Juice, Corn and Rotisserie Fixing

Even though there appears to be a major (for Georgia anyway) winter storm moving in and we are as prepared as we are going to be, there still was the regular work to do today.
On the table in a box sat about 10 oranges (tangelos, tangerines, whatever) and they just weren't getting eaten. I needed to juice them. Here is my juicer--another good deal bought from the thrift store a few years ago.

It is really simple to use, peel the oranges, and put them in, the pulp stays in the top section and the juice ends up in the bottom. We had some nice sweet "oranges" and the juice turned out really nice; not tart like a store bought juice. Now I wish I had juiced them all when we first got them.

This weekend I also found more cranberries on sale. Not as good a sale as last time. This time they were $ .99 a bag but that is still a pretty good price. I bought 4 bags and this batch I just made into juice. Cranberry juice is simple. Put 6 cups of water in a pot per bag of cranberries, add your cleaned and picked over cranberries.

 Bring to a boil and boil until most of the berries have popped, about 10 minutes. Drain in a colander with a layer of cheesecloth in it. Put the juice back in the pot and add 1 cup of sugar for each bag of cranberries you used. Heat until almost boiling. Allow to cool and refrigerate.

My other job today was corn. I had gotten a few ears of corn on sale as well and they needed to be blanched and frozen. You put the corn in a pot of boiling water and boil it for about 8 minutes.

Cool it in ice water or if you are lazy like me just run cold water on it, then bag it and put it in the freezer.



I also fixed my rotisserie today. It had stopped turning and frankly, I really missed it. I took it apart and found that grease had gotten down into the part that turned the thing. Well, this was around the time that the microwave broke and Phil had taken it apart to see if he could fix it, when he couldn't, he took it apart just to get the metal out of it (he saves metal to sell) and when he did he found that the microwave had the exact same turning part under the turn table part of it that had broken in the rotisserie. I put the part in the rotisserie today and so far it is working fine.

I also was able to buy some seeds today at Wal-mart. I am so pleased that they have their seeds out so early this year. I mostly bought some seeds that don't need to be started indoors but I did get some cubanelle pepper seeds that I started in a cut up egg carton bottom (8 spots planted). I used the black Styrofoam trays that came under the corn to put underneath them to catch any excess water. Here is a picture of the tomato, kale and pepper seeds I planted not too long ago. I am quite pleased with how fast they are coming up.

In other news, I finally got a duck egg today! My ducks haven't been laying for months now and it sure was a nice surprise to get an egg again, finally. I have the incubator plugged in and if it wasn't for the storm coming and the likelihood of losing power, I would be working on hatching ducklings, but I guess we'll wait a few days before filling the incubator.

So there's a pork roast in the rotisserie and a loaf of bread rising in the oven. Let the snow come, who knows, maybe we'll at least get tomorrow off!