 Hey guys, welcome back to my channel, welcome back to my home, welcome back to my kitchen. So it has been a while since I have done a true good solid meal prep video and I'm really excited to start in to this new series I'm kind of doing on budget friendly meals, how to shop budget friendly, how to prepare delicious nutritious meals for your family while saving a penny along with food preservation and just ways to efficiently feed your family in the day and age that we are in right now and I feel like that tips and tricks for that purpose are so needed and I'm excited to share with you the things that I have learned through doing a lot of meal prepping and a lot of healthy cooking for my family, things that my mother and my mother-in-law have taught me along the way. I've just really gathered a lot of fun things that I'd love to share with you. So we are going to be tackling some different recipes today, we're going to jump right into that, but I didn't want to forget to mention that I will be making some extract later on in this video, I know I mentioned it in the last video I put up. I've been making a few extracts, I think I have three or four in my cupboard that are developing and getting their good bold flavors, but I really want to make an orange extract today, so we will probably tackle that a little later on. In the meantime, we're going to dive right in and get started. So one little project that I've been meaning to accomplish is to make some single serving soups, mainly for myself and my husband. He loves in these colder months to take soup with him to work. He's a fencer, he builds fences, so he's outside in the cold air, so having a thermos of something warm to eat along with him is really important. And I also love having something easy and healthy right on the shelf to just heat up and keep going through my day. So the first thing that you're going to see here is cutting up these bell peppers that were in those freezer packs. And if you guys remember I mentioned in the last video that I had found a really good deal on bell peppers, so I took advantage of it. And that's one thing that I always say with budget, shopping, and keeping prices down is when things are on sale, buy a lot of it, find ways to preserve it, and then you will have it for lots of other days whenever it's not on sale or the price is doubled or whatnot. So it's nice to have it preserved in a couple different ways. You all saw me canning the peppers and onions in the last video, and then here you're seeing the packages whenever I vacuum packed some of the bell peppers in strips, and it makes it nice because if I want to use the strips I can, or like in this recipe, I wanted to dice up the peppers so I just chopped them up. So this recipe is kind of like a chicken tortilla soup recipe. I'm going to try to find the link for it or something similar to it in the description box. I'm always tweaking recipes, so I don't know that I followed it totally to the tea, but that's pretty much what this is. So whenever I pour this into a bowl and heat it up or in a kettle and heat it up, I will be adding some sour cream to it just to make it a little bit creamy. But if you try to can milk in something like this, it will more than likely curdle. I want to say a big thank you to DreamPairs for sponsoring today's video. I got three pairs of footwear from DreamPairs that I have been loving. The first pair I got was a lace up winter fur snow boot. Since we live in central Pennsylvania, there's a lot of snow and so having multiple boot options in the wintertime that keep the water out are super important. I also got a waterproof Sherpa snow boot that I've been really liking as well. It's kind of a shorter, more of a brown toned boot and I love that. And they have sneaker options and a lot of other styles as well. So I got these breathable non-slip knit sneakers whenever I'm on the go working in the kitchen. Just on the days when I am on my feet a lot, it's so nice to have a comfortable sneaker that I can throw on and wear all day without my feet hurting and giving me a lot of great cushion. Their site includes a variety of other shoe styles. I recommend you check all of their different categories out. Each pair of footwear that I've shown you today also come in a variety of other colors as well. I was very impressed at their price point. Their shoes are extremely affordable. If you head to DreamPairs website and use my exclusive coupon code Adeline, you will get 20% off on your order. Plus they have fast shipping two to five days for delivery in the U.S. All right. So back to our prepping. So here I'm using a new tool that I recently found thanks to Three Rivers Homestead. I love all of her great ideas over there, Jessica. And one of the things that she uses is this garlic smasher. It's kind of a really easy way to mince garlic. And to be honest, I've been really tired of cleaning out my garlic press. And it just is getting old. So I decided, you know what? It is time for a new tool. So this was really inexpensive. I will try to remember to link it below. It was a big help and I'm going to love using it to mince other things. So this recipe was