I think we’re finally done.  It’s been a long four and a half months but I think I can finally say that we’re done with food preservation for the year.  I might make marmalade once Florida citrus comes back into season in mid-December but that’s a pretty laughable idea, considering I’ll be HUGE by then.  So really, we’re done.

I’ve been done with the actual food preservation for a couple weeks but yesterday, I finally got both our freezers organized.  So now I know where everything is and how much we have.  At first glance, I can tell you this:  We have way too much pumpkin and not nearly enough chard.  I have a feeling we’ll be eating a lot of pumpkin soup in the spring!

The bottom shelf and door are ready and waiting for all the baking and cooking I’m planning to do in preparation for the months after the baby comes.  We’ll see how that goes.

We do, thankfully, have far more frozen fruit than we’ve ever had so it’s going to be a good winter for smoothies.  I’ll have to figure out how to incorporate some of that pumpkin puree into our smoothies.

Here’s one reason why we have so much pumpkin:

missing one big pumpkin I’d already cut up

This is definitely the earliest that we’ve ever finished up food preservation.  There’s nothing like a baby’s impending arrival to motivate you, right?

And yes, I’ll be making these rolls for Thanksgiving!

P.S. If you’re really curious, here’s the actual freezer inventory (Chest Freezer Inventory 2012-2013) that I’ll be taping to the doors of our freezers so we can keep track of what we have.  (It will open in as an Excel spreadsheet.)  We also ended up canning approximately 30 pints of pickles, 35 pints of peaches, 12 pints of strawberry jam, and 25 pints of pears (thanks to our neighbor’s pear tree).  It’s nice to have so much food ready to eat!