Category: Life

Tuesday was full of action.
It started in the basement with a fun filled morning of ironing. I always promise myself that I will iron stuff as they come out of the dryer. The trouble is, I’m lazy. I hang the shirts up and then leave them to be ironed “at a future time”. Lately the “future time” kept going on and on until this morning. It was either iron or my clothes rack was going collapse under the weight and fall to the floor. So after coffee and breakfast I headed to the basement.
I always think the basement is a cool place. I was wearing shorts and a tank top and there I was standing at the ironing board in my nice cool basement sweating like a race horse. I even had to stop and wipe my brow several times to keep from dripping on the clothes.
Was this ironing sweat or another hot flash? I’m not sure, but I can tell you it was uncomfortable!

After we had lunch I decided to sit an watch “All My Children” before I started my afternoon project. The soap was pretty good today, although I think that Jackson should just leave Jonathan and Lily alone. Apparently I am the only one who thinks they make a nice couple.

After the soap, I got out the vegetables that were soaking to make the Mustard Pickles.

I drained and rinsed them and then brought the vegetables to a boil. I once again drained them and then made the mustard sauce. Now the mustard sauce is a big deal. You don’t want it to burn, so you must cook it on a low heat and stir constantly until it thickens. So, I stirred and stirred and stirred. For an hour I stirred until it was thick and then I added the vegetables. I cooked it until it was thoroughly heated and then Hubby helped me put it in jars and seal them. This entire process took me 2 1/2 hours! 10 pints of these wonderful pickles! This batch looks good and I have high hopes that it will be just as tasty as the first one I made.

So it’s been a productive day and I can go to bed tonight and feel happy that I actually got all of these things done. Especially the Soap Opera watching. I mean ironing and pickle making are good, but the Soap watching? Yeah, there’s the important stuff, right?

This must be vacation week.
I went to all my usual blog reads and no one is around. Maybe they’re around, and like me find that the dog days of summer leaves them little to write about. At least in the winter one can write about the injustice of snow, below zero temperatures and ones attempts to stay warm.
In the summer? You are just hot. Hot and cranky. Or lucky enough to be on vacaction.

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I’d hoped to be writing about my incredible weight loss, the fact that I was now looking like a slim, trim, bathing beauty, but that’s not going to happen quite that fast. I’m watching what I eat, but it’s taking me far longer than the two thousand previous diets I have been on. I’m blaming menopause for the slowdown of my metabolism. After all in my 20’s I had the metabolism of a, well, a 20 year old, and I could pretty much eat what I wanted and not gain weight. Now, well, since you all know how old I am I won’t hedge here, I’m a 47 year old woman, and my metabolism has slowed to a snails pace. It’s just not right.
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I’m making another batch of Mustard Pickles with the good recipe. I have the vegetables cut up and will be making the pickles later today. Hmmmmmm! I just love Mustard Pickles. At least my homemade Mustard Pickles. I saw some in a store a while back and bought them thinking they would be good and they were terrible! But mine? Hmmmmmm!
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The garden is slowly winding down. I’m pretty sure I won’t have many more cucumbers or summer squash. My Butternut Squash look good and I should have maybe a dozen or so.
My tomatoes are now starting to come on and they are so sweet and juicy. It’s amazing how fantastic real, ripe tomatoes can taste.
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I woke up on Monday morning with a stiff neck. I probably slept wrong. When I was a kid my Grandmother would tell me she had a cold in her neck when she felt like this. She would also have colds in her ears, back or shoulder. If she had an ache, it was a cold. And she had all sorts of home remedies. The one I remember best was lambs wool that she would stuff in her ear when it had a “cold”.
So this stiff neck has me thinking of her.

I puttered. I worked for three hours solid in the garden.
I pulled weeds. I took dead plants out of the garden. I took dead leaves off of the plants. I filled three wheelbarrows with garden garbage! And in the process got a little sunshine on my pastey white skin. In fact, the old back is a tad red tonight, and a wee bit sore!
I won’t lie and tell you that the garden looks better. It looks like it’s been mauled and maimed.

However, at least the dead and diseased plants have been removed for now and I harvested more cucumbers. Yes, more cucumbers! I don’t feel the garden has been a disaster, even though it got this powdery mildew. Call that an act of God!
We have eaten a lot of summer squash, some zucchini, made a ton of pickles and eaten a bunch too. For a first garden, I’m actually thinking it was a rousing success. Of course next year I will do things differently and I hope to avoid some of the pitfalls I encountered this year.
I’ve enjoyed the gardening, and I’ve enjoyed learning to make pickles. Oh, and I have a new favorite pickle dish, Mustard Pickles!!!
I came in after working like crazy and found I’d been stung by some sort of Bee 3 times! The little bugger! I was also breaking out in a strange rash. So, I jumped in the shower with my brown soap and washed and rinsed away my garden sweat. Ooops, my garden glistening!
I felt a little like I’d been run over and decided to lie down after lunch. No sooner had my head hit the pillow, than there was a knock at my door. An old friend from my previous life stood there. She came to introduce me to the new man in her life.
We sat on the back patio enjoying the breeze and talking. A little about the old days and a little about the new. We showed them the fruit trees, which are doing far better than my garden, and walked around the yard some before they needed to head off to go back home.
After they left I went back out and took a few pictures of the fruit. It’s looking rather delicious now. Soon the peaches will be ready to pick, then the plums, apples and pears.