pretty simple. I had some jalapeños, which is nice to have that extra spicy heat, especially for my husband when he's cold. And I also put gloves on because I don't like my hands on fire when I'm cutting up hot peppers. And so when you're thinking of soups to can, one thing you can do is can everything but the milk or can everything but the cream cheese or whatever you would add in to make it creamy. I know that that's something that I'm always looking for are creamy soups and it is hard to be able to know how to preserve them. But that is one way you can do it. Something else I want to try out is adding in powdered milk. I use powdered milk a lot. I use powdered milk to make yogurt and other things. I have a few discount grocery stores in my area that I can often find powdered milk at a discount. And to be honest, in yogurt, we really can't tell the difference that I used powdered milk mixed up or if I used fresh milk. And with the yogurt, you're getting all of the great probiotics that it offers, whether it's powdered milk or fresh milk. So that's something to keep in mind also with the fact that sometimes, depending on the store, powdered milk can be cheaper than fresh milk. So using that for a milk kefir or for yogurt is something that works most of the time. So what I am doing here is I'm mixing together the last of my ingredients. I'm not cooking anything unless it was already pre-cooked like my chicken that was shredded up in cans and pre-cooked. But when you can something, it is going to cook that stuff down. So I'd rather not cook it more times than I have to. So a lot of times I will mix up the ingredients as raw as I can. Like I said, this chicken was already cooked and that's what I wanted to use in this. But I could have also used raw chicken diced up and it would have done just as good of a job. So right before I put everything in the canner, I wiped the rims with some white vinegar. It's just good practice, especially when something has fat in it or meats in it. Just to make sure those rims are good and clean and everything is all going to seal well. And of course, you could definitely can anything like this in a quart size. But like I said, a lot of this is for lunches. And so having, you know, a cup and a half to two cups of soup in a pint is a perfect personal size. All right, so per usual, we've got a lot going on in the house right now. There's people getting meals and whatnot. But we're going to still keep on rolling with what I'm working on here. So my canner is not completely full with that soup and I don't like to run a half full canner. So I'm going to go ahead and whip up another meal. That's a fast meal that I can pull out. That'll be single servings as well. And it's going to be a really easy gumbo. I actually pulled out one of my two or three gallon, two gallon buckets here to mix it because I think we're going to end up with even more soup than we did with the last recipe. So I have all of the ingredients here, my simple already frozen bell peppers that I got on a super good sale and vacuum packed a while ago and I have a bunch of them in the freezer. So they're really nice. I kind of vacuum packed them about what one pepper would be. I am doubling this recipe. We're going to have sausage in it. I have chicken, chicken broth, still trying to get through some of my store canned diced tomatoes. So I'm just using them up for different things. And then I actually have some okra that we're going to put in this as well. This is a frozen okra. So I'm just kind of letting it sit out while I'm getting everything prepared so that it's closer to the same temperature. We don't want like frozen hunks of stuff in the jars. You're kind of asking for broken jars possibly if it would be kind of getting messed up with all the hot going on in the jars and there's still some frozen pieces inside. So we're just going to let those fall out. We've got garlic and onions. So we're just going to kind of do the same thing and chop everything up. Put it in here, stir it really well and then fill jars and I want to get the canner running. Okay, so just like I mixed up everything in the bowl. This was just a nice size container to do this, especially if you're doubling up soup recipes because sometimes soups of the single version of the recipe are really big to begin with. So you double it and you get a lot going on. So I thought that a gumbo would be a good soup dish. I'm not sure if gumbo is considered soup. Let me know in the comments. If you're from the south, is gumbo considered a soup or is it considered more of like a casserole or a stew maybe? I'm not sure. So I chopped up some sausage. Again, I pulled out the bell peppers I have frozen. I was so thankful for these and I didn't have to spend any extra for fresh bell peppers and I had these right in my freezer ready to go for me and I did blanch those before I froze them. I wanted to mention that. And then I added in some celery. I've been thinking of ways that I would like to preserve some celery just to have it on hand in case I don't have it and I don't want to make that extra trip to the store to have to spend gas on that. So I've been looking at