Fran Sale Stafford

Small batches

Because we are senior citizens and just the two of us in the household, the garden is planned to provide for us and not a lot of extra. But providing for us includes not just eating fresh food, but freezing some vegetables and canning others. Toward this goal, I discovered Marisa McClellan’s books on canning in small batches. Typically, most of the canning I do is done in pints and half pints and since we can’t eat a dozen each of several different jams and jellies, her recipes that make only a few half pint jars each are perfect and provide variety.

The exception is usually pasta and pizza sauces. Generally I save tomatoes until there are enough for a full pot, but it usually still canned in pints. Yes, I did use quarts a few days ago when I thawed and canned the pints that were in the freezer, but that is rare. I will use some quarts for tomatillos or jalapenos that go to Son 1, but rarely for our pantry shelves.

This morning, I noticed that the tomatoes that I was gathering on the kitchen window sill needed to be used and was faced with just freezing them, peeling and coring them and then freezing them, or just going ahead and making a batch of something that could be canned. It was just about 2 1/2 pounds of peeled, cored, and diced tomatoes, so not but about a quart’s worth. I decided that I would just make a small batch of pasta sauce. I had used the pint that was in the freezer, the one that evolves when I use less than a pint or make a batch that is more than the jars ready to can, but not enough for another jar. When the freezer jar is full, it is pretty layers of leftover sauce and then it becomes the next jar to use and is thawed in a saucepan with whatever additions I want to add for that meal.

The tomatoes cooked down to rough sauce consistency, made two pints with a new layer to add to last night’s leftover. The biggest stock pot with a silicone pad in the bottom instead of the deep steamer is tall enough for pint jars, though it only holds 4 or 5 safely. The big canner pot takes so long to heat up it isn’t worth using for only a couple pints or half pints. They were canned, just two lonely pints, but the satisfying pop that signaled they sealed means two more for the pantry shelf while I wait for more tomatoes to ripen.

I guess you can call me a southern woman, I was born and raised in Virginia. I am southern enough for some traditional foods like black eyed peas, collards, and grits, but not southern enough for corn bread without a little sugar in the batter, I detest overcooked vegetables with fat back in the pot, and I can’t tolerate sweet tea. One traditional food I do like, but rarely get is fried green tomatoes. This morning as I was picking a couple more tomatoes to add to the sauce that I was prepping, I plucked a medium sized green tomato and made myself 4 slices of fried green tomato with my breakfast.

I still have not received a shipping notice for the reuseable canning lids, but a friend offered me a box which I declined because of having just bought the flat of 4 ounce jars the same day, but then in today’s mail, an angel sent me 4 dozen brand new regular mouth canning lids. This angel is my SIL, she is an avid canner, far more canning than I do. There was the sweetest note saying she noted back in March that lids and jars were hard to come by, started a quest that found them on Amazon at a price gouging price, then landed a windfall. As she was finishing up about 300 jars of her canning, she shared some of hers with me. I now have enough to finish any canning I will get done this season. I know she must read this blog or she wouldn’t have known my need, so thank you, you are the sweetest.

Winding down

Another month is drawing to an end. As the month has progress, so has my spinning for the monthly Jenkins spindle challenge. The challenge only requires 25 grams, only slightly more than 3/4 ounce to be spun in the month. I have spun along, spinning several samples that I had, they are good to carry in the car with my tiniest spindle; I worked on some Tunis roving that I purchased that is a nice blue with variation from light to darker; and I worked on a 5 ounce braid of Shetland blended with Bombyx in a color blend called Elderberry. That fiber is so smooth and soft and spins very fine.

During the month, you post 4 check in photos of your progress, then a final photo taken on a scale to show how much you spun. I stretched out my check ins this month, posting my 4th and my scale today. I had spun about half of the braid of Elderberry and I wanted to ply it.

My total for the month was 129.54 grams, the ball of Shetland/Bombyx has a small doggie tennis ball wrapped inside that weighs 20.8 grams, so it has to be subtracted from the total on the scale.

After lunch, I started plying that ball on my wheel, figuring it would wait until next month when I finished the braid to fill the bobbin. I was so wrong. I barely got it all on the bobbin, then wound it off on the Niddy Noddy to measure how many yard it made. As I said, it is only about half of the braid. The finished yarn was 24 WPI, very fine, the skein is under 2 ounces and there are 489 yards in the skein.

