Kitchen adventures

I have been staying busy being all domesticated. Yikes. I had made a goal for myself that this year I would use all/most of our garden goodies before they went bad. Last years garden had a lot of waste. I had a 3-6 month old while it was overproducing and I couldn't seem to find any free time to use the goods. Now that I have settled in to motherhood and have the perfect child :), I feel like I have much more free time. Her 2-3 hour nap doesn't hurt either. We have had constant zucchinis that I have turned into the previously mentioned zucchini bread and our side dish every night is grilled zucchini. This past week though our garden finally put out red tomatoes. We have had a lot of green tomatoes for awhile but for whatever reason they wouldn't turn red. Well, now they did and pretty much all at once. So what to do with an abundance of tomatoes?

Look at all those tomatoes! I even had some left over. I tried to weigh them and get them ready.

I minced fresh garlic for the first time ever for this project.

I had to peel and remove the seeds of the tomatoes. This took forever!

I case you didn't guess it, I made pasta sauce. I had never made pasta sauce before. It turned out okay. Definitely took much longer than I thought it would. Much longer. I started around 5pm and wasn't done until 10:30pm. That must be why I didn't get a finished product picture. I made about 3 quarts of sauce though and we had some tonight for dinner. The hubby approved, so I guess it turned out okay.


Tuesday I had a fitness fun day. I was worried about my shins, but after resting on Monday it felt a bit better on Tuesday and I couldn't let a friend down. One of my best friends and I try to get together occasionally and have a day full of working out. It is way more fun to work out with someone. We started at about 10 am. We went out for a 1.5 mile run, came home, had breakfast and headed out on bikes. We biked the trail I went on for my bike adventure. We didn't go nearly as far though :) We went for a round trip of 16 miles. We may have a full day bike adventure with the whole group in a few weeks (me, hubby, little lady, friend and her boyfriend).

After our bike ride we came home and she watched little lady while I went to the dentist. I actually had no cavities! That never happens so I was proud. By the time I got back home hubby was home from work and making dinner for us. What a nice treat! He made beer can chicken. I wish I had gotten a picture of it because it was delicious!

Today has been full of kitchen fun too. I was going to run this morning, but after the shin issues of Monday I decided to rest today and run tomorrow. I guess that meant that I spent the day playing chef. I made pickles, salsa (and attempted to can it. I don't think it went all that well), and finally got the pasta sauce out of the pot and into jars. I don't know if I will be able to actually can the sauce though. I didn't realize how big the jars were that I bought and they don't fit well in my pot. I may have to give some away. I still count that as using it though.

I spent the evening working in the kitchen with my husband as well. Here is just a sneak peak at our success.