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You can stop congratulating me.........

So in my last post, I was kinda proud of myself that I had an old keurig-style coffee maker in my garage. This, I thought, had saved me the cost of buying a new Keurig when the old one gave up the ghost. Well, not really. I got 4-5 cups of coffee from the garage-sourced machine and it stopped putting water through. I've done everything I know to do and I can't make it work. The coffee literally emerges at a rate of about 20 drops a minute. And then, long before one has collected a cup full, it stops. So you start it up again and you get a bit more in your cup. But, if you manage eventually to fill up the cup, you're about to drink a nice cold cup of coffee. It takes so long to collect a cup that what's been collected is cold before you can drink it.

So finally last night I ordered a Keurig from Walmart. I am waiting anxiously to see what I get. The last time I ordered from Walmart, I ordered a trash can I could use in my kitchen. It came on time, but I got a square trashcan and a round lid. No way the two pieces would work together.........Hopefully, in that the coffee maker will have been packed and sealed in a box when it arrived at Walmart, they will simply slap a label on the manufacturer's box and deliver it. Or, they will put the manufacturer's box in a Walmart box and deliver it without ever having to open the manufacturers box. This should all work out fine unless Walmart delivers my coffee pot to some other house..........I saved about $15 ordering from Walmart rather than Amazon, but I'm wondering if the worry isn't worth more than $15. 

Okay let's talk about canning. I have stuff to can sitting around. And I own about 30 empty jars. But, I've been stalled, thinking about the process. I would feel better if I had additional empty jars. I will begin to feel insecure when I have no more jars. So the first problem is securing more jars. I've about decided to do a delivery order from a local store and pay the delivery fee just to get some additional jars into the house. I have 4 beef roasts in the freezer. They're all the cheaper cuts and canning them is the perfect solution to my desire for "tender" beef. The meat will essentially be cooked at high temperature in a vacuum (so under pressure) for an hour and a half. Yup, it'll come out tender, no doubt. I also have a pretty good stash of dried beans. It makes good sense to can these. When I want beans, I can open a jar and heat some up--as opposed to soaking them overnight and then cooking them for hours. The final thing i need to can right now is sweet potatoes. But I don't have very many sweet potatoes, certainly not enough for a canner load. And I am too tight with my money to run a canner for an hour half empty--I don't want to waste the gas on my gas stove. I guess the final problem is not knowing exactly how many jars I'll need for either the sweet potatoes or the beef. One can estimate about a pound of meat in a pint jar, but it's only an estimate, and I don't even have an estimate for the sweet potatoes--it's just however many chunks of sweet potato will fit in a jar. 

The next problem is my right wrist. The sweet potatoes will have to be peeled. Both the meat and the sweet potatoes will have to be cut into chunks. I am concerned that my right wrist may really object to all that. Most of the time my wrist doesn't bother me at all, but every now and then it gives me a substantial shot of pain. And one of the times I can count on that happening is when I've been using it a lot. So, I'm none too sure about all this peeling and chopping........

What I've finally worked out in my head is that beans, meat, and sweet potatoes all have to be processed in the canner for the same amount of time. This somewhat eases the "full canner" problem. If I only have enough sweet potatoes for 3 jars, I can fill the canner with jars of meat or beans. 

I think I can parboil the sweet potatoes for 3-5 minutes in the skins and then the skins should slip right off. My fear is that the parboiling as well as the canning time may turn the sweet potatoes to mush........I found one reference that says it can be done so I guess I'll give it a try in the interest of saving my wrist.

I am thinking I can tackle this on a 3-day round robin schedule. I can peel and chop potatoes and keep them under water til time to pack the jars. I can cut up a roast or two and pack in a ziploc bag overnight in the fridge. That would be day 1. On Day 2, I would fill enough jars with whatever to fill the canner and actually do the canning. Day 3 would be clean up, checking seals on the jars, washing the jars, labeling them, putting them away, and restoring the kitchen to sanity. Then, on Day 4, start again. Anytime I end up with less than a canner load, fill in with beans. 

