The Slow and the Fast

This one falls under the category of yet another thing seen when I didn't have a camera.

So yesterday I was driving back home from the pharmacy after collecting mom & stepfather's prescriptions for them.  While waiting at a particularly annoying intersection for traffic on a very busy street to clear, it became painfully apparent that the traffic approaching from the left was going very slowly.  Peering around the corner of a building, the reason slowly appeared.  Some old fart was driving his mobility scooter on the road.  Now mind you, there was a 7' wide sidewalk right next to him, and every intersection has really nice ramps up and down.  Either his brain is completely addled, or he takes great pleasure in playing in traffic.  To add insult to injury, one of the cars that was creeping behind him was an F-type Jaguar convertible.  So idiot scooter man turns the corner, but unfortunately the jag was going in the same direction.  So they turned the corner too.  Once the jag had passed my car, the driver was able to get around the scooter.  Oh, that was a lovely exhaust note as he zipped away!

Small Problem

The paring knife won't reach the middle!

Such a terrible problem to have.

(How about them apples?  Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Does anyone know of a knife manufacturer,

that makes paring knives with slender, long blades? 

Four inches long should be about right.

However, the blade dimension from back to front should be

no > 1/2" or apple cores tend to become projectiles as they pop uncontrollably out of the quartered apples in random directions.

That is where most knife manufacturers go so terribly wrong when they make paring knives.

Oh, and a chunkier handle might be nice too.

Balancing Act

Ok, I'm ready for the garden to be done.

 First the tomatoes went crazy.

 So very crazy,

SO MANY TOMATOES!

It is good that church had a food drive.

One bushel went to other homes.

With the somewhat cooler weather, they have finally slowed down.

But I was in a very giving mood for a while there;

pretty much every friend, neighbor, and relative has been gifted tomatoes this year.  I drew the line at giving them to complete strangers walking their dogs past my house.

 A fair amount of marinara sauce was made.

Meanwhile, because I had not managed to spray the apple trees (wind, rain, concerns of overspray on the garden, busyness, & laziness are my excuses), apples started falling off prematurely because they had "inhabitants".  I hate coddling moths and should really purchase some of those sticky red ball traps to catch the things.  Of course, some of the apples were still ripe enough to use, with some creative paring knife action to remove the bad parts.  There is still a fair bit of applesauce left over from last year, because mom switched from applesauce to mandarin oranges as her favorite snack last winter.  (By April, I actually had her doctor check her over, because she was turning yellow.  She wasn't jaundiced, she had just eaten too much orange food and was color shifting to match.  Maybe she's really a chameleon.)

Back to the subject of lots of apples - 

since we still have plenty of applesauce, it was time to make some cider.  I wanted to buy a cider press, but the slightly less expensive table-top model I want is out of stock.  In the meantime, I have rigged a contraption that yields about a gallon of cold pressed cider for every 15 quarts of apple chunks that are chopped to pulp in the food processor and allowed to squeeze through a muslin bag in the colander portion of my stainless steel stock pot.  At least the weight set is getting some use.  I have put the individual weights in 2 gal. freezer bags and have stacked 35 lbs of them on top of a wooden block on top of the bag of mash.  It still doesn't squeeze the mash dry, but does a good enough job for now.  So to sum it up, sometimes a "windfall" can be a mixed blessing.

The Cortland apples have all been picked, almost two weeks early.

Now we're just waiting for the Winesap apples to finish ripening.

Really there is no hurry!  Stay on the tree a bit longer please!  I still have two plastic totes of windfalls to process and a full tote of Cortlands that were picked from the tree; those are fairly bug free.  And then there is the grocery bag of apples picked from my aunt's Paula Red tree; they are the perfect snack size for mom and stepfather.  1 3/4 bags of use A.S.A.P. windfalls from the Paula Red tree have been turned into cider.  Three paper grocery bags of ok-ish Paula Red windfalls and two bags of hand picked apples were given to a friend with a big family.  That should keep her busy making applesauce for a while.  Believe it or not the tree still wasn't empty.  Some of Aunt Ginny's extended progeny picked the rest of the apples on the Paula Red tree and mom's brother and his wife will also be kept busy making applesauce and pies out of those. 

Oh, and another unexpected blessing from having some of the winesap apples ripen prematurely is that cider made with Paula Red apples, Cortland apples, and Winesap apples mixed together is really tasty!

Oh, P.S., the beans are still going...and going...and going,

and so are the cucumbers, and kohlrabis and beets, and carrots, and potatoes, and peppers, and eggplants.

Happy gardening, but I am still glad it is almost done for the year!

Oh yeah, I forgot about the swiss chard.

Photographing Chloe

For every photo of Chloe you see on this blog,

there are usually three or four other shots that just aren't really blog worthy.  So the other day I wanted to get a shot of her next to some of the morning glories.  It went a bit like this.

"Chloe look at mom; I promise the flash is turned off."

Click

 Let's try this again....Click.

 Ok, here we go again....Click.

 Let's try this one more time.

Look at the camera and smile!

And this is what we get -

cross-eyed and bucktoothed.