Salsa, Pickles, and Jam

 It's been a while since I've posted anything because life has been a little busy.  There have been the everyday things like work....and then we've been doing lots of canning this year.  We've turned boxes of tomatoes into bottles of salsa. 

  We've made 5 batches of sweet, hot, GREEN pickles.  We made plenty this year so we can share them with our family.  It takes 2 weeks to make each batch of pickles with salt water, alum water, and then the sweet pickling spice liquid.  We do it on those orange buckets from Home Depot.  We've had them in our dining room for so long with pickles in various stages......that now it looks bare without them.  After the 5th batch Gary and I had both had enough of them and said no more.  Well, I got out the empty buckets Friday night when Gary works late.  I put towels over them so it looked like I had started another batch of pickles.  I think he wanted to smack me, until he lifted the towel and saw that they were empty!

  It's a recipe my mom got from my Aunt Leatha who ran a catering business in San Francisco.  My mom added jalapeno peppers and green food coloring to the recipe.  They are a family tradition now and so delicious!  We love to eat them with crackers, cheese, pepperoni and then topped with a slice of green pickle.  It's a tradition to take them camping.  Anytime we sit down to play games with family we have to get them out to munch on.

I've also made 4 batches of peach jam.  One bottle didn't seal (yay!!) so I had to try it out on toast.....until the whole bottle was gone in a couple of days.  I wish I could say that I had help eating it.

I've neglected my sewing machine during canning season so I'm happy to be at it again.  I've been working on a couple of quilts.  My mom gave me some fabric that I've been wanting to make a quilt out of.  I got a gift certificate to the fabric store for my birthday, so I went and found a new quilt book and I'm in the process of making a quilt from it.  Of course once my creative juices started flowing I had to start a baby quilt right in the middle of making the big quilt.  I've been admiring all the chevron quilts on Pinterest and decided it was time to try one.   It worked up in an afternoon.  I'll post pics soon.