Preserving and Ice Cream making

At first the picture above just looks like a whole mess of stuff, but I loved this picture because it shows all of our preserving efforts at once. Like the I Spy books my students love so much, if you look closely you can see a juicer, with a few ice cube trays full of juice (including a dinosaur ice cube tray), a baking sheet with tangerine wedges on it, and a silver bowl filled with orange chunks that will later go into jars. I would also like to point out the red container that we regularly fill with our green waste that either goes into our green trash cans or to our worms.



Here are our jars of oranges right before that last two steps of adding boiling water, and then putting them in a water bath.

Why are we preserving oranges? The main reason is just because we got so many of them, we didn't want to waste them. At the time of preserving we had citrus from our CSA box, Blake's parent's tree, a student in my class, another teacher at the school and my parents. Not to mention that our own orange tree has oranges that could probably be picked too!

We do love oranges, but the fact is that we can only eat so many before they go bad, and we hate to see good food get wasted. The jarred oranges sound strange to people, but consider them like the canned mandarins you can get. We intend to use them sometime in things like salads, where you want oranges cut that way anyways.

The orange juice cubes will be great for cooked recipes that need some orange juice added to them (usually in larger quantities than a single cube, but is was much easier to freeze that way).

The frozen tangerines can be eaten like a frozen treat, which we already tried, and were great, or can be taken out, slightly defrosted, and then eaten (haven't tried this yet). I imagine they would also be good in a smoothie ... but we usually don't remember to get out the blender to make ourselves one :-p .

Speaking of frozen treats, we made our second batch of ice cream this weekend, and loved it even more than the first one! It was peanut butter! YUM! The sad thing is that we are actually spending more to make our own ice cream... but we can't help plotting out new recipes to try! The next one we are contemplating would be a banana chocolate ice cream.