 if you want to tell them why you're drinking. So, good morning everyone. It is a little on the early side this morning and Cory was just asking me, why are you holding your coffee cup? I was like, because I want to show them and tell them what I'm drinking this morning. So, I am about to get a few things started. We are going to work in the kitchen today and I'm also going to run out to a local market with my mom. So I want to get a couple things kind of on the roll before I head out. So, one of those things is I need to get some yogurt started. I was able to find some organic milk, half gallon cartons for 99 cents at one of my bulk food stores I like to go to this week. And so, I want to go ahead and get a gallon started into yogurt because obviously once it's cultured it will last longer. It was getting close to the date that it needed to be used. So, I want to get it used up and I also hopefully will have time to quickly unload my freeze dryer. I put a bunch of herbs from my garden in it last night. And I think I'm going to go ahead and put some garlic in the freeze dryer to make garlic powder. If you all remember a while ago, I had gotten a really big bag of garlic and it's in the freezer and so I think that's how I'm going to actually use it up and make sure that it's preserved for a long time. And then I think the other thing I want to do is quickly get some eggs boiling as well to make hard boiled eggs because I'm going to make red pickled beet eggs. That is something we love in our house and I haven't made it in a really long time. And I have a ton of pickled beets canned and that was the main reason that I canned them last year. And so I just need to get in the habit of putting them into the juice from the pickled beets and I know that we ate it up but back to what I'm drinking. So for the last little while, I have given up coffee besides the occasional Swiss water decaf. So if you've ever seen me with coffee, it's probably Swiss water decaf because it's very low acidic coffee and obviously doesn't have caffeine or much caffeine in it. But to kind of give me my little warm cup in the morning that I really like, I have been making myself cocoa butter steamers and I wanna share that with you guys. I don't know if I will get time today but maybe in my next video, whenever I film in the morning, I will show you guys how I make it. It's really, really easy. So I'm gonna sip on this while I go ahead and get my yogurt started, disregard everything that's going on behind me. I think we're getting our kitchen cabinet doors back from the cabinet maker that is painting them. I think we're getting them back this week which I'm so excited about. We have had no cabinet doors on anything for the last little while, last couple of months. And so I am so ready to see my kitchen kind of be pulled together and things kind of get wrapped up and you can see like a makeshift countertop back there. Our countertops I think will be installed really soon as well. So all the little odds and ends but you know what? Cooking still happens in the midst of renovation and crazy. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you in a couple easy steps how I make yogurt and this is being made in my pressure cooker. However, I have made it in the oven a lot of times before. If I can remember, I will leave the link below on how to make it in the oven and all you need is a pot and a towel. I know it sounds a little funny but it's really simple. So I'm gonna go ahead and get my milk heating in here and I'm going to quickly get these things thrown together before we head out the door to the market. The first thing I did was pour the milk in to the pressure cooker and I started heating it up to 180 degrees. And then I got my eggs in a saucepan to start them boiling for the hard boiled eggs that we would need for the pickled eggs later. Then I pulled out my herbs that I had in the freeze dryer and I am a little bit new to freeze drying. I am so excited. All of these herbs came from my garden and I'm just excited to fill my pantry with herbs that I know where they came from. I know what I used on them but these actually were not quite completely dry. So you're gonna see me here in a second put some of them back on and I just decided to put them back into the freeze dryer for a bit longer to make sure that they were fully dry so that I can preserve them for years to come. All right, so I'm actually going to have to pick up some more milk when we go out today because for some reason, and I've only ever had this happen one other time and of course it would happen today while I'm filming but it's also a good reminder that we all make mistakes and whatnot but I actually scalded the milk to the bottom of the pressure cooker and I think some of it has to do with the fact that this is a pressure cooker that I haven't had as long as my previous one that heating element went out on that one and that one was stainless steel and I think that for some reason it just did better at not burning things to the bottom. This one's a nonstick and I think I need to be stirring it as it heats up and since I was kind of busy doing some other things here in the kitchen this morning, I didn't stir it and it's not 100% scalded but there is little brown flakes through it if you've ever done