Colored Salt

Being a stay at home mom is a lot of fun for me. I am always trying out new activities to keep me stimulated creatively and as a side point to keep my kids entertained. Don't you know... I only buy my kids toys I would want to play with! Today's activity was colored salt. Really I would have liked it to be sand, but I used what I had on hand.

I started by dividing the salt into 3 bowls. I added a few drops of food coloring to each bowl. then mixed to get the color spread throughout.

 After I got all three colors - I chose red, yellow, and blue - I spread out a sheet, dumped out the sand toys, and let them at it. My 15 month old had a lot of fun with the shovels and dragging his fingers through it. My 3 year old had more fun scooping it up and letting it trickle off his shovel. They were very serious during this activity. I think the weird factor of playing with a sand like substance in the house threw them off. Either that or they had their thinking caps on.

After about 40 min the salt was all over the place but I brought out our handy dandy vacuum cleaner and that tidied things up real quick.  

Canning Carrots

One of my newest obsessions is canning. Yes, I know.... I'm weird, but what can I do. I was born in the wrong century. I have canned quite a few things so far and I am getting more adventurous. Although today I kept it simple. Carrots. Yup Just plain ol' carrots. I started with about 8 pounds of carrots.

Peeled them....

and used my food processor to slice them....

With the help of a very cute assistant

 While I did all that my jars were in the canner getting hot. Hot jars are very important especially if you don't want smashed jars. hen your canning its important to have everything ready before hand so you are not running around looking for a lid or a ring or a measuring spoon while things are bubling and boiling. Being neat, clean, and organized are key to canning. 

I started with ½ tsp kosher salt in each jar. 

then using my funnel I added as many carrots as I could pack in (I used the cold pack method) and poured over that hot water. 

wiped the rim, put on the lid, and screwed on the band. 

One of the sort of annoying things about canning is that you actually can not do the assembly line method. You need to do one jar at a time and put in back into the canner before filling the next jar. The reason is to avoid the jars getting too cool. Again, cold jars = exploding jars. cold jars = bad news bears! So one at a time they go until they are all happily in the canner ready to get processed. 

The procedure from here is cover and lock pressure canner, bring to boil, let steam vent for 10 minutes, and then put on the weighed gauge and process for 30 min. Well, the time for quarts is 30 min and I did pint and a halves but I still process for 30 minutes since no time was given for pint and a halves and better too long then not long enough!

30 minutes later I turned off the fire, let the whole thing cool down before taking off the weight, and opening her up. 

Don't they look pretty!

Now you may ask what are you gonna do with them....

Well that is a post for another time...