Putting food by...

I got a great deal on local sweet corn this past weekend. I didn't know how much to buy so I went with 12 ears. My intention was to blanch and then freeze the corn kernels for future use this winter. We aren't huge corn eaters, but we do like it from time to time in chowders and corn bread.

After 9 minutes or so in boiling water and cutting off the kernels, I spread them out onto two baking sheets and placed them in the freezer. I wanted the kernels to freeze more or less individually instead of as whole blocks of solid corn. It worked well. After a day in the freezer I transferred the corn to freezer bags and I ended up with four quart sized bags full. Easy and they will be great in the months ahead.
Taking a page from Leslie, I have been having a little school time with Elijah in the mornings. Today we talked about the letter C and the number 3. C is for Car, so we made a little car with a stick butter box and construction paper and we practiced counting to three and holding up only three fingers. He seemed to enjoy it. So since we are focused on the letter C, I made crackers this morning for our snack. I used a recipe posted by Heather at Beauty that Moves and they were quite good. I have held off buying any crackers at the store the last few weeks because I wanted to make this recipe. I am trying to cut out more processed food from our lives, so homemade crackers was an easy thing to do. A few changes I made to the recipe: I left out the nutritional yeast as I didn't have any on hand and I used dried celery instead of rosemary as I didn't have that either. They are yummy. Elijah kept sneaking them behind my back...so I know I have a winner if he can't stop eating them. I see lots of double batches and variations in our future. I am happy because they are not only tasty, but I know every ingredient in them is fine for my family to eat.
This week we'll be picking apples and making apple sauce...I'm sure you will be hearing more about that in the days ahead.