this, you'll know what I mean. So thank goodness it wasn't a huge loss. I'll just grab a couple more of those milks if they have some and we'll try this again whenever I get back from the store. All right, we're back home and we're ready to try this again and I actually grabbed two gallons worth of this milk. I just felt like it was such a good deal and yogurt really holds up well. Homemade yogurt I've been able to have last even a full months in our house so I know that over the next month the girls will be eating this especially with all the fresh berries and fruit coming in from our local farms. So I stirred it while I was heating the milk up this time and then once it hits 180 degrees you wanna let it cool down to 110 so you just remove it from the heat and once it hits 110 degrees I take a little bowl I put some of the yogurt that I made the last time I made yogurt into a bowl and I just add a little bit of the milk and kind of warm it up a bit and then I dump it into the pressure cooker and just put it on the yogurt setting and if you don't have that you can definitely look into how to do it with a towel and if you're getting yogurt for the first time from the store as you're going to make yogurt with because obviously the first time you go to make yogurt you don't have any left over from your last batch just make sure to look at the ingredients and make sure it says live probiotic because that's what you need to create your first yogurt batch. Next I decided to tackle these cherries that I picked up from a local orchard and they were so delicious. I decided to freeze dry these. I don't think it's a super common thing to freeze dry and I discovered how you can make mistakes in freeze drying these in this process but I do think it's something I'm gonna keep on my pantry shelves just because they are such a delicious, crunchy snack. You just have to make sure that you're taking all the right steps to freeze dry them correctly. One mistake I think I made was not double checking every single cherry. If you leave a pit in the middle of the cherry it's going to cause that cherry to have moisture left over inside of it and if you store it that way it can actually ruin the rest of the cherries that have been freeze dried. So making sure that maybe they're cut in half in the future, I may do that just to be sure there is no pits left in the cherries and they are truly dry. At this point my herbs were ready and I pulled them out, I put them into jars and I put the cherries into the freeze dryer and got them started in total. The entire running time between freezing and drying I think was around 30 hours for these cherries and I think it's totally worth it. They were delicious. All right, so this is the next day and a lot of people have different opinions on how long you should let your yogurt sit. I like to let mine sit even up to 16 hours and just like bread yogurt turns out different every time. It can depend on the humidity in the air and the temperature of the room just like when your bread rises sometimes it rises better than others. The same thing goes for yogurt. Sometimes it sets up more thick than other times. So I am going ahead and peeling the eggs and basically to make pickled beet eggs all you need is a jar of pickled beets that has room for the eggs and actually I think I'm gonna pull a few more of the pickled beets out of here so that it's mostly juice so I can fit as many of these eggs inside and then I'm gonna show you all some of my finds from yesterday. I really found some treasures at the bulk food store that we went to and show you how I'm going to make use of them. So a lot of the bulk food stores in our area will mark things down whenever they are trying to get rid of stuff so things that maybe are not quite perfect looking or need to be used up quickly which if you know how to preserve food or you know how to make use of it you can really be able to find groceries at a really cheap price by doing that but you obviously need to know how to use them up and what to do with them. I'm gonna drop these in slowly along the side so hopefully I don't get splashed with beet juice. So quick little update on the cherries that are freeze drying as well. They are definitely going to take some time. I was just checking on them and they're going to probably take a good 24 hours so I'm not sure if I will show you the end result of those in this video or not. We'll have to wait and see how long I end up filming today but I do think they look really good and I think they're gonna be a great way to preserve and enjoy cherries without adding sugar to them. If for some reason I don't have quite enough juice in here sometimes I'll top it off with a little bit of white vinegar and then we kind of have a little debate in our house on how long they need to be soaking in there. I think after probably about five days you're good enough to eat them. My husband thinks that you should leave them alone for at least two weeks. So either way, you can enjoy them. Okay, I got pretty much all of them in there. I think it was about 10 eggs. I actually forgot to count them. So I'm gonna put the lid on this and I'm gonna shake it around just kind of let everything settle before I see how much vinegar or any added brine or whatnot. Yeah, it looks like