This week, Rob cooked the last turkey from the deep freezers. We want to make sure we have room for the new turkeys that we usually buy in November, and hope will be on sale this year, as usual. Even if the sales aren’t as wonderful as they are sometimes, frozen turkey does not improve with age, so it’s nice to make sure we are using things up before they get freezer-burned.

We’ve been making our own lunchmeat for quite some time now. I simply slice turkey or chicken or other meat if we have it, up into very thin slices and freeze little cartons of the slices. That lunchmeat is much lower in salt, in most cases, and much less expensive than buying packages. We will still buy some on occasion, such as when we go camping and don’t have any cooked up, but most of the time, we make our own. We don’t like it thickly sliced, and the answer to that problem is to have Rob sharpen the knives extremely sharp and I can slice the meat thinly that way.

I froze several packages of turkey bits for use in soups and casseroles and to sprinkle on salads. I boiled bones twice and made lots of broth. I froze some, and used some for soup.

Our fall/winter broccoli made some heads!

I was also super surprised to pick another bundle of zucchini. The bushes are usually dead by this time of year. One night, we had stir-fry with garden zucchini and kale, and other veggies from the fridge. We are eating the last picking of tomatoes I got before pulling the bushes, and the green ones Rob wrapped in tissue paper are starting to ripen, so we are eating those. We ate lettuce all week from the garden, and I can see that there are some more plants that will produce. I even was surprised with an handful of strawberries!

We filled the yard debris bin again. There is so much clipping, trimming and weeding to do, and we like to fill it with the bulkier things like sticks or noxious weeds each week if we can.

This was a week to re-stock the freezers with baked items, so I made applesauce muffins and Patsy made cupcakes. I have several items to make this week, if I get to it. Having frozen baked items helps me tremendously on busy days, and I want to fill up my supply again.

My grocery list was small this week, so I just had Rob grab some sale and bulk items for me, along with the few things I needed. I had him grab another 25 pound bag of sugar, as I used so much up in canning. It’s nice to have those weeks where I can stock the bulk supply in the pantry, using my regular weekly grocery budget money. One of those items I also stocked was Progresso soup for 99c/can. The clam chowder is gluten-free and we like it a lot, so he got 12 cans for the pantry shelves for that amazing price. I’m pretty sure 11 made it to the pantry shelves…….:)