Day 322, Year 7: Chutney and Apple Sauce Day
Date: Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Weather: Cool Overnight, Beautiful Day
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Today was all about apples, so my boat cleaning projects got put on the back
burner. Heather made chutney and apple sauce and I helped by playing with
Jonah and Oliver, and then later in the day, I took over with the canning
process. I actually don’t know when Mark and I started making and canning
our own apple chutney, but it has been enough years ago that both of our
children grew up with that tradition. I don’t think Justin makes his own
chutney, but Heather and Jed have been doing it for a few years now. Like
us, veggie curry is a weekly favorite for Heather and Jed, and it is always
better with the addition of the homemade chutney. The recipe we use comes
right out of the Ball Canning Book. While she was peeling apples with Jonah
early in the day, Heather peeled enough to make a batch of apple sauce.
Jonah loves it and the timing was right for trying it with Oliver. Oliver
really hasn’t started eating food yet. Heather has tried a few things and
Oliver hasn’t seemed particularly interested. He did seem to like the apple
sauce even though he made these funny faces that entertained us all. You
would have thought Heather was feeding him lemon juice by the expressions on
his face. So we’ll be making more apple sauce and I want to try to couple
of batches of apple butter. My mother always talked about making apple
butter in a big black pot on an open fire. It was a two day process. I’ve
been researching recipes and am going to try the ones that take 24 hours or
more, but instead of making it outside over an open fire, I will use the
more modern method of making it in a slow cooker. Today we borrowed one
from Heather’s next door neighbor, but we might not get to the apple butter
until next week. Mark and I leave on Thursday morning for Boston and then
when we return it is Heather’s birthday weekend. So apple butter is going
to be a project for the first week of October.
Mark spent his day making phone calls related to his public radio consulting
job. He is searching for candidates for a general manager position at a
station in the mid-west. At the same time that he was one the phone,
Heather was on her phone with a technician at WGBH in Boston. They were
doing a quality check on her cell phone to get it set up to do the two-way
interviews she does once a week early in the morning from home. Tomorrow
morning’s interview is about the politics of climate change. I was amused
that so much public radio business was happening in a household full of
little boys at play. Jonah doesn’t go to school on Tuesdays or Thursdays
and Sam was home with a friend as it was an Early Release Day. And then
there was Oliver. Somehow all of their sounds of play, joyful but loud,
didn’t stop the important business of public radio.
