More Projects of Yester-week

Last Friday afternoon, Katie came over and together we took the last 15-20lbs of my tomato harvest and cooked it down to a delicious tomato sauce. I found several recipes online and sort of just combined them to come up with the one we made.  It has been way too hot to can anything, so I decided to take advantage of our deep freezer and just make freezer sauce.  It went much faster than I expected it to, and if we end up loving the sauce, I'll probably forget about canning sauce in future years because freezing it was so easy.   We made almost 10 quarts of sauce!  I didn't write down whe final recipe we used but it has peppers and onions and garlic and honey and loads of herbs in it. I added 2 cans of tomato paste to thicken it up, because I was just too hot and lazy to let it simmer down for 2 more hours on my stove.  My house smelled like a pizza factory all night. Yum.

Our stake planted a few acres of corn as an activity to teach youth and adults to be more self reliant.  Wards were assigned times to participate in the planting, care, and harvesting process. Unfortunately, because of the nasty drought and heat wave we are experiencing, most of the corn became ready to harvest this weekend, rather than stretching out in 2 week intervals until September.  It was available for anyone in the community to pick for 10 cents an ear or 5 cents for ears that the heat or bugs had gotten to, first.

On Saturday morning, we donned our hats and headed to the corn fields. 

It was unbearably hot at 9am and we only lasted about 20 minutes, but between the children, Kasey, Aaron and I, we picked over 125 ears of corn.

 Many of the ears the children picked had been affected by the drought, but even on those, at least 75% of the kernals were in great shape...and for 10 cents an ear?  Totally worth it!  I froze all the icky ends of the cobs that we broke off and have been feeding them to our chickens. They love them!

After the children went to bed on saturday night, kasey and I shucked, blanched, and cut the kernels off of over 125 ears of corn!  It took a couple hours, but we were just sitting and chatting and watchign the olympics, so the work went really quickly. 

Below are my 15 quart sized freezer bags of deeelicious sweet kernel corn ready to go for about $7. 
Yes, we had to romp through the corn fields and pick it ourselves.
Yes, it took awhile to prepare it.
Yes, when my children eat corn with their dinner over the next year, they will know exactly where it came from, how corn grows, and remember how hot they were in standing in the Centerton corn fields when they picked it.
Hopefully, they will develop an appreciation of the effort involved in getting food onto the table and love the convenience of picking it from their own yard or buying it at the store even more than they did before ;)
I also hope they'll feel satisfied knowing they did a servive by participating and contributing to their family's meal.