Where have I been?

You might be wondering where I've been the last couple of weeks. I've been buried in apples and tomatoes!

My mom's neighbor is elderly and has about 8 apple trees in his back yard. He asked if we wanted any apples and we gladly went over and picked...and picked....and picked. I think total we ended up with 7 boxes of apples. The boxes were the size of a case of printer paper. One box went to my mom's friend, my mom kept one box, and I ended up with the rest. I made applesauce, apple cider, apple butter, dried apples, and apple pie filling. The apple cider wasn't worth it - 4 hours of work including and hour and a half of squeezing the pulp - for a half gallon of apple cider. It tasted good, though! My kids love the dried apples. They call it their apple candy.

Then my parents had a lot of tomatoes this year and my mom needs surgery so she didn't can as much as she normally does but she gave me enough tomatoes to make some diced tomatoes with green peppers and onions so all I have to do when I want to make spaghetti or stew is to dump a jar in. Not bad.

The apples took me a full week to get done as I can't work 8 hours in the kitchen at a time and the tomatoes were a full day.

What about the rest of the time I was MIA? Well, it was my husband's birthday and one of my best friend's birthdays so of course we had to have a couple parties!

I'm back, though, and will be madly putting new product on the store and maybe even adding some of my homemade incense for Samhain if I can find the ingredients in time. If not, look for Yule incense!