A LONG but productive day.....

It's Saturday, June 27th, and we've been busy...the day started with picking strawberries at a local farm. I went with just Rebecca, Caleb and Joshua as Andrew was volunteering at the public library and Dan was working at home. Rebecca picked a whole pail herself :)

The twins had a hard time figuring out what a RED strawberry was. They would pick one and say "is this red?" and I would say "no, it's more pink - now don't pick any pink ones because they need to grow on the vine so the strawberry farm can make money"....They tried.

It was time to head home and everyone was happy except Rebecca, she wanted to keep picking!
I told her we'd be back since it was just the beginning of strawberry season.

We picked up Andrew on our way home and got home so the "fun" could begin. We had a quick lunch and off to work we went.

Now you need to understand something about this "day"...we've had really, really hot weather here this week (not quite like Texas!) and we have not been running our a/c in order to save money during our non-employment period. I prearranged with Dan to run the a/c today so I could spend the day in the kitchen over the stove and with the oven running. Well...the temps dropped and we started off by putting our huge Lakewood fan in the kitchen, next to the stove, blowing the hot air out just to see if I could get by. I'm happy to report that no a/c was needed. There was a breeze throughout the day and it rained which may have cooled it off even more, I'm not sure.

In addition to working on strawberry jam, we would be harvesting rhubarb too. We have two rhubarb plants in our backyard and in the spring I thought they weren't looking too good compared to my backdoor neighbors so my neighbors fertilized and mulched them for me one day when I wasn't around. WOW - you should see them now - they grew bigger than theirs. I estimate that we pulled about 45 stalks today and you'd barely know I took any from looking at the plant. Anyone local want rhubarb?

Rebecca was a real trooper today - she cut all these rhubarb stalks and more - not just cutting the ends off but she cut close to 12 cups of diced rhubarb. She also washed and smooshed strawberries, washed dishes (and made lots of sudsy mess :), put baking cups in the muffin tins and tried to fill them and more.

Here is another one of my helpers -Andrew washed up most of the strawberries, also cut around 16 cups of diced rhubarb, peeled potatoes, smooshed strawberries, took out the garbage, ran errands (even once he and Dan made an emergency bike trip to the grocery store to buy me a package of walnuts since I was out), and more.

Even Dan was involved throughout the day - he started off helping cook 6 lbs of ground beef, then smooshed some strawberries and helped doing the final 3 minutes of stirring to make straweberry jam and pour it into containers. As dinner time approached I called on him to start the grill and then requested his assistance at cooking the pork chops - neither one of us has ever cooked pork on the grill but he did a swell job - and several people wanted more after they ran out. Hmmm...that's a good thing!

Here's ME :) I spent 9 full hours in the kitchen, on my feet, except when I took a few minutes to eat dinner and finely dice some rhubarb. Amazingly, this is what we accomplished today:

2 loaves of banana bread
5 batches of strawberry jam - each batch makes about 5 cups so 25 cups
1 blueberry coffee cake
cooked 6 lbs of ground beef - 2 were turned into taco meat, 1 was turned into a casserole with noodles and cheese, the other 3 were frozen
1 quick rhubarb dessert
1 dinner - pork chops, mashed potatoes and brocolli
4 batches of rhubarb slush - which called for 24 cups of chopped rhubarb - which fit into 3 ice cream pails - they go in the freezer and you mix the slush with 7-up for a cool drink
6 dozen zucchini muffins
1 bowl of smooshed strawberries for shortcake
3 boatloads of dishes

Here you can see lots of the baked good cooling - coffee cake, banana bread, muffins. The Lakewood fan is on top of the pizza oven.

Here is the strawberry jam - I will probably make 1 or 2 more batches just to make sure. As of today we are down to 2 large containers from last year - so, not too bad on the guessing of how much to make.

A really grand thing I found out while I was picking today - at a farm I don't normally pick at - is that they have pick your own raspberries too - fall bearing so not until late August and September. I am SOOOOOOOOO excited and they are less than 2 miles from my house.

Just for the record ... Rebecca lost her second baby tooth this week! We were so happy since most of our children's teeth have to be removed by the DDS. She is 8 1/2 and only 2 teeth are out - see the problem here?

I'm wiped out - but one good thing is that I hung in there long enough to finish 95% of the dishes. A few muffin tins remain...