So I woke up this morning to the pitter patter or rain on my window.  Rain Day!!!  Actually it’s currently not raining, but it looks wonderfully English outside just now and I’m resisting the urge to go all Jane Austen and dig out my quills and parchment.

No instead of writing correspondence to my imaginary penpals, I’ll be back in the kitchen, torching peppers and hopefully finishing up a batch of crabapple jelly.  I’ve never made crabapple jelly before.  One of M’s coworkers gave her a huge bag of crabapples and I cooked them down and mushed them and now I need to strain them… they taste good… very tart and for some reason they kept reminding me of tart cherries and cranberries.  We’ll see how it goes.

There’s muscadine hull jelly on the plan for today too.  That’s not my gig, M is the mastermind behind the muscadine jelly here and her recipe is sort of “interpretive” meaning that it changes slightly each time she makes it.  I’ve had a couple people ask for the recipe and the best I can do is give them the basic technique and hope they have the cooking know-how to work their way through!  Having said that, I am going to do a post just on the jellies as soon as they are finished.

I stayed up late last night canning peaches.  First Sophie tried to stay up to help me, but she ended up heading off to bed and then Jim attempted to come back down to keep me company, but he ended up asleep too.  It was ok.  I enjoyed some quiet time surfing the ‘net while I waited on the peaches to finish their water bath.  It gave me an opportunity to tweak this blog a little and get some of the links squared away.