Signing Off With a Kitchen Day

Good morning, my friends. We're heading for another hot day, but it should be nice this morning for our visit to the farmer's market. Warm, but not too hot. It's been about a month since I've seen Erik and Mae. They were off gallivanting with one of Mae's friends in Chicago last week, and it's been a while since we've gone to the market together. I'm looking forward to it.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I had a kitchen day planned for myself. My first stop was to harvest whatever zucchini I could from the garden. I needed three pounds. These weighed in at 3-1/2 pounds. By the time I cut the stems and ends off, I probably had just over three pounds.

It was good to harvest all the zucchini now. I left a few babies, but none of them will grow to world-domination size while we're gone. I wrote a whole tutorial with a recipe about how I make this Zucchini Garden Pepper Relish some time back. The first step is to mix everything up and sprinkle it with pickling salt. Then it has to sit for an hour. 

While I waited on that, I made these Breakfast Apple-Cinnamon Oatmeal Cakes. These are super tasty, and easy enough to make. We preferred them to the blueberry ones. If we don't eat all of them ahead of time, we'll take them along on our camping trip.

Those mix up quickly enough that I had time to make our favorite Chocolate Chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Dried Cherries and Pecans for Two. The original recipe for these came from Cook's Illustrated. I was able to scale it down to make this a "for two" recipe. They're big cookies, and so one cookie is enough. What you see here is "for two" times two. You can find my recipe right here, but know that I doubled it for four cookies.

These cookies are so good, they're the only cookie recipe I use any more. We generally don't keep cookies around since I'd happily eat an entire bag all by myself. Making these for two gives me a one and done cookie treat.

Finally, I was ready to cook and process the zucchini relish. My yield was 4-1/2 pints.

When I'm canning, I always keep a few used lids on hand for those partially-filled jars. Also, when I make something I haven't tried before, I know I'm going to want to taste it right away, and so I put a used lid on the one I'm going to open first for a taste. And all of that to say that the partial jar has a used lid, and that one went straight into the fridge for my sandwich-eating pleasure. We were out of zucchini relish, and it's my favorite relish for sandwiches. I used to make a cucumber version, but I like the zucchini better. It's ever so much better than store-bought.

While I was waiting for the zucchini relish to process, I finished up the final act of my kitchen day...egg salad for sandwiches next week. I love egg salad. Mike will probably stick with hot dogs, but I can only eat a couple of hot dogs before I'm dogged out.

So, all the food I wanted to cook ahead was done! Or so I thought. I sat down with some ice water to cross things off my to-do list when I realized I'd completely forgotten to make the frozen breakfast burritos. Bummer. But, man, I was so done. I'll make the burritos this afternoon. They don't take long, and I was pretty well wiped out after all that.

The rest of the afternoon was spent sitting around, nursing my tired feet. We had leftovers for dinner, fortunately. I found Mr. Smitty looking pretty self-satisfied on his catio.

This is where the kitties spend their summer afternoons.

Okay, so I've pretty much given you the rundown on the day's activities. Farmer's market, and then breakfast burritos. If there's enough time, there's another sherbet recipe I want to try out. I'll tell you more about that when I get to it. The rest of today and tomorrow will be spent packing, and I'm not going to have anything of interest to share with you. With that, I'm going to sign off for the next week. I'll be back next Saturday to tell you all about it. If that seems too long to wait, you can read about our previous visit to this same destination right here. 

We were in the thick of the pandemic back then, and so most everything was closed and everyone was hiding out. Also, we didn't have our boat with us. As I've mentioned before, we're looking for a new summer boating destination. This just might be the spot. We'll be able to take in more of the area this trip, and I've learned about some interesting places we can stop in to see. Several days of forced relaxation is sounding pretty good right now.

All right then...signing off. Don't forget to leave a comment to be entered in my giveaway, and thanks to all of you who have stopped by and left such nice comments. No wonder you guys are some of my favorite people.