Busy-Ness

 

Today was a get-shit-done-day for me. The main project I wanted to tackle was making bread and butter pickles. Remember how our first few cucumbers were so bitter? Well, they aren't any more and I had a refrigerator that, if not filled with cukes, sure had a lot of them stashed in different drawers and crispers and on shelves. So out came the water bath canner and the very, very cool colander you see in that picture above. I got that thing at the Bad Girls Get Saved By Jesus Thrift Store before they broke my heart and closed. I'm still not over it and probably never will be.

When I saw that colander, I wasn't even sure what it was but quickly realized that it was indeed a colander and built so that it could easily be adjusted to fit into different sized spaces. The handles are on sliding tracks which pull out or push in, making it adjustable for all of your draining needs. It works wonderfully well for rinsing vegetables just out of the garden in the sink that Mr. Moon built for me and/or in the kitchen. When I saw it, I realized that it was what had been missing in my life and I snatched it right up. I knew I'd use it to wash and drain beans before canning and I've used it for other things too. It worked perfectly today for my cucumbers and onions which had been salted, covered with ice, and left to sit in a bowl. It is so easy to just dump that big bowl of the salted vegetables into the strainer and rinse them and let them drain. Before I sliced each one though, I tasted it to make sure it wasn't bitter. I only found two of those in the whole mess, the rest tasting as cucumbers should. 
Bread and butter pickles are sweet pickles and so their syrup has vinegar and sugar in it, along with various spices like cloves and mustard seed and celery seed and red pepper and black peppercorns and all that good stuff. You boil that mixture, then add the drained cucumbers and onions, bring it all back to a boil and pack your jars, put on their lids, and in they go to the canner. 

Today's batch only made six pints but six pints is fine with me, especially since I didn't think I was going to be able to make any cucumber pickles this year. We only have two grow bags with the plants in them but they're pretty prolific. 

So while I was working on that project I started making a cake which we shall not discuss in depth here because it may be involved in a birthday. While the cucumbers were sitting in their salt and ice bath, I got the cake made and in the oven and was able to somehow coordinate my actions which is something I'm not very good at these days. I guess I was having a good mental health day or something. Whatever, everything went rather smoothly. 
Of course every different project creates a mess which I absolutely must clean up before I can go on to the next stage because I cannot cook in a messy, untidy kitchen. 
I just can't. So that's a constant too. 

But by three-thirty I had those pints cooling on the kitchen island and the cake baked, iced, and in the refrigerator, and the countertops de-stickified and all of the dishes and pots and pans and knives and spoons I'd used washed and in the drainer or in the dishwasher. And then...out to the garden!

My beans had slowed down a bit and I was beginning to worry but between the rain we got last week and a good watering with the sprinklers, they have made a splendid comeback. I picked for an hour. Or close to it. 

Picking beans is like a treasure hunt for me. Every bean I find and pluck gives me a tiny hit of serotonin even after all these years. Growing rattlesnake beans is an important part of my mental stability. I swear. And then seeing my pantry shelves fill up with the jars of them I've processed also brings me a sense of satisfaction that is hard to explain. And same with the pickles like the ones I made today. 
Tomorrow is pottery and I'm going to take a large bag of green beans to give away to anyone who wants them. I'll take smaller bags to parcel them out. I hope people want them. 

And now I've made a spaghetti sauce with venison from the woods and eggplant and a green pepper from the garden. They're the little Asian eggplants and so I just sliced them up and threw them in with the browning meat, the onions, and the chopped up pepper. And garlic. You know. I wish I had enough tomatoes to have thrown those in too but I don't. We should have planted a lot more tomatoes than we did.

Mr. Moon was going to leave for the cabin today but he got a phone call from another friend of our friend Tom's who somehow had been informed that Tom was in the hospital. We're not sure what happened but possibly another stroke. Glen is his health care surrogate so he needs to stay in town. It sounds like they're mainly looking for a rehab place for Tom to move to for now and I have a feeling that this means he'll never be going back to his Tiny House in the woods again. He really shouldn't be living alone there anyway and he REALLY shouldn't still be driving but he has been doing both of those things for far longer than I would ever have thought possible with his many and varied disabilities. The man is stubborn as ten Mr. Moons and a Tennessee mule and that may be the world record for stubbornness. Let me just say that although Tom has a very hard time speaking now, one of the things he can definitely still manage to say and make clear is "FUCK NO!" 
So. 
It's honestly really good that Glen isn't leaving this week because after months dealing with a place on his back what would not, will not heal and which has itched to the point of his madness, he has finally gotten a diagnosis and it is not skin cancer or any cancer but some sort of dermal hyper-reaction to possibly an insect bite and he is supposed to apply a steroid cream around it twice a day and he can't do that on his own. He simply cannot reach it. They've also prescribed antihistamines to help with the itching and thank god for that. Why I haven't been pumping him with Benadryl at night is a mystery to me. I know that Benadryl is losing favor with the medical profession but if you need to stop itching in any way in order to sleep, I can't think of a better remedy. 

And that's all the news that's fit to, uh, well, not print, but send into the cybersphere. Is that word appropriate? Who knows? Not me. I'm just proud I figured out how to use an adjustable colander. 

Magnolias from my sweetheart. 

Love...Ms. Moon