Today's Episode, in which We Melt the Stove

Yes, I know it has been a long time since I posted. I have been battling illness again; first Boxer and then Mia Madre brought to the household various chest cold type illnesses and I got nailed. Such is life. We have also been busy preserving the harvest (tm).

First, I did a lot of dehydrating of green beans, yellow beans, carrots, and sweet peppers of various extractions. The hot peppers are strung up, as I very much learned never to dehydrate them on my dehydrator a couple of years, when I did so and suffered from the self-induced equivalent of pepper spray to the face for over a week from the volatile oils released into the air.

We also canned. And canned. And canned some more. Our primary focus of canning was maters and salsa. We had three bushels of maters, most of which we got from a local organic farmer who specializes in heirlooms. Mia madre also brought her maters for the making of her salsa.

Here is Boxer washing the maters so that I could scald them.


And here is mia madre skinning and cutting the maters, and getting in a quick taste. Yum!


And here is the finished result of our first batch of yellow mater salsa, made with our homegrown hot lemon peppers. Which are really hot. Like go to the hospital hot.


We also made lots and lots of jam: forest fruits (mixed wild blueberries and raspberries), raspberry, and blueberry. We ended up doing a batch of salsa for mia madre and were going to do apple butter and pickled beets, too. Only one major problem though.

We melted the stove.

When we started doing major canned maters, apparently everything just got too hot (hell, you gotta vigrously boil that stuff for at least 20 mins). The electronics that control the oven and everything appear to have melted. We got the dreaded F11 code, which means a short. And yeah, we can reset it, but it keeps going off and the buttons all work intermittently, and we were afraid to even try to turn on the oven in case it exploded. Unfortunately, it would have cost more to fix it than it would to get a new stove. And so we have ordered a new stove, which was supposed to be delivered today, but Sears called at the end of our delivery time window to inform us that they actually don't have it. Bastards.

So, our basement is filled with goodness and we anxiously await the new stove. And we all hope that all illness will go away soon!