Poor Ezra has been fighting a cold for awhile now. The past few nights he’s been waking himself up because he’s been coughing so hard. I’m fighting a cold as well, but not to the extent that he is. A few months ago I read about a fellow blogger’s garlic balm that she uses on colds and I had used it on Ezra at that time and then left it in the fridge. I cleaned out the old stuff yesterday and made a new batch and lubed the babe down. I also caved and we bought a cold/cough medicine for children because I wanted Ezra to be able to have a good night’s sleep. All things considered, I really do think that garlic balm in amazing! Stink, stinky, stuff, but amazing. Ezra only had one coughing fit last night, and there is no runny nose today, and no coughing fits. He sounds so much better! I’ve been slathering him up chest, back, and feet every couple hours. I actually did up my feet last night, too, and I feel better as well. Garlic, who knew?!
To make it yourself, take 8 cloves of garlic, 1/3 C of coconut oil, and blend/whip together until it’s completely smooth. Put in a glass container and place it in the fridge when you’re not using it. To tell a secret, I have ours sitting on our counter right now, because our house is cold enough that it’s in a solid form. But “technically” it should be kept in the fridge.
Mister kitty has been keeping Ezra company while he’s sick. I think it has more to do with the fuzzy owl blanket Ezra keeps with him, but it’s a cute sight, nonetheless.
We’ve been canning tons of tomatoes lately, but I wanted to get some jars of paste. The trouble is, I didn’t want to wait while the mix simmered on the oven for hours at a time while I waited for most of the water to evaporate. I did a little web research about how other folks did tomato paste and saw a genius post about first dehydrating the tomatoes and then processing them. It made so much sense! We have a dehydrator that we got from a set of grandparents:
The thing is, this thing was probably quite old before we got it, and we’ve had it for probably 4-5 years and never used it. I placed the rows of tomatoes on the racks and set it. I checked on them the next morning before I went to work and only one rack, the one on the bottom, was ready to be removed. This was after about eight hours. I rotated the racks and had Jesse keep an eye on them for the rest of the day. They were still drying when I got home that night.
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I hopped on to a Facebook canning forum, and there is no real consensus about why they exploded. Some theorize that I needed more moisture in the cans, some say its because the tomato contents and jars weren’t hot enough before I put them into the canner, others because I had too little head space. All I know is that was a waste of two drying days, and now I have a mess to clean up.
It has been a little rainy/misty, so Jesse gathered up the onions we had pulled. I’m excited to try them!
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