Month: September 2025

Making Oyster Crackers

Yesterday, I used the last of our tomatoes to cook with onions to make a big batch of tomato soup base. You can read about the process at https://marykisner.com/making-cream-of-tomato-soup-from-scratch/

It really is a thick tomato sauce flavored with onion. From that, we each season the soup to our liking. I add salt, pepper and some coconut milk. Bert adds salt, more pepper and regular milk. When we have soup, we often comment about the big crackers we remember having with soup…oyster crackers. I have not looked for them lately in the store, but I have seen the “common crackers” sold through Vermont Country Store. I think they are pretty big.

Recently, I found a recipe in Bert’s muzzleloading magazine, “MuzzleBlasts” to make oyster crackers. I gave it a try and ended up with some really nice crackers for soup.

The ingredients are pretty simple:

Flour, Baking Powder, Salt, water, melted butter.

Warm water

Melted butter

Mix all ingredients together to make a soft dough.

Scoop out spoonfuls, roll into small balls of dough and put them on a cookie sheet. They rise a little but the next time I might make them a little bigger.

Bake in preheated oven 375 degrees for 15 minutes. Turn off the oven and leave the crackers in the oven until just warm. They make crunchy little globs that work great in soup! Enjoy!

If you have questions or comments, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Garden Update September 17, 2025

This year the garden seems to be winding down earlier…probably because of the lack of rain! Bert waters the plants that are left every day, but a good dose from Mother Nature would sure help! I just wanted to show you how the garden looks in mid-September.

On the patio, the onion planters were finally emptied. Bert took the onions that were left and spread them out on the picnic table to dry. I’ll have enough to cook with for a month or two!

The radishes and lettuce just gave up and those planters are now empty, ready for spring!

The Raindrop tomatoes, amazingly, continue to ripen, even though the plants look pretty sad.

I haven’t talked much about the asparagus. We planted the roots in the spring and just left them alone. They’ve been growing fine, so hopefully next spring we can enjoy a meal or two from them.

The pumpkins are turning orange and I’m surprised how many there are in the patch. Of course, we won’t know until we actually pull them out of the patch if roaming critters have taken bites out of them.

Moving up to the garden on the hill…the lavender continues to entice the bees but I didn’t try to cut any to dry. They didn’t make nice flowers.

The tomatoes are ripening slowly. We pick them as they look ready. I still have trays of tomatoes on the dining room table, so we’re eating at least one a day!

The carrots have struggled all summer. Many were just too small or deformed. Bert sorted out the good ones in the first batch and shared the rejects with a friend’s rabbits! They loved them!

Here’s the first batch. We’ll dig up more as we need them!

The zucchini is finally DONE! I think I’ve tried enough recipes so I can say we missed only one zucchini that got too big. The rest were baked into cookies, casseroles and bread OR they were shredded and are now in the freezer! Success! These beds are ready for next spring!

And finally, the Echinacea looks pretty ugly. Bert will cut it off at ground level after the first frost and the patch will be ready for next spring!

One last indication that fall is here…the Japanese maple trees in the front yard now have their orange seed pods all over! I call them my pumpkin trees for a month or two…just in time for Halloween! Enjoy! Remember, if you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Trying to Increase Bake Sale Participation

Very soon, the Ladies Auxiliary to the Boalsburg Fire Company will hold their fall “flea market/bake sale” at the fire hall. It will be held next weekend, September 19 and 20, 2025.

In the past, I have posted pictures about the flea market-style sale, with almost 30 tables rented by local folks to sell their own stuff. It’s also a major fund raiser for the Auxiliary, with most of the proceeds going to the needs of the fire company. You can see more pictures of one of the last sales we had at: https://marykisner.com/spring-flea-market-will-be-held-april-26-&-27/

In the past year or so, we’ve tried to better organize the bake sale. Honestly, we are not experts at baking, packaging or labeling food products…but we’re getting there. We are a small group of mostly older retired ladies and many of us have stopped doing a lot of baking in the first place. Some of us have moved to apartments or assisted living and don’t have a lot of pots and pans around anymore.

For now, we manage to sell bowls of chicken corn soup, hot dogs and sloppy joe…mostly to the 30+ folks that are taking care of their flea market tables. The baked goods are a draw to go with the lunch fare. However, our offerings have been very limited. This fall, I wanted to try to entice my fellow auxiliary members to expand our offerings at the bake sale table.

