On Friday morning I wasn’t up until nearly 7AM and someone almost didn’t survive until breakfast. Once he was fed, I got my post up and then got the kitchen cleaned up. Next was to get the dehydrator unloaded. I’ve got 1½ pints of paprika now. That should be enough for the year.
My helper friend arrived at 8AM and went out for 2 more cabbages. There had been 1 split one left on Thursday but when he got out there, another had split from the rain.
From Tuesday night into Thursday night we got 4½” of rain.
I weighed the 2 before cleaning and the old split one was 13.32 lbs and the newly split one was 12.74 lbs. After cleaning them up they were 9.53 lbs and 8.33 lbs.
He got busy chopping them.
I went out to the Big garden and harvested all the tomatoes and peppers of good size. I put the tomatoes on the windowsill to finish ripening and got set up to prep peppers for freezing. These would all be for Tom’s family.
I did the red ripe Kapiya peppers first and got 5 quart freezer bags @ with 1 large pepper. I’d seeded them and cut them in half. Then I got started on the green Kapiyas, doing the same to them. I got 16 bags of those.
My helper friend had finished the chopping so I weighed up bowls of 5 lbs and made up the seasonings for them. But something odd happened. I apparently had a 4th bowl of 5 lbs and a 5th bowl of 3.25 lbs*. That was way off!
It was at this point I realized the tare function on the scale had stopped working*. The stainless steel bowl I was using weighed 1.85 lbs and every batch I had done was that much too light in cabbage. There was going to be 3 batches of really salty sauerkraut!
So I adjusted the weight of the last batch and got its seasonings correct. That’s what is in the quart jars. The 2 salty ones are the big jars on the left and all have been labeled and dated. Sigh…
Apparently it had started to fail on Tuesday, hence the 1.2 lb* overage.
*All weights are 1.85 lbs too light.
I went back to my green Kapiyas and he started on the green bell peppers. He got 9 bags of those. So Tom has 30 bags of prepped peppers in my freezer.
We finished just before noon and I sat down to rest. Later I got a shower and got ready to go out for the afternoon. I prefer rock music before the mid 1970’s and I call it Moldies, aka oldies.
One of the women from the Senior center would be picking me up. Apparently our Senior center has several events at this venue each year. I’d never been.
It was a lovely big pavilion with lots of tables. I heard they expected 60 people but it didn’t seem like that many came. Maybe 40… They had the food ready by 5PM and it was pretty good, even though just barbequed chicken and hamburgers and hot dogs.
It was a lovely cool evening, just right for dancing and being outside.
It turns out it was 2 DJ’s, not a band as we expected. But there were several women who danced most of the night, particularly the one in the light pink top. I wished I had 1/10th her energy!
My neighbor was there, having come with another group, and she got up to dance several times. I couldn’t go dance as my foot was really bad from the morning’s work. So I just sat and chair danced.
My group left early around 5:30PM which was just as well. If I had sat for another 1½ hours chair dancing, I would have been wiped out on Saturday.
I was up late waiting to hear from my friend about Saturday’s outing. I’d learned that another neighbor had a birthday so I texted birthday wishes to her. She asked if I wanted to do an outing, and of course, I said sure!
So she is thinking of Hildene, The Lincoln Family Home up in Vermont, perhaps combining it with leaf peeping. So I may have 2 outings in October.
I finally got to bed just after 9PM.
Saturday I hope to get out to the New Herb garden and get the 7th row finished and maybe start some weeding. And I have the riverboat ride in mid afternoon.