Kitchen Slave,,,,,Sort of

There are days when I feel like I am a kitchen slave. This past Thursday was no exception. But I digress,,,,, Labor Day weekend we went to the Farmers' Market because my sweetheart wanted me to make more of my 14-day crisp pickles and I wanted tomatoes so I could make a roasted garlic pasta sauce. We started out by buying me some lovely flowers.

Then we picked up a box of pickling cucumbers. Its a 3/4 bushel box which is a 1/4 bushel more than we had previously purchased. We also bought another 25 pound box of tomatoes.

Once I had washed and sliced 2 1/2 gallons of cucumbers for the 14-day pickles, I started on some bread & butter pickles with the cucumbers I had left. The bowl on the left is full of sliced onions,,a lot of sliced onions.

Got the bread & butter pickles done pretty quickly.

On to the pasta sauce. We ended up with about 12 pints and used about a dozen bulbs of roasted garlic. I can't wait to try this stuff.

After that was strawberry-fig jam.

Now fast forward to 9/12. I had been out in the yard and picked some tomatoes,,,

And then some more tomatoes. I washed them, chopped them up and froze them in 2-cup portions for chilis, stews, soups and osso bucco or braised lamb shanks. I ended up with 16 cups of tomatoes when I was done. Also, the eggplant is the 3rd from our garden. I used the first two for eggplant Parmesan with fresh basil from the garden, it rocked!

While I was chopping tomatoes Mike was canning the 14-day crisp pickles. We ended up with 15 quarts and 1 pint of the 14-day pickles.

Next it was on to the figs. I am going figgin' crazy here. There are still a ton of unripe figs on the tree, however Mike assures me that next year there will be no figs as the tree only produces every other year. I am grateful for that little piece of information.

Since we had made a few batches of strawberry-fig jam we used these figs for plain fig jam which Mike will later use to make diabetic fig newtons. I can't wait. We ended up with 16 jelly jars of plain fig jam.

So here is what is left from my garden,,jalapenos. Lots of jalapenos. I promised Mike I would make cheese jalapeno poppers with them. Thankfully I have a couple days off from kitchen duty before I tackle this job and then make some homemade bread for our new neighbors. Whew!