It is gorgeous and I still have 2 1/2 ounces left to spin. I am going to end up with over 1000 yards of this yarn. And the kicker is, I don’t knit with lace weight yarn. I guess when the rest is spun, the skeins will go in my shop. It will take me all of next month to finish spinning that braid.

The morning harvest had lots of beans, a few peppers, 1 tomato, 2 cucumbers. As I was doing dinner prep, I blanched and froze two more gallon bags of beans, plus cooked some to go with our dinner and set aside a bag to take to daughter tomorrow. The third planting of beans are blooming, but beans aren’t forming quite yet, so we will have beans in the freezer and lots more to enjoy.

The morning began foggy. It is always interesting to look out the back and not see the next ridge and then later, it is visible again.

Stay safe everyone.

Work on the Mountain

When we built our house, we ran our power line 2/10 mile underground from the road to the transformer to the meter. We didn’t want to look at the line coming down our driveway or have poles in our view. But that is not the norm here in rural, rocky, mountainous land. For the past two years, the power company has hired a contractor to cut down trees anywhere near the power lines. They come in, cut a wide path, leaving branches, limbs, and tree trunks where they fell. It may help to reduce power outages, but it has increased wildfire risk. It has been unseasonably wet this year, so hopefully we are not threatened. Since we have lived here, the power goes out periodically, but usually only for a few hours at a time. After a Derocho wind in 2012, it stayed out for 42 hours, and a winter or two after that, it was out for 7 days after an ice storm. We hauled water from the catchment system. Once we could get off the mountain, we hauled ice when we could get it to try to keep the freezer cold enough to not spoil, we grilled, cooked on the top of the wood stove, kept fires burning in the wood stove and the fireplace, wore lots of clothes, and coped. After a week, we booked a hotel room for a day, took all our laundry down, got hot showers, and while hubby tried to watch a Sunday football game on a very poor TV connection, I went to the laundromat. We got a hot meal not cooked on the grill, camp stove, or wood stove, and started home as it was getting dark. To our amazement, as we cleared the gap and could see our mountain, we saw lights scattered up the mountainside, the homes had electricity again.

When our house was being built, before the power line was laid by son and DIL for the power company to hook up, we had a small gas generator they used for power tools. After the week without power, I tried to start it, but it wouldn’t start, so we took it to the repair place and were told it wasn’t repairable, at least not for what a new one would cost us, but we didn’t purchase one then. We should have.

The hurricane that is about to slam Louisiana and Texas tonight will make it’s way here still with wind and rain, certainly not anything like what they will endure. My thoughts are with those folks who have lost or had their homes damaged before as they face this again. I hope it isn’t another Katrina for them. But, we will have wind and rain and possible outages. Maybe the destruction around the power lines will reduce the likelihood.

At any rate, we drove to town yesterday and the grocer did not have canning lids alone, but I was able to purchase a flat of a dozen 4 ounce jars with new lids. I came home, thawed the pints of pasta sauce and reboiled it while the big canner heated up and canned it in quart jars to save lids, so my pasta sauce is safe from an outage. Then I went outside to the garden and picked almost a dozen more tomatoes that are sitting in the kitchen window waiting to see if enough will ripen to make another batch before they have to be frozen. I won’t can green beans or peas as I don’t like the texture of overcooked vegetables, so I will just make sure that the freezer is packed densely toward the bottom, not in the hanging baskets and toss a couple of big bags of ice in there too and hope that if we lose power, it isn’t for long enough to spoil the meats and frozen vegetables in there. The brined and fermented pickles and peppers in the refrigerator will be fine. Hopefully the wind won’t be strong enough to knock down the tomatoes. We had a brief, maybe 90 minutes worth of strong wind and some rain with thunderstorms that dropped south last night. It tipped over a large jade plant on the porch, blew a cushion off a chair, but no other damage.

Today’s walk was a throw back walk. Fifteen years ago, we stayed at Mountain Lake Lodge about 4.5 miles farther up the road off which we live, with Son 1, DIL, and 9 week old Grandson 1. The lake was full, Son 1 and DIL dove off the pier after a canoe ride across the lake and around the huge rocks at the end of the lake. The lake is only a pond now with no swimming, fishing, or boating allowed. We started up in the woods and walked down the mountain to the Lodge parking, down to the pier that is now on dry land with young trees growing up, then down a path through what used to be the lake bottom to a temporary floating dock they installed when the lake started losing water. It too is on dry land now. From there, we did a steep uphill back to the trail that lead to where we parked our car. The walk was about the same length as the walk we do in town, but it was cooler, less foot traffic, and more intense in elevation changes. A very pleasant time.