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.