My day started out ever so promising. It was pick up day for my fruit order that came all the way from Oregon. It is actually quite a fun little adventure hanging out in the church parking lot with all your equally crazy friends waiting for a big ole refrigerated semi to pull up and drop off the loot.
As much as I love to can, I hate being a slave to it. Looking at my calendar I realized that I somehow had to manage canning the rest of my apples in addition to all the peaches and raspberries today and I had a very small window to accomplish this. I am pretty awesome at the multi-tasking, but sometimes I try to do too many things at once.
I seriously feel like Jordyn did yesterday when she was laying on the floor crying about having to take medicine….
I was making applesauce and peach jam at the same time and things were going pretty well until I got the applesauce going in the water bath and I started on peach cobbler filling to can while waiting on the peach jam to finish cooking. I must have gotten some applesauce on the burner….as you can see by the picture my stove top was a mess -which is what happens when you cook-especially at a frenzied pace. I put a big stock pot on said burner with 6 lbs of peaches etc… well….it started smelling like something was burning. I figured it was no big deal because I probably spilled something on the burner….happens all the time.
The sad thing is that I knew something wasn't right, but I pushed through because my husband called and said he had time for dinner with me after all…which was great except that when you start the canning process, you simply just can't stop. You have to keep going until you are finished.
This made me kick it into even higher gear so that I could get another water bath going so that all the kids had to do was pull the jars out when the timer went off.
I checked on my cobbler going in the stock pot and realized that the smell was coming from inside the pot. Crap, what happened. Why on earth would it burn when I had been stirring it and the peaches were still pretty cold because they started out mostly frozen.
When I went to lift the pot off the stove, it would not separate itself from the cooktop. Seriously? No, like seriously?
Not only did it take a big ole chunk of glass out of the center of the burner but there is a very long crack that has now sectioned off the entire burner away from the rest of the cooktop. Do you know how much cooktops run? A lot! If that weren't bad enough all the cobbler was scorched and ruined and had to be thrown away.
They made it into the jars because at this point I was talking on the phone with my husband because I was supposed to be leaving the house to meet him for dinner. I pulled a peach out and tasted it just incase some miracle had occurred. Nope. I had to throw my fresh from the orchard peaches away.
I feel like calling the farm and telling them not to send me anymore peaches because our family cannot be trusted with such a valuable possession. The reason being is that when I went to pull out the peaches I had in the freezer from the last delivery we had so I could add it to this batch, I remembered something. Jordyn can never get the freezer door shut all the way so it has thawed and refrozen things about 3 times recently. A lot of the obvious stuff got tossed right away, but the peaches managed to stay in there. When I pulled them out they were so freezer burnt you could hardly tell what was in the bag and they were all shriveled and nasty so I had to throw all those away as well -which was probably also about 6 lbs. So approx 12 lbs of peaches murdered!
Nothing phases my husband. All he said when I told him of the disaster unfolding before me was "you could never loose as much money as I have in the business. Not even if we counted it up from the beginning to the end." "Loosing money is the cost of doing business." I guess that's why he runs a business and I don't. Loosing money makes me sick and it never gets easier.
I am still trying to figure out a way to just fix the cooktop. I guess duct tape can't fix everything. Nate and Jared did go and peruse the internet looking for a new cooktop for me. They found an awesome one that even had a u tube video that went with it. There are no burners on it. It just knows where you put the pot and turns on there. As soon as they started describing this thing to me I knew I could never own it. "Exactly how much does all this awesomeness cost?" He just smiled and I knew it was way too much. Jared then chimed in with "you've got to give money to get money, mom. With this awesome new cooktop you can can even more and then sell all your goods and recoup all the money we are going to spend on it." Well, there you have it. The kid who groans every time I can anything because it "stinks up the whole house" and thinks that apple cobbler smells like poo. I guess he doesn't need to sample my wares, he's just got confidence in me and that's enough.
The above picture was from when I was using the food mill on my applesauce while watching yet another of my crushes on tv (it was actually taken on tuesday when I made the first half of the batch). A little snapshot into who I am. A GB and talk radio and canning junkie. There, now you know the depth of my crazy.
The good news. I am canning raspberry jam right now on my broken cooktop. The other burners are still working for now.
I guess perfection has eluded me yet another day ;0)
There were a few people that were sad that I was able to continue the canning process because they wanted all the lights in the house turned off. Who can be bummed when you've got such entertaining assassins running around the house?
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