Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Being Held Captive

Well this is the day. The day when I'm finally held captive because I haven't any clean clothes. Not one stitch which means I spent all day yesterday in workout clothes biding time when I should have been doing my laundry. It's 10:48 am and I'm still in pjs because there is nothing else until I can get my clothes out of the dryer. Stinky part is that husband left some towels in the washer last night so I have to wait until they are dry until I can get my stuff in there.

I don't have time to line dry and forget towels on the line. That just doesn't bode well. I'm almost 85% tree hugger but there is a limit to my self sacrificing. Crunchy rough towels would be up there with one ply toilet paper. No chance. I'll reuse a brown paper bag until it gives at the seams but rubbing off half my skin while trying to dry off it not acceptable.

With my procrastination comes a good serving of guilt. I am a bit of a tree hugger so I feel horrible that I didn't do my laundry on the weekend when I had the green light to use the amount of electricity to get the job done and the time to get it on the line to dry. So today with the temps climbing into the the low 4o's here I am. A/C running though at 78C. The drapes all pulled to try to keep the temp low and the washer and dryer going overtime. Blarg....why now?

Simple, I've got somewhere I have to go this afternoon. Why this afternoon? Because I procrastinated doing this chore all month. Yep, it's time to have my rings cleaned and inspected. It is something that has to be done every six months. I had 31 days. I chose to put it off until day 31. Some what typical for me.

Here's what I did yesterday while being trapped in sweat pants and procrastinating laundry. I got to the other half of the tomatoes. Spent about 1.5 hrs peeling and seeding to get this.

I believe this stock pot holds about 12 or 14 quarts. It took about 30 minutes to cook them down to the point where I could puree them. While I was waiting for that I chopped the vegetables that I was going to add in.

This is what is in the skillet: 2 large onions, 1 large bell pepper, 1lb of carrots, a bulb of garlic and 1.5 cups of celery. Then to that I added basil, salt and oregano.
Once they were sweated down enough into the pureed tomatoes they went. To that I added balsamic vinegar, a little bit of sugar to take the bite off the acid, some course salt and more basil and a good mitt of bay leaves. Gotta love a product where you know exactly what's in it and a 4 year old could read the ingredient list.

I got 10 pints out of this batch. While I waited for the jars to process (15 mins at 11 psi) I cleaned up the mess and did the dishes. Once out of the canner and safely stored on the cupboard I sat down with a cup of tea and put my tired feet up. One-by-one I heard the sweet sound of "pop" "pop" "suck.....pop" The sounds of each jar sealing. I was able to count them as they popped. Irritating part was that I only counted 9 pops. Yep, one jar failed. Once it was cool enough to touch I swapped out the lid and had to process it all over again but in the end I had 10 lovely sealed soldiers.

I made homemade pizza for dinner then once the dishes were out of the way hubby took the boys off to the park and I made a batch of cookies as a treat to the boys who were so good for me while I got all my kitchen work done. They do drive me crazy from time-to-time but they can really rally when I need it the most.

Sigh....towels are still damp. In the time it took me to write this blog I came up with an idea to ease my conscience. I'll just take the outfit I intend to wear and dry that in the dryer. The rest will go on the line. Phewww....one less chink in my chain.

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