PEACHES AND FAMILY

As parents we are always looking for ways to spend quality time with our children.  So imagine how happy I was when I came home from work a few days ago to see this view.  My wife and youngest daughter had spent the afternoon picking peaches from our tree and preserving them in bottles for our use and enjoyment this winter.  This is so amazing on many fronts.  First, my wife and daughter spent hours together chatting and laughing while working together toward a common goal.  What fun for them.  Second, this service will bless not only them but everyone lucky enough to be at our table when one of these bottles is opened up.  Third, they have provided a very healthy food.  As you might know, sugar is used when fruit is canned or preserved in this way.  In an effort to follow the TIPS FROM A MAN guidelines, they used honey along with sugar in an effort to make this final product more healthy.

Well, we just couldn't hold out until the snows of February to try the peaches so we opened a bottle to go along with dinner last Sunday.  The peaches were amazing!  Yummmy!  You could taste the honey.  Here is a TIP FROM A MAN... whenever you can, double up by spending time with your children while storing away good food for future use.  If you have not tried to preserve fruit before, maybe it is time you learned how to do it.  When I was growing up on the ranch, my mother was an expert at stuff like this.  We hardly ever went to the grocery store.  We raised beef.  We raised pigs.  We hunted deer and elk.  We caught fish.  We had chickens for eggs and cows for milk.  We grew a huge garden.  We'd pick berries from trees.  We didn't live where we could grow fruit so we would make trips to Utah to buy fruit then Mother would spend hours preserving fruit and making jams and jellies for use in the long winter months ahead.  This is how we fed our family.  I've never forgotten these valuable lessons.  It is good to be as self sufficient as we can be.  Even though we live in a Quick Serve world, we can bless ourselves and others by learning skills such as this.  And, have a great time doing it.

Enjoy life!