One of our Peaches

The Plums

A Pear
Ah yes, life on a farm. Well sort of. We’re growing some of our food, and we have two animals, so that’s close enough! Right?

Today I’m going to spend the day puttering in the garden. I bought some new work gloves and a kneeling pad, so I can work with ease. I need to clean and clear a good quarter of the garden where the powdery mildew has destroyed my squash. I was upset about it for a while, until I realized how truly sick of summer squash and zucchini I am. Before the powdery mildew hit, the plants were extremely prolific and we’ve been eating squash nearly every night. Cooked almost every way that you can imagine!
Next year diversity is the key. I will have maybe two zucchini plants and two summer squash. Then I want to plant eggplant, peppers, maybe some corn. Anything but hill upon hill of squash.
The cucumbers? Yes, I’ll still plant a lot of those. Making pickles, piccalilli and mustard pickles is fun, and we all know how much I love mustard pickles!
So I’ll be puttering in the garden. Maybe the dogs will play outside with me. The sun will shine and life will be good.

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I’m taking this week off from Saturday Scavenger Photo’s. I wracked my brain for an idea about how I could present the theme of “money”, but I realized that money is the one area that I’ve never been comfortable with. Money means very little to me, it just pays the bills.
I’ll be back next week…

The Pickle Lady here.

Today I made another batch of Mustard Pickles. I used a different recipe, just for the heck of it. I am not happy with the results. The first recipe was so much better, so that one will be the one I save and use when I make them again. Hopefully, next year. After canning all these pickles, piccalilli and mustard pickles, I am sort of all pickled out! Of course soon it will be time to do the peaches. We like to can some as well as make a peach preserve called Heavenly Jam. I hope the peaches are ripe before I have my surgery!

We’re at the end of my squash. The powdery mildew has pretty much killed off the plants. I may get a few more, but what I need to do is get in there and take out the dead plants, and then set up the Butternut Squash to flourish and grow. Next year I will start at the beginning of the season and use preventative measures to guard against the mildew.

The heat broke about 6 o’clock on Thursday night. It’s cooler right now than it has been in days. I’m thankful. I’m not sure I could take many more days of hot, humid and hazy!

My weekend plan is to putter around the house and to putter around the garden. Life is good and so it’s time to enjoy it a little, especially now that the heat has broken.

Stay cool and enjoy the weekend.

My garden is growing. And growing and growing. I really can’t take much credit now. It’s all in God’s hands. In fact the garden is still producing at this point despite the fact that we have “powdery mildew”. I wasn’t sure at first what this was, but after reading about it I have learned that A) It’s too late to do anything about it now, and that B) Next year we will need to use a fungicide right from the start to keep it from happening again. Good thing Hubby has his Pesticide applicators license. I knew there was a reason I kept him around!
Meanwhile, I am still able to enjoy a harvest and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it won’t affect my huge crop of Butternut Squash. I must have a dozen babies that are easily seen. There is no telling how many of those little buggers are hiding under plant leaves.
I was looking for cucumbers and squash today under all the leaves and look what I found:

This one weighs 2 1/2 pounds!

Far too big to slice and eat, but I figured I could do something. I raced up the hill to my neighbor’s house. She knows everything about vegetables and how to get the most out of your garden. She gave me two recipes to use to make pickles from over ripe cucumbers. I will start that tomorrow. Who knows I may have another couple of monsters to add to the pot!
I’m really getting into this canning thing. In fact I have already found ways to eat mustard pickles with almost every meal! I just love them!!! My neighbor also told me that she liked them very much. I’m thinking of canning some in half pint jars for Christmas presents. At least for people who like mustard and pickles!
Maybe I could become the “Mustard Pickle Queen of New Hampshire”!

Piccalilli! Yes, today was Piccalilli day. As you know, I chopped up all the cucumbers, (6 pounds of them!) onions and peppers yesterday. Everything soaked overnight in a heavy salty brine. This afternoon I drained the vegetables, and then cooked it all up with the vinegar and spices.
It took a while to simmer the pickles until they were tender/crisp.

Then Hubby came in and helped me with the canning. He is a master! I present the hot sterilized jars to him, he fills them, and then I seal them.



