Banana Bread (and other treats) In Jars

With Christmas rapidly approaching, it's time to start baking some of our gifts. We long ago abandoned the big Christmas shopping ordeal, in favor of handmade, useable or consumable gifts. One of our favorite gifts is a "goodie basket". This is usually a very pretty basket (picked up sometime over the past year at Goodwill or somewhere similar) filled with goodies like banana or cranberry nut bread, maybe some homemade jams or jellies, apple butter, handmade soap or salves. It is always handmade and usually comes from the farm.

The first item for the basket this year is Banana Bread. It's a pretty popular quick bread, and there just happened to be a sale at Kroger - bananas were 29¢ a lb. Lord only knows how many pounds I bought, since we love bananas. We ate some and the rest we used for Banana Bread. We made some of the usual small traditional loves (pictured above) and the rest we baked in canning jars, put the lids on as soon as they come out of the over and you have Banana Bread in Jars that lasts about forever (as long as the seal is good). These are great as gifts for people who may want something sweet long after the holidays.

Here is a picture of a few of the Banana Bread(s) in a Jar, right after they came out of the oven. After they have cooled and the jars have sealed, I put them back into the original case and cover them with a sheet of newspaper, plastic or whatever is handy so they don't get dusty in the pantry. Then I label and date the cover so I don't have to remember what they are in a year or so! When I need one to give away as a gift, I print a nice little label for the jar, tie a ribbon or several strands of natural twine around the top for a decoration.

Besides being great little gifts for a food basket, house-warming or thank you gift, they are right handy to hanve in the pantry for our own use. And it doesn't have to be just Banana Bread. Any favorite quick bread recipe will work for an instant quick treat with out the chemicals and preservatives of store-bought food.

If you are having a rushed day, how about taking a jar of homemade canned chili off the shelf with some Cornbread in a Jar? Once you know the technique, the possibilities are endless for healthy, satisfying and fast desserts, snacks or side dishes. Here's the basic formula -

You'll need:

4 wide mouth pint jars with lids and rings
A quick bread recipe that makes 2 loaves - banana, banana nut, cranberry nut, pumpkin,
                          zucchini, applesauce cake - you get the idea

Preheat the over to 350 º F (or whatever your recipe calls for)

Grease the insides of the jars. Mix up your quick bread recipe as usual. Fill each jar about ½ full. Place the jars evenly spaced on a cookie sheet. Bake for 30-45 minutes, according to your recipe. Test with a toothpick for doneness. When they are done, remove the cookie sheet with the jars and place on the counter on a towel to prevent burning the counter. Place a lid on each jar and screw down, but don't crank it down tight. Set the jar on a towel on the counter andrepeat with each jar. Within a few minutes, you'll hear the jar lids start their delightful "pinging", signifying that the lids have sealed.

When the jars have cooled, place them in the jar box for storage or store in a cool, dry, dark place. The cakes will last indefinately as long as the jars stay sealed. If you are canning these for your own use, you can remove the lids before storing. I usually leave the lids in place for things like this, since we normally use them as gifts, and you'll want rings on them in that case.

To remove the cakes from the jars, place them in the microwave (without the lids) for 30 sec or so or set in a pot of hot water for a minute. They will slide right out and you can slice them into pretty little rounds.

Keeping House

Having a reasonably clean house is really important to me. I am just one of those people who can’t function when the house is dirty. I am not obsessed with it and it doesn’t have to be spotless, but it has to be neat. The kitchen is really the hub of our home, and if the counter tops are cleared off, the dishes are done and the floor is clean, I am happy.

Now, if you live in the country, as we do, have a lot of dogs, as we do, and visiting grandchildren, as we do, keeping the floors clean can be a challenge. One thing that does make this chore easier is the Swiffer® – I have to tell you, I LOVE the concept of the Swiffer® .Unfortunately, disposable Swiffer® pads just don’t mean my criteria for frugality – they are expensive and add to the clutter in the landfill, something we try to avoid. Swiffer® fluid is expensive and, at least on my floors, leaves a filmy residue.

So I decided that I would go back to my old way of damp mopping with a string mop and a squirt bottle of my preferred cleaning solution. The string mop head is removable and therefore washable, which is wonderful. However, it doesn’t get into the corners very well, it picks up little twigs and sticks which are impossible to remove and it tends to leave little bits of the cotton on the floor after it’s been used a while, which means you have to sweep again after you mop.

