Snapshots: Fun With Produce

So much produce. So much processing. But so much fun, too! How can produce be fun? Allow me to show you.

I grew two new-to-me varieties of tomato this year: Cherokee Purple and Chocolate Cherry. When they're ripe, both are a distinctive purplish-red color. I harvested some of each this week, and noticed that the cherry variety looks just like a miniature version of the Cherokee Purple.

So of course I set them up in a little tomato tableau and called all the kids over so I could tell them: "Look! It's me and you four kids, but tomatoes!"

Only Poppy was very enthused about this. The boys just rolled their eyes at me.

One of those eye-rollers then appropriated the tomatoes to make this freaky bird-looking face.

Yikes.

And then I used the big Cherokee Purple--plus lettuce from the garden, bacon, Duke's mayonnaise, and toasted sourdough bread--to make my annual BLT.

Perfection.

Remember last week when A. started fermenting a bunch of our neighbor's grapes to make wine? He ended up adding some rhubarb and apples to up the acidity in the notably sweet and not acidic Thompson's grapes he was working with. After fermenting the mixture in an open container for a couple of days (to allow the majority of the carbon dioxide to escape), he strained out the solids and put the liquid in old wine bottles with airlocks.

The airlocks allow the bubbles of carbon dioxide to escape, but keep oxygen from getting in.

When they weren't bubbling anymore, the wine was done fermenting.

So how was it?

In a word, rough.

It tasted very much like the cider A. used to make, which has a very funky, strong flavor. I am not a fan, but it was certainly alcoholic. And as A. noted, you can't make peasant wine in an old tub and expect it to taste like fine wine aged in oak barrels or whatever.

Anyway.

We got a call on Friday morning from a guy who lives in the village and goes to our church asking if we would like to come pick peaches from his tree.

I trust you don't need me to tell you that we most definitely did.

The tree was right next to an old adobe chicken coop with a flat roof, so the kids actually climbed a ladder onto the roof and picked up there.

They thought this was the most fun thing ever, as I usually forbid them from climbing roofs.

A. and I picked from the ground.

Okay, so actually only I stayed on the ground. A. climbed a ladder.

We came home with about fifty pounds of white peaches.

That's a lot of peaches. Only one thing to do!

The next morning, as soon as I had fed everyone, I fired up the burners and got to canning.

Small pot in the back for the sugar syrup, red pot with boiling water to facilitate peeling, giant pressure canner full of water to function as my water bath canner.

One reason canning peaches is a pain is because they have to be peeled. Well, they might not have to be, but I know for sure that A. would be very disappointed to open a jar of peaches and find skins on them. And honestly, peeled peaches canned in syrup are one of the great joys in life. Might as well do it right.

Luckily, I was only a fraction of the peaches into peeling when I was discovered by a couple of small people who were delighted to help me divest the peaches of their skins.

Slightly less delighted by peach #200 or so, but they valiantly soldiered on with their puckery fingers.

Two jars of peach halves broke in the canner (the. worst.) but I still ended up with this.

Twelve quarts of peach halves in syrup and six pints of peach sorta-jam (sorta because I didn't add commercial pectin, just a few apples, so it's a bit runnier than a traditional jam).

In case you are wondering, processing that many peaches takes approximately five hours of continuous kitchen work. As I assured the children, it will all be worth it when we open those jars in the dead of winter.

Due to the fact that I had cooked a bunch of beef ribs the day before, I also had a lot of beef stock to deal with. Just as I had that in the pressure-canner and was thinking I was FINALLY almost done with the canning, A. and the kids returned from the neighbor's house with this.

Pears, grapes, and some sort of small plums. Guess I'm not done yet.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.