After we were done, I did up the dishes, and Hubby came into the kitchen, hugged me and said, “Well, look at this! Maribeth’s Piccalilli! Maribeth’s vegetables from her garden! And you’re doing all this canning!” He was smiling and I knew he was proud of me.

I am sitting here thinking back to when I was in High School.
Back then, I really wanted a home in New Hampshire, a vegetable garden, and to learn to can the stuff I was growing. It seemed so romantic and so wonderful.
Fast forward 30 years. I have all of the above, but I have learned that it isn’t quite as “romantic” as I thought. I remember the digging of the garden in the heat and getting sunburnt, I remember planting everything the day before Hubby’s surgery and hoping I’d done it all right. I remember doing the “cultivating and weeding”.
I remember watching over the garden, thinking it would never grow. Now. I go out each day and hope upon hope that I won’t have too much produce. My neighbors now pull their shades down and pretend they aren’t home when they see me coming with more summer squash!
I have to say that the joys of gardening are many, even if the work is tough. I will be doing it again next year. I’m already planning it…

I just sliced 6 pounds of cucumbers, 5 large onions, 3 large green peppers, salted them all and set them to rest overnight. What am I making now? Cucumber Picalilli. I had all these cucumbers, (I still haven’t used them all up!) and I knew if I didn’t do something now, they would simply rot. Tomorrow is the cooking and canning. I can hardly wait to see how this comes out.

The children left Saturday morning. It was sad to see them go. They had to cut their visit short this year because their father has accepted a new job and they are moving to a new town. The kids were a little nervous about the move, but we all told them how great it was going to be. Matina picked up Greta and hugged her and said, “I wish I could put you in my suitcase and bring you home with me!” and I could hear her voice crack. It’s a beautiful thing, the love between a child and a dog.

Today was a Greek Festival in a town near-by. We drove down and enjoyed a lunch full of Greek goodies. Hubby had a lamb shanks meal and I went A La Carte with Lamb Kebabs, and stuffed Grape Leaves! I also tried something new this year, Pastichio. It’s sort of the Greek equivalent to macaroni and cheese, but it also has meat in it and in many ways is creamier and finer. Yum!

I was lying in bed last night thinking of my Uncle George.

He is my cousin, Janet’s father. He was probably the single most important male in my life growing up. The one that showed me what a real man could be.
He taught me to swim, to dive and to do somersaults off his shoulders. He would play games with us in the water, watch over us if we got in over our heads, and above all he made sure we always had fun.
When I was maybe 6 or 7 years old I stepped on glass at the beach. My foot was bleeding pretty badly. He wrapped it in his T-shirt and then carried me the 5 minute walk back to our house in Falmouth. He sat with me while I got stitched up and then carried me around the beach so that I wouldn’t get sand in my stitches afterwards. I asked him about that recently and he’d forgotten, but I’ll never forget it, because he was so kind to me.

How lucky we are to have these special people in our lives. Young and old, they add so much.

Today it arrived!

I have been waiting almost two weeks for this.
As many of you know, I love to cook. I also love to experiment with new recipes, (or old) and try new techniques. So, as soon as I got home from the Post Office I tore open the box and sat down to revel in the book. My hands quivered as I turned page after page, seeing what Julia had to say to me.
I love the way she puts things. It’s simple, well thought out, and easy to follow. Most of the recipes are French Cuisine. She narrates the recipes with how to’s and advice for the new cook. And yet I never felt like she was talking down to the newer cooks either, but reassuring them that they too can cook like this.
The first recipe I want to try is her Quiche Lorraine. I have tried other recipes over the years and found them simply horrid. I somehow know, Julia will guide me through it and that it will make a sumptuous dish!
I’m getting a ton of pickles again! Almost enough to make some sort of relish. Perhaps Picalilli or Sweet Pickles with onions? Not sure. I wish my neighbor was back from New Brunswick, Canada because she makes some really wonderful pickle recipes and I would love to pick her brain.
My first baby Butternut squash appeared last week. One is a good 8 inches long already! Today I noticed probably 8 new, tiny 2 inch squash. Butternut squash are my favorite. I love to peel, boil, mash with butter, brown sugar and cinnamon for a truly awesome meal.
I hear the local corn is finally in. There are signs up that tell you to basically not expect much because of all the rain we have had. Even with that they are charging 60 cents an ear.
And lastly on the kitchen front My dishwasher is leaking. This will mean another call to our repair man, Barry, and it will also mean I will have to wash dishes by hand until he can fit us in. Shoot! I detest doing dishes all alone.
When I was a kid, I would stand on a chair and my sister and I would do the dishes together. Mel would either tell me stories or we would sing. We loved to sing, “White Coral Bells” or “We Are The Sister’s” or “Frere Chaque”. Yes, back then doing the dishes was fun! Thanks Mel. Want to come up and help me do the dishes?

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