Monday, July 9, 2007

It's Canning Season!

So a few years ago I decided I wanted to make and can some salsa with tomatoes from my garden then later that year I decided to try applesauce and apple jelly. And I did and it was good! So the following year I went canning crazy; I canned strawberry jam & preserves, raspberry jam, black cherry jam & preserves, more applesauce, stewed tomatoes, peaches, peach jam. I think I named them all. Anyway, I went to Eastern Market on Saturday and picked up 3 flats of strawberries which is 1 more flat than I got last year (there are 8 2qt containers in one flat). I gave the vendor $20 for all of them. I just ran out of strawberry jam but we still have some preserves from last year. Maybe I'll have to look and see if I can't find a stalk or two of rhubarb and try combining that in a few jars this year. I've never had strawberry-rhubarb jam before so I have no idea what it should taste like.

I've been working on learning to do stranded knitting (aka Fair Isle). Once again Knittinghelp.com came to the rescue! Thanks KH!! I decided rather than cut and paste felt eyeballs for my fiery dragon that it would be better to knit them. I wonder if I can figure out how to knit the teeth too. Here's a couple pictures of the front and back of my practice piece; however, I decided later that I think the mock up of the green eye and slits for pupils I came up with after Googling images of alligator eyes looks way better than white eyes with square pupils. Here's the link for the finished Fiery Dragon Scarf.

Saturday was a hashing day... A casino hash which brought out about 20 fun seeking hashers to dash about the streets of Detroit looking for flour to lead them to 3 casinos and 1 beer check on top of COBO on a 92 degree sunny day.

After the hash I was dashing off to a Ken and Sandy's for the infamous Adrienne Estates block party which featured food, hillbilly horseshoes, volleyball, 7 kegs of beer and the ever popular ice luge! I Mark and Lance arrived about the same time I did and Cathy had apparently been there for a while. Oh there were the interesting stories the next morning of people passing out on bathrooms with their panties down (glad that wasn't me!), two people locking lips on the hood of some one's car (the previous passer-outer was involved) and a comical bed swapping that occurred twice that night (I was involved in that one).Unfortunately I didn't have a camera to get any pictures of the festivities. All 4 us stayed for the pancake breakfast down the street in the morning. Too bad I was feeling so poorly that I couldn't eat. It was one of those cold sweat things I get now and again mostly around that time of the month which appeared today.
The rest of Sunday was spent trying to recoup which took until about 5pm prior to which I would prop myself up at the kitchen sink and work on getting all the strawberries cut. I timed a few cartons and figured it took about 10 minutes to wash and core one container. 24 containers X 10 minutes / 60 = 4 hours! Yikes that's a long time to cut berries!

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