I swung the door open and took a quick picture. I won't be able to unload until later this afternoon. The results look pretty good. Rob's Green looks a little muddy at the top of the kiln, but until I can get the pieces out, I'll just have to speculate.
As soon as I get this one unloaded, I'll load another. At first, it irritated me having to fire back-to-back, but I've started looking at it as an opportunity to immediately adjust my firing if I'm not happy with something.
My sister Trish and my niece Kate came to visit this weekend. Trish lives in Framingham, MA and Kate lives in Cary, NC. They are the first from my side of the family to see our mountain place. And they were on hand to watch me fire the big kiln. Jay took the kids hiking up to Mt. Mitchell and I took them swimming in the South Toe River, despite it being only around 70 degrees.
My sister hates to cook, but loves to can and put up food. She brought some fabulous strawberry jam , bread and butter pickles and sweet relish. She showed me how to freeze some of my CSA bounty, since I've been drowning in veggies lately. I'm going to try my hand at canning this week, too. We have two pear trees which are dropping fruit all over the place. I'm also going to try making some salsa with the tomatillas that my neighbor gave me.
Here's a mostly CSA dinner of grilled eggplant and squash marinated in red wine vinegar, honey and garlic with tomato and onion slices over couscous. I'm glad for the cooking diversion, since I have a tendency to be a sneaky-peeker when it comes to a glaze firing.
Can those tomatoes! So simple and really pretty on the shelves.Just like your baskets! If you like that you can move on to bigger things :)
ReplyDeleteWes and I go and buy 10-20 lbs. of tomatoes at the Farmers Market on Saturday, come home, wash them, boil them in hot water, peel them, chop them and then put them in a boiling water bath(in sterilized jars) for about an hour. Takes us about two hours to do this and we get 4-5 pints for every 10 lbs. easy peasy.
waiting is so hard- I am a big fan of peeking and letting some air in to help cool- but not too soon.
ReplyDeleteI hope you are mega happy with the results.
I made Jam last night with local peaches.
I freeze as much as I can.
I use to can, but I even freeze my jam.
sounds like a fun weekend, was the 70 the air or water temp? Sounds delightful to me. Hope your green turns out like you want. Years ago I canned 30 quarts of tomatoes every season and used them all winter long. A somewhat famous Italian cook had a potluck party-I brought eggplant parmesean, she went over my ingredients one by one and couldn't figure out why mine was better, finally I said I used my own tomatoes, and she said that's it. There is nothing better than home grown or canned. I love pears, what kind do you have?
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