Busy Bees

It has been quite the busy weekend for me and the wifey! We had to work Saturday morning and then it was straight to Yellow Springs to go to the Street Fair. We had some fair food and perused the crafts (I bought some alpaca yarn from a local alpaca farm). We met up with all of our Glen friends there, and also went to some sweet local Halloween stores before heading back home to Milford!

That's where the craziness insues. We planned on having a leisurely day of activites and relaxing, but the relaxing part was not to be. We left the house with the intention of going to a farmers market and to brunch, but instead it went like this: 1. farmers market (got a beautiful bouquet of dried flowers and tasted pawpaw gelato); 2. brunch (delicious pancake full of oats, wheat germ, craisins, walnuts, almonds, and raisins); 3. bookstore (got a cool book about different crochet squares!); 4. Trader Joe's (yummy tamales and more!); 5. Fresh Market (surprisingly didn't buy anything, although I tried a jalapeno-stuffed olive, which was quite tasty); 6. Kroger (to buy canning supplies, only to find they were much more expensive than Meijer); 7. Meijer (so many canning supplies!)... Five hours later, we were finally back home ready to begin all of the things we'd originally planned! (See below.)

First things first. Our boss gave me a basket of tomatillos from his garden so I decided to make salsa. This process began with broiling the tomatillos, jalapenos and garlic cloves.

After being mixed with many onions and cilantro, here is the final product! Get on my tamales from Trader Joe's, salsa!

Meanwhile, Amanda was making a batch of jalapeno jelly. Way to add that pectin, wifey!

After I finished canning my salsa, I figured I had time to make another batch of jalapeno jelly myself. You might ask, how did you chop all of those jalapenos without gloves??? Welcome to the Amanda Chisholm technique: putting plastic bags on your hands! Hey, it worked.

Phew! That's a lot of canning! Note: apple butter, one batch of jalapeno jelly, tonatillo salsa, and the other batch of jelly! But hey folks, we're not done yet!

That's right! We've been waiting to do this for awhile! Making cheese! With my expert supervision, Amanda cooked up some mozzarella in no time!

So, if you were worried we'd starve this winter, don't be! We have enough jalapeno jelly to last us. Haha. Unfortunatly I ran out of time to do anything else today. Darn it, I guess that means that cleaning my room will just have to wait... :)