This was unsatisfactory to me, also. I like to get my work done in the best way possible, with as little effort as possible. This means I have more energy to use on the projects where a lot of effort is necessary. And that started me thinking about how to get my floors clean with the least amount of time, money and effort and still have nice, clean, shiny floors.

That chain of thought brought me back to the Swiffer®. I started looking for ways to make covers for the Swiffer® instead of using the disposable pads. Looking online, I found several links for handmade, re-useable, washable Swiffer® covers. You can sew, knit or crochet covers or you can even buy re-useable covers for the Swiffer® Wet-Jet (the one with the batteries) or the regular Swiffer® which is mostly just a handled stick with a head for the cover. This is a great option of you don’t want to be using batteries to run the Swiffer® You would just squirt your cleaning fluid of choice out of a bottle. An old dish soap or shampoo bottle would work well for this. Here are some links to get you started –

Zoom Swiffer Cover (pdf)

Biffer Shrug (pdf)

Old Socks as Swiffer Covers 

Swiffer Cover Sewing Pattern

These are all great, easy, fast patterns. Personally, I lean toward sewing the covers, since I like to reserve my knitting time for socks, sweaters, etc. I use old, stained terry cloth dishcloths or washclothes and I use velcro to attach the sewn cover, rather than using buttons.

For those of you who still prefer the battery powered Swiffer® Wt-Jet, even if we save money on the hand-made covers, there is still the issue of the Swiffer® cleaning fluid. How do you get the top off the bottle to refill the bottle with your preferred cleaning solution, and still get the cap back on right so you can mount the bottle on the handle properly? This stumped me, since the bottle cap does not just come off and I thought there had to be some magical combination to make it work. Or worse, they just did not come off and you always had to buy a new one. Period.

After searching online, I found an great “instructable” video on how to remove the bottle caps and make those Swiffer® bottles reusable! It is simple and very do-able. BTW, this site has a ton of other “instructable” videos – be careful you don’t get lured into spending a couple hours looking at all the great ideas!


How to remove the cap on a Swiffer Wet-Jet cleaner bottle. - More DIY How To Projects

December Flowers

This morning, my husband came in with a nice, but amazing surprise - a bouquet of fresh picked flowers! Now, normally, he picks a really beautiful bouquet, and you might look at this one as a little scraggly, but to me, ANY fresh flowers in the Shenandoah Valley on December 1st are amazing and welcome. They really highlight the peculiar weather we have experienced here in the past few years - this year was especially odd.

The temperatures stayed warm during the day, with some rain occassionally and the dropped down to frost, sometimes even hard frost at night. In the morning the sun comes up and we're back up to 68 or 70 degrees. The grass is still growing, the goats are still browsing and, as you can see, flowers are blooing! We saw somwone actually mowing his lawn this afternoon! It is really more like springtime in the valley!  Being a moderate weather type of person (not too hot, not too cold), I am really enjoying it. I have been able to do a lot of catching up on my pitifully neglected garden clean up!

We took so many pictures during the Thanksgiving holiday that I would not have the space to run even a few here. But here is one I loved and wanted to share...

                                       

This is the grand-daughter you hear about all the time, our little Sarah. We made Thanksgiving pies together, and in the process, it occurred to her that the cupboard door handles would be great eyes for a "smiley face". She did this and I raced for the camera! She'd been trying out a new cranberry-raisin pie filling, and was in a very creative mood!

We are STILL doing venison! We cooked and processed about 15 lbs of venison barbeque last night. We ran out of some of the ingredients for our usual barbeque sauce, so we created a new, and very tasy recipe...

Venison BB Sauce -

2 bottles of your favorite BB sauce

1 qt tomato sauce

1/4 red wine vinegar

Mix together and then pour over cooked, shredded venison (or pork). Mix with your hands and then let cook on very low overnight in a large roaster/cooker. This was enough for 15 lbs of meat.

So good! Adjust the vinegar to taste and maybe add some salt and pepper. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving and an Ode to America

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner here. We have the "Big Hall Family Feast" every Thanksgiving, but this year, we took it to the fellowship hall at our church. Since we were there, we also invited any church family who wanted to come to have Thanksgiving dinner with us. This was not a church event - we just know that some of the folks are older and don't have family close by (if at all) and some just don't have much, so we invited them. Daughter Laura and I cooked for the last 2 days and then cooked all day today. You never SAW the like of food. And Cliff shot a 13 lb wild turkey this morning, so there was a store-bought turkey, a huge store-bought turkey breast, a ham and a wild turkey, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, salad, macaroni & cheese, several homemade pies and homemade just-out-of-the-oven rolls & bread (with real butter, thank you very much). It was a real farm-style feast. We had 14 people from the church, plus our 10, which is about 1/2 the church. (We average about 50 now and are starting to really grow.) At the end of dinner, we told everyone to take home some food and we got out a couple of dozen take-out boxes. EVERYONE left with a big take-out box, Laura and I filled the refrigerator with food for Sunday and we both STIll took home carloads of food.

