Apple Saucy

It was another busy kitchen day yesterday, but I get a break today. Today I'm getting a pedicure, followed immediately by a trip to the grocery store. My bliss will be short-lived, I'm afraid. After that, though...sewing, sewing, sewing. I haven't had time to spend in the sewing room lately, and so I'm looking forward to having a few hours this afternoon. I hope. Unless I forgot something. And maybe I did, but I'll worry about that later.

So, I finished up the top panel for I Believe in Snowmen yesterday. This didn't take long. Really, there wasn't much embroidery to do.

This morning, I'll get started on the last Snowflake block. I have some good ideas about how to set those into a quilt, and so it'll be good to have them all finished. There are a few block sets needing to be sewn into quilts ahead of them, but getting a spot in line is always good.

After that, I was outside for a while, watering the pots and harvesting whatever needed it. I scored another big bowl of beans. These will get pressure canned tomorrow. Also three more zucchini and about a dozen tomatoes.

I'm hoping to score 40 pounds of tomatoes from our CSA farmers by this weekend. We're leaving on a trip in about 10 days, and so I'm down to do-or-die time for this year's batch of pasta sauce. Interestingly, this little blurb came up in my memories on Facebook this morning:

Well, thanks for that, Me from three years ago. Actually, I was wondering. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep for all the wondering I was doing. I wasn't actually thinking of doing salsa or tomato jam, but 14 quarts of pasta sauce will be plenty. If I get the tomatoes, looks like I'll be making salsa and tomato jam too. And, honestly, one can never have too much of any of this stuff.

So after the vegetables were bagged up and put away, I went to work on the applesauce. Yesterday's yield was 13 pints, for a total of 25 for the year. There were apples left over, but those went to our neighbor's horse and mule.

And after all that canning, Smitty was downright exhausted. Looks like we ran the wheels off the cat, once again. Also, he'd had a meal of gopher, and that always means a long nap afterward.

So while Smitty slumbered, I finished the binding on the Stitch Sampler. This is my third finished quilt for the month of August. It finished up at 16 x 25 inches.

This is a combination of two patterns from Crabapple Hill Studios. The one on the left is the "Stitch" Heart Sampler. The one on the right is the "Remember" Stitch Sampler. And let me just warn you, if you head over to the Crabapple Hill website, you might want to lock up your credit cards for safe-keeping. I can barely escape without spending a fortune there. I made these two pieces because I wanted to practice some of the fancier stitches. Now they're sewn into a little wall-hanging for my sewing room.

Okay, so I wanted a simple dinner last night. We had two leftover salads from earlier in the week, and we had hamburgers. Fortunately, I had everything I needed on hand. Then, remember those Zucchini Fries I made last week? Well, I got an idea to use one of the "rogue" zucchinis sliced into rounds and to try them again. 

This was actually a really good way to use zucchini that gets away from you. I sliced it into half-inch rounds, and then made it like the recipe suggests. As I mentioned in my previous post, the recipe makes too much breading, but you can freeze any leftovers. I was using frozen leftovers last night (thawed, of course). The only other thing I did differently was to roast them for 30 minutes, flipping them over after 15 minutes. They were delicious that way. I'm excited I have another rogue zucchini in the fridge because I'm going to make this again. We dipped them in ranch dressing. Really yummy.

Okay, so I've already mentioned what today holds. I'm going to get to work on that Snowflake next. If you're in the path of any of the big storms, or the fires, or the pestilance and plague, please stay safe out there. There is much to fear right at the moment. Remember to breathe, and know that the sewing room is always a good place to shelter.