Butchering 36 more chickens this week. Did 30 last week, then spent three days boning out the breasts, individually quick freezing all the parts and bagging them, making broth and canning it, and canning 72 1/2 pint jars of cat and dog food! Ack... what a job! No one here likes giblets, and we have plenty of meat, so I cook all the backs, necks and trimmings for our broth, and then spend too much time picking all the meat off the bones. I cook the giblets separately, grind them up in the food processor with the water they are cooked in (which makes the ugliest looking and smelling mush you can imagine- the cats LOVE it! LOL!) and mix it all together with the meat scraps, and can it. Oh, all the fat I skim off the broth goes in there too.
It's a PITA job, but makes a lot of high quality protein food for the house cats. But I'll be very glad to be done with chickens for the year. (we'll have 6 more to go into the freezer as whole roasters, but that's a minor job).
On buying soup.. MAKE IT! I canned a lot of tomato soup from the garden this year, and it turned out wonderfully. I make big batches of bean soup, usually when we've had a ham, so I use the ham bone for flavoring. But you can just use "ham stock" (sort of boullion) instead.. Add some onions, carrots, celery, a bit of garlic... you've got a great, filling soup. Can it up in pint jars, and it's ready to heat and serve. The tomato soup I canned will also make a great base for anything from minestrone to Manhatten Clam chowder. I've also got a recipe for a "clone" of Campbell's Vegetable Beef soup, and it's great. I haven't bought commercial soups in years... well, I bought a flat of Aldi's "chunky" soup to give to my son in college, and we opened one can. It was almost too salty for us to eat!
If you have leftover mashed potatoes, you can make a fantastic "cream of potato" soup... saute an onion for every cup or two of mashed potatoes, add a cup or two of chicken broth or stock (measurements depend on how "oniony" you like it, and how thick you want it). Then add the hot onion and broth to your leftover mashed potatoes and blend together in the blender. Salt and pepper to taste. It's filling, and wonderful on a cold day.
Summerthyme
It looked like practically everything went up and some of it significantly. Following our practice of only buying what's on sale and using coupons we still got better buys than many people, but even then it cost more than we're used to. Peanut butter was on sale buy one/get one free, so we stocked up on that - but $4.99 for a jar of peanut butter...ACK!!!! Of course, we got two for that price which made me feel some better, but I can't imagine paying that much for peanut butter. Remember when you ate it because it was cheap?
