agh i missed an update

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i was so busy on Friday I didn’t even post an apology about it. it’s been, well, kind of a stressful week. though i should state for the record that the week before last i was absolutely tormented with heartburn for days on end and this week just past, i did not experience even a moment of it even eating tomatoes for every meal and not sleeping well. so that’s a baffling reality i need to prod at some point; is it true that the stress here is somehow less upsetting to my stomach than the stress back home? if so that is a sad statement about how my body and brain work, i tell you what.

anyway.

i am rather close to updates on both stories but not quite there. p r e s u m a b l y this upcoming week is vacation so i should have time to sit around and write but i have no idea if that’ll really be the case, so i can’t promise anything, but fingers crossed.

(It will also be my birthday and the one thing i had resolved to do for that was finally commission art since i’ve been whining about wanting to do that for literal months now but did I? NO i have made zero progress on figuring out what to ask for. I did not realize I would have such a huge mental block about it. I can even think of several moments, now, that I would want illustrated, but I can’t– make the connection– of how to– leap from the concept to actually doing a thing where I. Do it. Anyway. IDK. If I could identify the block I’d work around it but I don’t anticipate suddenly coming up with the time and focus to do that anytime soon, so this is not likely to happen but it was an idea!)

ANYWAY here is a snippet to make up for lack of update. from Sparrow, cw panic attack/PTSD dissociative episode.

“Morvran,” Cirilla said, sounding alarmed. “Morvran?”

Luliana didn’t understand what had gone wrong. Voorhis was dead-still, like a statue; his eyes weren’t focused on anything. He was barely even moving to breathe; after a moment Luliana realized the faint twitch of his movement was his heartbeat, moving his body ever so slightly.

“It’s like he’s not there,” Luliana said, horrified. “What’s happened?”

Cirilla stood up, careful not to scrape the chair. She looked– angry, and Luliana didn’t understand. “Emhyr happened to him,” she said, her jaw set in anger.

“What?” Luliana slipped to her feet in alarm, laying aside her pen carefully. “I don’t understand.”

“Stay with him,” Cirilla said grimly. “I have to go commit regicide.”

“What,” Luliana said, and to her horror, Cirilla turned around and vanished. “No!” she exclaimed, but she was too late. “Ah fuck.” (Your picture was not posted)

preservation

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grrlcookery https://tmblr.co/mj8paJCKJ4bu8eOJ2DbdsBw reblogged a post https://grrlcookery.tumblr.com/post/660136776198995968/tomatoes and added:

Preservation question: how much space does canning take? By which I mean tools and empty jars etc, and I’m assuming the household is functionally lile ten ppl since you tegularly feed staff?

If you have the spoons to andwer, of course; you sound knee-deep in harvest season

Ah it’s not that it’s harvest season, it’s a lack of staff and a long-ago-planned family vacation, but I can answer this pretty quickly.

Empty jars take up as much room as full ones, and you can’t use just any jars; even specialty canning jars sometimes burst in the water bath, and reused spaghetti sauce jars etc. absolutely don’t hold up– likewise, you need a new lid every time, though you can reuse the ring part of the lid– the seal is a one-time-use thing. Other equipment you need is a large pot with a metal rack to hold the jars in the water bath, and a set of lifting tongs to remove jars from boiling water, and you really want a canning funnel, which is just a wide funnel that fits exactly into narrow-mouth jars (and usually is designed to sit well in widemouth ones too). You’d also want some regular tongs about, to put things into and take them out of boiling water baths. And I tend to keep a few kitchen towels around to put things on.

Canning takes a lot of energy. I got the big pot boiling by first using the electric kettle to boil batches of water for it, since we’re on solar here and so the electricity is cheaper and more green. Our stove runs on propane we have to have trucked-in, and canning can be a severe drain on that.

The other preservation method is freezing, however, and that– well you have to boil things down first for that too, but then the expenditure of electricity is small but ongoing, and it’s taking up finite space in a freezer for ages.

(Many, many vegetables are easily-preserved as frozen, but must be parboiled (or blanched) first to halt enzyme action– peas, beans, broccoli, etc. These veggies aren’t good canned because they’d have to be boiled in the jars so long they’d be thoroughly cooked. We only use the canner for salsa, some kinds of pickles, and lots of jars of unseasoned tomatoes.)

Canning is very energy-intensive both from you doing it (and it’s a lot of time-sensitive things; I had to can the sauce immediately after finishing boiling it down, which was very tiring, but it was more efficient than letting it cool and then having to bring it back up to a boil) AND from a standpoint of using cooking gas. I was sore just from standing around; it was exhausting and I spent probably nine hours on it all-told, with the stove constantly on in the heat.

We only really bother with it because we grow so much, and so it’s just sitting there already, waiting for someone to eat it before it’s too late. It’s not so much a money-saving thing as a kind of ecological thing. It would be cheaper to buy the fruits of someone else’s harvest and labor in the grocery store, once we tallied up the time and labor and cooking gas. But it’d be someone else’s harvest and labor, and ours would have been wasted. From an ethical standpoint the best way to avoid feeding into an agricultural system that chews up and spits out its workers and the land is to opt out, so that’s a part of this as well.

But no, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend anyone take up large-scale home preservation to save money. It is, however, a lovely bulwark against food insecurity, so if there are times when things are cheap and you have time, that’s a way to have control over it.

We don’t generally can to meet the needs of the farm crew, it’s for the core staff over the winter and into the spring. It’s a way to avoid buying imported summer foods in winter. It’s because we grow so much and want to have it put by for use later. We have the big freezers already for the meat we sell, so it’s not a big deal to put in lots of vegetables too. Etc.

We still always run out before the new season comes on; this year we used the last of last year’s canned tomatoes in April, when the new ones didn’t ripen until July, so there was a long gap and a lot of anticipation. (Your picture was not posted)