Harvest season is beginning in earnest now, after a delayed start. The garden is late, and the yield is lower this year. Even so, the produce is coming in and keeping us very busy.
On Friday Attila was off work, and we canned 24 jars of pickles. We had found a 1/4 bushel of pickling cucumbers at the grocery store, Ontario grown, for $9.99, and scooped them up. Our cucumbers are not doing all that well this year, so we haven’t made many jars of pickles with home grown cucumbers. The 1/4 bushel of cucumbers yielded 16 500-ml jars of dill pickles. Garden onions and scarlet runner beans gave us another eight jars of dilly beans and pickled onions.
Yesterday we canned eight jars of coleslaw, using garden cabbage, carrots, and onions. Also a bountiful basil harvest was transformed into 20 servings of pesto, which will be enjoyed over the winter months.
Early today I baked bread and chocolate zucchini muffins made with our garden zucchini.
We took a break from our labours and went shopping in the city. This is a rare activity for us. We visited four different stores. We first visited Home Depot, wandered the aisles, and bought nothing. The next stop was a fabric store, where I found cotton material on sale, and purchased enough to make two aprons for myself. We carried on to a Food Basics grocery store, just to see what it was like, and bought a few things that were less expensive there than at home. Our final stop was Costco, which Attila jokingly calls the $500 dollar store. We buy items in bulk when we visit Costco, taking advantage of reduced prices on items that we normally purchase and are cheaper at Costco that at home.
We headed home, exhausted and satisfied with our purchases. Attila decided to prepare dinner, homemade sausage patties on homemade burner buns, served with home canned coleslaw on the side. This is our “fast food”, low in fats, sodium, and sugars, high in nutrients.
Wordly
Weather
Updated on Sun, Aug 13 at 5:25 PM
24°C
FEELS LIKE 29
Mostly cloudy
Wind 19 W km/h
Humidity 59 %
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Sunrise 6:08 AM
Wind gust 28 km/h
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Ceiling 9100 m
Sunset 8:16 PM
Quote
“It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.”
Jerome K. Jerome
1859 – 1927
Perhaps not always true, but I think it is often true!
Yum! Those all look so good!
I’ve found a new appreciation for pickled onions. I’ve had one or two small, whole white pickled onions before and not really thought much about them but last week we picked up 2 burritos for dinner and I had them put slivers of pickled red onion on mine. The pickled onion was so good! It really added a lot to the burrito.
After a couple of rather sunny weeks we’ve had some rather rainy days with the odd interspersed sunny day. It was just long enough for DH and I to put up a small pergola in front of our living room window. I like it but it doesn’t quite do the job with keeping the sun out completely in the afternoon. I think in a few years we’ll end up replacing this small aluminum pergola with a similar but taller one made of wood.
Thanks Teri! I hadn’t thought to put pickled onions on a burrito, good to know. Our garden onions are Vidalia, not very large, but big on flavour.
Nice pergola! Too bad it doesn’t quite shade the window. Could it be raised using concrete deck blocks or concrete blocks under the corner posts, or large wooden blocks? These could be painted white or the colour of the siding.
We are still considering how to handle the afternoon sun on our back porch, summers are just too hot for sitting out in the sun in the afternoons. Hoping to think of something simple, but no viable ideas so far, we still have time.
Maggie after I read your food posts I am soooo hungry! Everything looks so delicious!
Thanks Sandy! I live with a fella who eats four to five main meals a day, and gets up to snack in the middle of the night as well, but not overweight. Food is on the agenda constantly, and luckily I am interested in preserving and cooking, so that is our focus, good food! We love our food!