possibly canning some of it because that would make wonderful like celery juice or celery broth along with it to dump right into my soups. It would give a big celery flavor or possibly to blanch it and freeze it. I'm not sure. So if you preserve celery, let me know what how you've done it because I haven't done any yet and I just would like to add that to my pantry. So I also diced up a onion and I think I have the recipe on mine or it's possibly from a recipe book for this. So it either or I will leave the link below and then of course I'm adding in some Creole seasoning and this was a bit on the spicy side, but it was so delicious. To be honest with you, I think this is my favorite soup that I've canned so far. It might be in Thai with my chili and that's really why I decided to start doing this is since it's gotten cooler. We've been leaning into eating up a lot of chili and I had done a big batch of that this spring with my mom and my sister-in-laws and I'm like, I think if I have more soups in the pantry, we will use them and homemade soups are so great. You can add a lot higher quality ingredients than the store-bought soups and one of my biggest reasons for doing homemade soups is I can do the pink Himalayan salt which has a way higher mineral count in it than a lot of salts that are used in pre-packaged foods and things like that and I can also control how much salt goes into them because a lot of store-bought canned soups are very salty. So those are my reasons and I just love having home canned soup around and easy to grab and go. Okay, so I have a pressure cooker that I can double that. So I put my water in to get it all going. I've talked very, very little about pressure canning here on my channel, but I'm plan to change that and I want to share more tips and tricks with pressure canning. You definitely do not need an expensive pressure canner. This one is pretty inexpensive, but I did make sure that I purchased the correct size where you can put two layers of pint jars. So there is 20 pint jars in here which will create 20 single serving meals, which I'm really excited about and it is heating up now and I wanted to share with you if you're making a soup or any kind of meal where you've got different components going on. You're not just canning green beans or something like that. You just want to look in your manual for your pressure canner and kind of go over the different ingredients that you used and find the ingredient in your recipe that has the highest amount of time and for the pressure canning and then go with that. So say like my sausage in the gumbo was the one with the longest amount of time and I needed to pressure can it for 90 minutes at 10 pounds pressure, then I would just do the whole thing 90 minutes, 10 pounds pressure just making sure that it is getting canned thoroughly and correctly. But that's just kind of how I go about figuring out how long to do something whenever it's got a lot of components going on and you can kind of do a little bit of guesswork off of it because your manual may not list every single vegetable or whatnot that you've put into your soup. So just kind of use some common sense and you will figure out your timing for it. So I think this is going to be for an hour and 15 minutes. I need to double check in my manual at 10 to 11 pounds pressure and then I will have all of those meals ready to pull out. All right friends, so we have had our soup sitting for over 24 hours. So it's able to make sure that everything sealed. I had one faulty seal for some reason, but other than that, I actually put a second batch of soup in and I did sort of a creamless Zappa Tuscana. I think that's how you say that soup right. All I know is it always makes me think of Olive Garden because that's the first place I've ever had it, but either way, we ended up with 40 pints of single-serve soup and we've actually used a few of them and they are delicious and oh so convenient on busy days whenever I need something healthy and I am a little less tempted to eat something that will make me feel not so good. So I'm really excited about having these on the shelf. I just washed them up and labeled them. So they're ready to go down to the seller to my shelving and yes, I know I've had so many requests on a tour of my seller and where I keep all of my long-term storage slash my long-term pantry. So we are working on that. There is a few things I want to get organized a little better before I go ahead and show you all that. So I'm happy with the soup. It's been a good productive project and now we're going to move on to extracts and I'm going to pull out the extracts I already have going and then I'm going to show you what I'm going to do with some of these oranges after we're done making the extract. All right, so I am a little bit new to making extracts. However, I've done a lot of researching and learned a few tips and tricks along the way and I'm excited to make some orange extract. I feel like there's a lot of uses for it. Not only does it smell amazing and I may end up eventually putting some in some homemade cleaner, but of course I can bake with it. I can make orange cranberry