Canned Goods

When D brought the firewood over, he brought several jars of canned goods. I made some hoe-cakes and had them with home-made applesauce, an egg on top. My canning days are over, except for blackberries and blackberry juice, but I still eat a great many condiments and relishes, and try and remember which jar is returned where. Any more I just make a serving or two of red onion jam, it saves water on the clean-up before and after. I'd make more pate, but I hate cleaning up. If Bear or Ronnie call, to tell me there's a rabbit in my mailbox, it's usually cleaned and wrapped in a Kroger bag, the heart and liver are usually inside. Usually I just boil whatever it is, squirrel or duck or rabbit, in herb water with wine (a broth I need to strain and save) then I have to caramelize onions, cook chickens livers, cook mushrooms, then use the blender. A normal batch of this is about four pounds, it takes me a full day and uses five gallons of water. It's hard to justify. If you have a dishwasher, it doesn't even matter. Strange, how things are constellated. I did get to town, paid my bills, filed for my tree-farm exemption (this reduces my land taxes to $300 for the year), bought kim-chee, which was half-price because of the expiration date, which is more or less meaningless when it comes to a fermented and pickled product, had a free beer at the pub (a wrong pour), and took lunch down on the river, watching barges. They were backed-up because of some loch construction upstream. They don't anchor, but keep the monster engines going to equal the flow and provide steerage. The river-fog put everything into an impressionistic mode, Monet, in his barge period. On the way home I stopped for gas and bought a few potato logs, to tide me over, and stopped to examine several ferns. I wonder what their anti-freeze might be. On a south facing slope, they seem to do fine, even through the snow. The driveway wasn't thawed, when I got back, and I got in with no problem, chattering on frozen clay. Yet another book on Dante. Snow, they say, tomorrow, so I bring in some extra wood.