Thursday, October 26, 2017

Canning applesauce



I love this time of year! While I didn't have a great garden year (bad weather, animals breaking in and eating stuff, zukes getting a fungus), I totally cheat when it comes to applesauce season:

I do love a good sale!
In Braving the Storm, those living at the cabin (I really want to start calling them the scooby gang for the purposes of this blog...haha) discover an apple orchard nearby where they're able to collect apples both to can and to use as a bartering item when at the trading post. While I'm not that lucky, $0.99/lb isn't too bad, either!

I follow this recipe whenever I can applesauce. Not only is it super easy, but there's no added sugar or any other ingredients for that matter; it's apples (and cinnamon, if you're so inclined) and that's it. In my opinion, homemade applesauce tastes a million times better than the store bought stuff. One drawback is, once the jar is open, it doesn't last more than a day or two. I can mine in quarter pints so that I can eat them in one or two sittings (mainly because I learned my lesson).

The apple was too neat looking not to take a picture of before I sliced it up.
If you're looking into getting into canning, this is the best way to get your feet wet besides canning peaches.

The recipe really is this simple:
1) Slice up your apples (make sure there aren't any cores or seeds).
2) Cook the apples until they're soft.
3) Turn the apples into applesauce.
4) Can your applesauce.

I usually get at least 4 different kinds of apples, as I think this makes it taste better. You want to use the sweet ones, not sour (so no granny smiths). I usually use red delicious, fuji, gala, and mcintosh.

Slice those bad boys up and add them to a pot with an inch of water at the bottom.
Once they're good and soft, I run them through my food mill so that all the peels are out. Some people use the electronic ones, but remember that I wrote books where there is no power available; I like to learn how to do things without electricity. 

(Yes, I have an electric stove, so I am cheating a bit, but I'm not making a fire to cook apples unless I have a lot more time on my hands, and it was already 8pm when I decided to start canning.)
My Food Mill hard at work, about halfway through the batch I made.
All that's left after that it to ladle the applesauce into jars and process them in a water bath. The recipe above has really great, in-depth instructions on how to use a water bath canner if you're just getting started in the wonderful world of food preservation.

And voila! A dozen quarter pints of applesauce and a half pint of apple juice (ran through a strainer to get all the bits out). I know that others who have pigs, horses, etc. will feed the scraps to their animals. Since I don't think Lars or Kaylee would be too fond of snacking on peels, I'll be putting all of the scraps into my composter. Hopefully with the apples' help, my garden will be more successful next year!
Breakfast tomorrow will be delicious!
I have an adventure to post soon. I have all the pictures, I just got to organize them. Hopefully I'll be posting that soon!

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Finalist in an awards ceremony! And marketing ideas

Today was a fun day: I was a finalist in a local awards Ceremony!

I brought a copy of my book, just in case.

As we all know by now, I get nervous around people, but I enjoy this event. This was my second year as a finalist (Braving the Storm was a finalist last year), and I love the crowd. They're really nice, and some of them are delightfully quirky (as writers are want to do). There's an author, Dede Rittman, who brings a stuffed rabbit everywhere she goes. She's so animated and excited and just so happy to be there that her enthusiasm is infectious. She just makes me smile. 

Plus there's dinner, and it was delicious; butternut squash ravioli + alfredo sauce = happy Jen.
 
I got third place in the ceremony, of which I am very proud. There were some people there who hadn't gotten finalist, so I was quite honored to receive even that. Though I often worry my books don't compare to my peers, it's moments like this that make it all worth it. Plus now by book has a new sticker adorning it:
 
My book's going to run out of room on the cover soon! :)
The hubby also got a decent picture of me with my certificate and book:

I am a very proud author!
The best part of the event was the panel of authors. The panel's theme was marketing, and I got a few really good tips. One of them was that, in order to gain exposure, it's important to talk about a topic related in some way to your book (but not directly involved with your book) so that people can get interested in it. For example, one of the authors wrote a book about a small town outside of Pittsburgh, and the book had little league baseball as one of the major themes. Because of this, he's spoken in events about little league baseball, and he's spoken in other events about the town. He then links his book into the subject. This has helped him get more exposure as people show up to hear about the topics, and its snowballed from there.

