Can-tastic!

This is a lot of tomatoes.

My mother-in-law is in town and yesterday she loaned her 30 years of canning experience to help me "put up" lots of tomatoes (probably about 40 pounds, costing me about $48). This is fourteen 32-oz jars (why do they call it canning when you use jars?) I borrowed the supplies (a very large pot, a mechanism that holds the jars in place, a gripper to pull the jars out of the boiling water and a funnel) from someone in the mothers' club.

The jars cost $1.10 each. I need to go to the store and figure out what the actual cost per oz is for the home-canned vs the store-bought. Of course there's a lot of work involved with the actual home canning, but there are benefits...

I love fall!

Last night I made butternut squash soup and it made the whole house smell divinely of fall. I used two very large squash and double the recipe, leaving out the chili flakes.

This was after the boys and I went to the nursery and got a bunch of lovely Halloween-colored plants. We're not into Halloween so much, at least not like some people are, making their front lawns look like graveyards (ick). I much prefer to decorate for two months of "Harvest" time leading up to Thanksgiving. It's starting to feel a little bit like fall; maybe Sunday was the last day of 80-plus weather!

Here's some of our handiwork (this pic doesn't quite do it justice; those coreopsis [the daisy-type flowers are an incredible shade of orange)!

Furiture fun

This is a piece I picked up at Savers -- after I took the sander to it.








Here it is with a new coat of paint and some fabric from Cloth in Sydney. The paint is left over from the bathroom trim painting -- it's a bright purple. I think I'll repaint it with the brownish purple I'm using in the guest room...

Tomatoes!

I use tomatoes in at least 50 percent of the recipes I regularly make, so when my mother-in-law comes to town at the end of the month, she's going to teach me how to can, and tomatoes are going to be the big staple to "put up" in our house. I'll be borrowing the gear from someone in the mothers' club and my neighbor is planning to come over and learn from the expert, too.

Yesterday I asked one of my favorite vendors at the Menlo Park Farmers' Market which of his tomatoes would be good for canning. He said I should buy one of his big boxes of "soft" tomatoes for $20. Oh my word that's a lot of tomatoes! Below is a picture of maybe half of them in the sink. Last night I boiled, peeled and chopped the rest. This morning I finished the job. About five of the tomatoes were too far gone to even be used for canning and another 5-10 were some variety that just disintigrated when I tried to peel them. It boils down to what seems like not very much: three gallon freezer bags filled half way.

New room

It's time for yet another room transformation, but not nearly as dramatic as last time: this one involves only one room of the house being covered in dust.

The former office was more-or-less transformed into a functioning guest room for the house-swappers. This mainly involved moving some furniture and making some new curtains (which I stopped liking before I finished making them). Since then, we stayed in this house in Australia that was green and purple, and I fell in love with the color scheme. (Now I just need to find the right fabric for curtains.)

Last night I did some spackling of the area that used to be covered by these random strips of faux-wood about a foot below the ceiling. Hideous. Today I sanded the spackling. Have you ever sanded after spackling? The dust is incredible. I was covered in it. The room is still covered in it, after I wiped the walls and the floor with wet rags. I will have to do so again tomorrow. But then the fun begins! Gotta buy that paint this week...