Harvesting, Canning, and Hal's Big Win
Last weekend, while Casey was in Escalante rappelling Calf Creek Falls (luck-eeee!), the kids and I started our annual fruit collection. Last Friday we picked a bounty of pears and on Saturday we gathered Gala apples. (We have really nice neighbors with fruit surpluses that let us come pick gratis.) I had planned to start canning on Saturday, but the picking alone exhausted my energy, so we waited for Monday. I must be out of it, because it wasn't until Monday that I realized that Monday was a holiday , and a perfect holiday for sweat shop labor. Labor Day!! Amazingly, the kids get excited to can every year, especially the apple-pear sauce that we make. Sophie likes to crank the handle of the vintage Victorio strainer and Hal prefers to tamp the fruit down, often dramatically retelling the story of when she fed the strainer a wooden spoon and it came out in the refuse bucket shredded. So labor we did, from about 9:30 in the morning until nearly 10 pm at night. We did stop, n...