We all had a lot of fun. We really feel blessed that we could have had a dinner like this to share, and the church family seemed to be thrilled to have dinner with us. We had a little more time than usual to visit, Cliff got a chance to get to know some of them a little better and they us. It was a real blessing for everyone - wish y'all could have been here to share it with us!

We have a dear friend that my husband met a few years ago while on a mission trip to Romania . We started talking via email and became good friends, then she and her husband came and visited us for a week. What a joy it was to hear about their different culture!

My husband loves to tell about the simple, basic lives lived by many Romanians. What we earn here in a year that keeps us solidly middle class would have us placed as very wealthy folks in Romania . We can learn a good bit from them about frugality and eating good, basic, homemade foods. I can still taste the wonderful goat cheese she brought with her, and today opened a plastic bottle (recycled, of course) of the most wonderful, fragrant Romanian honey you ever want to taste-homegrown by her father.

But they lack the one thing that we take for granted – freedom. They are not free to leave the country to work or visit without specially granted visas, which are extremely expensive and difficult to get. Our friend tells of spending $300 to apply for her visa – on a monthly salary of $80.

She sent me an email today that I wanted to share with you all. We seldom hear what the other countries of the world think of us – with the obvious exceptions of the British, French, Israel and miscellaneous unfriendly Arabic countries. Here is an excerpt from a Romanian newspaper that you all may find interesting. The article was written by Mr. Cornel Nistorescu and published under the title 'C'ntarea Americii, meaning 'Ode To America ' in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei 'The Daily Event' or 'News of the Day'.

~An Ode to America ~

"Why are Americans so united? They would not resemble one another even if you painted them all one color! They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations and religious beliefs.

On 9/ll, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the Army, or the Secret Service that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed out onto the streets nearby to gape about.

Instead the Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand.
After the first moments of panic, they raised their flag over the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a government official or the president was passing. On every occasion, they started singing: 'God Bless America !'

I watched the live broadcast and rerun after rerun for hours listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who gave his life fighting with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that could have killed other hundreds or thousands of people.

How on earth were they able to respond united as one human being? Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put into collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit, which no money can buy. What on earth can unites the Americans in such way? Their land? Their history? Their economic Power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases with the risk of sounding commonplace, I thought things over, I reached but only one conclusion.... Only freedom can work such miracles." ~ Cornel Nistorescu

Ah, yes, Cornel, but the point you miss - while aptly describing the American spirit and love of freedom - is our absolute, unfailing intention to keep that freedom. We “accuse the White House, the Army, or the Secret Service that they are only a bunch of losers. …rush to empty (our-sic) bank accounts.” Not for the sheer joy of humiliating our leaders, but in an attempt to keep them honest, and to keep them working for the “right side” - the side of freedom.

In many ways, we are not the same people, not the same country, we were before 9/11. There are more laws restricting our personal privacy now than our forefathers would have ever imagined. But in some ways, we are stronger, as a collective group. We have seen what can happen in our own country and we are not willing to let it happen again. Never again will we be terrorized by forces that I personally am willing to recognize as “evil” – not from outside the United States nor inside the United States . 9/11 was the first wake up call. Perhaps Ft. Hood is the second.

Our greatest fault lies in our willingness to let others do our work, namely the state and local governments. They have been joyfully allowed to feed, clothe and house us, prevent or eliminate the birth of our children, determine the validity of marriage, even determine the validity and popularity of our religions and the quality of our spiritual life.

We have been sleeping for several decades, lulled into a sweet, drunken slumber of complacency and it has nearly cost us our lives. We are on the edge of the web, about to be drawn in to a nice, warm cocoon – only to find that it holds us safely paralyzed until we can become dinner.

But we, the people of the United States, are slowly, groggily waking up to our surroundings – a tad hung-over and disoriented, but very much aware that something evil does indeed this way come. We will need a miracle to get the country through this phase – but, to quote Cornel Nistorescu once again, “.... Only freedom can work such miracles.”