contemplation and canning: what I’m reading and pickles & tomato sauce

Winter is coming, and when I won't be in the pottery studio, I'll either be sewing or reading rather than watching stoopid t.v. I trekked to the public library and filled one of my book bags with some treasures.

For psychological detective fiction and in my summer pattern of transporting to an island with a menacing character a la Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, I’m listening to The Fury, and it’s making me recall Michaelidis's Silent Patient, which I remembered as a good read. For literary fiction, I'm a bit leery of Reichl's foray into the genre, but hopefully there will be delicious plot as well as her food and wine knowledge woven into the prose. Truthfully, I was drawn to the book cover art of her new novel at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, but refrained to instead buy Keanu Reeves’s new novel. I'm also most excited about my craft book checkout, Stitch with One Line because I actually want to inject the minimalist concept, not into embroidery but into pottery with my black clay pencil. And maybe my cookbook checkout, Kismet will provide recipes for my proposed cook book club with 3 neighbors whom I sometimes go out to dine.

On my jaunt with Meral to our favorite bookstore, I was tempted to bring home this book. . .          

. . .because of this opening page . . .

. . . and then the next page.

How fascinating to go from some penciled scrawling to monumental 3-D! On a much smaller and more amateur scale, I try to do the same in my clay journal. I plan on going to Heath Ceramics to exchange 4 of my mismatched but beloved (truly I adore my Crate and Barrel and Anthropologie artisan plates, but they're not consistent with my handmade dinnerware or white glazing) for a 20% discount on 4 of their Coupe plates (torn between Aqua matte glaze on chocolate brown clay and just Opaque White on that same brown clay body--but I'll know in person when I see & touch them). I also want to do my own version of their Alabama Chanin-inspired Echo dinnerware.

I think I know how I will reproduce it for my own use. I'll make the plates with the pottery forms at Clay Life and add a foot. And after it's bisque-fired, I'll use a compass to draw pencil lines on which to randomly paint wax resist concentrically before dipping into matte white glaze.

And because cooler temperatures are coming, I put up cucumbers and heirloom tomatoes from the garden a couple weekends ago. Patrick wanted me make the cucumber pickles with just peppercorns and mustard seeds and just a half teaspoon of pickling spice, but I also spiked them with coarsely chopped garlic and a few jalapenos in each jar. To my marinara, I added fresh basil.

  

The colors are so pretty before the processing.

40 minutes for the tomato sauce and just 15 minutes for the pickles.

 

There were also raw tomatoes that I didn't get to boil into sauce, and so I just pureed them and stuck in the fridge to make next weekend.

Really Patrick will probably finish these pickles in 3 months, and I'll likely need to make more.

But it'll take a month to finish a quart jar of tomato sauce.

And so I'm hoping whatever tomatoes we can't consume, I'll have plenty more for canning. Tomatoes this fresh though are best for eating right away, and before long, we'll have to buy the poor excuse of what the supermarkets call tomatoes.