Making Salsa - a working girl's perspective

When you have a 30-hour a week job, food preservation looks a little different.

Step 1: husband buys tomatoes, peppers, and other things at Farmers Market.

Step 2: husband cuts up tomatoes and peppers (and other ingredients I guess) and roasts them in the oven.







Step 3: Voila! Salsa!





Obviously there are many steps I missed, but I wasn't home to watch or help! This is Jeremy's favorite salsa which he made last year. It's in the Ball Canning book. Another blogger tried out a few recipes in there and recommended this one. Jeremy loves it. I think we'll (or he'll) definitely be making this one every year.

Goodbye, crappy old bedroom...

... and hello brand new bedroom and office! (And hello readers - I'm back!)


We actually finished the bedroom side of the upstairs a couple weeks ago and we finished the office side just last Saturday. There has been a lot of moving around of furniture, boxes, and dust! It has been an amazing space to be in. The first day, as we were moving in and getting things set up, Jeremy said he felt like we were staying at a B&B! I'm not sure that the feeling has worn off yet.

I'm too embarrassed to show a picture of the whole room downstairs - it was so full of stuff. But you can tell we were in tight quarters.



Dismantling and moving - lots of stuff under the bed!


New bedroom, ready to receive us!


Oh you glorious closet!!


Sigh, sigh, sigh. =)


All that glorious, reachable closet space.


I've shown pictures of the nasty living room before, with a pathway down the center between piles of wood and boxes and furniture. Well that has cleared out now! All the office-type things came upstairs. Coming out of the bedroom, here is the window seat.


And the office itself (which needs a little more unpacking - and another filing cabinet!)


We put our twin mattress in there to use as a daybed. Jeremy built the desktop over the filing cabinet area and the little cd shelves. It is a cozy little spot. And the view!





And what happened downstairs? I finally got my dedicated sewing room!


Now, it's not that I've already gotten it messy - it's more that I haven't had time to get it cleaned up and organized since all this moving took place. Too much moving and too much sewing (but more about that later).

I'll get it cleaned up today though, because we're having an open house tonight! So, off the computer for me, and onto more cleaning and putting things away!
(And I promise a whole lot of updates are on the way...)

I will blog again...

...some day. Things have been busy, as usual, and I have pictures and stories piling up. I've been sick for over a week (and now I have an ear infection too) and I know I haven't been resting as much as I should be. Fighting with this darn computer to post a few pictures isn't very relaxing or restful, so it will have to wait a little longer.

I hope all you readers out there are having a lovely transition into fall!

Finally, those stairs

I've been meaning to post about these stairs for ages. Once again, here are the stairs before:



After looking at different paint colors we decided to go with a reddish-brown color. Just before starting, we decided we really had better prime it first. Jeremy picked up some primer and the woman at the store tinted it as dark as she could. It turned out to be a brownish-grey color. We kind of liked it.

Then it was all dry and I started painting the final coat:



And that is as far as we got with that color. One a half steps! We both looked at it and agreed it was much too dark and we liked the primer color way better! So Jeremy went back to the store and got the stair paint with as close a match as they could to the primer color.

Ta-da!



In some way, the color doesn't even matter. It's just nice to finally have the stairs in good shape and in one color! And I guess it's nice to have the drywall patches done and the trim up too.

I didn't get before pictures of the desk, but there wasn't a whole lot to show. Jeremy has been constructing the table top for a couple days. The main piece is some plywood and then he cut a groove in the edge and notch on the rounded pieces, then fit it all together and glued it.





It's pretty fantastically beautiful. Once it dries a bit more he'll attach it to the knee wall, the supports, and a leg we've got for it. Then we'll practically be done!

Finished quilt

I liked the black and white thing, but it was a bit stark. I found the perfect (I think) fabric to go with it and I rather like how it turned out.







The machine quilting went pretty well. I did it all in a couple hours one night. Amazing. I think I mailed the quilt off to my friends one week after buying the fabric at the store. Incredible. I don't think I've ever quilted anything that fast, so I guess there is something to be said for the machine. But... I still kind of feel bad about it, like I cheated somehow.

Harvest time

For mushrooms, that is. Way back in April I told you about the winecap mushrooms Jeremy had... planted? inoculated? ...spread around on the ground on the north side of our house. We've actually harvested some before now, but we hadn't been expecting them yet so by the time Jeremy found them they were dried out and not very edible.

Yesterday I peaked around the corner and saw the tell-tale sign of bulges in the hay. I sent Jeremy out with a basket to collect what he could find.







It was a little over a pound for this basket. Jeremy cooked some up for a quiche. How do they taste? Not bad. I don't know that there is anything I can compare them too. It's hard to pick out the flavor with so many other things going on in the quiche. Perhaps we'll try them again in something with fewer ingredients.

I'm not sure how successful this mushroom experiment was, and that's only because we didn't keep an eye on them much at all. We didn't bother to water them (just let the rain do it's thing) and we didn't do anything to protect them from cats or squirrels (both of which have been in there digging and chewing on 'shrooms). I'm sure we'll do better next year, if we decide to grow them again.

Yesterday's project

A friend of mine just had a baby and I decided it was high time I got back into making baby quilts. The last one I made was in 2005! Life intervened, as it is wont to do, and I've missed making quilts for quite a few folks.

No time like the present to get started again. I whipped this up yesterday:



I decided on black & white because supposedly that's all a baby can see for the first while anyway. Maybe it's too stark though. I'm going to add a splash of color to it, just have to make another run to the quilt shop.

I wanted to make a quilt with the cirle motif and I saw a couple like this online. Most of them, however, do it differently than I did this one. They cut out a circle and, through different methods, sew it down on top of a square of fabric. I didn't want to do a ziz-zag stitch and I didn't want to mess with folding under the edges of the cirle (what a pain!). So I cut the circle out of the square fabric, placed a square piece of fabric under the hole, and folded under that circle. Does that make any sense at all? If anyone is interested I guess I can post more detailed pictures. In any case, it seemed to me to be way easier.

I think I'm going to take the plunge and do some machine "quilting" on this one. I use quotes because I just think using a machine to quilt is cheating! (And yet I am jealous about how much faster machine quilters can get their quilts done!)

I'll post a pic when it's all done.

(p.s. oops - I forgot that I have made two baby quilts since 2005 - both for my niece!)