Wednesday, June 08, 2005

What to do with today's local produce

We stopped in at the local farm market this morning and spent the cash I had on me -- not quite $10 -- to get: a pound of tiny red new potatoes, a pound of tiny white potatoes; four medium zucchini; five small summer squash; five or six little pickling cucumbers; a quart of local sand plums. If I'd seen the $6-a-quart blueberries earlier, I'd've gotten those instead of something else!

In about a minute I'm going to turn off the computer a/k/a heat generator and head to the kitchen to slice and ice the pickling cucumbers AND several of the little summer squash so I can make bread-and-butter pickles (for the first time!) tonight.

I'll also wash the supermarket strawberries so we can eat them (goodbye pesticides I hope).

Except the boys and I appear to have hit the wall about one minute ago. Since lunch they've been sniping at each other endlessly and I don't have endless patience. It's starting to look like an after-lunch thing that I have no clue as to how to get under control/released with deep breathing and new ideas. I've had them in separate rooms since lunch, so now they're switching rooms.

I'm gonna try to get the pickle stuff sliced and iced anyway. After dinner tonight I want to stew the rhubarb (supermarket) and, separately, the sand plums. Then I can refrigerate them and use them this week or weekend. I don't have enough of either to can, nor is my canning stuff even retrieved from boxes yet, nor do I want to can after baseball games tonight!

Maybe the pickle thing will pique the boys' interest and change their focus... We leave for Son2's swim class in half an hour anyway. After that -- popsicles, a bit of TV, and maybe we can do some reading aloud and dinner prep before getting dear husband for our baseball evening.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love your blog ... very refreshing and fun.

Barbara said...

Thank you, Becca! I'm feeling a smidge pleased with myself today -- I stewed separately the sand plums and the rhubarb and they smell very good. A nice interlude of kitchen work after a busy morning. The boys are ever curious, so I may make that raspberry cake a la sand plums sooner than I thought!

Barbara said...

Oh, I forgot I hadn't mentioned my plans for the stewed sand plums. I found a recipe online for sand plum upside-down cake. Based on that recipe I've stewed the plums and plan to substitute the cake batter and method from my grandmother's raspberries baked with a cake topping. Mmmmm.

Emily said...

Yummmm