Chain reaction

So I was watering my deck plants this morning, as a break from stitching on the hardanger curtain.

As I was putting the hose back on the hanger, I thought I should probably water the strip of garden between the driveway and house as well.  The plants there are lavender and other drought-tolerant plants, but they do appreciate an occasional drink when it's been this hot and dry.  Watering that area reminded me that the four little varieties of sedum that I bought in May would probably appreciate being planted in the ground instead of being left to dry up in their 4" pots forevermore, so I planted those while I was in the area, after pulling a bunch of weeds.

As I was putting the hose back on the hanger, I noticed that my car was still extremely dusty from last week when I had to drive an hour on Forest Service roads to get to a job site.  I had hoped that it would rain this week and wash the dust off for me, but no dice.  So I pulled the car down the driveway a little and hosed it off.

As I was putting the hose back on the hanger after pulling the car back into the carport, I noticed that the front garden beds were looking a little droopy as well, so I set up the west hose and sprinkler to water the main bed, and used the driveway hose to spot-water the rest.

As I was putting the hose back on the hanger, I noticed that the fuchsias on the front porch were droopy because I meant to water them yesterday but forgot.  So I put the hose over the porch wall and watered the fuchsias. 

As I was putting the hose back on the hanger, I noticed that there was an area where watering the driveway bed had splashed dirt up onto the house siding.  So I used the hose to wash the dirt back down to the bed where it belonged.

As I was putting the hose back on the hanger, I noticed that the area of siding around the hose hanger was looking dingy from a couple years of accumulated wind-blown dust and forest fire smoke.

So I used the hose to rinse off those areas. Then the adjacent areas looked dingy by comparison, so I hosed those off as well.  Then the areas adjacent to that looked dingy so I hosed them off.  Then the next bit of adjacent area.  All the way around the house.

Long story short: a quick ten minute break to water my plants on the deck this morning turned into three hours of yard work and washing my entire house.

Cherry harvest 2016

As in previous years, I rented (sponsored? adopted?) a couple cherry trees over in Cove.  I have two trees in my name, because for the past couple years, my original tree hasn't produced very well.  Last year, I got a total of 65 pounds of cherries off the two trees combined.

This year, I got 138 pounds of cherries off the same two trees!  Wow!

I gave away 20 pounds to Emma's friend who came to help us pick, and kept the rest for us.  I dehydrated most of them (80 pounds, turned into 10 quarts), used about 10 pounds to make 4 quarts of juice, and put the rest in the freezer.



The cherry pitter earned its keep again, as did the steam juicer.  At least one quart of that juice is destined to become a batch of cherry jelly.  I've never made cherry jelly before- cherry jam, yes, but not jelly.  The steam juicer is a fabulous thing.

It's a lot of work to pick and pit them all, but I love having organic cherries on hand.

Canning chicken again

I canned chicken again this week, enough to last us a good long while.



This is 20 pounds of chicken breast, ready to store on the shelf downstairs. I was quite happy with the first batch of chicken I canned, and felt that it was worth doing some more.  It's handy to have pre-cooked, pre-chunked chicken ready to go into soup, burritos, or chicken salad.

And even if I don't immediately use the broth in the recipe with the chicken, it's good to substitute for some of the water when cooking rice.  I don't put any salt in with the chicken, so it's just water and the juice from the meat. It all gets used.

I also put 20 pounds of chicken breast in the freezer.  Why so much chicken at once?  I discovered Zaycon Fresh last fall.  They are a sort of cooperative meat supplier that is supposedly farm-to-consumer, cutting out many of the middle transportation steps that grocery store meat has to go through.  They also have really great prices.  This boneless, skinless, never frozen chicken breast was about 30 cents cheaper per pound than the normal prices at my local grocery store, and appears to be better quality.

