A homey Saturday

Today was a homemaking kind of Saturday.  First thing this morning I went to Market On The Move which is the food co-op where for $10 you can have up to about 60 pounds of produce that would have been taken from the inspection station at the US-Mexican border to the dump because it was not picked up on time. 

I got:

tomatoes
English cucumbers
yellow summer squash
little sweet bell peppers

Doesn't sound like much, but from the tomatoes I got:

30 jars of diced tomatoes.  They were all pints except the last one which was a half-pint.  I was out of tomato pints (still have a few quarts) and was having to use store-bought ones. (!!!)

David stopped by around lunch time, then he and Bill went to a gun show.  It was David's first and he was quite intrigued, Bill said.

A little later Alicia dropped in and we chatted while I finished up the canning.  She suddenly had a hankering to pet and hold a chicken, so I sent her out with a container of scraps to entice them.  They're very friendly.

You can see the towels drying in the sun behind her.  I got a couple of loads of laundry done too.

 

In the evening, a cook-out with David and Alicia and all of us.

 

It was a good day.

I bought myself a few hours of work yesterday

Yesterday was Market on the Move, the program that lets you buy up to 60 pounds of product for $10. It was raining, so after Bountiful Baskets I drove over to the distribution point, thinking the line would be short. Not so. It looked to be about 45 minutes long and they still had 10 minutes before opening time. I took a quick look to see what they had, but decided that since I didn't have a coat let alone an umbrella, I didn't want to stand in the rain waiting. And I wasn't sure I wanted to can anything anyway.

Bill and I went out later and we drove by to see if the line was shorter. It wasn't.

Still later, on our way home, we drove by again and there was no line at all. Ugh. Decisions, decisions. I didn't really have anything planned for the day, but I didn't really want to can anything either. In the end opportunity won, so we picked up

Cucumbers
Zucchini
Yellow squash
Bell peppers
Grape tomatoes
Small slicing tomatoes
50 lbs of Roma tomatoes

Since we already had most of these things from Bountiful Baskets, we got them for our neighbors. I was especially interested in the 50 lbs of Roma tomatoes.

I found a recipe for spaghetti sauce and started slicing and dicing. I used my food strainer (Vittorio strainer) and that made processing the tomatoes go much faster than I expected.

Would you be surprised to hear 50 pounds of Roma tomatoes makes only about 11 1/2 quarts of spaghetti sauce?

Lots of canning!

9+ hours at the sink yesterday yielded:

• 10 qts diced tomatoes
• 1 pt diced tomatoes
• 6 pints dilly beans
• 6 qts bread and butter pickles
• 7 pts relish

Here is what I made:

Don't those look good? 

Here is a look at the dilly beans with their cloves of garlic and fresh dill:

I see lots of soups and chilis in the coming months.  We've been eating a lot of vegetarian dinners lately and have been using more tomatoes than usual.

The relish was my only disappointment--and it was really time-intensive!  The recipe called for a cup of finely diced celery plus 2 teaspoons of celery seed.  It's just too much celery.  I wish I had either cut the seed amount in half or left it out all together.

Everything is packed away on shelves in my food storage closet. The pickles will be ready in about 2 months; the tomatoes and relish are ready now.

This might be tomorrow's project

Market on the Move is supposed to have cucumbers tomorrow. If so, I'm going to get some and make pickle relish (the kind you put on hot dogs). I've never made relish like this before, but why not try?

sourceI also expect Roma tomatoes there tomorrow, and if so I'll try to get a case of them to make more plain canned tomatoes. We're going through them a lot faster these days than we have in the past.

Market on the Move

Here in Arizona we have an unusual situation. Fresh produce is trucked up from Mexico and is inspected in Nogales, Arizona. Sometimes for one reason or another, the produce does not continue on its journey north. It might have started to go bad, it might be too dirty or have scratches on the surface of the produce, or the trucking schedules might not be set to pick it up. When the warehouse is full and another load is on its way, the warehouse will take the produce to the landfull. About two full trailer loads get dumped every day.

Market on the Move is sponsored by a group called The 3000 Club. Each week three trucks pick up this donated produce and bring it to rotating sites in Tucson and Phoenix. For a $10 donation, people can choose up to 60 pounds of produce. The rest goes to food banks. This is a tiny fraction of what I brought home today:

I brought home:

25 lbs of Roma tomatoes
6 large salad tomatoes
3 quarts of grape tomatoes
1 basket of cherry tomatoes
2 kinds of hot peppers
10 green bell peppers
8 red bell peppers
10 zucchini
10 yellow squash
13 small ears of corn
5 eggplants

The Roma tomatoes turned into 13 pints of diced tomatoes and 9 pints of salsa, along with some of the peppers.

The eggplant and more bell peppers turned into a Spanish eggplant dish for the freezer. You'll see that on the menu a couple of times over the next month or two.

Tomorrow some of the zucchinis will find their way into zucchini muffins for the freezer for our regular Monday muffin breakfasts.

We gave away a lot of the produce to our neighbor and a friend who provides us with delicious bakery bread for free every 2 weeks.

It was a busy day, but I'm feeling very satisfied.