I've talked before about my canning escapades. This year's pasta sauce was especially exciting! How could pasta sauce be exciting? Well many farms across vermont lost their tomato crops. Between the horrible rain and the late blight my own tomatoes all shriveled and died even my CSA didn't have extra tomatoes to sell. But finally I found a farm selling tomatoes, and I managed to get 30 pounds of organic tomatoes for $35. Some of them were considered seconds:

But they look fine to me!

I don't have one of those fancy food mills that grinds and separates out the seeds and skin all at once. Every year around this time I swear I'm going to get one... This year I finally perfected the dipping in hot water technique.

See? The tomato is practically jumping out of its skin!

You have to have the water at a rolling boil FIRST. Then you drop the tomatoes in just until the skins split. I've started pricking them before putting them in because once in awhile the skins just don't split and the tomato gets soft. Really, you only want to leave them in the water for about 30 seconds - not even long enough for it to get back up to a boil.


And, the center is still cool, which is nice for me since the next step is to cut it in half and scoop out the seeds, much easier to do when I'm not burning my fingers at the same time. I found treating the tomato a bit like a grapefruit worked best for getting all the seeds out of each wedge shaped hollow while preserving as much flesh and juice as possible.

I threw them all into Neil's brew kettle and smashed at them a bit with the potato smasher. Then the simmering began. I simmered all of the tomatoes and flesh, along with a bottle of wine.


The fresh herbs, onion, and garlic got chopped very fine and sauteed lightly before going into the pot.


And I ground the dried herbs up and added them:


The final result? 17 pints of pasta sauce put up in my cabinet! That'll last us awhile, although certainly not all winter.

I've had salmon, chinese food, left my sewing machine on the dining room table for 3 days in a row, and I'm tired of TV as a companion. I'm ready for Neil to come home!

Seriously, I've never really lived alone, and I'm just not cut out for it. I think if something horrible happened to Neil I'd have to join a commune, or get a housemate... I grew up in house with at least 7 people in it and shared a room for most of my childhood. I moved on to college where I always had roommates and/or lived in suite style dorms (I take that back, 2 semesters at BU my room mate was gone for days at a time, I was miserable there though, so my theory holds) Then I moved to apartments and houses with house mates, then I got married. I guess I'm just a social creature by nature.

I had a great 3rd/4th of July (it was actually a friend's birthday party, it was good) My parents' came to visit on the 5th (and we hiked to roundtop AND prospect rock, go Mom go!) So it's not even like I've been very alone.

I manage fine - I am, in fact, surprisingly productive. This weekend I:
Baked: an angel food cake, a loaf of bread, chocolate chip cookies
Gardened: finished the sunny tall perennial bed, worked on the shade bed, bought and put in big watermelon "seedlings" Weed-whacked the front lawn (including figuring out why the machine wouldn't run - turns out it needed gas, I like my reel mower better)
Sewed a skirt and cut fabric for a second, worked on some sweater knitting (the juno I'm reverse engineering) and prepped for my incoming big project.
And canned! I made pickled scapes, both standard and sweet and sour.
But I have no one to show all my successes to, except the dogs, and they just don't appreciate a new skirt. Moxy did, but only because she could sleep on the fabric on the table.

Several people asked (over the phone) what a scape is exactly. It's this:

The flowering stem and head of any stiff-necked garlic. It grows in that crazy loop-d-loop.
Those are my garlic plants in my garden - but I got some extra scapes from my CSA on thursday:

the bag on the left is full of them. I was the second to last person there, and the farmer suggested I "take them all, please" when I mentioned I was going to pickle them he asked me to bring him a jar in return.

So I will! I did have a new kind of problem with this batch:

That's never happened to me before. It was one of my older jars, so I'm guessing either the glass was weak, or possibly I screwed the band on more then "finger tight" and the pressure couldn't escape through the lid like it's supposed to. I remember hearing a pop while the batch was processing, so that must be when it happened. The rest of the jars all sealed just fine.

For two years I've been pronouncing these scapies, but the CSA farmer corrected me - scapes like the second syllable of escape.

With this sweater:



( details photos, and what else I did with my weekend )

It's harvest season!

( And I went away for the weekend )
ETA: I just broke down and called the store that has the perfect buttons.  They were still there and they're going to ship them to me!

It's been a busy (and long) week at work.  The bad news is our department is loosing 3 people (RIFs reduction in force) along with the 11 vacant positions they have to shut down (not firing anyone but not filling the position) and probably twice that in vacant positions that they aren't allowed to hire anyone into (so the position doesn't stop existing it just doesn't get filled)  And since the state has already said they're not reducing the police force that keeps the public safe all these reductions come from the civillian side of the department.  Luckily, the federal grant funding that buys all my supplies has been approved so I should be good for another year.

Other then that fall is a busy time of year.  We're preparing for the winter and trying to fit in all the things we wish we'd done this summer.  We've got a storm window and a chainsaw to fix, we need to get our furnace inspected and clean our chimney and stack the last of our firewood.  This weekend we're going apple picking and making apple chutney, apple wine, apple sauce, apple butter, and probably apple pie.  Apples may be one of my favorite fruits (oh let's face it, they're all my favorite fruits, just like they're all my favorite seasons)

And of course I've been knitting.  I'm mostly done with my bug hat, I've started on a hat for Neil that will probably be a free pattern.  I'm still working on the cables in the tangled yoke cardigan (the sweater is big enough it mostly stays home now) I have 1/2 a sock in my purse at all times, and I have more yarn coming (which should arrive today!) even I don't know how I kept all this organized pre-ravelry...

And now I'm going to sit in the sun for 30 minutes with my knitting, a book, and an apple.

Sunday was rainy all day, ( and I got lots done! )