My contributions seem to be the chicken corn soup and scones. The soup was easy, but I tackled the scones last year without knowing much about making them. I simplified the process by buying boxed mixes for scones from King Arthur Flour Company…online. You can read about the learning curve I went through to make a ton of scones at https://marykisner.com/making-scones/. At that time, I didn’t realize my oven was not very accurate with preheating so the whole process was quite an accomplishment. I also finally discovered silicone scone baking pans and what a difference they made! I can cool the scones right in the pan and pop them out after they cool and firm up.

Even with the steep learning curve, the scones were a big HIT! That was great, but this fall we needed other items to make it an interesting bake sale. I wanted to encourage my auxiliary friends to each make something to contribute to the sale. I started at the grocery store. I stocked up on a few cake mixes that could be made into cookies.

I found a recipe online to make cookies from a cake mix:

I found some muffin mixes that could be packaged with 2 muffins in a ziplock bag for sale.

I picked up a few disposable cake and bread pans.

I hauled all this stuff to our meeting yesterday and offered the mixes, pans and recipe to the group. I think it worked! At least everybody took at least one thing to try and the pans were helpful for those who no longer had baking pans around. I’m encouraged that we may have more items to sell next weekend! I hope I’ll be able to report that we had a nice variety of baked goods to offer next weekend!

If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Freezing Zucchini Shreds

One last blast about zucchini! Last week I had a full tray of zucchini and I was done experimenting with recipes. Time to pull out the food processor to shred and freeze the last big batch. My little hand-held shredder was fine for one or two zucchinis to make one recipe. Now I had a pile and the food processor could handle it quickly…it probably took longer to clean up the machine when I was done than it took to shred all the zucchinis!

I had more to choose from, but the two biggest zucchinis ended up being composted…the seeds were too big!

I first cut all the zucchini into smaller pieces.

The chunks had to fit into the hole at the top:

The food processor has a nice shredding blade.

It took only a few minutes to shred all the zucchini!

All done!

I scooped 2 cups of the shreds into each quart bag and flattened them out so they would stack in the freezer.

I now have 5 bags of shredded zucchini in the freezer ready for all those recipes I tried over the last month! Yay!

If you have comments or questions, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.

Making Mary’s Zucchini Bread

I just realized I had not shared my Zucchini Bread recipe yet! We’ve had enough zucchini so I’ve been able to experiment with cookies and a casserole along with how I dehydrate the zucchini shreds. You can find those articles at the following links:

https://marykisner.com/marys-zucchini-chocolate-chip-cookies/; https://marykisner.com/making-a-zucchini-cornbread-casserole/; and https://marykisner.com/dehydrating-zucchini-shreds/.

Now that the zucchini plants are not producing so much, it was time to use up all the zucchini sitting around my kitchen. I put several of the small, misshapen ones in the compost bin. I saved two smaller ones and shredded the rest.

I ended up with about 5 cups of shredded zucchini. I decided to make two batches of zucchini bread…which would use up 4 cups…and froze the last cup.

Making a double batch of zucchini bread made sense and it was a lot easier if I measured everything out in pairs. I wouldn’t start mixing until I had everything ready.

Here is the recipe!

First, I measured out the Baking Powder, Baking Soda and Salt.

Then, I shredded and measured out the zucchini.

I chopped the walnuts:

Here are all the prepped ingredients:

Then, I was ready to follow the instructions.

  1. In a large mixing bowl whisk the eggs, oil, sugars, cinnamon, nutmeg (I did not use) and vanilla. Whisk well to break up the eggs and get everything well incorporated.
  2. Blend in the baking powder, soda and salt, so they are mixed in thoroughly, then stir in the flour.

3. When the flour is almost all incorporated, fold in the zucchini and nuts. Stop mixing as soon as there is no dry flour left and the zucchini and nuts are evenly dispersed. Do not over-mix this batter.

4. I poured the batter into 3 pans, instead of 2. I’m always concerned my oven isn’t the right temperature, so I thought these loaves could be a little smaller and get cooked through.

I let them cool in the pan about half an hour (mostly because I forgot about them!) and turned them out to continue cooling.

Result…I had three loaves of zucchini bread…delicious!

If you have questions or comments, please email me directly at maryjkisner@gmail.com.