Home Economical

 Since my sister and mother have been giving all my father's tomatoes away to strangers on Facebook, I thought I had better go over there while they were both gone and get some for Sydney and myself.
We started the day with big plans we gathered two grocery sacks full from the resting location on my fathers infamous wood burning stove and went to the store to purchase other supplies for the gallons of product we thought we would end up with.  Little did we know three hours of time and 30 kilo-watt hours later we would end up with 3.5 quarts of juice and 3 pints of spaghetti sauce.  Not the gallons we were imagining earlier.

We broke Sydney's mother's cardinal rule of not eating what had sealed but since we were planning on having spaghetti for dinner we tried a bottle that's why some are missing from the picture.  It was good and we were delightfully surprised, especially since we got discouraged when my mother told me there wasn't a recipe and we had to use one from the internet (not from pinterest).

Much of the time and electricity were used to heat up this massive water bath of my mother's.

The picture doesn't do it justice we have no idea how big it is, but it is way more than our ceramic stove top can handle. It seems silly to spend well over an hour heating the water up to boil the bottles for 20 minutes then dump the water out.  We could have bathed a dog or a large toddler in that thing.

Then if that wasn't enough Sydney had this idea to make cantaloupe jelly, to save some of our delicious cantaloupe.  It tastes good, but we would rather eat the three batches of apricot jam we made three weeks ago.  I think the jelly would have been better if we had found the recipe on pinterest:).

Next weekend we'll probably attempt to make grape juice and some jelly any one that wants to come help is welcome.