You'll Find Me in the Kitchen

I wasn't expecting that a week full of canning tomatoes and cucumbers would bring me to the places in my mind that I went this past week. Not realizing how activities or events can bring on memories, I jumped into my tomato canning as always, excited to put away goodies for my family to use all through the year.

It was the crazy busy canning week last summer when my hair was falling out. As the first batch was processing this year, I remembered how I sat on the computer in my kitchen a year ago and summed up the event along with all of the emotions that go along with losing my hair.

Funny how in the morning on Saturday, I grabbed what is left of my scarves, the denim blue colored one, and threw it on over my short hair for canning day. It will probably be my canning day headwear for years to come just because it is a memory that makes me thankful. It was my favorite one of the scarves because when I put it on, it stayed in one place and I never had to think about it. That is what you need, not only when you have lost all of your hair, but it is also nice to have on canning days.










Matthew and I started with the cucumbers. Many of them were way too big and I hate to waste things. So we cut them up and tasted a bit of each one and when they weren't bitter, I just seeded the big ones and sliced them into spears. We did seven quarts like that.

I did sweet relish in pints. I love my sweet relish recipe. It is great in tuna, egg or chicken salad, potato salad and a few other things. The cucumbers that were not "spear friendly" got processed and made part of that big pot of relish. When that was done, there were 13 pints and 7 half pints.

As I wrote about above, Saturday was tomatoes. 11 quarts of salsa in the morning and 12 quarts of spaghetti sauce in the evening. Of course there was harvesting on Saturday too, so I had a new big basket of cucumbers and more tomatoes. I love doing this for my family and so thankful that I can!