Sunday, August 7, 2011

Pepper jam, tomatoes, butternut squash, and beans!

Pepper Jam, Baby!

We've started to get a small ton of tomatoes!

Ugly Tomatoes!

The first batch of tomato sauce!

I baked our butternut squash in the oven and whirred it
around in the food processor.

So many beans, with so many more to come.


Jasper begged for a bean, but wasn't digging it once he got it.



Kidney beans, black beans, favas, soldier beans,
yard-longs, and black-eyed peas.

We just haven't figured out how to get around this part yet.... 

Prepped for drying....

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Watermelon Jelly (Part 2) and Other Stories....

The water bath is heating up and the lids are sterilizing
in a sauce pan. I'm stirring watermelon juice, vinegar,
sugar, grated ginger, and pectin.
First, some storytelling: "The Unnatural History of Brown's Island" was the featured story at Fiction365.com on Saturday. I hesistate to call my Brown's Island story 'new', since I wrote it in January 2010 and have been sitting on it, like it's an egg, ever since. The story itself, although fictional, is based largely on local legend and some fact, since there was indeed a deadly explosion there just before Christmas in 1972.

In other news, food preservation continues! I started watermelon jelly on Monday and finished it on Tuesday afternoon. In fact, I was
washing dishes just as Michael came home from work, and that left our evening free to attack the other things that needed to be taken care of, namely, carrots. Michael got a fannyload of them on Sunday by digging them up with the potato fork. Last night, we washed, trimmed, scraped and re-washed the carrots before raw packing them and getting them into the pressure canner....pictures of the productivity follow, just below: 
Just out of the canner! Watermelon-ginger jelly.


Rainbow carrots, being peeled and chopped.

The smaller carrots got their own jar.

We chopped the larger ones.


Fresh out of the pressure canner!

A long view of Tuesday's productivity...is that a
ghost in the image, or is our jar just steaming?

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Watermelon jelly (part 1), brioche, and Jasper at the 'dentist'

Savannah started making watermelon jelly on
Monday afternoon. The watermelon  here is in the
food mill, getting a good wringing!

The resulting juice, but...I'm not able to make jelly
just yet. We have to pick up our little patient Jasper....

Fred's was a little glum. Jasper was getting a tooth
extracted and was at the vet all day. Fred missed him and
hid most of the day beneath the coffee table tablecloth.

Savannah also made brioche, and as you can see above,
 it grew like the blob, touching the window on the
machine lid.
Michael says our brioche looks like it has a beret.

Finally, Jasper came home, slightly drunk from
the anesthesia. Michael re-applied a bandage to
his IV boo-boo.

Woo! They shaved it so close it feels like suede.
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