Mañana

I will can them...mañana.

Don't know if I've mentioned it, but when my family had our DNA analyzed, it revealed my mother's side of the family comes from Northern Europe and my father's side from the Mediterranean/Middle East. 

While it's kind of a cool combination, I also think it means I have a constant war going on inside me, between my Scots work ethic and my Mediterranean "mañana mentality." The latter phrase, while it has a Spanish-sounding name, is actually an attitude which occurs not just in sunny Spain, but throughout Southern Europe and the Middle East. (You can tell this because if you visit someplace in the region, like the Acropolis in Greece and they have scaffolds up and are working on restoring it, when your friends visit the same spot 30 years later, the same scaffolding is still up and the place looks exactly the same. True story. I'm sure they're getting to it soon. Really.)  

Who knows, maybe it took the Israelites 40 years to get to the Promised Land because they figured they could always "just go tomorrow." Makes sense to me.

To that slack-y end, I've decided my summers spent slaving over a hot water bath canner are over. This year I'm experimenting with freezing my tomatoes first, then canning them once autumn and cooler temperatures set in and it doesn't feel like my entire being is on fire if I stand in front of the canner.

I'm not sure why I didn't try this years ago. Probably because my Scots ancestors were nagging inside my head to be productive and task-oriented and hard-working. What do they know? The other half of my DNA decided this was, in fact, torture, and that while canning is all well and good, it should not be done if you have any hope of trying to keep the house cool. Which the inner Scots, not surprisingly,  agreed with, since it involved saving money and being thrifty with electricity and all that.

And so into the freezer goes the tomato bounty of summer. And onto the sofa goes me and my 46 chromosomes, with a cold beer and an authorized permission slip of sorts from both sides of my ancestry to put tomato canning off for now. 

It's nice when we can all agree on something.

Procrastination and "Honey, What Were You Thinking?"

So I have 30 pounds of tomatoes in the freezer waiting to be canned. Back in September, when I told myself I needed to have them all processed by a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, that seemed like an easy deadline to keep.

And now I'm up against it. So next week it is. Production happens around here sometimes only after procrastination has run its course. 

Tomatoes. Next week. Firm. You can't bump tasks into the future once the future arrives, which is always sooner than expected.

In other news, Big Ag promised a good friend that his daughter's boyfriend could park his 26-foot long RV on our land this weekend. The catch? We don't have land to park it on, nor an RV space...we live on a hill. Does the friend know this? I don't think so. So a 26-foot RV will be parked front and center in our driveway all weekend long, housing someone we don't even know -- a boyfriend of a friend's daughter. We don't even know his name.

These are the things which test a marriage, I'm tellin' ya. And that's all I'm saying about that.

Making Marmalade...Or Not

It's January, which means it's marmalade time.  Organic oranges are ripe and cheap for the asking, and so I picked today to fire up the canner and get a few jars put up for the rest of the year.  This morning has been about preparation, which has consisted of:

1.  Thought about making the marmalade.

2.  Thought some more.

3.  Watched an episode of "House Hunters," where the couple moves to the South of France.

4.  Thought about moving to the South of France.

5.  Took cute pictures of my dog sleeping.

6.  Headed into the kitchen.

7.  Ate an orange.

8.  Arranged surviving oranges in a nice still-life for a picture for my blog.

As you can see, making marmalade is a complicated process with many steps.  The reason I put it off and procrastinate is because the first step consists of peeling about six oranges, removing all the pith from the skins, then cutting the skins into little, matchstick-sized pieces.  It's maddeningly meticulous, before you even get to the cooking part, but if you like authentic Scottish marmalade, the orange skin is an essential part.

And so it must be done in the exacting fashion described above...thinking, dog pictures, eating your ingredients.

So I'm going to get right on this marmalade business.

Really.

(I'm thinking I will at least do the matchstick part today.)