Tomato season...hunting the trophy fruit

Once upon a time, the arrival of fall* was heralded by the imminence of school. These days, I know fall is coming when we start to get the full onslaught of ripe tomatoes.

And so it begins once again: the tomato processing cycle:

Son2 used to have to kneel on a stool to reach the strainer; now he towers over it.

The juice cooking down into sauce.

One batch done; the other still in the steam-canner.

Beauties.

Then, there are the smaller tomatoes...cherry, grape...that we dehydrate.

Exhausting work but worth it come winter.

* meteorological fall which starts September 1st

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Children of the corn...and tomatoes, and eggplants, and...

It was a good summer for green beans, even with the deer mowing down an entire bed of it. We froze many, many quart bags, and canned 14 quart jars of it so far. And there are more to come! It's exhausting work, even with four of us, but we'll be so happy to have it in the winter.

Canned green beans and tomato sauce

And if you hadn't guessed yet from the photo above, we're having a good year of tomatoes too, which is kind of surprising since it's been a generally cool summer. Yes, the white lids are Tattler lids. Now that hubby has read the directions and used them properly, they work great and no BPA!

More gratuitous photos of canned tomato sauce

We also had a bumper crop of wild blackberries (not wild black raspberries though). I froze a bunch and made my first ever blackberry jelly using Robin Edmundson's A Simple Jar of Jam e-book!

Beautiful blackberry jelly

Not everything from the garden was processed for future use. We ate a ton of stuff too, mostly summer squash and eggplants.

Scrambled eggs from our chickens to go with the squash-eggplant medley 

I'd forgotten we had a great crop of strawberries too this year, but while adding photos for this post, I found a picture I took in the spring of one of our many harvests.

Red and delcious

How did your garden do this year? Was it a good summer for growing where you live?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

A birthday wish, and a bevy of goodies

Firstly, it's dh's birthday today...47 and every bit as adorable as when I married him 20 years ago. And he's such a hard working dude too. It may be his birthday, but instead of sitting around wanting to be treated like a king, he spent the morning weeding and harvesting with the kids, and, now, after lunch, he went to the office to work for a couple of hours even though he didn't have to teach today.

We'll probably go out for his birthday dinner tomorrow, but tonight, I'm making him one of his favorite desserts: creme caramel (recipe courtesy of our wonderful neighbors...have I mentioned yet how glad I am the previous owners moved to the East Coast?).

We've been having lots of fun with ceramics lately. We made some new and different things that we're quite happy with. I created a tree shaped container:You lift the leaf lid and the trunk of the tree is a cavity in which you can store jewelry or whatever treasure you want!

Ds#2 made, with his teacher's help, a pen/pencil holder; the Old Brick glaze is quite attractive:
Ds#1 decided to make a stylized earth star bowl. For those of you not mycologically-inclined, earth stars are a type of fungus (puff balls, in fact).
Not to be out-done by us, dh cooked up some wild Alaskan salmon for dinner on Saturday. He made his own charmoula sauce, and whipped up his usual yummy Greek salad:
I know you never get tired of looking at our tomato photos...hah!And from these tomatoes, we canned another 14 quarts of sauce.What else have I been working on? Well, after seeing the cutest post at Lorie's Be Different Act Normal blog, I decided to whip up a bandana apron myself. Haven't gotten too far yet. I put some pleats in the black bandana for the bodice and attached it to bottom half. I am a messy person in the kitchen, and if I didn't have a bodice on my apron, I may as well not wear one at all.
And speaking of aprons, go check out and enter Amber's Ambry's 200th post giveaway!

All right, last but not least, and then I have to get back to reading the biology textbook and lab manual (for the lab class that I'm leading for some homeschool teens, including ds#1...again, many thanks to Meg!!)...we made and froze another 9 pints of pesto. Here the boys are, "de-foliating" the basil that dh picked and I washed:
I hope those of you who have Labor Day off today are having a wonderful holiday weekend! Are you doing something fun and out-of-the-ordinary?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams