Three Chicks, A Canner and a Computer

What are three self proclaimed  farm chicks in the middle of suburbia to do?  Why combine forces of course!  The Three Chicks got together again this week to begin working on some pumpkin recipes that we have selected.  Since we were not as prepared on Monday as we thought we might be, we started with a plan to make pumpkin butter.   Using a recent post from Farm Girl Chick Chat about roasting pumpkins  the oven was preheated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit at an early hour. ( After all we are Farm Chicks,  we get up early)  Two pumpkins were washed, sliced in half and seeds and goop removed.  The pumpkins were placed on foil lined cookie sheet.  Just in case, the foil was sprayed lightly with cooking spray.  Plan on cooking the pumpkin pieces for one and a half hours until fork tender.

cooked pumpkin on the left.  Saved seeds to be roasted later and the gunk for a chicken treat!

When the pumpkin is "done", remove it from the oven and let it cool a bit before removing the skin.  When it is cool enough to be handled, scrape the meat from the skin and process the cooked pumpkin in a food processor. 

Now on to the making of the pumpkin butter!  This is where the computer came into the story.  None of us farm chicks had a recipe for pumpkin butter.  So we did what any modern day pioneer would do, we surfed the net!  Surfing  Farm Chicks.  Get the picture?  We found something on Instructables.com that seemed like a good bet.  Here's the link if you want to look it up yourself.  http://www.instructables.com/  When you get there, type pumpkin butter in the search and choose the crock pot pumpkin butter recipe by batness.  I couldn't get the link to this page to come up. 

This is the list of measurements and ingredients we used.  It made three pints plus a little taster/sampler  in the four ounce jar.  
• 3 cups pumpkin puree (one CAN is usually 15 ounces)
• 3 cups brown sugar
• 3+ Tablespoons lemon juice (half of a small lemon)
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon pumpkin pie spices (make sure you add this slowly, in case you don't like the cloves or other spices in it).
Since we are   Farm Chicks we made our own pumpkin pie spice using this recipe.  
  Pumpkin Pie Spice Recipe

All the ingredients were measured into a sturdy pot and placed on the stove.  This is where things became very boring.  The only thing to do now was to take turns stirring the pot while it cooked down.  But we wanted more.  This was not enough for Three Farm Chicks  on a Monday morning, after drinking two pots of coffee.  No.  We needed something to do.  So again, we headed to the Farm Chick helper, the computer and the internet.  I remembered that I had seen a post about red wine jelly.  It was way too early to drink wine, but hey, we could certainly make some wine jelly while waiting for the pumpkin butter!  I went to the basement for a bottle of red wine that I didn't care for.  Any wine will do according to the recipe.  And here is a recipe for onion red wine jelly.  There are many variations out there, so don't be afraid to find your own type of wine jelly. 
 

Aren't they pretty?!  Such a great color.  Looking forward to serving it Friday night at craft night with some cream cheese and crackers.  Or maybe a goat cheese Chevre?  Oh yeah, back to the pumpkin butter.  After the butter thickened, we poured it into the jars and followed the usual procedures of wiping the jar rims, capping and putting the rings on.  If you need to review basic canning rules, I recommend going to this link for a great step by step list of instructions :   Canning Instructions from the Egg Basket                

 The butter was canned in a boiling water canner for  20 minutes AFTER the water returns to a full boil.

This turned out pretty too.  I just love these round pint jars from Ball.  So old fashioned.  I commented to my friends that I felt just like a pioneer with our canning day projects.  They replied that we really weren't too much like Pioneer women if we were using a computer for our recipes!  It's all in how you look at it!   We enjoyed another day of surviving suburbia with a farm chick heart.  Sharing, laughing and getting things done.   That's what makes the work worthwhile.



stay tuned for more from the three farm chicks later this month.  We will be taking on some dessert recipes for holiday gatherings.