Last year I canned 500 jars of food. I attained my goal of canning all of the spaghetti sauce, tomatoes, and salsa our family ate in a year. Enough for the little family living at the farm, and enough to share with the children/grandchildren along the way, including a few big family dinners here. So – win!
This year, I haven’t canned as many jars due to working. But, I am pretty sure I have enough spaghetti sauce and salsa for the year again. I will have to buy some canned tomatoes to add in here and there, but that’s alright.
Every year, we buy a side of beef. We bought a freezer specifically for this purpose the very first year we bought the farm. Living approximately 30 minutes from any real groceries, we have found that very beneficial. Besides being equipped to fix dinner at the drop of a hat (not that I’m guilty of that very often anymore), we like the taste of the local beef and knowing that all our meat came from one single cow/steer. We aren’t “farmy” enough to eat our own, but have no problem eating a neighbor’s. Even if we sold cows to that neighbor a few years in a row – and it may be one of ours. But we don’t know, and we don’t ask.
The drama on the farm this week:
Before we bring home this year’s beef, any remnants of last year’s beef are cooked, canned, or given away. I don’t mix – I don’t want to accidentally be cooking 3 year old beef. Its a rule I keep.
We had kept back the filet mignon for a special occasion – turns out “time for new beef” is special enough. We grabbed a recipe of the internet and it was SOOOOOO good! I canned up some roasts, which are always nice mid-winter to go with mashed potatoes and veggies. But let’s just say eating beef 3-4 days a week is too much for us. We were tired of it for a little bit.
Then we walked in to get something out of the freezer which was fully loaded with this year’s beef and the door wasn’t all the way closed. I believe the load of hamburger meat may have shifted and popped the freezer door ajar. All of a sudden, the freezer beef became the priority. Much of the meat had thawed – all the steaks, about 30 pounds of hamburger meat, several roasts, all the cube steak, and all of the various other things that get stored in the freezer.
So, we cooked, we canned, we gave away steak, we ate this year’s filet mignon while cooking and canning. We called Andrea and Bernie and Bill and Dawn to come and help us out. We saved (still frozen) about 70 pounds of hamburger and 6 roasts. We canned all the rest of the roasts and about 20 pounds of ground beef.
In trying to wrap my head around the frustration of losing our beef less than a week after putting it in the freezer – I worked to be thankful for what we didn’t lose. To focus on what God did rather than what he did not do. I worked to not wallow in self-pity. And then God reminded me of the words He gave me after our house fire (in 2011?) – It’s just stuff.
The day of the house fire it was easy to say – it is just stuff, because my family was safe, and so was I. I usually have a quick thought of how much worse things could have been. But several days later, when we were sorting through the rubble of the house, I came to a place where I was focusing too hard on what was lost. So I made a decision, that was the last day to sort. Whatever we got out of the house that day was it. I didn’t go back.
So I work to not be frustrated about the hours of work that went into the diced green peppers out of the garden that were frozen and lost, the couple bags of tomatoes that hadn’t gotten processed yet. The steak that needed to be given away because we couldn’t cook it all. I concentrate on the fact that we managed to keep so much burger and roast, we were able to share food with family and friends, and now there’s some more room for chicken (which really we need to eat more of anyway). I am thankful for great family who were able to come and help us process, to store the still frozen beef while we re-set the freezer.
God is good – as always. And He is patient while I take time to remember that He is good, always
brandnewfarmers 