Greetings from cold, sunny Michigan! I have ham bones in the pressure cooker. I want to make ham and beans for supper tonight.
Our pork is almost all pressure canned or in the freezer. We still want to smoke 100 pounds of summer sausage using hamburger and sausage.
The vegetable soup we canned last week totaled 30 quarts. I make it thick so that more tomato juice can be added to the soup at the point you open a quart if preferred.
Our freezers are filled beyond capacity. We ended up putting some meat in Timothy’s freezer for now.
Saturday we will help Jacob and Emma butcher pork. Then we should be done with that for another year. It’s a lot of work but well worth it once it’s in the freezer.
On Friday, my brother Amos was working with his construction crew. He was found outside, lying down. They called an ambulance. He was taken to the nearest hospital, where the doctors think he had a mini-stroke and a bad ear infection, causing dizziness, vomiting, etc. He still is almost too weak to walk but was released to travel home, about three-and-a-half hours away.
It was two years ago in January when Amos was also taken to the hospital by ambulance after being in a van accident on his way to work. They hit black ice, causing the van to roll numerous times and taking the lives of two of my cousins, Dan Graber and Chris Eicher. The Michigan hospital Amos was in this time is two hours from here. Jacob, sister Emma, sisters Verena and Susan, Joe, and I went to visit with Amos at the hospital Friday evening. Amos’s wife Nancy and children, and all their married children were at the hospital too. It was a long drive for them.
Saturday visitors here were sister Liz, Levi, Levi Jr., Rosa and Suzanne, and their married daughter Elizabeth with husband Samuel. They spent the night with sisters Verena and Susan. Rosa and Suzanne were going to spend the night here with my daughters Verena and Loretta. Plans changed when daughter Verena was taken to the emergency room after not being able to be awakened. Doctors ordered chest x-rays as her heart rate was dropping fast from hyper-ventilating. Diagnosis was a panic attack from being too stressed, and pain from headaches. They also gave her IV fluids as she was starting to dehydrate. It gave us all a scare but we are glad she is back home and doing well.
Sister Liz had her 46th birthday on Saturday, Jan. 24, as did daughter Susan celebrating her 19th. Happy birthday wishes to both!
God bless you all! Try these cookies. Sister Susan made them awhile back.
Delicious Cookies
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup soft margarine
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup nuts
1 cup oatmeal
1 cup Rice Krispies
1 cup coconut (optional)
Mix ingredients in order given. Shape into balls on cookie sheet. Dip a fork or glass in sugar and flatten each cookie. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes.
Lovina Eicher is an Old Order Amish writer, cook, wife and mother of eight. Formerly writing as The Amish Cook, Eicher inherited that column from her mother, Elizabeth Coblentz, who wrote from 1991 to 2002. Readers can contact Eicher at PO Box 1689, South Holland, IL 60473 (please include a self-addressed stamped envelope for a reply) or at [email protected].
Sorry to hear of too many visits to the hospital in your family of late. Boo! I hope folks will be feeling better soon. The canned goods look wonderful. My mother did not can our home-grown pork, as we had a freezer; but she did can some fish and venison for a few years. When I was in college and first-married, the fish made lovely croquettes. We used the venison in either stew or a stroganoff with egg noodles.