Proof reading material I've been reading for a couple of years, contending with reluctant printers (why don't printers like me? is it because I resent the cost of ink?), attempting to build a website (ahem), watering a garden, and canning fill my days. The canning prep may be tiring, but at the moment I look at the pickled onions (made for myself) , the dilly beans and sweet pickled carrots (made for others) with some satisfaction. I've got electricity and so I'm using the immersion cooker as a canning tool, eliminating boiling water baths in overheated kitchens and constant attention to a timer. Also known as Sous Vide cooking, the tool sits in the water bath and heats it to a specific temperature, your food is vacuum sealed and resting in the water bath. It never gets hotter than the temp you set the tool to, so it never overcooks.This means I can pasteurize a quart of tomatoes (a rubbermaid tub of tomato quarts!), exhausting the air and killing the microbes within the jar in two and a half hours without boiling anything. No longer doing tomatoes, but I still make pickles. I've made jugged hare this way. Quite good. https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/make-crisp-flavor-packed-pickles-on-the-quick I'm impressed with the process. and it means I can spend three hours doing prep, put the jars into pasteurize and walk away for a while. I can do just a few jars in a small pot or the whole dozen in the rubbermaid.
There was a time when seven lugs of tomatoes were a day's work to peel and squash and can. We'd have gazpacho for dinner that night. I'd do that a couple times in a summer - bring me a lug or two of peaches and I'd play! Dilly beans and bread and butter pickles made from massive zucchinis, fig jam with honey (it was always with honey). One year I candied some cantaloupes that ripened without getting sweet. I've munched through the first two small batches of onions and made my third this week. I see the dilly beans are getting eaten as well, so I am satisfied. All the astrologers warned us that August was not a month to be in a hurry and where publishing is concerned, I think that's a great idea - don't be in a hurry. Proof read. Then do it again. But I can't wait for this part of it to be over. Not to say I like promotion and sales as an occupation, I don't. But I have more books to write, and really that's what I'm about, mostly.
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Avery Milieu Writes
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