By the pond

Last weekend, Evan spied a baby turtle in the drainage ditch/stream leading from the pond to the woods. He carefully scooped it up, using a piece of plastic sheeting, so we could get a closer look.

There are occasionally some big ole snapping turtles surfacing in the pond or the mud by the stream; this little guy was only a few inches long.

Rainy Saturday ... and more tomatoes

I never knew how many plum tomatoes one sprawling plant could yield. So when hurricane Hanna blew through here the other day, I had plenty of tomatoes around to keep us busy as we continued to try our hand at canning.

They were all very beautiful, similar in size and jewel-like:

We dunked them in hot water then shocked them in cold water so they were easy to peel. Next we packed them in jars with lemon juice and hot water. Then loaded the jars into the hot water bath canner.

After a few hours of this, I also tried my hand at a batch of chutney which required 10 cups of tomatoes (I used large red ones, several varieties), plus cucumber, onion, red pepper, vinegar and some other ingredients.

In the end both canning projects turned out OK, though I think the chutney was a little runny. Here are the quart jars of tomatoes, in front; behind are the pint jars of chutney.

After all of that, I wasn't sure I'd do any more. But the tomatoes just keep coming. So I cooked down another huge kettle of them -- I'm thinking they will be the last for this year -- and hope to put them up tomorrow night.

During this whole process, Evan and I remarked to each other that the massive canning project(s) would not have been possible on our old tiny stove, pre-kitchen renovation!

Tomato fever

It's been a long time since we've posted to the "cooking" portion of the site. Frankly, we cook all the time. We cook so much that it almost feels ridiculous to post to the cooking section, because cooking has ceased being special for us.

The fact that we cook every day, or nearly every day, is actually pretty special on its own -- but if we posted about that with any diligence, this would cease to be a house blog and would be just a blog about what we're cooking every day.

However, in the past few days an abundance of tomatoes has led us to a cooking arena which is off our normal routine. We broke out the hot water bath canner (and a trusty canning/preserving cookbook) and put up some tomatoes.

We actually had buckets and buckets of tomatoes. Here are some of them, including heirlooms. We also had tons of plum tomatoes:

After we cooked down the most ripe ones, Evan put them through the food mill. We then cooked that sauce some more:

Then we ladled them in quart jars with 2 tbsp of lemon juice apiece. We ended up with five quart jars, which we put in the canner for 35 minutes. Here they are before I lowered the canning rack into the canner for processing:

I burned myself a couple times on hot water. And the kitchen got very hot. We actually did the cooking and canning at night, which was good because the temperature was lower overall, so it only got to like 90 in the kitchen.

After they'd processed in boiling water for 35 minutes, I let them sit in the canner for another five minutes, then extracted them from their steaming bath so they could sit quietly overnight. Voila!