They only sell by the case, which is why I had 40 pounds of chicken to deal with all at once, but this will probably last us at least 8 months or so.  I also bought a 16-pound case of (frozen) pork tenderloins in December, and they are so yummy.  Mmmm, pulled pork sandwiches from the crock pot. And I have a case of frozen pollock fillets coming in April.

It felt a little weird the first time I went to pick up an order, because you pull up to their truck and they give you a case of meat.  I mean... buying meat off a truck in a parking lot...  But both orders I've gotten have been really high quality and fresh.  No complaints at all so far.  If you have the freezer space or are a canner, I definitely recommend it.

Here's a link if you want to check it out.  Zaycon Fresh.  In the interest of full disclosure, if you sign up from that link and place an order, I will get a referral credit on my account.  But I really have been very happy with what I ordered!

Blue

It's about six months later than I intended, but I finally got around to bottling the tinctures/extracts I made last summer.  Part of the problem was that I didn't have any bottles, but mostly I was just lazy.

I ordered a case of 4-ounce cobalt glass bottles from Mountain Rose Herbs this week, and they arrived yesterday.  They're so pretty!  I tried to take a picture with the sun shining through them, but it ended up being mostly glare.  Still, I think you can get the effect.



I strained out the plant matter this afternoon, and ended up with two and a half bottles of lemon verbena extract, one and a half bottles of peppermint extract, and half a bottle of lavender extract.

The lemon verbena came out very nice, and is quite lemony.  The peppermint is good and strong.  The lavender is very, very, VERY strong, almost too strong to even taste.  I don't really know what I'm going to use the lavender for because it's so strong, but we'll see. It'll be interesting to see if a few drops in a recipe gives a non-overpowering lavender flavor.  It may have been better if I hadn't left the plant matter to infuse in the alcohol for six months...

I think the first experiment will be a batch of lemon verbena cookies next weekend.

New old roasting pan

One of the things I brought back from Kansas was my mom's large covered oval roasting pan.  I don't think it's super old, and it's certainly not some fancy expensive one, but it was Mom's.  I've wanted one of these for ages, but could never justify it since I got a large rectangular roasting pan as a wedding present oh so long ago.  I don't need a cover every time I roast something, but when I do it's a pain to try and piece together foil to make one. Plus, I hate the handles on the rectangular one and end up burning myself every time I use it.

But now I have a roasting pan with a cover and handles that don't burn me!  I think it's time for the rectangular pan that I never liked to go away.

This afternoon I put Mom's pan to good use, with two smallish chickens and a pile of carrots and potatoes roasted into deliciousness.  I started it off covered for 30 minutes, to steam the veggies and cook the meat faster, then uncovered it for the last hour to brown everything.



That right there is dinner for tonight, plus five lunches for me and possibly a dinner or two during the week, plus a pot of chicken stock from the bones next weekend .  I love being efficient.

Happy 2016!

Happy New Year!   Emma's and my new year got off to a fantastic start with a trip out to Kansas to see my dad, met there by my sister, brother-in-law, and niece.  It was so great to see everyone, and wonderful to watch the cousins playing.

I couldn't find reasonably-priced plane tickets for me and Emma, so we drove.  It was two 11+ hour days of driving each way, but we had plenty of Harry Potter books on CD and it was actually really enjoyable.  We had good weather, which helped immensely, and the traffic wasn't bad except around Denver on the way home.

We stayed overnight in Rawlins, Wyoming on the way out, and man was it cold!  Temps when we left the motel on Dec. 27 were -14 degrees Farenheit!  I haven't been in weather that cold since I was in college in Maine. The hoarfrost was beautiful, but it was awfully shivery pumping gas!



We were treated to a beautiful sunset on the Great Plains on the evening of the second day, somewhere near Goodland, Kansas, documented by Emma out of the back window of the car.  This was the tail end of our outbound journey, only a little over three hours left to my dad's house at this point.  We were very glad to get there and not have to drive for five days!



