Eighth of an Acre Bounty

The past week has been pretty busy round here. Cold weather and rain rolled in and I believe it is here to stay. Gary is still stuck on the pipe dream of summer through October and we have a daily battle over whether or not to pull the volunteer tomatillo plant. He gets very attached and is loathe to pull anything out before it is obviously dead. This is how he got a radish tree at his old house. I did pull several of the tomato plants that were planted in the main bed and not given the hoop house protection. The bean trellis took a header after 40 mph winds over the weekend, so we cleared those out too. I got pretty used to the big screen of greenery at the back of the yard over the summer. It is disconcerting to walk out there now and not see it. I think we will make that a permanent fixture of sorts next year.

I’ve canned 7 quarts of tomato sauce this past week. The San Marzanos are ripening slower than any of the others. So even when I fill my stockpot to the brim with cut up tomatoes, it really amounts to only 3 or 4 quarts of sauce once I have simmered all the extra juice/water off. Black Russians and Aunt Ruby’s German Greens are making up the bulk of it, with a few Tiffen Mennonites and Marzano’s thrown in as they see fit to ripen. We have boxes upon boxes of green tomatoes wrapped in newspaper strategically placed on every horizontal surface as I speak. It seems to be working well, I just don’t get the mother lode of ripe tomatoes all at once which made putting them up a bit easier last year. This year it will be a much more punctuated process.

I also put up 14 half pints of Dill green tomato pickles. I used up all of the green cherry tomatoes left from when I pulled the Sungold plant yesterday. I made green tomato pickles last year but tried a different recipe this time. Last years were a big hit with a friend of ours, and a good thing since they didn’t thrill me too much. I still need to get out there today and pull the remaining tomatoes from the hoophouse, as it has done all it can do. I will try to box ripen all of the Marzanos and also the larger Tiffens and Black Russians. The others I hope to make up a big batch of Green Enchilada sauce with and perhaps some more of Susans Green Tomato Relish. I need to get to the produce market or the Farmers market to get chilies and cilantro first though.

Other activities this week included alternately belly crawling and back crawling under the house for a few days. We needed to replace all of the furnace ducting and figured as winter approached, we should just start the job. Despite a seeming complete inability to find the proper supplies and days worth of hold-ups and other engagements – we actually managed to finish this past Friday. Hopefully the new insulated ducting will show its presence in a decreased heating bill this winter and warm warm toes. Both Gary and I have mostly recovered, save for the bellyaching about parts of our body we didn’t even know were there before, and the remnant coughing up of fine Skyway clay and fiberglass. I suspect Gary will go much more into detail on this project and I will leave that to him.

Also on the list for today is Duck Confit. In our weekend errand running we stopped at the local asian market and picked up a whole duck plus two legs. Yesterday I broke the duck down and rendered all of the skin for fat. I think I am still a little short, but will give it a whack anyway. I can’t go buy another duck right now and refuse to pay the highway robbery prices for mail ordered duck fat. Well, I could go buy another duck but that would result in another rendering event and I don’t know if my arteries could take it. You know what the byproduct of rendering duck fat is? Duck Cracklins, oh god – the pure, salty, crunchy bliss. Things like that can only happen once a year lest we give up all passion for everything else, sell the house and buy a million ducks in a freezer storage locker and spend the rest of our short days munching on duck cracklins while sitting on the truck tailgate over a portable propane stove.

I also have the two breasts from the whole bird which will most likely make itself known in some form for dinner. Or perhaps we will eat the garlic sausage we picked up from the butcher. We will see how I feel about it all after several more hours of canning and mucking about in the rain picking green tomatoes.