What Was On Sale and What I Did With It

If I just had a bit more time.... and a bit more energy... I could get so much more done.
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Have you ever thought that? I think that all the time. Then I wonder if I am just wasting time when I am resting....but sometimes my body says that I just HAVE to rest.

Anyway, there was some good stuff marked down at the store this week and even though it meant I was going to have a looong weekend, I couldn't resist. I started this morning with carrots- actually, that isn't true, I started this morning with violin practice. In case I haven't mentioned it violin practice is an EVERY DAY thing. I believe if you want to play well, it will always be an EVERY DAY thing. I want to play well.
But back to the carrots- 8 lbs of multi-colored carrots for $4. I ended up with 9 pints (a  canner full) and a few to spare. Here is one of my earlier blog post on canning carrots.
Then there was chicken. This chicken was not on sale this week but several weeks ago whole chickens were on sale. I don't know how many pounds they were, they are fairly small but they fit in the rotisserie just right and I cooked one in it yesterday and it was wonderful. However, one of our big problems with just the three of us here is food waste. We just don't eat a lot of leftovers. So I took what was left and took the best of the meat off of it and put it in the crockpot with some canned alfredo sauce, then I took the carcass and put it in a fairly large pot with water, some onion and some of those spare carrots and I made some great chicken stock that I have really been missing lately.
 I see I don't have a particular post on just canning chicken stock. I basically put the chicken bone carcass in a large pot and boiled it (then simmered) while I was making the strawberry pie (below).  I am not sure how much time that was but it was long enough to make the rest of the chicken meat come easily off the bone. Then I strain it through a metal mesh strainer which I put in the canning funnel, into the jars. Do the usual, wipe the jar rim, and can it at 10 lbs pressure for 20 minutes.

The other thing that was marked down was strawberries -the large containers of them (I don't know how much is in them but I think it is two pints). Strawberries are my favorite fruit but usually the marked down containers aren't worth getting but this time they still looked good and I got 5 of them -yes, that was a bit much and I had no idea what I was going to do with them but, of course, google came to the rescue and came up with the recipe for this strawberry pie.

I got the recipe for this here. We have not tried it yet but I just don't think we can go wrong with basically strawberries and sugar. This only used up 3 of my 5 things of strawberries though. I have been urging Phil to eat some and he has started on one of the containers--can't wait too long as they we already marked down so were already good an ripe. 

So this has been my weekend. I still have flowers to plant too but nothing will get done tomorrow as I have a doctors appointment--first time in almost 15 years. So nice that my works insurance started covering people who worked over 30 hours instead of 40.