it's been a busy day, and it's not even close to over!

Today there is a windstorm outside. Pretty serious one, power is out all around. Not my house, for which I am extremely grateful, but all around town and several towns around, power is out.

I woke up this morning when the wind started to pick up and have made a busy day of it. I had a huge box of tomatoes that I wanted to get into sauce and into the freezer. I have about 4 or 4.5 pounds of raw tomatoes chopped up and frozen already. I have 8 tomatoes frozen whole (and I'm going to add at least 1 more to that.) I have about 8 quarts of sauce, with 3 of it being pulled out plain and the rest being meat sauce with antelope italian sausage.

I have lotion bars made as well. I only made a quarter batch today, but that's okay, since this meant I could do the melting in a jar and not in the crock pot. I made starfish, fish, paw prints, and stars. And a bit of a mess. Oops. The lotion got moved to the bathroom to finish setting up. The meat was browned and put in the remaining sauce.

Now I need to wash the pots I used for the meat. Last cooking to do today is peaches. I have a big box of peaches as well, and I need to go through those and freeze some (where, I'm not sure, since the freezer is REALLY full right now.) I also want to get some into the fridge for later and some will be made into a peach crisp for dessert tonight and lunches this week.

So it's been a very busy day in my kitchen. I really find that I miss having an extra freezer and I'm seriously thinking that I need to get rid of my dining room table. If I do that, I could put in a much smaller table, and what I might do is buy a small chest freezer and get a table that can fit either right next to it or right over the top of it. Or something.

But a chest freezer is something I have wanted for years. We always had an extra freezer when I was young, and we had food storage somewhere in the house. My mother canned quite a bit of stuff, and we also dehydrated food a lot. I still make a lot of dried apple slices in the fall. But I am not as fond of dried peaches. I do love frozen peaches, so I'm going to try to fit some into the freezer. If I can find the room, I'm going to blanch some green beans and throw them in the freezer too.

I made a curry last week and had a laugh at that. I am always working on getting more veggies into my curries. The original recipe just called for onions. Over the years, I've added more and more veggies. Some with greater success than others. Potatoes? Failure. I did NOT like those. Baked potato on the side, sure, potatoes in the curry? Not again, not ever again.

However, I do like at least a red bell pepper in there, and often a red and an orange. I loathe and despise green bell peppers and will never use them for anything. HATE THEM. But Red, and Orange I like. Yellow I will tolerate. I also like carrot in my curry, but I'm conservative in how much I put in. Carrots are lovely, but rather high in starches and if you are trying to cook like a diabetic, you don't go overboard on carrots. Or peas, but I like peas in there too. Part of why I want to blanch the green beans is because those are surprisingly tasty in my curry.

What made me laugh is that I added a small crook necked squash. I had one, and chopped it up and threw it in.

When I got home from work and served dinner? No more squash. It had completely melted into the curry. It's a great way to get extra veggies in there though. :D

I'm planning to thaw some more meat for this week. It's going to be a bit of a meat heavy week. But meat takes up a lot of room in the freezer, and I want to get some of the older cuts out and used up.

Pretty soon it will be weather where I go back to baking bread once a week. That will be lovely. I miss my home made bread. But when we are having 100 degree weather, I am not cranking my oven up to 450 or 500 degrees.

The power seems to be flickering less now, so I guess I will save this and go wash the dishes and start dinner. Part of this meat sauce is going to be put in the fridge and made into lasagna later this week. Because I think that sounds wonderful.