muffins. I mean really all the things that you would use regular extract from the store with. So I'm excited to do this. I don't think I'm going to need all of these oranges. So we'll use them for something else, but I wanted to show you the extracts I've already started. So this is my vanilla extract. I've got cinnamon and of course they're already looking very bold in their color. When you start the extract, it just looks clear and you can see your like cinnamon sticks inside of there. So I know that you can't really see it, but I promise there is a whole bunch of cinnamon sticks in here. This already smells very, very good. I've been kind of opening them and smelling them. This is my lemon, which I'm extremely excited about. I love lemon, the flavor of lemon, anything. So I think I'm definitely going to be using this a lot. And then I also did a mint and mint is something that takes a long time to extract. So most of these things I will be checking in about six months. I started them almost a month ago and I'll be kind of testing them out in about six months and then whenever a year is up is when you want to start taking the solids out of whatever you are going to extract. We're going to get into that, but while I'm talking to you, I'm going to go ahead and start peeling these oranges because the zest of the citrus fruit, whether it's limes, lemons or oranges is actually what you're going to extract from and you don't want much white part. So I think a nice little Y shaped or V shaped, however they refer to these peelers is really convenient when it comes to doing this. So you just want to go along and just take off just the top little kind of sliver of the orange and it's a little bit time consuming. So I figured I would talk to you while I'm doing this and it is a labor of love because in the end you will have your own orange extract. So you can choose what you want to extract with some people use bourbon, but most of the time people are using vodka, a clear vodka and you need to be at least 80 proof for it to extract correctly and another option if you want an alcohol free extract is you can use vegetable glycerin. I have vegetable glycerin on hand and also regular 80 proof vodka on hand because I also make herbal tinctures and so those are things that you can use to make an herbal tincture as well. So it's it's kind of really the same concept because if you're doing like an echinacea herbal tincture you're going to allow the herb to sit in the alcohol or the vegetable glycerin for you know a certain amount of time until it extracts from that product or from that fruit or or herb or whatnot. So either way any way you do it is going to be good. One of the reasons I haven't used vegetable glycerin very much in things is because yes it doesn't taste quite as sour. So if you're making like a herbal cold tincture for children it's a little easier for them to take it but it is very high in sugar in fact most of the time it's higher in sugar than like even sugar is so you have to really think about that because right now I'm making a dental tincture and I don't really want to be swishing with something that has a really high sugar content or if you're someone like me who has to eat a pretty low sugar diet just for health reasons you know those are all different components but some people can't you do any alcohol for health reasons so those those would be reasons of why you would choose something over the other. I know that certain things like bourbon make certain extracts taste really good like a vanilla bourbon flavor is delicious obviously but you're not going to get quite as pure of a vanilla flavor by doing the bourbon okay so I thought I would go ahead and show you the back are kind of the back of these peels so that you can see what I'm talking about so this white part right here I really don't want a whole lot of that you mainly want them to be nice and thin like this and the reason for that is if you leave the white part of the lemon lime or orange in the extract it will make it bitter so that's why I am peeling ever so lightly across these to get the zest off so a fun little fact about the vanilla bean and I didn't know this even whenever I bought my vanilla beans and I'm really excited to know this is vanilla beans are kind of perpetual extractors so they are something that you can use for years and years there are a lot of cooks out there that have had their vanilla beans well over 10 years and basically what you want to do is about every six months or so you want to take maybe about half of the extract out of the jar and then just replenish it with your extractor so you want to replenish it with your your vodka or whatnot and let it sit another six months and you can pull some more out of that jar and replenish it again so like I said I didn't know that but I'm really excited to know that because that is a huge money saver when it comes to vanilla extract we all know that pure vanilla extract is pretty pricey compared to a synthetic so if you get yourself a set of vanilla beans I will leave a link below for the recipe for vanilla extract so you know about how many beans you'll need depending on the size