MOM OBVIOUSLY TALKED IN CODE

All of my growing up years we bottled food. Green beans, corn, peaches, pears, cherries, etc. We had a little room on the far end of the house that seemed to always be cold. It was lined with shelves and the shelves were filled with home canned food, and store bought food that we couldn't can, like tuna. Mother was never "out" of anything and she had enough for a couple of years worth of most things.

This room was called the "fruit room." It was built as a storage room. It had one tiny window with no glass, just screen. A down pillow, just that size, was in the recess of that tiny window and it was moved to the side of the window, a little bit or a lot, depending on how much outside air mom wanted in the fruit room. In the winter that room was cold enough that she kept the Thanksgiving leftover turkey in there. (I know, I shudder at the thought, but we never got sick from food poisoning, not one time.)

I once asked her why she canned and bought so much food.

"It's for the Californians," she said. "There will be trouble in California and they will come here for refuge and we will feed them."

I was young. What did I know.

Then today I got an email from a dear friend (Hi Kim!). This was in it:

Mother obviously knew this. She knew everything. And now I know. Zombies, not Californians, were coming. (Although I lived in California for four plus years. I should have known.)

And now you know. You've been warned.

APPLE PIE FILLING

The apple pie filling recipe is posted here.

I DON'T KNOW WHY I BOTHER!

Don't even bother reading this...it's long and depressing.

Our neighbors gave us some of the most wonderful apples on the planet and my busy little brain--and I emphasise the "little" part--decided it was time to can Apple Pie Filling.

One year, the kids and I canned over 50 quarts in the fall. They stuck with me until we were all finished and at one point--one of the favorite memories stored in my little brain--is when Trent picked up a double handful of the peelings--picture a pile of those about a foot high--and threw them in the air and yelled, "Happy New Year!" Gosh, I love that kid. (Well, he's a man with a wife and 7 kids but to me he will always be a kid.)So, today I watched things I had recorded on TV--The Event, House, NCIS, Katie Brown Workshop, 16 minutes of Studio 5 about photography, and other things that my tiny little brain cannot recall at the moment--while I peeled apples, but right from the start things went wrong.

I spilled apples all over the floor and the noise of the stainless steel, pan hitting the floor, annoyed people two blocks away, and permanently damaged my hearing.

Then I couldn't remember how to load the apple peeler and so had to peel and slice a lot of the apples by hand. Then, my brain--the little one--kicked in and remembered how to do it right.

I think the highlight of my day was seeing previews of the movie "Unstoppable,"......with Denzel Washington......and it's rated PG 13. Hooray! (We don't go to "R" rated movies.)Lookit, there are men running on top of trains......and trains crashing......and trains blowing up and school kids on a field trip and other exciting things.Which is more than the excitement of my apple pie filling boiling over and six out of eighteen of the jars NOT SEALING because of the boiling over bit and even the sight of all this bounteous beauty cannot mend my broken heart about 1/3 of my efforts a failure. Another day, another failure.

Phil opened one of the non-sealed ones and ate it over ice cream and said he didn't care if any of them sealed as he would eat them all, one after another, on ice cream, and it was the tastiest stuff in the world. He's nice like that and my love for him grew some more, if that were even possible, because I am already rather fond of him.

And so, now six quarts will have to find a spot in the fridge or freezer. I hope we can go see "Unstoppable" (hopefully soon) to mend my wounded heart, but right now I'm going to go have a good cry in my huge pillow--pronounced "pilla"--and know that tomorrow will be a better day. Hopefully. And because it's Sunday, I will have a nice Sunday nap after church.

I should have consulted The Damsel from Old School--she knows how to do everything and she even has a blog of the 50 best canning sites, which I looked at--too late, but I did look at them--and did you know you can can bacon? (Or maybe "can can" is a dance. I should ask The Damsel.) And did you know you can can rabbit and squirrel? (They do a lot of that in Minnesota, I guess.) And there is even an article--thanks Damsel--about Mormon Food Storage Techniques. I should definitely have gone there first as this Mormon was not doing things right.

If you have had a recent failure would you please tell me so I can know that I'm not the only one in the whole wide world that does things inadequately. Thanks so much.

And come on over. I'll give you some apple pie filling with ice cream underneath.

PS Knock loud, because I might not hear you because of my damaged hearing. And if I don't answer the door just stick you head in and yell, "Yo-hoo." (There's not enough yo-hooing done now-a-days.) But if it's on a Sunday after church, I'll be napping, so you might have to get in the fridge and get your own.

PPS I have never actually made an apple pie with the 100's of jars of apple pie filling I've made over the years. We just heat it up and eat it as a side dish. You should make some--that is if you can can successfully--or dance, either. I'll put the recipe on my cookbook blog soon.

