have quick, healthier options. I like as much as possible to be in jars, because I only have the freezer on my refrigerator so I am limited by space and if the power goes out then there goes all my hard work. Since not all foods can be safely canned at home, I do want some quick meals or partial meals in the freezer too. 

Tonight I made a Chive Gnocchi. I made enough for dinner tomorrow night and the rest are going into the freezer in meal size portions.

These are ready to pop into the freezer. I will freeze them on this pan until they are firm enough to put into freezer bags. 

The recipe is from the My Spice Sage blog and the link can be found above. I have been ordering from them for several months now and have been very happy with the service, quality and selection that they have. In fact, I got a package from them today!

So now instead of relying on fast food so often, I have enough food options in jars or in the freezer that I can get a quick healthy dinner on the table in a matter of minutes. If it is a really bad day and I need Kip to cook, there are options that he can do quickly too so that if we can still have dinner before it gets too late. 

Bread Making Class

I have always loved to cook and trying new recipes. Most everything I have learned, I have picked up from books or from cooking shows on TV. A couple of years ago my friend Judy gave me a couple of cooking classes at the Viking Store for my birthday. I loved them! In addition to learning a little more about cooking and some new recipes, they are just a lot of fun. I have taken several more since then and have really enjoyed how to cook foods from different parts of the world. For Christmas, Kip gave signed me up for the Artisan Bread class. I LOVE LOVE LOVE bread and I enjoy their classes so this was the perfect gift for me. I was having so much fun that I forgot to take pictures, except for this one of my French baguette dough rising.

Canned Goods

I know it has been a while since I have posted anything here, but one of the reasons is that I have been spending so much time canning as much as I can. In the quest to eat healthier, I have decided to eliminate as much processed foods and I can and to prepare as much as I possibly can myself. So I have canning. I grew up in a gardening and canning family, so I learned a lot from them. They froze a lot of their foods though and I would prefer to have things in jars. One reason being that I wouldn't have to worry about my food in case of a power outage and another is that I just have the freezer that is on my fridge, I don't have a separate one so the amount of food that I can freeze is pretty minimal.

Because the size of my kitchen is pretty small and I have very little storage I was running out of room to store my jars of food. I already had one stainless steel shelf in my kitchen and decided a matching shelf system would solve a lot of my storage issues. I bought this five shelf system at Lowes and bought two additional shelves. The bottom shelf is tall enough to hold both of my canners and then I arranged the other shelves just for enough apart to allow me to to move quart jars around. I have three baskets on top. One holds tools such as funnels, jar grabber, food mill, and unused lids. The middle one is full of bands. The last one has consumables that I use like clear gel, pectins, citric acid and things like that. 

So here is the back wall of my kitchen with both shelves side by side:

I am pretty happy with the extra storage that this gives me. And I am VERY happy that my kitchen looks much less cluttered.

More Canning Goodies

I have had so much fun since I decided to start canning and making jams and jellies again. I forgot how satisfying it is to look at those jars of beautiful preserved foods can be. And how great it is to hear those "pings" coming from the jars as the seal. I have probably gotten a little carried away with the jams, but I seem to have an unending supplies of offers to relieve me of a jar here and there for taste testing. I did take a few jars of the blueberry to share with some friends at work. 

I went back to my Whole Foods last Friday because they were having a one day sale on peaches. So I bought a bushel. Kip asked if I really needed two boxes. I have found the magic response "well there is peach jam, peach cobbler, peach ice cream, ...." and suddenly he is on board! It did take me a while to plow through all those peaches, but I managed to get a large batch of raspberry peach jam, a couple of batches of peach jam and several jars of sliced peaches. 

Summer peaches are definitely at the top of my list of all time favorite flavors in this world, but I think blackberries hold that top spot. I remember when I was a little girl I would ask my Grandmother for "peanut butter pocketbooks", which was a single piece of bread smeared with peanut butter and blackberry jam. That is one of my strongest food memories from being a child. My SIL offered to take me blackberry picking with her this weekend and I took her up on it. Her BIL and SIL have blackberries on their property and they are out of town and called her and let her know there were lots of berries that would need to be picked while they were gone. We were both able to get enough berries for a good size batch of jam. It was her first time making and canning anything, and I think she is hooked. 

Apple Pie Jam

Having my canning stuff out again is proving to be as fun and as satisfying as I remember it being. I have just been going through a couple of canning books/magazines looking for types of jam and other things to make while the fruit is so available. This one was a new recipe for me, it is called Apple Pie Jam. I love raw apples but only occasionally like them cooked so I only made one small batch of this. It is delicious though! I didn't have any left after filling these jars so Kip didn't get a sample, but I  know he is going to like this one.

I am off today looking for peaches to can!

Blueberry Jam

I used to can and make jams and jellies quite a bit, but in the past few years have neglected my jars. I decided this would be the year to get back to doing something I love doing and love eating even more! I have missed growing things too. This year I am growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and strawberries in my back yard. I can't grow everything (yet) that I want to can so I am going to be relying on my CSA, the Farmer's Market and wherever I can get what I am looking for. I saw on Facebook the other day that Whole Foods would be having a having a one day sale on organic blueberries yesterday so blueberry jam would be my starting point this year. I went early yesterday morning and got two flats of blueberries. This is the first batch of jam. I will be making another bath this morning and then I will also freeze some of the berries to eat with oatmeal and to cook things like blueberry muffins and blueberry pancakes. 

And I am a happy girl again.

I won 2nd place!

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner! Okay actually it was my BBQ Lentil lunch that won me 2nd place in the Cosy Savvy category of the Shape the State contest. I was pretty happy with that!

Bagel Bento

I have made bagels a couple of times this week and thought that a bagel bento would be good. I sliced a poppy seed bagel and spread a cream cheese spread over both halves and then added some smoked salmon.  I have one cup of cherry tomatoes, another with tri-colored pepper strips and some homemade ranch dressing for dipping. I also added a fruit cup with strawberries, blackberries and blueberries, all packed in my Laptop Lunchbox.

BlueCross BlueShied of Tennessee is sponsoring a contest called Create Your Plate. You are supposed to create a lunch using the USDA's My Plate Guidelines. One category can be voted on by the public and I would love it if you could vote for my lunch by clicking HERE. Thanks so much!