As best I can figure it, that's a workable plan for a little old lady with bad wrists. I DO have a bottle of ibuprofen and I know how to use it if the need arises. I just hate to put my liver to the trouble of processing ibuprofen if I don't have to.......

So, I think tomorrow will be Day 1 in this scheme and we'll see how it goes..............

Sometimes it pays to be a packrat

My beloved Keurig has died. I have determined that cats may well have 9 lives, but Keurigs are limited to 4. It has died 3 previous times. Each time, I've managed to resuscitate it. Not this time. I pulled an old drip pot out of the garage and hated it as much as I've hated it since I first got a Keurig. It makes too much coffee. It doesn't even begin to measure the water til it gets to 4 cups. And that still leaves me wondering how to scale down the grounds for just 4 cups of water. Additionally, if I get it right, the first cup is grand. However, whatever is left in the pot soon becomes grotesque--I hate "burned" coffee. I searched through Amazon, looking for a Keurig like my recently deceased one, only to decide I don't want to spend that kind of money. It's not one of the pricey ones, but even being a stripped down model, I am concerned that money is going to get awfully tight around here and I might wish I hadn't bought a Keurig replacement. This necessitated a thorough search of the garage. I THOUGHT I'd bought another cheaper Keurig-lookalike on the event of a prior Keurig death. I found it and it's working. And I didn't have to give Amazon any money!

I need to apologize. I've been gone a long time. A major part of my excuse is the malfunctioning of my computer and a computer guy I completely trust that works a full time job as well as a part-time job. That means if he can't get here, I wait. The wait just to get the computer picked up was more than a week. Then the fix and return delivery was another 2 days. I read 8 books while I was waiting. But it's all good now. I have, however, been dealing with a dandy case of the shakes. Data entry with shaking hands is a daunting task, but today is a good day. So, here I am.

Can I tell you an Alissa story? She's been here going on 5 months now. And on only 2 occasions has someone come to the door and been admitted. First time, clients. Second time, computer guy. She barked her fool head off when the computer guy came and I regarded that as a good thing. Anyone outside the house would definitely know there's a dog in here. And she doesn't sound like some dainty little ankle biter, also good. Anyway, then the computer guy came, it took me a while to get her to shush. And once she got quiet, I temporarily transferred my attention away from her to pay attention to the computer guy. When next I looked for her, I found her about 8 inches from my left elbow. He was on the far side of my desk. She was between him and me, eyes glued to him. I felt very well and faithfully guarded. It's the only time she's ever sat there. 

Bad timing: I have decided I have to back on my breakfast green smoothies. First, I decided I'd not been taking my potassium supplements as i should. Then I read that potassium actually helps with neuropathy pain which was causing me great consternation, particularly at bed time. So I started back on the potassium supplements and the neuropathy pain is all but gone. But, I was still extremely fatigued. I looked at how I've been eating and realized a nutritionist would be frantic. So, it's back on the breakfast green smoothies. It's only been a couple of days, but already I have more energy. I'm not so sure about the cost, however. Prices on everything have gone up. I can still afford kale, spinach, bananas and oranges. I got lucky and got a 2 # box of strawberries this week. However, the growing season for fresh fruit will be gone soon enough and have you checked the price of frozen fruit? Oh, my Lord, they're outrageous around here. I don't always manage to stick to the smoothies like I should, but suppose I make it through the summer. Then what? Then I will have to rely on frozen fruit and that's a scary concept. I've given up on half and half in my coffee to trade off for fruit in the future.

My parents always used milk in their coffee. As far as I was concerned, that gave the coffee the look of dirty water. Totally unappetizing. I used powdered coffee creamer or that flavored stuff for years. Then I read a bit about hydrogenated fat and swore off. I turned to half and half and have hung onto that for years. However, recently it occurred to me that my parents used SKIM milk. No wonder it was so awful. I have experimented and found that whole milk is not too objectionable in coffee. So, we'll try that for a while.........

That's it for now. I promise "I shall return".