We had a great visit.  There were Christmas presents and walking in the brisk Kansas wind and reading old family cookbooks and running Dad's model trains and happy shrieks from the basement as the cousins played.  Cooking and going to the movies (Star Wars again!) and sorting through Mom's old kitchen stuff with my sister to divvy up some of the bits and pieces Dad doesn't use anymore.

Emma was delighted that we had snacking-for-dinner on New Year's Eve, which has become a tradition with her and me these past five or six years.  Sis knows all the good cheeses, and introduced me to the wonderment that is cracker plus fig jam plus goat cheese. I am going to have to source some figs next year so I can make a batch of fig jam.

We may have gone a little overboard on the snack spread, but it was all really good!



All too soon it was time to head out for the trek back home.  We were treated to another beautiful sunset, this time with the Rocky Mountains in silhouette as we headed north from Denver.



All in all it was a very uneventful drive, which is a good thing, and I so, so, so enjoyed the extended time with Emma.

I planned ahead and took the day after we got back off from work as well.  This was a good call, because it was wonderful to have a day to decompress after driving all weekend.  I did laundry and said hi to all my plants, and just relaxed.

Oh, and I made jelly!  Here's my first canning project of 2016, some grape jelly.  The batch made seven half pints, but two of the jars went as thank-you gifts to the friends that kept an eye on the cat while we were gone.



As for Coco, I think she was convinced that she had been abandoned forever.  I think this is the longest she's ever been left alone since we adopted her, and she apparently did not like it one bit. According to the kitty sitters, she was yowly and clingy when they came to feed her, and this continued after we got home as well.  She didn't leave me and Emma alone from the moment we walked in the door, and stuck to me all the next day while I was home and Emma was in school.  Tuesday, after I was back at work, she was frantic again when we got home in the afternoon. She seemed very relieved that we hadn't left for a week and a half again.

Even tonight, after almost a week of being home and back to our normal routine, she is still being unusually clingy.  Poor kitty.

Final canning and dehydrating of 2015

Well, 2015 is winding down.  Here's my last batch of food preservation for the year:



Left to right, that's

• five pints of dehydrated cremini mushrooms
• eight pint-and-a-half jars of cranberry juice
• two quarts of dehydrated homegrown tomatoes
• eight quarts of amazing turkey stock
• one pint-and-a-half jar of turkey meat with the last bit of stock

This is the first time I've dehydrated mushrooms in a couple years.  The first time I tried, it wasn't successful at all.  The mushrooms dried fine, but they are so hygroscopic when dry that they started rehydrating immediately just from the humidity in the air.  I tried storing them in Ziplocs, in jars, and in Ziplocs IN jars.  Nothing worked to keep the moisture out, and they got leathery and floppy within a couple days, and moldy within a month.  Very disappointing.

This time around, I immediately sealed them in jars using the vacuum sealer attachment of my FoodSaver.  This worked brilliantly.  A week later, and they are still crispy dry and rattle in the jars.  Success!  I love my FoodSaver.

The cranberry juice is the leftover liquid from making dehydrated cranberries (which are still finishing in the dehydrator, but I estimate there will be three pints). I prepared the cranberries by boiling them in water until they popped, then soaked them in an orange juice and honey mixture for an hour to sweeten them before dehydrating.  The cooking/sweetener liquids had too much good flavor to waste, so I mixed them and canned it up.  Yum!

The tomatoes, well..... I'm still processing tomatoes.  You can see in the background of the pictures that I still have garden tomatoes ripening in my dining room, and I've been dehydrating them as they ripen.  I think this is it, though.  We're getting ready to go on vacation for a week and a half, so the last batch that's still not quite ready to dehydrate will be bagged up and tossed in the freezer.  I'll probably sauce them some time after we get back.  Not bad, to still have fresh garden tomatoes at the end of December!  I am officially calling my 2015 tomato harvest a RESOUNDING success.

The turkey stock is also a first for me- the first time canning it, anyway.  I've been freezing stock for years, but I'm out of room in my freezer and am delighted to have pressure canning in my arsenal now.  This batch of stock is one turkey carcass from Thanksgiving, one chicken carcass from several months ago, and four steak bones from some point this summer, plus a big bag of mixed veggie trimmings collected over the past few months.  I was cleaning out the freezer, obviously!  The stock is gorgeous and flavorful, and I'm very excited to have it on hand.

I did the single jar of turkey meat because I had 3/4 pound left over from the batch I got out to make soup the other day, and I knew it wouldn't last in the fridge until we got back from vacation.  So I jarred it, added the last bit of stock that wasn't enough for a full quart, and topped it off with water. Easy peasy, and ready for another batch of soup.

Canning and dehydrating is so satisfying.

Turkey soup and BreadOnSunday

It was blustery today, with snow showers off and on all day, and I felt like making soup.  I never got around to making turkey stock after Thanksgiving, just pulled all the meat off the carcass and tossed it in the freezer along with the bones.  Today I pulled out the package of bones and did up a big pot of stock.  I'll can most of it, but took out some to make soup for dinner.

This soup is entirely from my food storage shelves and freezer: dehydrated corn, peas, celery, carrots, and potatoes, half of a 1-pound package of frozen turkey meat, and homemade stock.  Not shown are the home-grown dried thyme and oregano, home-dehydrated onion and garlic powders, and frozen grated ginger.



The recipe was so easy.  I just put two cups of stock plus two cups of water into a pan, threw in a scant handful of each of the veggies, the chopped turkey meat, a tablespoon-ish of the thyme, oregano, and ginger, and a hearty dash of onion and garlic powders, simmered for 20 minutes until the potatoes were rehydrated, and voila!  Dinner is done, with enough left over for my lunch tomorrow.



And because it's Sunday, we had already made bread earlier, which went great with the soup.  The pineapple was dessert.  Yum!

Bread on Sunday

Emma says that we should make bread every Sunday.  Who am I to argue?



This is the same recipe as last week, but swapping out 1.5 cups of whole wheat flour for part of the white flour, and adding a good sprinkle of cinnamon in the middle before rolling it up to shape the loaf.  Mmmm.  Adding the whole wheat flour was an improvement, and the bread is really good.

Add in a chuck roast cooked on "low" in the slow cooker for 9 hours (with thyme, lemon balm, salt, and pepper added in the last hour), potatoes and carrots roasted in the oven for an hour with rosemary, thyme, pepper, and olive oil. and WOW.  The roast was succulent and falling-apart tender, the veggies were so sweet, and the bread was amazing as only fresh home made bread can be.

Yum.

Home made dinner

Today I gave my KitchenAid stand mixer a workout.  First I made bread, trying out a new recipe from the interwebs.  It's a basic white bread, but has a great balance of density and airiness, with a nice texture.  I think the recipe is a good place to start, but next time I'll add some whole wheat flour because I'm not really much of a fan of white bread.



Then, since it was SNOWING,



I decided to make pasta.  I had 22 eggs that a friend had given me a little while ago (from her own chickens), and I knew that there was no way that we would be able to eat them all in time unless I made something with them, considering that Emma doesn't like eggs unless they're hidden in something and she can't detect any cooked-egg texture.

So I took 4 eggs and made a double batch of plain narrow linguine with just white flour, which works out to about 8 servings for us.  The KitchenAid pasta roller attachments are just so slick!



That was so fun that I took 6 more eggs and made a triple batch of narrow linguine with half semolina flour and half white flour.



Those 10 eggs gave me about 20 servings of pasta.  I put 18 of them in the dehydrator, and cooked two of the semolina bundles for dinner (and had a bit left over, so that "two serving" portion was really more like three).

Home made pasta, home grown and canned tomato sauce, home made bread, and grocery store frozen peas that I dehydrated in August 2014.



Yum.

As Emma was eating her pasta, I was astonished and a little taken aback to look over and see that she was actually teary.  I asked her what was wrong, and she said that she couldn't believe that we made all these things ourselves, and the pasta and sauce just tasted so good.

If that isn't a proud moment, I don't know what is.

Oh yes, I did.

Today I made this.



That is home made fresh mozzarella cheese, my very first attempt ever at making cheese.  It was so easy, and tastes fantastic!

Then I took a quarter of the cheese and made this:



Three kinds of home grown tomatoes, home grown basil, home made mozzarella, olive oil, salt, and cracked pepper.  Oh, my.

Then, since Emma was across the street playing with friends, I ate it all up by myself.  Yes indeed I did!

My day in the kitchen

Well.  I had quite the productive day today.  I don't think I've ever canned so much in one day before.

I started off with 20 pounds of tomatoes (mostly San Marzano and Amish Paste), which became 10 pints of sauce.  I actually started the tomatoes last night but ran out of energy when I got to the straining and canning stage.  So they sat on the stove overnight and I finished this morning.

I made another kitchen gadget purchase this week... a Victorio food strainer.  I have much ambivalence about kitchen gadgets.  One one hand, gadgets are fun. On the other hand, they take up space.

But gadgets have their place.  Having the right tool for the job makes things so much easier, saves time, and makes the task enjoyable.

I have my mom's Foley food mill (seen here in the last tomato post), and it does a great job.  It removes the seeds and skins, gives a nice consistency to the pulp, and is easy to use.  I think it's also older than I am, so it's obviously sturdy.  However, it is very time-consuming for anything other than small to medium quantities.  Each 20-pound batch of tomatoes took about 45 minutes to an hour to strain, since I'm picky about getting allllll the goodness out of the tomatoes.

After the third large batch of tomato sauce, I cried uncle.  The Foley mill works, but it takes a long time and is tiring.  So I got a Victorio.  It's not too pricey- no local stores in La Grande had one, but only $48 on Amazon.

It.  Is.  AWESOME.



I ran that 20-pound batch of tomatoes through the Victorio in 10 minutes, including putting the seeds and skins back through a second time to get all the goodness out.  The final waste product after two passes was nearly dry.  TEN minutes!  Awesome.



So I simmered down the tomato pulp for couple hours while we ran errands and had lunch, and then canned it up.  What's next?  Peaches!

My second 20-pound box of peaches for the year got peeled, sliced, and canned. I got 9 quarts from this box, plus two quarts of "peach nectar".  This was the water/citric acid solution that all the peaches were soaking in to prevent browning while I was prepping everything, plus the leftover simple syrup (water plus sugar).  The peach slices give off too much flavor to the acidulated water to waste it.  It's good in tea or just on its own.



Tomatoes and peaches down, next up is apples!

I had 25 pounds of Jonagolds and 8 pounds of Granny Smiths that I got at the Farmer's Market last Tuesday.  I sliced up a big bowl of both the Grannies and Jonagolds, about half and half, and did up eight quarts of pie filling.  I've never canned pie filling before so that was an adventure.  It was pretty easy, just peel/core/slice the apples (using another great kitchen gadget which is totally worth the money and space) and hold them in a bowl of water with some citric acid to prevent browning while preparing the sauce.  The sauce was water, sugar, spices, lemon juice, and ThermFlo.  (I normally use flour or cornstarch to thicken a pie, but neither of those is safe to can.  ThermFlo is just a modified cornstarch product that according to Ball is safe to can.  I found it at the local Mennonite-owned market.)  Mix the apples into the sauce and heat through, put it into jars, and process in a water bath.  Easy peasy but very sticky.



Since my canner holds seven quart jars and I had eight, I was forced to make a pie for dessert.  Oh darn, we had to eat pie.  I actually did that on purpose, so that I could try out the mixture and see how it tasted.  I'm happy to report that it's a success.  One quart of filling made a scantly filled pie.  I think a quart plus a pint would be a perfectly filled pie. Or to put it another way, three quarts for two pies.  I may not use my nifty slicer next time though, because the thin slices (while perfect for dehydrating apples) pretty much lost all shape in the pie.  Larger chunks would hold up better though the processing and baking.  Emma likes that almost-applesauce consistency in a pie, though, so maybe I'll leave well enough alone.  The ThermFlo worked well, giving a thick clear sauce that wasn't too gloopy.

