What's Old Is New

My summer of productivity was obviously interrupted by my son's illness so I've got some unfinished business to attend to, namely getting back to those boxers.

Here's a peek at the one and only pair that got made this summer. This fabric began it's life as a really loud Hawaiian shirt.


Right now I'm cooking some applesauce to can. So while I wait for the apples to cook down, I'm going to try to cut out a few boxer pattern pieces. It seems like the right thing to do, especially in light of the financial turmoil going on.

Random Food & Gardening Notes

Our first CSA pickup is Saturday. I'm so psyched! I can feel the creativity hovering at the edge of my cooking conciousness just waiting to be reawakened. I'm fantasizing about fresh salads and stir fries.

With harvesting beginning, I'm also thinking about canning. Higher gas prices mean higher food prices. I'll be going through the fruit at our local farmers market with a different point of view this season. Frozen berries from some faraway state in the local store's freezer case are likely to be a much pricier choice this winter. Local foods are the way to go. I'm thinking about setting up a weekly goal for myself.

In really local gardening, our currants are just starting to ripen and it looks like we'll have quite a lot if we can just beat the birds to them. I suspect that we really need to think about some kind of netting to protect them.

There's a great article in Mother Earth News about how to plant a peach tree from the seed of one you've just eaten.

We've Got the Beets!

We have way too many beets. They've begun to take over the fridge. I've been putting them aside thinking I'll can them when I have enough to make it worthwhile. Clearly, when all three drawers in your fridge are filled to the point of exploding, the time has come.

I've really enjoyed getting back to canning. I feel that it is such a worthwhile use of my time and energy. The sunny days of CSA pickups are beginning to dwindle. In the cold of the winter it will be so comforting, and economical, to dip into my cupboard of home canned foods.

After reading several bulk cooking books a while back, I've begun to embrace the logic of keeping the liquid content of frozen foods (usually water or broth) low. I've thought about it and carried it one step further. In the past, I would take the apple butter I'm working on, make it into apple muffins and then freeze the apple muffins. Well the apple muffins take up a lot more freezer space than the cup of apple butter I used in them. If I froze just the apple butter to use later wouldn't that be a better use of my freezer space?

I think constantly questioning why we do things a certain way is really helpful in breaking out of our wasteful ruts. Speaking of this, my daughters are both going to the homecoming dance this year. When we went to homecoming it was not a very dressy thing. Now, I'm told (or is it, now that I'm old?), it requires a rather fancy dress. Tasha went "shopping" in her aunt's closet of dresses that have been worn exactly once. She came up with a beautiful black dress. Leen's going shopping in the same closet today. I love that they both chose to do this without any prompting from me.