I don’t have a master plan for canning in the summer and fall. If I did I wouldn’t stick to it because that would probably be impossible. Generally, if it’s piling up then something has to be done with it before it spoils. That’s the long and short of my master plan. Some foods last for awhile though, especially if refrigerated or put into cold storage. Last year I kept my carrot crop fresh in a refrigerator drawer for a long time. I finally grated what I had left and made a couple of quarts of fermented carrots that I kept in the fridge for salads and ginger carrot salad dressing.

It is late October now, and I still have about six or seven pounds of carrots. A few days ago I decided to can them instead of fermenting them. The first step was to look for a recipe. I decided to try one from the Better Homes and Gardens Complete Canning Guide. But their Rosemary Carrots recipe requires chicken broth. Well, I have a quart of smoked turkey broth in my pantry but no chicken broth, so like any honest homesteader I had to make my chicken broth first. Since I had frozen several bags of chicken gizzards and other parts when we butchered some of our chickens in the spring, (no master plan for those either,) I decided to make broth with those. But I didn’t have time to tend to a pot of chicken broth on the stove top, so I made the broth over night in the crock pot.

Yesterday the only thing I did to move my plan further along was to refrigerate all that chicken broth. So later today will finally be the time to combine my sliced carrots and fresh rosemary with my home made chicken broth, minus the soup I made with some of it last night (not in the masterplan either but I have a sore throat and it was good to me.) That is if everything goes according to plan. If not, my ingredients can wait patiently in the refrigerator for me to get my act together.