I love this idea. Since my books revolve around emergency preparedness, I think I could use that as a marketing strategy. I want people to learn about being prepared without necessarily becoming a full-on prepper; it's just important to have some sort of plan, especially when a family is involved. With everything going on in Puerto Rico right now, its citizens struggling to get food and water, it's more important right now than ever. With the right water filter stored away for emergencies (or knowing how to make a simple one with charcoal and sand), finding a water source would be a *little* less of a concern. If you have a basic idea of your region's edible wild plants--or how to fish/hunt/etc.--you'll have a much better chance of having something to nibble on.

I'm nowhere near an expert in emergency preparedness, but I can use my learning process to teach others as well. I can point out the little hints I make in my books to important plants and strategies. I've always sought to help others gain these skills; this could be a great way to do that.

I'll have my work cut out for me with the basics, but it should be worth it. With as much as I geek out when I start talking about disaster preparation, it might also be the best way to get me out of my shell.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Walking a few miles in my characters' shoes

One of my favorite things about writing is the research that goes into it.

In Book 3, two characters who are still living in Pittsburgh 7 months into the Blackout finally need to flee. They do this by escaping via walking a nature trail which connects to railroad tracks, then they make their way to the Panhandle Trail. 

While I don't think I'd be able to walk the entire distance they'd have to (especially since it'll take them a few days), I ventured out today to test some of path they'll encounter while on the first leg of relocating to their new home.

 After resting a while in the Thornburg Conservation Park, they decide to take the trail which leads through the woods into Carnegie.


Not the worst view by which to travel, if I do say so myself.
The terrain isn't too bad, either. They'll have walking sticks, of course, so they should be able to maneuver it with little effort.

It's quite beautiful with naturally-made tunnels in some places.

It took me about an hour to get to the end of the trail. It stops abruptly, and you have to climb a small incline to get on the train tracks.

The end of the trail
From there, you follow the tracks for a ways. It takes you behind warehouses on either side where they may be able to scavenge a bit, plus it makes for great scenery:


I eventually got to a railroad bridge, which is where I ended my adventure for today for two reasons: I was losing light and I didn't want to walk through the woods in the dark, and my fear of heights convinced me today was not the day.

I want to conquer my fear of heights, but I suppose I'll cross that bridge some other day (ba dum tiss)
To be fair, I've crossed sketchier bridges than this, but still.
Still, it was a really cool adventure. The trail had a lot of coal just lying around, which will be nice for them to be able to just pick up and use in a fire instead of chopping wood, plus I saw a few other really cool things:

A random pocket knife left sticking out of a pallet. All they'd need is duct tape for the handle, and boo.! Free knife!

Someone's actual makeshift camp: a tarp, two blankets, a bowl, a glass bottle, a pot, and bug spray. It's like my book came to life for me.
So someday when you're reading Book 3, make sure to stop back to this blog entry and see what they're seeing :)

Sunday, October 1, 2017

A recollection of 9/11 and Foreign exchange students in a post-apocalyptic world


I'm still on my writing binge, and another topic that has come up is how foreign exchange students would handle a scenario such as one in The Storm Series.

Imagine being thousands of miles away from home with no way to tell your family that you're safe and no way to get back. Not only that, but you barely speak the language of the country you're in. If the power would go out right now, like it did in the book, there would be thousands of students across the country in this predicament.

This topic comes to me from experience. I was a freshman in college during 9/11, and I hung out primarily with most of the foreign exchange students in my college. They were an amazing group of people, and I learned so much about different cultures during that time. Most of them were juniors, and they hailed from all over--Northern Ireland, Venezuela, Rwanda, Spain, Mexico, and Russia. I fit in with them so much better than I did people from my own country (though I didn't know nearly enough about soccer), and they would joke with me that I could be considered European if I didn't love chocolate and cheese so much. My friend from Northern Ireland, Peter, would get so mad at the vending machines. "Look at this! There's not a single thing in there that doesn't have chocolate or cheese in it!" I laughed so hard, because he was right.

