Harvest Season

I am exhausted. I should be sleeping. But I can’t. Every time I get close to falling asleep, I hear a "thwock" coming from my kitchen denoting that another jar of delicious, organic applesauce from Eastern Washington has sealed itself. And I get all proud and giddy.

So far we’ve put up:
- 15 quarts of peaches (see above)
- 16 quarts of pears
- 10 quarts of apple sauce...with more to come
- 15 pints of roasted tomato sauce, which is no small feat when you consider that it takes 10 lbs of tomatoes roasting for 6 hours to make 3 pints of sauce.

It is my first foray into canning. I am quite hooked.

This year, our family Earth Day goal was to join a CSA. At a local meet-the-farmers night, I got hooked into a locavore food network run by a young farmer wife who networks with other farms to bring local products to market. It is major off-the-grid grocery shopping. In addition to our weekly veggies & berries, now we now eat local cheese, yogurt, honey, grass-fed beef, pastured chickens & their eggs, pastured pork and have access to the yummiest organic pears, peaches, apples and nectarines for a fraction of what we would pay in the store.

It takes a bit of extra effort sourcing all this stuff and organizing it into meals but it is worth it when I watch Missy devour half a peach that we canned and then sign "more please."