Scenes From Summer's End

A Wedding And More Than A Bit Of Produce To Process

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Our family spent the fourth week of August at the state fair, so it only made sense to we had to spend the last week of our summer getting ready for a family member's outdoor wedding. I mean, the planning was genius, we were already exhausted from animal showing, so why not add in an event that included the attendance of over a hundred people to that life stew.

This past week involved very little rest or eating and a whole ton of to dos. I got to meet more people and serve more tacos that I ever have before. I'm actually really rather proud of those two accomplishments. It's always good to try new things and stuff.

On top of the wedding banana-ness, it's also time to get ready to head back to homeschool for the year, my kids both play football and volleyball, and oh yes, the gardens of North Idaho have blessed us all with abundance. I am personally overloaded with tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers, even after rehoming some, and my friend donated a large plethora of plums and pears to our food cause.

Not that I am complaining, but boy was my kitchen counter starting to look like an unorganized produce department. The wedding wrapped up Friday, I had to work Saturday, and today I took a whole herd of teenagers to a movie and pizza because I 'promised" to do so. Yes, I know I am a sucker. The produce volcano got to me though, and upon arriving home from my bit of cinematic enjoyment I exploded into action and plunked all of the tomatoes into a stock pot to reduce.

Most of my canning methods revolve around my tendency to be a bit over-scheduled and propensity towards life task laziness. Thus, when I am faced with a pile of tomatoes, I just rinse them off, pluck out the stems, throw them skins and all in a stock pot, and let them reduce into a messy pulp. Then I run the goo through a food mill or sieve and can the resulting goodness. The resulting tomato stuff has all the flavor and goodness of a much longer to process sauce and is much less labor intensive to produce. I'll show how I process the tomatoes in tomorrow's post for those that may be interested.

Then there were the plums. I live with a peanut butter and jelly monster. My gigantic eleven year old lives on PB and J's. His favorite sandwich, I kid you not, is peanut butter, strawberry jam, and salami. Weird, I know, but everyone's palate is a work of art I guess. Faced with a surplus of plums I instantly thought of the boy's predilection towards peanut butter and bread adorned with fruit spread and decided to turn the plums into butter. Then my laziness spoke to me again. I got out my crock pot, washed, cut in half, and pitted the plums, and put those little beauties into the crock on low. I'm going to let them stew all night and in the morning I will turn the resulting goo into the most delish plum butter and can it. And yes, I will post the recipe and method for the plum butter in tomorrow's post as well.

And on that lovely little future Kat-labor note I am going to sign off for the evening. It's definitely that time of year in our land, about six weeks are remaining before the snow usually flies, so it's preserve the harvest, put in firewood, do the required pre-winter maintenance on the farm time before we are buried for a few months. I am finding myself looking forward to mid October when I get it all done, for then this Kat might hibernate along with many of the critters.

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And as almost always, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's plum juice stained and tomato pulp saturated iPhone.

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