A Look at My Morning, So Far

This was my dining room table at 6:55 this morning.

Please ignore the bags of potato chips. In this house we only eat homemade potato chips, of course. Those were…for………the neighbors.

Anyway.

On the table I’ve got some canned crushed tomatoes, other canned stuff that’s buried and you can’t see it. Bowls of basil, sage, and kale, a little plastic container of cookes, a bowl of tomatillows, some apples, peaches, garlic, tomatoes, a few jalapenos somewhere, 6 ears of corn, that bag of shredded coconut…which is also……for the neighbors, because of course we only travel to tropical islands, climb up trees, harvest our own coconuts, and shred the flesh ourselves….

This morning I cored and quartered 30 lbs of plum tomatoes, cooked them a bit to soften them, ran them all through the food mill, and the juice is in a big pot on the stove, cooking down for sauce.

I’ve already done 30 lbs worth of crushed tomatoes (the jars were on the table in the first picture), but this time I’m making sauce, which will result in less yield but a finished product.

In between all the tomato stuff, I was also trying to catch up with labeling jars of all the stuff I’ve canned this week. And I wanted to get pictures, too, for any blog posts I might do…like for this “Summer Salsa,” a recipe I got from my Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

The recipe has, among other things, peaches, and I love peaches. I also love a bit of sweetness in with the heat of the jalapeno peppers.

I have some leftover peaches (which I’ll do something with today, as they’re very soft and I don’t want to waste them), so I figured I’d shoot the jars with a couple of peaches hanging out next to them. (I’ve been so horrible with my food styling…alas!)

So that’s the sort of picture I was going for.

But before I could take that picture, this happened:

What is that?

It’s a bag of cereal.

Why is there a bag of cereal?

Because besides the bag of cereal, there was also this:

What is that?

That is a Hungry Child. A Hungry Boy, to be precise.

And he doesn’t care that I need to take pictures of peaches and jars of salsa.

He just wants food.

So, to hurry me along, he does this:

Note the bruise to the left of the fruit, and the blemishes on the skin. This peach was from the background in my planned photo series. I didn’t want to show all the flaws.

So I took the peach off.

“No, Mom, it looks cool,” the Hungry Boy protested.

So, fine, I took a picture of it.

Then I took several more pictures, while I could.

A close look at the jar, so you can see all the yummy ingredients: