Goings On

Ahh, another day in the life of the farmlette!

It's been fairly busy around here, with various chores and projects and canning and reading of textbooks.  The last bit isn't so exciting, but as I can do the earlier three in between chapters, all is not lost.  I've resumed baking bread for the year, as summer is generally too hot to contemplate running the oven for a prolonged period of time and I can zip over to the local bakery-slash-bulk food store once a week and grab one of their fabulous loaves.  It is now a mission for me to recreate the wonderfulness that is their Cranberry Walnut bread.  Mmmmmm.  Yummy!

So far this morning, I've done this:

I hate peeling tomatoes for canning recipes, so I go all cheaty with this wonderful Tomato Basil Simmer Sauce recipe and cook the unpeeled, unseeded tomatoes first and then run them through my food mill.  I heart my food mill.  I may never peel another dang tomato again!  So far, I'm at the chopped-in-the-pot-cooking-until-soft stage of the saucing process.  This should use up the last of my basil for the season, and make a good dent in my oregano, thyme, and parsley crops as well.

Day two of checking the alcohol content of my first batch of home brewed beer.  I think it may be done, but maybe it isn't, so I'm doing a couple consecutive days of alcohol content checking to see if they stay the same.  According to the directions, if they stay the same, it is ready for bottling!

The seals are good on this batch of Carrot Cake Jam, which smells heavenly and was really easy to make.  The hardest part was shredding all the carrots, which I do old school style with my handy box grater.  I think it builds moral character to use the old tools, instead of relying on technology all the time.  (Or so I tell myself, in my old school, low tech kitchen.)  I wound up with eight half-pints of goodness, so these should be great for presents come the holidays as well as enough for me to enjoy on my own toast.  I think it would be good over rich vanilla ice cream, too.  Mmmmmmm.

Well, I should get back to reading a chapter or two, and check on my simmering tomatoes.  There's knitting group this afternoon, and chickens to check on, so I'm off like a dirty sheet in the wind!