Ok... tomato sauce, peach slices, apple pie filling, apple pie.  Check.  What's next?  More apples.

I took the rest of the apples (18 pounds, Granny Smiths and Jonagolds together) and sauced them while the pie was baking. I did this the easy way, just like the tomatoes. I washed and quartered the apples, and threw them in a pot with a cup and a half of the acidulated water I soaked the apples in when I was making the pie filling, and steamed them for 20 minutes to soften them.  I put the apples in the pot skins, stems, cores, and all.

Then I ran them through the Victorio.  In ten minutes.  Did I mention that I really like this gadget?  Perfectly smooth and seedless apple sauce.  Back into the stock pot to heat to boiling, then jarred up and into the water bath.  The 18 pounds of apples gave six quarts of wonderfully flavored applesauce, naturally sweet with no added sugar..



OK... tomatoes, peaches, apple filling, apple pie, applesauce.  Next up: grapes!

I picked the last few grapes and was surprised at how many there were.  I got six more pounds! And Emma's still been eating them daily since we picked the first batch.  I think this vine approached 60 pounds of grapes for the year! But that's all, the vine is now bare.  Sorry, squirrels.

I pulled out my steamer juicer again for this.  I put the grapes in, along with all the apple cores and peels from the pie apples and the leftover seed/skin mash from the applesauce.  It pretty much filled the juicer.  I let it do its thing for about 45 minutes, then combined the resulting juice with the last bit of acidulated water from soaking the pie apples. (I pretty much wrung every drop of flavor out of those apples.)  The juice is deeelicious, and you can taste both the apples and the grapes.  I canned the whole shebang and got nine and a half pints of apple/grape juice.



And then I was done for the day. Whew.



While I was finishing off the grape juice, Emma made us dinner (!!), a very yummy combination of sausages, cheesy shells, and steamed green beans from the garden.  And then we ate pie and had some grape juice.  And life was good.

More tomatoes.

I need a bigger pot.  Possibly a vat.  Or a cauldron.



I have 26 more pounds of tomatoes today.  Plus I bought another 20-pound box of peaches, and a 25-pound box of apples.  Yum!

In addition to a larger pot, I need another day in my week.

Pickling

I picked some cucumbers today, with an eye toward making some pickles.



As you can see, a couple of them got away from me a little. The one I'm holding weighs a full pound.  It should have been picked several days ago, but it was hiding under the alyssum and escaped notice.

This one, however, is even bigger. I left this one on purpose, though.  It will be allowed to fully ripen and become next year's seed.



I got a total of nine pounds of cukes today, which turned into one quart of whole dill pickles and three quarts of dill pickle spears.  Even though some of the cucumbers were really too big for the ideal pickle-size, they were still fine.  The Boston Pickling variety is perfect for canning, since it is crisp and fleshy, and the seeds stay small for quite a while.  Even the one-pounder in the first picture had hardly any seed cavity.



It's going to be hard to wait the required few weeks before opening a jar of these.

Peach time!

Late summer is peach time.  I almost missed it this year, but managed get myself organized enough to purchase a 20-pound box of peaches earlier this week.

They were still pretty hard when I got them on Monday, but ripened well over the week.  I canned them this afternoon.



The 20-pound box turned into 10 quarts of slices.  As you can see, there are only nine jars there. Sadly, one jar cracked in the water bath.  I hate disasters like that, but that's only the second jar I've ever had break in the canner, which isn't too bad for roughly 15 years of canning.

This is what 41 pounds of tomatoes looks like

I finished off the second half of Sunday's tomato haul last night, for a total of 18.25 pints of sauce safely stored away this time around.  My biggest harvest so far!