it could use just a little bit of some extra, got some eggs that aren't quite covered up here. You could also add a little bit of sugar to this as well since you're adding some extra vinegar but I think I'm just gonna add a few drops of stevia because this does have, it's kind of a sweet sour of the pickled beets if you've never had them before. All right, we're good to go and you can see how white they are. They are going to turn a bright purple when they're done. Okay, so here are my treasures that I need to do something with. So they had blueberries. They're from North Carolina, which of course I used to live there and I love finding North Carolina blueberries and they are a dollar, a carton. So I got 12 in here. So I'm going to go ahead and wash these up, pick out any bad ones, which they look really good and put them in the freezer. So either just stay in the freezer for smoothies or blueberry bread or pancakes or I may freeze dry some of them eventually but for now they're just gonna go in the freezer. These wonderful, huge heads of cauliflower. You can see I'll just trim off a few of these spots but overall they look really, really good. The bottoms of them are very good. So I'm actually going to put these through the food processor and make them into cauliflower rice. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with it. I may freeze it or I may put it in the freeze dryer. I'm not sure. And then these were probably the biggest score of all. So these were in bags of three together and they were 69 cents a bag. So crazy, crazy good deal for some really nice. You can see that they are ready to be used which is what we're gonna do today. All right, so my plan to use up these bell peppers is something that's been in the back of my mind for a while. So a couple of months ago I canned up some onions and peppers. We love having them on hand. The broth from it is so good to make rice. Really enjoy that but I don't need that right now but another project I've been wanting to do is making some roasted red bell peppers. So I actually have my husband's smoker slash grill on outside, I'm getting it heated up. I'm going to cut these red ones in half and I'm actually going to char them a little on the grill and then I think I'm gonna try canning them. We buy them that way and the main thing we like to use them for is when we make like a turkey melt or a panini, we love to put some roasted red pepper in there, oh it's so delicious. And then the orange ones and the yellow ones I'm gonna throw through the food processor, vacuum pack them and keep them for pizza. To prepare my peppers for the grill I just cut them in half and removed the seeds and the stem. I kind of wanted them to be as big as possible on the grill so that they wouldn't get too soft too quickly and I would be able to flip them over pretty easily with a pair of tongs. While I was running back and forth and checking the grill I also cored or I guess de-stemmed and de-seeded the other colors of bell peppers and I put them through my food processor and then I put them into individual bags and used my food saver and just vacuum packed them for the freezer. I found that this is the best way to freeze peppers and if you see me pressing on my vacuum sealer I discovered with vacuum sealers and I've had a couple different ones that when it comes to something that has liquid in it and these still kind of were wet and had some liquid sometimes adding a little pressure to the top of the vacuum sealer helps it to seal better. So at this point my roasted peppers were done. I pulled them off and I obviously was ready to throw the other peppers into the freezer while those were cooling down so that I could slice them. I went ahead and used the shredding disc on my food processor to make my cauliflower rice and I'm gonna end up freeze drying this cauliflower rice. However, if you don't have a freeze dryer you can totally freeze it and that's pretty much what I'm going to be doing here is some of it's going in the freezer and then whatever I could fill the freeze dryer with I did as well. So I started a pot of boiling water and I blanched these for about 30 seconds. So right around like 20 seconds I started scooping them out. So somewhere between 20 and 30 seconds is how long they got blanched. All right, so I'm not gonna lie that cauliflower mess was pretty wild but that is one benefit to doing things in bulk especially messy projects like making the rice cauliflower which we'll get to in a little bit is that you make the mess all at one time and you don't have to do it again for a while. So that is helpful. So what I'm actually gonna do is show you all this is what I tend to buy to do roasted red peppers and actually I decided to pull it out and pretty much look at what the ingredients are in here very, very simple, some water, some salt and these here are in slices. I think I'm going to take my roasted peppers and make them into a little bit bigger slices. I bought them that way before and they just seem to give you a nicer slice to lay inside of a panini or something like that and of course if you're making hummus it doesn't really matter what size slices they are. So I'm going to see, I don't know how many of these I'll need. This is a little bit too big of a jar for us actually so I'm