Eat What U Can, Can What U Can't

Written this past Thursday.

I’m in my element today. No farmhand stuff…just house stuff. My kitchen was clean and now looks like … I’m afraid to say what. I have baskets and baskets of tomatoes that I picked just this morning. I’m writing to you while I am waiting for water to boil and for my bread to rise. I’m fixin’ to bake a loaf of bread and can a bunch of tomatoes. I’m the epitome of multi-tasking…well, more like the reasonable facsimile. I’ve been so domestic the last couple days that even Martha Stewart wouldn’t be able to match my skills.

Canning, sewing, gardening (vegetables and flowers), chicken ranching, housekeeping.

Been thinkin’ ‘bout how to be more self-sufficient. Remember a few blogs back when I wrote a parody for Country Boy Can Survive? One of the lines of the real song goes something like this: “my dad taught me how to live off the land”... Well, that’s what I’d like to do more of. Not sing…I mean live off the land. I’m doing a fair job of the food preservation. “We eat what we can and we can what we can’t.” I heard that line a long time ago and I have in my mind that Mickey Mouse said it. I don’t know…I may have just made that up.

The whole meat thing has me perplexed. I KNOW for a fact that I cannot *CANNOT* butcher something that I’ve raised. I mean me myself. Someone else can do it. I just can’t. A couple months ago I was all “Oh, I’m so awesome that I can chop a chicken’s head off..” Let me tell you one of my hens became crippled somehow, I had to put her out of her misery. Well, I did it…..and I came in an laid on the couch and cried for half an hour. So…yeah, anyway…I’ll have to buy meat from someone…I know it’s not self-sufficient.

But in the meantime, I’m making homemade tomato soup. Yeah, I know I can buy it pretty cheap, but then it wouldn’t be my own. There’s something very satisfying about shelves full of stuff I canned myself. Ok, I’m a geek…so what. Go ahead and make fun…whatever. I have the canners and the jars…..so…

I had to buy the canners…but the jars? Man, people can’t wait to give them to me. I think I’ve bought a few pint jars and some jelly jars…that’s it. I have probably over 150 jars total. Most of them are empty right now…but I’m hopin’ to change that.