Sunday, September 25, 2011

My grandparents give the best presents

My birthday was on the 22nd, and I went to my grandparents' farm the Sunday before for my "birthday present." I'm too old to get presents (they say) so the last few years I've been going out to their farm and helping them with the fall harvesting - and taking home some of the fruits of their labor. This year, we canned my FAVORITE soup, vegetarian vegetable.

The recipe came from this lady my grandma knew, Bertha. Apparently, Bertha and her husband left Minnesota with their 13 children to join some UFO religion in Texas. Seriously. But we have their soup recipe so we canned 18 quarts of it this fall!
Grandma quartering tomatoes for the broth.
 After cooking the tomatoes, we ran them through their awesome strainer/separator thing. It's really handy because we didn't have to peel the tomatoes or anything, it just pressed the juice right out from the guts.


We add a few types of beans, carrots, barley, etc. to the broth and then put it in jars.
 We also made some applesauce. The apples my grandpa uses come from a cutting he took from the apple tree on his grandparents' farm, and grafted it to one of his trees. The original tree is at least 100 years old. I think that is so neat! It makes really great applesauce too, very soft apples with light flesh. I took home two gallon pails of it!

 
Our final product, lots of soup! It was so awesome to spend time with my grandparents, to catch up and to hear stories of their lives. My grandparents are some of the most amazing people in my life and they continue to inspire me.

(One more side note: On my birthday, my grandma came to see me at work, and she told me when she turned my age (27) she with pregnant with my mother - her 6th child! I think she might have been trying to tell me something?)

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