Sundried Tomatoes, Sans-Sun

It's tomato season...we're rolling in them. I am to the stage where I have started packing a small container of tomatoes to take with us when we leave...just in case any of our friends want tomatoes. (Yay friends!) Almost time for making tomato sauce. I'd be all over it this week except we're wildly busy with Vacation Bible School at church every single day so, all other major accomplishments (hello Laundry!) are out for a while. Next week will be sauce week, and our counter will be splashed with tomato seeds, and we'll have tomato skins dropped all over the kitchen floor and the house will smell like tangy, sweet sauce for days on end, long after the jars are sealed and rinsed and making their way to the pantry shelves.

 But, I just couldn't wait to do something with tomatoes...they beg to be used, and loved and enjoyed. So, I decided to try making my own "sundried" tomatoes. It's been raining this week and the heat is finally down a bit so I decided to skip doing it outdoors (maybe another year) and just do it simply, in my oven.

Now, this week is insanity at our house so low key was really important if I was going to be working on anything at all. Is tomato sauce intimidating but you'd like to dip your toe in the water of food preservation and old fashioned home-making skills? Dry a few tomatoes. They're dead easy and so luscious good.

 I took some really beautiful plum tomatoes (from the Farmer's Market, not our garden) and sliced them in half. I laid them on a cake rack, to give them good air circulation, set it in a cookie sheet....and popped the whole shooting match into my oven on the lowest setting which on my oven is 150 degrees Farenheit.

They slowly, slowly wrinkle and darken and after a day or so, depending on the humidity, the moisture content of the tomatoes, the heat level of your lowest oven setting...etc. they'll be done! I rotated the cookie sheet around in a circle sometimes to make sure they dried evenly, and towards the end I checked more frequently so that I could start picking finished tomatoes off the sheet as they started to stagger towards done. I turned my oven off at night just because that's a long time of unsupervised cooking and I worried they'd finish somewhere around 3AM and then keep toasting away till I woke up and found them sadly dark and hard. When they're finished they're this sumptuous lipstick red, beautiful, just teetering on the edge of burgundy. And the flavor has intensified to a wonderfully  deep, zippy sweet...almost like fruit leather.

You know they're done when they feel like nice flexible, leathery dried fruit....nothing gushy left to them. I am keeping these in a ziploc bag in the fridge at the moment but next week...when all that tomato canning happens, I'm planning to take them up to the next level and try making this amazing looking tomato confit with them....slobber slobber slobber! I forgot to pick up a couple of heads of garlic at the Farmer's Market today but otherwise I have all of the ingredients ready and waiting...it's just a matter of time.

Tomato Stars

These shining beauties were the first tomatoes off our vines this year. Am a big fan of the orange streaks and stripes. It still takes my breath away to pluck something out of the yard and take it straight to the table for dinner, there's a really deep empowerment to the process, somehow being part of something deep and mystically sacred, much bigger than you, but paradoxically also something you did by the sweat of your own brow. I get fairly drunk on it all.

Painless Monday

 Orchids in bloom indoors, although most of the houseplants 

have fled to the back patio at this point

The garden is growing on apace, I put in some perennials and some potted bulbs from this winter this afternoon and we had the most perfect gardener's rain this morning. Ru and I both have a square of peas in our raised bed veggie garden and both of them are growing happily, all teepee'd now and ready for climbing, the first tendrils reaching outward. There are lettuces, almost ready for harvest and broccoli that's getting its fourth set of leaves. And indoors there are velvety baby tomato plants getting their first set of leaves. I'm a little tardier than I would like getting those going but, hey....I have several varieties, they seem happy and they're started...that's the key. I am telling myself that they may have a mad growth spurt anytime now. I'm rather pleased that they survived a round of hockey stick throttling and overturning by a wee boy last week. I was on my hands and knees tenderly scooping soil back into the little peat pots, searching carefully with my fingertips for the seedlings, and then tucking them back in hopefully. We didn't have a 100% survival rate but, every variety I'm growing has at least one living seedling and that makes me very happy.

Tomato babies, post clubbing

The other big news around here has been the constant right hip pain I've been in. I made it through the California trip with just perennial discomfort but some nagging extra pain by the end and, I kid you not, when we drove into our drive from the airport I found myself suddenly in such unbearable pain that I couldn't make it from the car to the house without a lot of help. I braved it out for a few days, hoping to "sleep it off" repeatedly but, when I ended up in a puddle of tears because I'd tried to crawl up the stairs on my hands and knees and couldn't manage to pull it off any longer, I decided it was time to do something. So, a little handy googling and I found a chiropractor in our area who specialized in prenatal work and called her and got into her schedule for that very afternoon (this was Wednesday of last week). After a lot of painful wrenching and crunching noises, some illustration with plastic skeletal models and a signed debit slip, I was on my way again. Honestly, I've never been to a chiropractor and wasn't sure what to expect or how much it would help, I was just desperate. I was in such severe pain though and am also married to an utter alternative medicine skeptic that I really hoped it would help...at least in some small measure or else I might keel over and die of pain and/or endure social misery at the hands of my bitter I-told-you-so mate. Heh. After she worked on me, I thought when I stood up that I felt a little better but, on the short walk from exam bed to registrar to our minivan I lost all faith. I still really hurt and I held onto the building all the way to the very end of it, hobbling along miserably and then thought when I reached the corner and saw the parking lot stretching off between me and the van "HOW, am I going to make all the way to the car?" *sob*

This is what I look like these days

And then I slowly improved. And by the time I went to pick-up A from work I wasn't limping much anymore and wasn't holding onto anything to walk. It was just a slow burn. I wonder if my ligaments and tissues around the site of the pain were just so inflamed that once the bones were back in a better place the irritation just took a while to go down? Not sure what it was but, by evening I was sure I was going back for the follow-up appt. I'd booked for this morning. This appt. was similar...I wasn't sure it had helped at all until as the day wore on I noticed more and more of a difference and by this evening I was no longer limping at all and could even walk fast if I wanted to. I can officially say that I pretty much am no longer in pain. I am looking forward to one or two more appointments putting things in final position so I can begin the maintenance exercises to strengthen the muscles around the bones and hold everything where it ought to be. Whew. Not hurting feels really good. And chiropractors rock.

The big boys in the way-back!

New seat for Baby

We are also getting more and more ready for Baby. We're down to once a week midwife visits now and on Saturday we brought home the birthing pool that we'll use once things really get going. On Sunday, A moved the two older boys carseats to the backseat of the van and installed the carseat for Baby Bird to boot. We're almost completely ready. There is a short list of stuff I already have in the house that I need to lay out in a basket for the birth (receiving blankets, towels, the hot water bottle, a flashlight...etc.) and tonight we plan to take one more big bite out of our boy baby name list which, is still not finalized. We're getting closer!

My feet are only somewhat puffy, just enough to 

legitimize putting them up while eat my bon bons. Heh heh.