Canning

Well my feet are tired but the night is still young, so too bad for me! My husband showed up last night with almost fifteen gallons of wild plums. He drove out to west Texas over the weekend to the family farm and got busy. So... what do I do with all of these?! Make jelly is what I'm told. Mind you, the plum trees at home produced this year and I made a dozen quarts of jelly. Then we picked blueberries and I made a dozen pints of jelly. Now I'm working on wild plum jelly. By my calculations, I have enough plums here to make almost a hundred more pints of the sweet stuff. Forget it! I've been working all day and there is another batch on the stove now, but there is no way I'm canning that much jelly! I'm going to share. My friends will all be hiding from me by this time next week, but too bad - this week they're going to get a batch of plums.

I also canned pickles over the weekend. This was another first for me. We have quite a crop of Armenian cucumbers this year and I hated to see them go to waste. I tried giving them away, but my friends all seem to be cucumbered out and have been conveniently forgetting to take my offerings home with them. I must say that I did a good job and these pickles are pretty tasty! I picked enough from the garden today to make another half dozen quarts or so, and am going to get busy. (If this jelly ever gets done).

Last but not least, we once again have a lot of okra. My husband loves it fried, but I think I have enough to freeze and pickle. My dear hubby won't eat pickles, but the kids and I do. I bet we'd like nice, crunchy pickled okra. I'm going to give it a try. I found some recipes online for sweet okra and some for hot okra. We'll try them both. I'll let you know how it turns out!

Now it's time for my tired feet and I to get busy - the plums are boiling away.