Tomatoes, Tomahtoes

Everything currently in my life revolves around tomatoes. Saturday night – salsa. Sunday – a quick stop at a small farmers’ market yielded a BIG BOX of tomatoes for a very small price. Upon further review, I got a deal. A few are bruised, all are ripe, several have marks that make them unaesthetic, but they’re all ripe and fairly solid. Tonight, I load up the crock pots with tomatoes and start the sauce process.

Last week I brought a quart bag of cherry and yellow pear tomatoes to work. I knew some of my coworkers would enjoy nibbling on them throughout the day. Heck, I enjoy nibbling on cherry tomatoes all day when I’m at home! Someone else had gotten there ahead of me with big tomatoes! Well, ’tis the season.

In our closet-lounge

In our closet-lounge

I took it in stride by arranging all of the lovely tomatoes on a platter. By the end of the day, all were gone.

That brings me to a piece of educational philosophy for you.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is knowing not to serve it in a fruit salad.

And with that, I’ll go find my crock pots.

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Fall Market Days

We’re buying a little less at the Farm Market these days. The freezers are filling up, and we’re getting low on containers, too. That’s usually a sign that I don’t need to prep quite so many peas or so much corn. In that case, we buy mainly what we’ll cook and eat in the next week.

Saturday's Take

Saturday’s Take

I had to set up the still life on the table with the canning books and jar lids because the kitchen counter was full. See below.

Salsa Time!

Salsa Time!

I convinced “Chuck” to help prep the tomatoes. The kitchen smelled of onions, tomatoes, and vinegar. Yum! The only drawback of last night’s salsa marathon is this: there are no chips in the house. We’ll take care of that later today with a quick grocery run.

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Pepper Sauce

Or is it Peppa’ Sauce? It’s a Southern dish, a spicy hot vinegar that goes on everything and anything, if I’m to believe the comments. I found it when a friend had too many peppers. This was one suggested solution. I had just the right bottle, so I tried it myself.

Pepper Sauce!

Pepper Sauce!

It’s more formula than recipe. Measure enough vinegar to fill the bottle. Heat the vinegar to a simmer. While it’s heating, prep the peppers by slicing into the skins to enable the vinegar to best soak in and absorb the pepper flavor. Add whole peppercorns and a few cloves of garlic, minced. Pack the peppers into the bottle, and then pour in the warm vinegar. Voila!

If we don't like it, at least it look pretty.

If we don’t like it, at least it look pretty.

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The Broad Side

Readers, I feel like I’ve made it big. My article about depression is live on The Broad Side.

This piece is groundbreaking for me. I published under my own name, not my Daisy moniker. I took a few posts from my major depression of 2011 and pulled them together to form a coherent whole. I had posts from the beginning, the middle, and the end (my recovery), so I found a representative piece from each time period.

This took courage, my friends. If I’m really going to make headway in breaking the stigma attached to mental illness, I needed to use my own name in discussing my depression.

Please take a deep breath and click over the The Broad Side. When you’re finished with my piece, feel free to stay a while and peruse other articles. If you enjoy reading me, you’ll find a lot to like on The Broad Side.

Here it is. Read it slowly and thoughtfully, please. Remember, it took courage.

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Parsnips?

The greens are certainly huge. I thought that meant I could harvest a few parsnips.

The greens look good.

The greens look good.

But seriously, folks, even the rabbit wanted nothing to do with these funky looking root vegetables.

Today's garden lesson:

Today’s garden lesson:

Straw bales might not be the best growing medium for parsnips.

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