Thursday begins with pears & tea and off to work. Today Dennis makes soap while I ship orders. We have a late lunch of vegie boogaloo with sausage, with fizzy apple cider. Our gift of Clendenen's cider was unrefrigerated the day before we got it, all it takes to accelerate the fermentation process!
I break to water the greenhouses and pick the few peaches in the top of our cling peach tree... A surprise! Hidden in the leaves were a whole basket of lovely ripe peaches! Wahoo!! Fruit that is SO not pears!
We celebrate later with a snack of a peach strawberry smoothie using the yogurt I made and the handful of berries that was in the strawberry bed. Bliss.
Dinner is local tortellini I got at Eureka Co-op. The label does not give the origin, but it is the fresh pasta you see at both co-ops. There was a sign by it saying it was locally made, but I did not write down the producer. At any rate it is delicious with the pesto we made, a cucumber & tomato salad with basil and Tehama olive oil & our homemade red wine vinegar dressing, and a glass of the Elk Prairie Pinot. As a very special treat I heat some peach slices with honey until soft and hot and we drizzle some Humboldt Creamery cream over it for dessert. Now, THAT is delicious.
My last effort of the day is to fill our dehydrator with pear slices to dry. This leaves only a very full single layer in a lug box. The end of the pears is in sight at last.
Friday this time of year is a minimal business and maximum food preservation day. Really, when the harvest season is full on, if I am not putting away food one way or the other every day it will rot, explode into zillions of fruit flies - and I will miss the opportunity.
This Friday is salsa and corn. My favorite canning partners, Amber and Lila are coming over to can this morning.
We start the day with tea and pear and grazing on cherry tomatoes and peppers and some melon (our first this year) from a honeydew that actually exploded open. I guess that one's ripe!
When the girls get here we go out and harvest ingredients for salsa before the day gets too hot. After, I play with Lila while Amber preps to make Zesty Salsa (Blue Book again). After which she and Lila lay down for a nap.I lunch on a vegie scramble and some melon, then pick the remainder of our 3rd batch of corn (we plant corn to ripen at 65, 75, 85 and 100 days to extend our season). By then the girls are up and had their lunch. Amber resumes the salsa making and Lila and I husk corn.
There are quite a few corn earworms this year and Lila is very excited about this. She took this picture of a green worm all by herself!
Speaking about excited. I am still very excited about the peaches. During this Challenge I have been wanting to make an egg custard - eggs and milk being two great local products and eggs in abundance right now. But the flavoring aspect, sans vanilla, was baffling me. But I can see that peaches could be the perfect sweet-tart note to add, with some sort of base.
Using the Lundberg Rice loophole and some solar cooked rice from the other day I made a peach rice pudding with 1 c. milk, 2 eggs, about 1/3 c. honey beaten together mixed with a few chopped peaches and maybe 3 c. cooked rice. This cooked up lovely in the solar oven.
Salsa done, and after eating some grapes from a friend in Trinity county, Lila and her mom went home.Time to can the corn...
I wanted a more serious beverage to end a long, busy day, but felt guilty about my gin & tonic last Monday. So as an apertif, while cutting the kernels off the ears of corn, I had a cocktail of a dash of homemade Limoncello and a shot of sour cherry liqueur over ice - with several of the cherries in it.
A friend in Arcata make the Limoncello, a lemon flavored liqueur. I make the cherry. When our sour (pie) cherry tree has been robbed by the birds, leaving too few cherries for pie, I layer the cherries with organic sugar in a glass jar about 2/3 full and fill the jar with vodka. Wait at least 3 months, stirring occasionally, and the cherries turn pale and the liquid rose and the flavor - quite nice. A dessert, really. Not bad over fruit, ice cream or, in this case, ice. Be warned - the vodka soaked cherries are potent!
While the pints of corn were in the pressure canner, Dennis and I dined on grilled local beef steak, corn on the cob, and a salad with lettuce, cabbage, radishes, and steamed beets from the garden. Our condiments included Fred's Horseradish with our home made sour cream and the buttermilk salad dressing. Of course some Elk Prairie Pinot to accompany this. No salt, no pepper and no butter - but all good. And made all the more locally wonderful by our peachy rice pudding dessert!
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