Picklin' My Life Away~

   

     It was a weekend of canning, pickling and all things "What the heck do I do with all these veggies?" You can only give away so many ...You can only take so much time to can or freeze~
     I hit the same crisis point last year, yet for reasons that remain confusing still, I repeated the pattern with absolutely no better game plan going in this time, other than "Brace for it...Life gets real crazy come August."

     About twice a week Thurman will call to ask "What are you up to?" If I'm near a phone at all (cause Thurman will not leave a message on voice mail) it's because I'm in the kitchen, which means this usually happens just when I'm feeling productive about my day, having frozen 4 measly batches of corn or canned 8 whoppin' jars of pickles. I swear that man lives to burst my bubble; he goes on about how he and Miss Brenda just put up 20 quarts of beans or picked and pickled 6 bushels of okra.
     Moral of the story (this, my recurring theme): Farming is no solo sport.
     With that in mind I decided to call in the calvary (or in this case, the Calvo-re). My girlfriend Janet is married to an Italian chef who can do more with a tomato than Heinz 57. With my kitchen a bomb, I figured "What the heck?" (One only extends these invitations to folks who don't give a rat's butt about a messy kitchen, but sadly, it was determined somewhere between cutting open a huge watermelon, slicing into a cantaloupe every bit as huge and shifting things around to make room for the whole tomato-blanching proposition that MY KITCHEN IS TOO DANG SMALL! If I'm gonna test recipes or can food going forward, dadgumit, I'm clearly gonna need more space.
     But seeing's that's not happening today, I decided to scale down my operation...See if there was any potential for a book titled "Canning for one." (Turns out there's not.) One day later, minus my sou chef, and too pooped to climb on a chair for my big food processor, I decided to see if my Nutri-bullet (right there and handy on my counter) could fill the bill. Again, the answer is no.
   

       The resulting milky pink substance I'd hoped to call salsa might work if your teeth were wired shut from an accident, but personally I don't like drinking salsa through a straw. When it comes to some foods, texture is everything...At least now we know.
     So my countertops will just stay cluttered until this process is over...(and at the rate I'm going, Lord knows how long that will be...)
     At least there is joy in the journey~