jar that you're going to be filling up you can have vanilla extract go on and on for years and definitely get your money's worth out of vanilla beans alright so it took about seven oranges to fill this up with the zest and I didn't fill it you know clear to the top but I would say I got a majority of the jar filled up so now all you have to do is pour in your vodka and it's really that easy isn't any special craziness to this it's fairly fairly simple so I'm just going to pour it in until it gets to the top and then you want to remember to shake these every once in a while a lot of people say every day but I'm going to be honest with you I don't remember to shake them every single day but I just remember whenever I can to shake them so you want to make sure you have a good seal on the top and just shake it around a little bit and that is it isn't this just beautiful I think that they're so pretty I had them all sitting on my counter for a while just because they're so so pretty but haven't tucked away into a cabinet they should technically be in a dark space and that's all you need so then you'll just want to date the top so you know when you started them and you can check them around three months you can check them around six months the main thing you want to remember is a year you do want to remove the solids so you can look into I know some of these can be a little bit perpetual like the vanilla beans but I'm not exactly sure which one so if you look that up I'm sure you can figure it out I know the cinnamon sticks can be like that as well where if you empty out at least half of the vodka and you refill it and let it sit another six months it will be golden so my kitchen smells so citrusy right now it smells really good so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to grab my dehydrator trays I'm going to teach you all a little bit about how having a dehydrator on hand can save you a penny and so I have a nine tray dehydrator I believe I'm saying this right when you say the brand is called Excalibur Excalibur and a lot I get questions about that and I haven't really talked about it before it's a great large dehydrator that is very very convenient but I think these oranges are not going to fill the whole thing so to save a little bit of money I had bought a little bit too much of the cilantro for the chicken tortilla soup that I made and so I'm going to take that bunch and lay it out on a tray dry that I don't worry too much about flavors transferring because I know that's a question you know will my oranges taste like cilantro and that kind of thing the main thing I wouldn't do is like onions and garlic with anything else those would be their own but when it comes to most of the stuff it's okay and then if I have any space left after I've sliced up the oranges and I put the cilantro in I also want to get some ginger dehydrating we use that in tea a lot and I don't have a very big back stock of that so I bought a bunch of it the other day and I have it in my refrigerator just for whenever the dehydrator isn't completely full I can throw in some sliced ginger and I don't really mind if my oranges taste a little gingery and I don't think the ginger will go into the cilantro and if it does it'll be fine it's all kind of flavors that kind of go together so kind of keep that in mind when you are dehydrating I've never done a lot of ginger so I'm not sure how it transfers but we'll see so let's load up the dehydrator alright so you may be wondering what I'm going to be using the orange slices for so we like I said we drink a lot of tea and with it going into colder seasons when you have colds and things like that having dried citrus to put into your tea is just something that's excellent and obviously making up simmer pots is another thing if you don't know what a simmer pot is it's basically something that you you just take a saucepan and put it on the stove with different things that have great aroma like cinnamon sticks and oranges and cranberries and things like that to make your house smell good kind of as a healthier alternative to candles and things like that so that's actually what I'm saving all these leftovers here for is to make a nice little simmer pot this afternoon on the stove to make the house just smell like fall and smell delicious and our dehydrator is in our basement and believe me our house our basement or our cellar wherever you whatever you call it is going to smell very orangey over the next 24 hours or so finished loading up the dehydrator here but I wanted to say a big thank you to you guys for watching today and spending time with me today I hope that there was something here that was helpful to you or you've learned something new or maybe I just brightened your day a little bit I do hope that that is the case subscribe if you're new and I'm really excited about this series and just kind of show you guys a little bit of what I've been up to in learning a lot of new things especially with learning to kind of stay within a good budget and feed my family well so leave me a comment below I love hearing your feedback and give this video like and I'll see you all in the next one.