MADE SALSA TODAY

I made 13 pints of salsa today. I have five boxes of tomatoes--in various stages of ripening--on the kitchen floor. I want to have none. But I want the product they will produce so I am trying to be patient and work hard. And it was hard work! Maybe it would be more accurate to say it was tedious, long work. But the salsa looks wonderful and tastes pretty good. No photos because I'm too tired to download all the stuff that's still in the camera.

But, hey, I finally blogged. Go forth and do the same. You know who you are.

CANNING TOMATOES

I called the extension for office for advice about canning tomatoes. A steam canner is not recommended. WHAT? That's how I did it last year. Rats.

So we took the pressure cooker to The Mending Shed to be checked and had to buy a new gauge. Rats, again.


Then all afternoon I chopped tomatoes, filled bottles, added lemon juice--and WHY should I have to add lemon juice if I'm pressure canning the tomatoes?! It makes no sense to me. WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME? You don't add lemon juice to beans, for crying out loud! It's enough to hark a dog.

And when I took them out of the canner you know what? It looks like out of my first batch of seven, four aren't going to seal! Rats. I followed the instructions to the letter, putting them on a rack to cool.
The second batch of seven I turned upside down like I always do. We'll see what they do about sealing.
I'm totally bummed. I want to do four dozen quarts of tomatoes. (I did three dozen last year, and we've used almost all of them.) But, if four jars of every seven aren't going to seal then what's the use?

This is me, being totally bummed. Not a pretty sight.
I'm throwing a "Rats" in there for good measure. And he's a lot better looking than my bummer face or the tomatoes. I should have just started with rats to begin with.

Maybe he'd eat the spiders we are finding in the house. The cats certainly aren't any help. What a bummer.

DRYING TOMATOES and MAKING PEAR JAM.

It's that time of year. Harvest time. This is a picture of the tomato plants in the garden.

The tomatoes are ripening and so it is time for me to start slicing the Roma's and put them in the dehydrator. This means I watch mindless TV in the kitchen. Today it was the Today show and Rachael Rey. When Phil had to go to BYU I tagged along and spent an hour in the bookstore.

There is nothing like a bookstore to restore your creativity. New ideas for books sprouted and festered and then I fled before they boiled over and made a mess that I wouldn't be able to explain.

The regular tomatoes are also FINALLY ripe and so I fixed a plate of tomato and basil sandwich fixin's, right on the breadboard where I cut the Roma's. Then back to the tomato-cutting grindstone. I watched MASH, and The Barefoot Contessa where I learned how to make truffles. It looked so easy. And delicious. Doesn't that look delicious? Here's the link in case you want to put it on your Christmas To-Do list. Oops, did I mention Christmas? Forgive me. It's only September, after all. I'm not mentioning Halloween yet, so that was really a slip.

You'd think I had kids at home. They always talked about holidays months and months ahead of time. I heard about what Halloween costume they were thinking about wearing right after Easter. That is enough to drive a mother crazy.There are mothers, all over the nation with glazed looks in their eyes from hearing, for the 78th time what their kids are going to wear for Halloween. Even mothers in countries that don't celebrate Halloween can understand.

Okay, back to the subject, sort of. After I filled the dehydrator I didn't have my quota of mindless TV today and so I watched some more TV while I made pear jam. A neighbor had given me a sack of pears and we have eaten pears until we are pear'd out. I couldn't throw them away--I should have sliced them and put them in the denydrator but it was full.

Phil reminded me later that we don't like pear jam. It's true. We don't. Actually we don't eat hardly any jam at all but I have jam-genes and it's hard not to answer the call of the fruit at Harvest time. It's a hypnotic call, you'd recognize it if you grew up in my house with my mother. It's sort of a haunting, do-not-waste-anything sort of a call.So, here is my pear jam, which we don't like. There was a bit left over. See the lovely chunks of pears in there. I also added some lime juice. I don't know why. It was the jam-gene, mutating.They all sealed--all the jars of jam we don't like. How lucky for us.

While I jammed I watched a movie so bad that even I was appalled. It was Final Days of Planet Earth. Daryl Hannah was the star. That should have been a clue. Finally it was coming to a close when...the sequel started. The SEQUEL! So, I made soup because I had to find out if Planet Earth really was having it's final days. I'll save you the pain. Planet Earth still has more days left.

I couldn't find the pinto beans in the basement and so the Kale and Bean Soup was made with kidney beans which, I'm sorry to say, was a mistake. If you try this soup DO NOT use kidney beans. You will loose faith in me as a cook, a pear-jam-maker with mutated genes, and a movie reviewer. But, I had made a double batch and so I froze four containers of the soup with the evil kidney beans. I'm sure I will be grateful by Halloween, when I don't have time to cook because I have to dash to the store for more candy for the greedy little goblins and ghouls, who have known what they were going to wear since Easter.