Busy Summer Days

Well, like everyone else in the summer, we tend to throw the household into ‘overdrive’ because so many things need to be done and can only get done when a) they are in season and b) the weather is warm and dry enough to do them. So, this week has been super busy, starting out mid-week when our eldest daughter called me when I was coming home from work to announce that a local apple grower also had sweet cherries and they were ready to pick and would I like to come along (Would I?!). In Upstate New York, the fruit schedule goes strawberries (and we are just about done with that), then sweet cherries and raspberries, then pie cherries, then early blue berries, then maincrop blues and black berries and early apples, then late blues and early peaches and plums and more apples and on it goes through the fall with apples until nearly November, when all we basically can go out and do ‘you pick’ for is Northern Spy apples which are great for baking.

But, as usual, I’ve wandered off the topic.

So, this week, we picked sweet cherries and raspberries. Years ago, when the DH and I were young, early married and did not have a freezer, we went out to pick sweet cherries and learned the very painful lesson about pick your own, which is that you need to pretty much make up your mind how much you want to pick and stick to that. Because when you are up on a ladder picking and handing down buckets, it becomes really really easy to get off target and get into the ‘just a few more..oh, these look sooooo good.”. So, in this case, there we were, with literally 40 pounds of sweet cherries (which doesn’t seem like all that much except that it would take up nearly a garbage bag in terms of space) on a hot afternoon, and no idea whatsoever what the heck we were going to do with them.

And sweet cherries go bad really…really fast, so you need to get them clean and cold really fast so that you can then start pitting them.

Don’t pick cherries for processing unless you have a two person team willing to stand there with pitters to get the job done. Otherwise, you will be throwing out a lot of fruit the next day. There are two basic designs on cherry pitters and both work really well, the grip type and the plunger type. Plunger Pitter
Grip Pitter

The grip type is less expensive but in addition to being slower, it is also harder on your dominant hand, so if you have any issues with carpel tunnel or your joints, you will end up with a very sore hand the next day. The plunger type is more expensive but is actually more efficient if you have a lot of cherries to do (and if you are picking for more than casual eating that day, then you will have a lot of cherries) and the action uses the palm of your hand and your arm so your hands do not get sore.

Also – be aware that finding organic cherries to pick is practically impossible – no matter what anyone says, everyone sprays something on their cherry trees, whether it’s copper for fungal diseases or the full Magillah of pesticides. So, your cherries are going to be flat out filthy when you pick them and when you get them home (resist the urge to eat them in the orchard – picking is not the time to find out what bird did what on that gorgeous Oxheart or Queen Anne cherry in your hand). Research shows that multiple washings with running water are as good as using one of the veggie washes out there so just keep rinsing and rinsing those cherries until they look clean — and then rinse them again. Then use a pitter and they are ready to process.

Sweet cherries can be turned into almost everything that you can process fruit for – salsas, jams, chutneys, but at Chez Siberia, we tend toward the short term thinking, so it’s better just to get the cherries washed, pitted and frozen on cookie sheets and then bagged or dried. Then later, when the weather is cooler, we can turn them into anything we want to but your mileage may vary. My elder daughter turned hers into a salsa with jalapeno peppers, so let your imagination go crazy.

The raspberries are an easier deal – no pitting, but they are even worse in terms of perishability, so as soon as the picking was done, they were quickly put into a cooler with chill packs and then rinsed a lot, popped onto cookie sheets and frozen and put into bags.

Next up should be pie cherries and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to pick and process some before the DH and I leave on our trip to the UK in a couple of weeks because we don’t have any.

And you know how I know we don’t have any (and actually how we know we have a huge amount of rhubarb in the freezer and need to do something with THAT)? This week, we also did the freezer inventory for the fruits and veggies. Now, we’ve talked about needing to know what’s in your freezer before – one of the big issues is not only knowing, but also actually using. One of the things I did this time once we have counted everything was that as the DH repacked the freezer, I made a diagram and put it on the freezer so that people can actually SEE, physically what we have and where it is. Using stuff in a freezer is all about convenience and people really don’t like to dig around to try to find the one bag of frozen tomatoes at the bottom if they don’t really know it’s there. And while I was at it, I yelled, to no one in particular, “Hey, I think we should make a mixed fruit crisp for din – anyone disagree?”

And of course, since no one disagreed, I hauled out a bag of apples, cherries, blueberries, and peaches, crossed them off the inventory list and brought them upstairs and made a mammoth mixed fruit crisp featuring a huge amount of cinnamon and our usual topping made with oatmeal. For anyone who has only had apple crisp, a mixed fruit crisp is a revelation, a great complex mix of flavors and certainly easier than making a pie. Grease a pan, fill it full of fruit (even half frozen fruit) sprinkled with cinnamon (or nutmeg and ginger if you are feeling adventurous), put the crisp topping on top and bake for 45 minutes at 375 degrees F. Great stuff.

In our last episode, I was bemoaning the lack of certain items in my wardrobe and it occurred to me that our son, basically because he’s still young and doesn’t work at the sort of job that requires ‘business dress’, doesn’t have much in the way of nicer shirts to wear in his closet. One of the big changes over the past 20-30 years in terms of clothing is that there has been this huge blurring of the separation of what gets worn when. Years ago, there was a division between ‘every day dress’ and ‘the clothing you wore to go to religious services.” For women, there was the separation between what you wore at home and what you wore if you worked outside the home or what you wore if you were what we refer to now as a ‘SAHM’ and what you wore if you were going out to grocery shop versus what you wore if you were going into town to shop for something else. And then, if you were a family with real money, then there was the morning versus afternoon versus evening clothing.

Today, especially for guys who don’t live/work in a large city, the choices have been blurred down to blue jeans/tee shirts/golf shirts/sneakers versus khaki pants/golf shirts/sport shirts/loafers or a casual tie shoe. So, for many guys, making the break to dress up a little bit more takes a lot. And our son has plenty of jeans, tee shirts and golf shirts in his closet but if he wants to dress up a bit more…he doesn’t have anything between that and full on dress pants, a dress shirt, and a sport coat.

So, I showed him some shirting fabrics, had him choose a couple and I pulled out a vintage men’s shirt pattern from the stash and off I went. Making a sport shirt for a guy is a fairly easy endeavor – no collar stand, no separate band, no placket at the bottom of the sleeve for a cuff. And with today’s fusible interfacings, it is even easier. I used Pro-Tailor Deluxe Fusible from Pam Erny at Fashion Sewing Supply for this casual shirt, though I did add an addition strip of the Pro-Tailor Deluxe at the back of the neck at the bottom of the collar to give it a little bit of ‘lift’ and ‘oomph’ since there is no separate collar band.

Now, the print on this shirt is interesting and you’d think I’d have noticed the fact that it is a one-directional print,but I did not. The only place where you can really see the effect is on the collar. If I’d thought about that, what I would have done is this:
1) Make a copy of one half of the pattern (remembering to add the seam allowance at the center edge) on tissue or my usual go-to: waxed paper.
2) Cut one full pattern for the undercollar.
3) Cut one half pattern with the fabric pattern going in one direction. Then flip the half a pattern and cut out the other half, making sure the pattern at the collar ends will go in the same direction as the first half.
4) Sew the two half pieces of the collar together at the center seam. Iron seam open.
5) Putting right side to right side, sew the under collar and the seamed top collar (the part that will be seen) together and finish the collar.

So, what is everyone else trying to get accomplished this summer?