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My son in Pittsburgh has been buying flats of black raspberries, either at a farmer's market or from the company that does his farm share. I think he's bought 3 flats (of 8 cartons) so far. My guess is they're coming from nearby West Virginia.
He's made jam, jelly, syrup, and probably a few other things. He was infusing vinegar with left over pulp. The vinegar should be good for vinagrettes and sauces. I think he said he was doing some kind of black raspberry liqueur too. We're SOOOO jealous!
We got about 2 cups of black raspberries from the east side of the house this year, but that's more than we got the last several years, though some years we never got around to checking for them until the season was over.
We originally planted a few vines (2 or 3 at most) at the back of the lot along the fence, the ones there got crowded out, but the birds helped us out by spreading seed to both the east side and west side of the lot. The vines on the west side used to do very well but have also been crowded out these days.
We had tacos, sweet corn and some cantaloupe. The cantaloupe was sweet enough but not very soft or juicy, so it was sort of crunchy.
I generally do sweet potatoes in the oven (my wife likes them, I do not), but regular potatoes using the 'potato' setting on my microwave. I put a little butter and salt on them and put them in a ceramic bowl with a plate for a lid. I'm told you can do the same thing with a sweet potato, but probably using oil instead of butter and salt.
Be sure to poke lots of holes in your sweet potato.
I haven't made crackers in a while, and I've been experimenting with the convection oven setting on my big oven more lately, so I may have to try them again, but not when it's 95 outside!
Too often bakery carrot cake has coconut in it, which my wife cannot stand. (If I buy Almond Joy bars, I don't have to hide them.)
When I make Irish Apple Cake, I work the butter into the flour by hand. (Darina Allen calls it 'rubbing the butter into the flour', a pretty accurate description.)
I use my mixer to cut in the butter into pie dough, plus I borrow an idea from Kenji Lopez-Alt and reserve about 1/5 of the flour to be put in after the butter has been cut in, just a quick spin or two to mix it together. He goes much further, taking the butter/flour to a paste before putting the reserved flour in, I've tried that a few times, I like my way better.
It's not true that it takes 30 carrots to make 2/3 cup of grated carrots, but it FEELS true. Actually it takes 2 carrots and 2 bandaids if you use a box grater.
These days I put carrots in the juicer (for making carrot vinegar) and use the pulp for carrot cake, freezing most of it. It's quite fine so the cake is smoother, though you still get most of the carrot crunch, just not as many carrot pieces stuck between your teeth.
I like raisins in carrot cake but not nuts.
I saw eggplant at one of the fruit stands today but not zucchini or other summer squash. The sweet corn she had was really tiny, but that's often the case with the early varieties. I'll buy some at the farmer's market tomorrow, the half-dozen we got there last week was very good.
We bought one tomato to have on our burgers tonight, and also some plums, but the plums weren't local. They were out of cantaloupe, as was the other stand near us.
Our plan for tonight is burgers on the grill, and probably some kind of salad.
I think we're having tuna salad on a tomato tonight. We've got a big (12.85 ounce) tomato from the local veg stand that needs to get used soon.
They used a reamer fitted with a TV camera to see what the inside of the pipe is like.
The plumbers are going to do something to clean out the cast iron pipes under the house on Monday, that might help. The PVC pipes outside looked OK, except that they aren't totally level anymore (after 25 years) so there are some hills and valleys, though that doesn't appear to be where things are clogging up. Digging the outside line up to redo it would be a major job.
I don't know what we're doing for supper, probably picking something up. I'm dealing with some sewer backup issues in the basement--again, I just don't think I'm going to have energy or interest in cooking. (This is probably the 4th time in the last few years I've had to deal with sewer water in the basement, the expensive part isn't the plumber, it's the clean up service to do the floors and get under the hot tub with steam and sanitizers.)
I've got several little tomatoes on maybe 10 of my 24 tomato plants, the largest of them isn't quite ping pong ball size yet. The vines aren't as tall as I would have expected them to be by July 7th, but at least they're setting some fruit.
Eggs are 74% water, and the content difference between a large and an extra large egg is about 3/4 of a tablespoon. I never have XL eggs on hand, if a recipe calls for an XL egg I just add 2 teaspoons of water.
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