Backyard Eggs

Not my backyard but my friend down the street – her backyard eggs. It was so nice to have an omelette from eggs that were about 24 hours old!

I’m back to loving breakfast again.

Here’s everything set up assembly line style, which seems to work great for me and my absent mindedness.

Not virtue signaling here (do I have to keep saying that? Probably!)

Front row: whole wheat bread that I made by grinding hard red, hard white wheat and Einkorn. Eggs from my friend. Vince doesn’t like as much pepper as I do so his are in a separate bowl. Front row is Vince’s. Sausage from a jar that I canned.

Back row: my eggs, cranberries I drained from the cranberry juice, onions and jalapeno peppers I sauteed for my omelette.

Almost every time I mention canning, someone will ask me if we really use all those jars of food. YES! We do.

This is one day’s worth of food in jars.

Front row, left to right:

• Elderberry juice (from our elderberries)
• Cranberry juice
• Peach jam made from peaches from a friend’s tree
• Breakfast sausage

Back row, left to right:

• Enchilada meat for dinner
• Freeze dried mushrooms to go into the enchilada casserole
• Green beans (because we’ve had black beans twice this week already)
• Dehydrated squash from quite a while back that will be made into a squash casserole.

The juice is drained from the cranberries and I’ll make into whole wheat cranberry muffins today. Then I combine the cranberry juice with equal amounts of elderberry juice. The cranberry juice is sweetened and it’s sweet enough that the elderberry juice doesn’t require any added sugar.

Sometimes I will put the strained cranberries in the freezer and when I get enough of them, I’ll freeze dry them, run them through the blender and they’re great for adding to baked goods, icing and pink salad dressing. I use this recipe but I use avocado oil instead of canola oil and I don’t add sugar because the cranberries were sweetened in the “juice”.

We usually use at least 25 jars during the week. The jars for the cranberry and elderberry juice will last us several days; the enchilada casserole will last us two days and the rest will go into the freezer. We’ll eat the squash casserole for a couple of days. There will be leftover green beans from a quart so those will go into my “soup pot” that stays in the freezer and I dump leftover veggies in there for adding to soup. Of course, we don’t eat all the jelly in one day (but I could!) so it isn’t like we use 8 jars EVERY day but on average, it’s 25 jars per week.

Even though I don’t grow the beef or the mushrooms or the cranberries, I like knowing that I’m serving up the best I possibly can with little to no processed foods or unnecessary ingredients. It is a lot of work to do all the canning but we’ve all heard that saying – Make your career something you love and you’ll never “work” a day in your life. It will all be fun! That’s how I feel about canning. I’m not sure if I can so we can have healthy home canned meals, or if we eat the food in the jars so I can empty more jars and can some more! 🙂