Meal Prepping From The Pantry #7

 

A couple weeks ago I enjoyed another busy day in my kitchen doing all of the things that bring me joy.  Cooking and baking is my way to decompress and really recharge my batteries so I was thrilled to have two days to do just exactly that.

 

Apples cooking to make applesauce

The cores went into the compost bin

I began by processing apples to make applesauce, which I shared that with you in a previous post, but I also had plans to do some meal prepping while the apples were cooking down in the slow cooker.

 

Making yogurt

While the apples cooked away in my large and medium slow cookers I began by making a new batch of vanilla yogurt and getting that into my little picnic cooler to begin setting.  After that I made a double batch of my favorite homemade granola, this time adding ground cinnamon, raisins and dried cranberries, which I absolutely love this time of year.

 

Granola!

With the granola in the oven I mixed up a batch of pumpkin bread batter.  I added chopped raisins and pecans along with some pumpkin pie spice and got that into my mini loaf pans.  I was able to use up half a can of pumpkin puree I had tucked into the freezer as well as the last of a bag of pecans that was hanging around in there too.

 

The granola came out of the oven and the pumpkin loaves went in.  I sprinkled the raisins and dried cranberries on top of the granola and gave it a good stir, then allowed it to cool down.  Next I stirred the apples in the two slow cookers and moved onto my next project.

 

I mixed up some biscuit dough and cut out thirteen biscuits, a baker’s dozen, to go into the oven next.  I had biscuits and gravy on my mind for a meal that week and I was very much looking forward to it.  While the biscuits waited their turn in the oven I pulled a pizza crust from the freezer and a lot of leftover ingredients from the refrigerator.

 

Progress!

Using up a frozen pizza crust, a bit of leftover Italian sausage, pizza sauce and some mushrooms in the refrigerator I also added some sliced pepperoni from the freezer.  The biscuits went into the oven and the mini loaves of pumpkin bread cooled on a rack while the pizza waited its turn.

 

By the time the biscuits and pizza had baked and I had my brunch at nearly noon the apples had finished cooking down and were ready to become sauce.  I used my immersion blender to puree the applesauce to the consistency I wanted and then stirred in just a touch of sugar to until it tasted the way I like my applesauce to taste.  I let that cook while I set up the water bath canner on my stove and started heating the water.  Then I gathered up my jars and lids and got busy filling them up.

 

I put in the first batch of jars into the canner to process and then got busy wrapping up the pumpkin bread and biscuits for the freezer leaving out half a dozen of the biscuits to use for meals that week.  I also put away the granola into Mason jars and into the pantry.  With everything put away the first round of jars came out of the canner to cool on a towel and the next round went into the canner to process.

 

Yogurt all done!

Dishes too!

Next I pulled the jars of yogurt out of the cooler, dried them off and put them away into the refrigerator.  By the next day they were ready to enjoy with some of that homemade granola for brunch.  In the meantime the last round of applesauce came out of the water bath canner and I called it a day.

 

I made cinnamon applesauce

and blueberry applesauce - Yum!

The next day I was back at it filling up both of my slow cookers with apples once again and getting those cooking to make applesauce.  Once they had cooked down I used the immersion blender again to make sauce.  Then I added an open package of blueberries I had in the freezer that needed to be used up to my medium sized slow cooker and added cinnamon to the larger one.

 

Beautiful!

Once the blueberries had cooked a bit and were soft I used the immersion blender again.  Both batches got a bit of sugar added to them and then I was back to processing jars in my water bath canner.  I also made some sausage gravy using a half pint jar of sausage I had on the shelf and scrambled a couple of eggs to make my Sunday supper.  It was delicious!

 

Yogurt & granola

This little squirrel is enjoying an apple core out of the compost bin

With all of the jars processed and cooling I was done with everything I had planned to do that weekend.  Once the jars were cooled I wiped them all down and labeled everything.  It was a bit of a different meal prep this time, but I have loads of wonderful things to look forward to eating this winter and I couldn’t be any happier about it.