Sylvia's Scenario

This is an ultimate fall dish so to welcome this first day of fall, I decided to make this dish tonight.  We still have buckets of plums laying around here from our two plum trees so making pork chops with plums instead of applesauce just makes sense to me (except that we have dozens of jars of   applesauce , too!)  I just love pork chops with fruit and plums work just as good as applesauce.  This is the pork chop version of my plum good chicken   and since it is fall, I can use fresh plums and not plum jam. You can swap the chicken with pork chops for either recipe.  Our pork chops are local, they come from a farm just down the street called Headstead .  All their meat is grass fed and natural and you can tell the difference.  I love their pork chops.  Good quality ingredients is going to make any recipe even better.  And I love this one. Serves 2 2 bone-in pork chops, about 1-inch thick salt and pepper 1 onion, sliced ...

We finished canning our first batch of plums on Sunday so we are moving right along with preserving our harvest this year.   Any that we do now will be extra since we have a little bit of everything;  applesauce ,   apple butter ,   tomatoes  and now  plums .  The supply seems endless so we just preserve as much as time allows.                                  It's almost as fun to pick them as it is to eat them. Time to do more canning. And there are more to pick. so we just keep picking. I keep a bowl of apples in the refrigerator just for munching and the rest get turned into applesauce. It's like having our own little Garden of Eden.

Now that we have our supply of apple butter for the year completed, we can turn the rest of our apples into applesauce.  Delicious homemade applesauce! We have a great crop of organic apples this year. We won't begin to put a dent in our one tree but we'll have enough applesauce to last at least a year, for sure.  This recipe makes 14 pints.  I like the pints because we can't eat a whole quart of applesauce once the jar is opened before it spoils.  Now, if I had a house full of kids or even a couple of teenagers, that would be a different story.  But for the two of us, the pint jars work very well. Makes 14 pints 23 pounds of apples 2-3 cups of sugar, depending on sweetness of the apples 2 Tbsp of cinnamon 1/2 cup lemon juice 14 hot and sterile pint jars, (run through the dishwasher right before canning) 14 lids and rims, sterilized in boiling water 1. Wash apples thoroughly. 2.  Quarter apples and cut away any bad spots. ...

With tomato season in full force, we are working hard to eat up our tomatoes.  I canned a few more quarts of tomatoes as we made a batch of  apple butter  last weekend. As you can see, some of the apple butter will be holiday gifts. Apple butter is such an old fashioned-type food so a lot of people are thrilled to get it.   Have you ever bought apple butter at the store?  Exactly.  Sometimes I'll just take some over to people's house when I visit with a loaf of Old Fashioned White bread  from  Great Harvest Bakery  which is the perfect match for our apple butter.  We couldn't let our canning season go by without making more apple butter.  I also couldn't let all these tomatoes go into quart jars without making some spaghetti sauce so last weekend we had spaghetti with homemade spaghetti sauce.  I love fall! I thought this would be a good first dinner for my sister-in-law who was driving here from Montana o...