A Big Day in the Kitchen

I had a great day today! Good news of the day is that I popped down to the dermatologist and got the two little stitches out of my chin. I am SO excited about that! It was getting pretty itchy. Good news from that biopsy, it seems that what is on my chin is a sunspot which they are not concerned about but would like to keep an eye on. I get to return and see them in about eight months.

With that good news I ran a few errands and took on Aldi all by myself for the first time in over a month. When I came home the kids helped unload the groceries and we got to work on dinner and some of the veggies. There was a lot to do. The plan for dinner was cottage pie. My recipe has evolved and changed a little over the years. Once I started cooking gluten free for Zachary I stopped using cream of mushroom soup and started using pasta sauce.

Not everyone loves pasta sauce in our house, in lasagna they like less pasta and more cheese, in spaghetti they like more pasta and less sauce. So, not long ago I started making my own "cream of" soup to cook with. You will find a similar recipe here although I am not sure where I got the original recipe. It works pretty slick, I keep it in an airtight container and have written on it the recipe for the dry mix and on the other side, I wrote how to cook it up. Dawn mashed all of the potatoes. They were yummy!

We cooked up two five pound bags of potatoes because I was  hoping to make one for supper and make up two for the freezer. That makes two more freezer meals and makes me happy! Stacey cut up all of the cucumbers and we used about half of them for cucumber salad for supper and she cut the rest a little thicker and put them in the fridge for snacks (the children in this house are always hungry!)

I was excited to find a zucchini pickle recipe...a SIMPLE zucchini pickle recipe and I had all of the ingredients in my cupboard. Unfortunately one of jars in the batch cracked but I fished everything out before it broke in the canner. The little bit of time that the zucchini was in the jar waiting for the canner, gave it enough of the taste when I tried it that I am pretty excited about how the pickles will taste. I have six quarts of zucchini pickles.

I shredded the rest of the large zucchinis and put eight 4-cup bags in the freezer for breads and muffins through the winter. Stacey snapped the beans that David picked this afternoon and there are a few smaller zucchinis to fry up in the next few days.

Never having any experience with cabbage and sauerkraut, I stuffed a whole head of cabbage into a quart jar and had about 1/3 of the jar empty at the top. This is my second fermenting attempt after the curried zucchini last week. I have enjoyed trying new things and I always forget how much I love this time of year when I can make most of my supper from my back yard.

Tonight we had okra, Stacey's awesome cucumber salad and the cottage pie made with Dawn's help. It was a perfectly yummy meal and the kitchen was full with many hands and lots of conversation and time with my girls. Good stuff!