going to do them in the little jelly jars and this will be a perfect size. I'm just slicing up the peppers but if you are going to freeze the cauliflower rice all you need to do is put it into bags after it's cooled down from being blanched. I actually took it from the blanched hot water and I put it into a colander and sprayed it with cold water so it would completely stop cooking and then I was able to put it into freezer bags. Okay so here I am putting a little bit of citric acid into each of these jars. Whenever it comes to something that's really brightly colored like strawberries or these red peppers you want to add some citric acid to help keep that bright color throughout the year. Otherwise they will fade, they'll lose their color as they sit in the jars on your canning shelves. So I'm doing that and I'm also adding some of my pink Himalayan salt which is one of my favorite reasons to can your own home canned goods because you can use a much healthier salt option than what most store-bought canned goods have in them. Then I just filled them with water leaving about a quarter inch head space and put them into my pressure canner. While they were in the pressure canner I went ahead and got started on dinner for this day. So we were just doing a really simple dinner and a lot of times at least once a week we'll do steaks on the grill. And so then I just pull out a few simple sides and so I took some of my home canned baked beans. I can leave the video link below for the video where I made those if you want to know how I make them. And I added just a little bit of water. The baked beans I make is a little bit more of a concentrate and then I just add water to it to heat them up. And then these are the spices my husband likes to use on our steaks. If you are curious they make amazing, amazing steaks. So he took them out to the grill and then I just took the cooled cauliflower rice and filled up my freeze dryer trays. I think these took around 24 hours to completely freeze dry and popped them in the freeze dryer and I got the corn on the cob in the water because that's what we were having steak, baked beans and corn on the cob for dinner. Such an amazing summertime meal. Okay, so I've had a really big request particularly after I showed my last cellar tour which I will be showing you one from this house very soon. I'm excited to share that. But a lot of you wanted to know how to can strawberries especially since this is strawberry season in most of the Northeast area. So what I do is I take the strawberries, wash them off. I cut the tops off of them. And I really think the best thing to do is to can them whole because you're going to be heating them. You don't want them to get softer than they have to. So most of the time I end up just canning the entire thing unless they're massive strawberries. And these were fairly large. So I did cut some of them in half. I fill the jar up to the neck and you're going to want to do that because they're going to shrink up. So as much as you can get in there, that is the way to go. And then I make myself kind of a, I don't know if you call it a brine, a sauce, brine would have salt in it, I think. I'm not sure, but maybe a syrup would be the right word even though it's not as thick as syrup. So I put half a cup of sugar per quart of strawberries I have into a kettle. And then I put a cup per quart I have. So I had seven quarts. So I put three and a half cups of sugar and I put seven cups of water in there. And you want to just heat it until the sugar dissolves. While that's heating, I put half a teaspoon of citric acid into each jar. Like I mentioned earlier, it just helps to keep the color. After that, I take that syrup, I want to say brine, but it's not the right word. That's syrup and I just divide it out between my jars. I don't do exact, I just watch on the side about when they all look evenly distributed. And then I fill them up the rest of the way with some water. So once you've got that, I wipe the rims, I put the lids and the rings on and I put it in a water bath canner for 18 minutes. You pull them out, let them cool and this is how they look. And they look amazing. I've told you so many reasons why I like to can strawberries. One of them being for strawberry lemonade, but we use this in our homemade yogurt and baked oatmeal. The girls really love just eating these right out of the jar. They often ask for that. And the texture of them, I get that question a lot. What is the texture of these strawberries? I would say that they are pretty much the texture of a salt out frozen strawberry. And so they just work great with softer foods. You could even flavor applesauce with these in a blender. Just keep your eye out and I will show you many more ways to use this, including making some strawberry pie filling right from these jars. So you don't need to can the pie filling right away. You can just can the strawberries and then figure out later what you want to use them for. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed today's video. I am just so excited to show you more of what we are up to. If you're new around here, don't forget to subscribe. Give this video a like and I will be chatting with you all in the comments. I love reading your comments and I'll see you guys in my next video.