Prep Time: 1 Hour or More

I've been digging through the deep freeze lately trying to weed out some of the older stuff, and use it up. I was in for another dig yesterday when I discovered a kg bag of goat stewing pieces, and figured I'd try to whip up a stew with them. So I let them thaw in the fridge for a day, and today took them out to start the stew. Note in the recipe below if you are going straight from the freezer then add 10 or 15 minutes to the oven time - but more on that in a bit. First a comment on what makes this "kid friendly". A couple of things really, but mainly the fact that I pureed a number of the ingredients that I knew the boys would balk at if they saw them in there. Namely - the whole 2 cups of carrots, and 2 of the 3 cups of potato. The 3rd cup of potato I diced up really small figuring that they would not balk at small pieces - and my gamble paid off. I did not have any turnip on hand, but I'd have pureed it as well if I did. Another thing which makes this kid friendly is that I meticulously picked through the goat to eliminate the copious bones. Goat bones can be small, and sharp - definitely a hazard for even an older child. Though if you wanted to go for a more authentic Mediterranean feel, you could eliminate that step.

Something I've been doing a lot of lately with meats is roasting them in the oven in my cast iron frying pan, and collecting and saving the juices which result. Though clearly in this case we would use the juices for the stew. In fact, I also dug out some juice I saved the other night from some pan-fried minute steaks, as well as some home canned lamb broth that my wife and I canned up early last year.

For some time now I've wanted to get into sausage making, and finally made the leap today! Actually, I tried it once about 10 years ago but only the once. And now I recall why - that Kitchen Aid sausage stuffer attachment is just terrible! Really difficult to work with, and incredibly slow. The basic problem is that the vertical tube leading into the feeding chamber is tapered when in fact it would be most effective if it were the same diameter the whole way down. The plunger should be perfectly engineered to fit snugly down in there, but it is not. You start plunging down on the mixture and more of it oozes back up the sides than makes it down into the feeding auger. If you take a look at purpose-built stuffers they are exactly as I describe how the Kitchen Aid should be.

Nonetheless, it did get the job done, and the results were really good. But I cannot for the life of me imagine using this thing very often because it would just get way too frustrating. I'm going to buy a proper stuffer for sure.

Chocolate Pound Cake

Mix and then let cool:

½ pound soft margarine. (Do not use butter... it spoils the texture)

10 tablespoon cocoa (Be generous with it... heaping tablespoons please!)

3 cups sugar

1 ½ cups boiling water

I have received many compliments on my baked bean recipe, so I have decided to share it with the world. It started off as a recipe from a slow cooker recipe book, but I have since played with it so much it's become my own. Enjoy!

Preparing pie pumpkin is pretty easy to do, and the same method can be used for squash as well. Instead of going through the labourious task of peeling it raw, just cut it up, bake it for an hour at 350F, then let it cool and finally peel it.

Roasting pumpkin seeds is pretty easy to do - once you get the guts out of the pumpkin, just manually pick through and pick out all the seeds, then give them a good rinse under the sink, and put them on a baking sheet.

Making applesauce is pretty easy to do, if a bit time consuming. It does work out to be a fair bit cheaper than buying even the cheapest of applesauce though. 1/2 bushel cost me $12, and gave me 18 x 500ml jars of applesauce. The home made stuff seems to be a lot thicker than the commercial stuff, so there is probably even more apple per unit volume.

Since I made the salsa and pasta / pizza sauce really mild this year, I wanted to make a nuclear hot chili sauce to compensate. Something that I could use just like that, or mix into one of my other tomato sauces to spice it up a bit. I did some googling and asking around, and finally found a recipe that really appealed to me. I did not follow that recipe to the T - left out the salt and pepper, and the vinegar. The latter I believe was only added to make it suitable for boiling water canning, which I do not have to do since I pressure can.

I wanted a sweet tomato-based sauce that was spicey as heck, and that's what I got! It's got apples, peaches, pears and honey to sweeten it up. It calls for 10 lbs of tomatoes - I used 7 lbs of romas, 2 lbs of various heirlooms from my CSA, and about 1300 ml of canned diced tomatoes from my 2006 batch.

We did not make any salsa last summer and so ran out some time ago. When I went looking for my recipe I dug up a list of ingredients but unfortunately had not recorded the procedure before, so I was shooting in the dark a bit here. This time I'm recording it all for posterity though!

Note that due to the lack of vinegar this recipe is not suited to canning by any means other than pressure-canning. The lack of vinegar makes for a nice sweet, fresh flavour that is very similar to the fresh salsas that are so popular these days. This is easy to make, though does take some time to boil down. We cheat and add a bit of corn starch to help thicken it.

This is pretty mild for spiciness.

Roasting red peppers is pretty easy to do if a bit finicky at first. In this video I'm fumbling around with it quite a bit in part because I only do this once a year during harvest time, and this was the first time this year, and in part because silly me chose peppers which were largely inappropriate for roasting. You want to select peppers that are larger, and fairly regularly shaped. This video was taken a few weeks ago when peppers were just in season, and I got so excited that I just picked up a bushel without thinking about it first. Today I picked up about a half bushel of large, nicely formed peppers for my pasta sauce today, and I had them all roasted and peeled in no time at all - less than 2 hours.