I am quite happy with how my tomatoes are doing, I just hope the frost holds off for a while longer.  We've had several nights down into the high 30s, and I'm not ready for tomato season to be over.

No scurvy at my house.

I got 41 pounds of tomatoes today! (This recycled produce box came in very handy.)



I did one batch of sauce this evening, using 20 pounds.



Perhaps it wasn't the best idea to start this process at 7 pm on a Sunday night, but I was so excited about the piles of tomatoes.



By the time this batch was cooked to soften the tomatoes, put through the food mill, cooked down more to get the right consistency, and canned, it was late.  I just finished, and it's 1:00 in the morning.

But I now have another eight pints of delicious thick spaghetti sauce safely preserved to add to my stash in the basement.

Grape Harvest 2015

We picked the grapes this weekend, since the majority of them seem to be ripe.  Strangely, the green ones are just as sweet as the red ones.  Since some were starting to shrivel up and go bad, we decided that it was time to harvest even though they weren't all red.

I picked a total of 39 pounds off the single vine.  We've also been snacking on them for a couple weeks, and there are still a few bunches that weren't quite ripe which we left for more snacking.  I would say that this vine easily produced close to 50 pounds of fruit this year.  I have no idea if that is a good amount for a grapevine or not, but it seems pretty impressive to me. 



I did the first batch of juice by picking 15 pounds worth of grapes off their stems, washing them, mashing them, cooking them for about 45 minutes until they were soft, then straining them through a jelly bag to drain off the juice.



While that worked, it took forever to strain the juice.  My jelly bag only held a third of the grape pulp, and there was so much fine sediment that it clogged the bag to a slow drip.  I ended up rigging up two more "jelly bags" out of dish towels, string, and two large bowls, and hung them from the pot rack.

Finally, after about a day and a half, the juice was pretty much finished draining.  I called it done, canned it up, and yay!  I have 8 pints of grape juice!



Then I looked at the rest of the grapes that were waiting to be processed (26 pounds), and decided that there was no way I wanted to spend four more days waiting for the next two batches of juice to drain.  I took myself down to BiMart and got a steamer juicer, which very conveniently was on sale at 60% off.



You put the fruit in the colander basket (top compartment), and boil water in the bottom pan.  The steam rises through a funnel in the center compartment into the colander in the top, cooks and breaks down the fruit, and the juice drips down to the middle compartment and drains out via the tube.

This is SO MUCH EASIER!!!  You don't even have to take the grapes off the stems!  Just wash and put them in the pot!  The yield was exactly the same, the juice comes out much clearer with almost no sediment, and there is no straining required!

I processed the entire remaining 26 pounds tonight, in about three hours.



So now I have a total of 27 pints of grape juice ready to store.  I did these in pints instead of quarts because I know my daughter.  If I put the juice up in quarts, it would be gulped down by the quart.  This way, we can split a pint between us so it's savored as a special treat.

Productivity

I did up some pickles today; they're just basic dill pickles, but the veggies are all from my garden!  I ran out of cucumbers and didn't have enough to fill the jars completely, so I added a bell pepper.  I've never pickled peppers before, so we'll see how that turns out.



We've also been eating the first of the grapes.  They're a slip-skin type, with sweet pulp inside, and they're so good!

Triumph

So on Monday, I picked this from the garden.



On Tuesday and Wednesday, I was out of town.  On Thursday there were two colander-fulls of tomatoes to be picked, between my yard and the Tomato Annex, including the very first ripe San Marzano tomatoes from the plants I started from seed.  I was so giddy that I completely forgot to take a picture.

And this afternoon, I have this.



Six pints of gloriously rich sauce from roughly 15 pounds of mixed-variety tomatoes.

It's not the first time I've put up tomato sauce, but this IS my very first ever home-canned tomato sauce from tomatoes that I grew myself in (mostly) my own yard of my own house that I bought all by my own self.