Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard ... Enchilada Sauce

Here is a before and after picture of my home canned enchilada sauce...

You can find the recipe and directions for the sauce here on the Canning Homemade web site. I did add one of my home grown cayenne peppers for a little heat ... it tastes great! I had a can of "Old El Paso" sauce in the cupboard ... the ingredients include MSG, soy protein, yeast extract and soybean oil ... I'm not going to miss any of those in my home canned version. Thanks for the recipe, Cindy!

I am adding this to Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard. Join Robin to find out what others are cooking up from their garden produce.

 Enjoy!

New Pages ... New Directions ...

Reading the news these days (online; on my lap top ... we *voluntarily* don't have television service) is scary.  There are many days that I think that civilization as we know it is about to come to an abrupt end.  I'm not going to bore you with my personal political views, which, if our Congress is any indication, half of you would agree with and half of you would not.  But I think it is safe to say that we all can agree that the problems come down to a few basics; politics, money and the fact that we are using up the world's resources at an alarming rate.  And the problems are not confined to the U.S.; they are global.

If you read my post on GMOs you know that I don't believe that there is really anything we as individuals can do to change politics with our votes.  Vote them out doesn't work when both sides are corrupt (oops! that personal political view just crept in there ... sorry about that).  All we can do is take matters into our own hands, vote with our wallets, and (and this is the biggie!) take care of ourselves, our families and our friends by learning to live frugal, sustainable lives and being prepared for what might come.

I enjoy writing gardening posts, and while I hope that anyone who has the space and even a small amount of time to devote to gardening will do so, I realize that for most people it really isn't feasible.  In the future I plan to include many more posts having to do with frugal and nutritious recipes, "freezer meals" for those Mom's and Dad's who want to feed their family good, healthy foods but are hard pressed for time ... and especially the concept of "pantrying" ... putting food by in season for use in the coming year while also developing a long term "survival" pantry to sustain us when disaster strikes, whether natural or man made.

If you look up at the top of this page you will see that I have added three new tabs; "Pantry Basics", which I am developing to be an inventory of our day to day food stores, "Preserving The Harvest 2012", which will show my goals for preserving this year, and "My Long Term Storage Pantry" which will be an effort to build a supply of food put by for times of need and regularly rotated into our day to day stocks.

I hope you will follow along with me as I stock my pantries and think about stocking one of your own.

Enjoy!