I got him a chocolate cheesecake for his birthday. He was so pissed. :)

Anywho, one sleepy morning in September I had stumbled down to the computer lab to finish a paper that was due at 9am. Suddenly a student bolted into the room and announced that the World Trade Center had been hit by an airplane. We didn't realize the severity of the situation yet, like most people, but the details started trickling in. Class was cancelled for the rest of the day.

I remember seeing this one student just standing outside of one of the buildings, his eyes distant. We'd never spoken before--he was a jock and I most assuredly was not, so we didn't run in the same circles--and he just looked at me with tears in his eyes. "I can't be drafted," he said. "I don't want to go to war."

I was only about an hour away from where Flight 93 crashed, so I headed to the student lounge to try and get a hold of my parents to let them know I was safe. Almost no one had cell phones yet, so I tried to call them on the pay phone. The phone lines were all tied up. I gave up after a while and sat down with everyone who was gathered around the TV. I watched it numbly, unable to process what was happening. My foreign friends were scared, needless to say. To be that far away from home in a country that might be going to war? What would they do?

We sat around for quite a while that day watching the TV, and my friends started sharing stories from their own countries. My friend from Venezuela told us that you couldn't speak against the government in public for fear of being shot. My friend from Rwanda told gut-wrenching stories about having to lock themselves in a school and seal the doors and windows to protect themselves from killer bees and how he helplessly heard people being killed in a neighboring apartment, knowing that to help them would spell his own demise. The Northern Ireland Troubles was still going on, so car bombs were always a concern for my Irish friends. I just sat there, this naive 18 year old, amazed that people lived like that. Their stories still haunt me to this day.

There was a prayer circle in the yard that evening, hundreds of us from different backgrounds joined together, praying for everyone affected by the terrorist attack. The night sky twinkled with the blinking lights of planes in the sky. I'm not sure if they were military planes or commercial planes that weren't allowed to land, but I'd never seen so many aircraft in the sky at once.

Most of the foreign folks I hung out with spoke English quite well--either it was their primary language or they'd had a few years of English under their belts before coming to the states--but the students from Russia seemed to struggle the most. One was a little more proficient with the language than the other, so she would often help translate.

Because of this, when writing Braving the Storm, I wanted to make sure the foreign student dynamic was included in the story. The third book in the series goes a little more in-depth about one of the students, Manuel, who joined the militia. He spoke broken English in the second book which drew the attention of a few closed-minded individuals. We see him again in the third book, this time much more proficient:



“Can you hand me the rubbing alcohol, Manuel? I don’t want this getting infected.”
“Sure thing,” he said, handing her the bottle. “Should I get another bottle from the cabinet?”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Christine replied.
“Your English is getting a lot better, Manuel!” Steve observed. Manuel had been a foreign exchange student at the school, and his grasp of the English language was limited when he arrived. Also a member of the militia, Steve recalled Manuel struggling to get ideas across in their meetings.
Manuel beamed, nodding. “We did not have much to do in the winter, so everyone helped tutor me. I think they had fun teaching me.”
“The local library had children’s books for different reading levels,” Tony explained. “We started with some practice workbooks, then we started helping him read out loud. He started with Miss Nelson is Missing!, The Magic School Bus series, and Where the Wild Things Are, all of which he got through pretty easily. Then we read Charlotte’s Web and My Side of the Mountain. Currently we’re getting through the Harry Potter series. He’s made so much progress.”
“And he does the characters’ voices when he reads,” Christine added with a chuckle. “Some of us gather and listen to him read the books. It’s like listening to a radio show.”
“Good for you, Manuel!” Steve exclaimed.
Manuel flushed. “Thank you, Mister Steve.”
“Please, Manuel, just call me Steve.”

While stuck in a less-than-ideal and downright terrifying scenario, I have hope that the students would band together regardless of background, just like my school did the night of 9/11, and work together to make the world better if anything like The Storm Series ever happened to this country.