It's a cloudy day at the farmette. Woke up to 6C temperature. BRRRRR.
We're supposed to get back to some sort of normal - like 20+ temperatures - in the coming week.
Rob and I have been busy little beavers canning the tomato harvest over the past couple of weeks. Here he is putting together our spanky vegetable grinder that has save sooo much time over the years.
While I know it's probably way more efficient and probably cheaper to just go to the store and buy canned tomato sauce and chutney, there's something about the fresh taste of the product and the satisfaction that goes into having grown and jarred it ourselves.
This year was a bumper crop, and we got about a dozen pints of sauce as well as three pints and nine half-pints of tomato-apple chutney. Yay.
It's hard work and this year it was a bit nostalgic since we always use the now late Pat Inett's chutney recipe. She copied it out in her perfect hand writing from a recipe book that her mother Bertha had from the 1950s!
While the process takes pretty much the whole day, it has been successful every year we've been at the farmette.
So many good ingredients - apples, raisins, tomatoes, lots of brown sugar and spiced up with cinnamon, allspice, pickling spice and a bit of spark from the cayenne. YUM.
We've also 'done down' pickled beets, peach jam and red pepper jelly and I still have a few tomatoes that might go into a salsa or something. I am grateful for the harvest and look forward to opening the tasty treats all winter. They're great presents for friends and family at Christmas time. Until next week.
Gratuitous cat photo courtesy of Hobbes who likes to really sink into my oversized chair.
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