Freeze Fresh, No Freezer Burn With Vacuum Sealing

Those of you who know me well know that I am in love with Mason Jars!  I love to vacuum seal our food so that it lasts longer both on our pantry shelf and in the freezer or fridge.  I also love to do crafty projects and decor with them.  Enjoy this video showing how I vacuum sealed to prevent freezer burn.

Seal It to Save It - No Freezer Burn!

I hate freezer burn!  This made me want a better way and I think I found the best way.  Its great!  We put together a vacuum sealer with the jar sealing attachment and I just take out the air before I freeze.  I use this for dry pantry items and refrigerated foods as well, to make them store for 3x as long (or longer).

Paper or Plastic? Both! When I get baby food in bulk with my groceries :)

About once a month we buy the baby food for that month in bulk so that I'm not always running back and forth to the grocery store and then I can take advantage of sales as well.  Its a nice system that saves me a headache and produced my personally developed bagging system and storage system for the baby food jars.  When we go to WinCo I bag anyway, cause that's their system, but at other grocery stores I usually get flak for even wanting to put the food in bags.  It was exciting this past trip to Dan's Market because the bagger was so excited to learn my system and wanted me to share it with the world.  Most importantly she wanted me to share it with other mothers who could use it.  You may love it or you may hate it, either way its been very useful and I will keep doing it for as long as I am buying baby food.

I do want to note that most of what I feed my 10 month old baby is actually breastmilk still, and then it is mostly fresh veggies.  She really likes heavily steamed carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower.  I also give her juiced veggies and fruit like beets, celery, carrots, and apple.  She can have nutritional yeast as well, which she loves; and then she likes raw pears and avocado.  Since starting to buy baby food I've found a lot more allergies with bum rashes and upset tummies, and.... lots of tears.  She can't handle banana, grains of any kind, or any of the typical bad food that kids love that I wouldn't give her at this age anyway.  If she has much of those things she not only gets a rash, it turns such a deep red its almost purple and sometimes starts to bleed.  I have a special cream I get from target and buybuybaby.  It's from a company called "Shea Moisture" is made from shea butter and has frankincense and myrrh essential oils in it that works better than any other cream I've ever found, though its hard for anything to help when its due to a negative reaction to food that's in the body still.

The baby foods are super exciting for my 4 and 2 year olds to eat as well.  I like to get a lot of applesauce because it makes a really fun snack for the older kids if I need something to tide them over while I'm preparing lunch, or while we're out running errands.  The jars are awesome to keep and re-use.  There are hundreds of fun things you can do with them, so subscribe to my blog or youtube.com uploads to be able to see a bunch of those as I get them done.

A Look Into My Fridge & A Week of Bone Broth

As you can see, like most people who drastically change their diet, the contents of my fridge are not yet perfect.  Especially when it comes to our condiments.  We are very slowly getting rid of them and then to do more with what we have I am making my own versions of them that is healthier and then putting that in the empty bottle of the store bought condiment.  Its amazing how many eggs and how many vegetables it takes to get through 2 weeks.  Normally that 2nd shelf is full of just eggs, but this week I did it a bit different.  On the top shelf right now I have 13 quarts of homemade bone broth that I have made this week.  I am planning on making lots of different types of soup with them.  Wow... bone broth is not nearly as hard as I thought it would be and I can get about 4 quarts a day and keep the same bones cooking in the crock-pot for a whole week (just add new veggies every couple days or so).  The longer it sits in the fridge the darker it gets, so fascinating.  Here's a few pictures from making the chicken bone broth.

13 quarts of homemade bone broth (a week of doing broth gave me a lot more than this, I just have used a bunch for cooking and soups since it is soooooo nutritious) & 6 + dozen eggs

The bone broth on the third day right after adding fresh water and 3 cups of new veggies - 1 small onion, 1 celery stalks, 1 carrot, 2 cloves garlic, 1/2 cup cut up kale, 1 Tbsp Raw Apple Cider Vinegar, 1 Tsp Sea Salt

This is the way the broth looks when stirred when the veggies have been cooked for 8-12 hours.  You can cook anywhere from 8 hours up to 3 days without taking out the broth liquid.  The sooner its removed, the more broth you get, but the longer it cooks before being removed the stronger (and better) the flavor and the more nutrients go cook into it from the bones.  I like it to simmer for 12 hours before I switch out the liquid for new water, but there were a couple days this week that I did 24 hours (the first day it seemed better to do a full 24 hours).

This is the bone broth right after I used a measuring cup to spoon out the liquid through a sieve into a 2 quart mason jar.  I like using the mason jars cause they can be vacuum sealed to preserve the food in them longer and better.

I found that to strain the broth well enough I needed something similar to a cheese-cloth on top of the small sieve.  I also found that it turned out better to use the sieve in a pot and then pour it into the mason jar from that because it spilled so much less onto my counter that way.

I love this picture because it shows so well the bones  once they have just started to break apart after the broth has been taken out.  Every time I remove the liquid I use my wooden spoon and push the bones against the crock-pot.  After the first 24 hours to 3 days this is what the chicken bones look like, just the ends break off first, then as the week goes on they fall apart more and more until they are basically a mush at the bottom of the pot. 

 For those of you that have been thinking about doing a bone broth for a while now like I did, it's so fun!  To see how the bones change is fascinating.  It doesn't have to be as intimidating of a task as it seems.  Once you get it going for the week in the crock pot it only takes around 30 minutes a day to change out and get 2-3 quarts of the broth out twice (every 12 hours - morning and evening) along with add new water & veggies (if you want more veggies - this is optional).  This broth/stock is one of those super foods that helps the gut heal and provides so many nutrients people in our society are deficient in.  I recommend it to everyone.  Take my word for it, you'll love this, and you're body will love all the micro-nutrients in it too!