Newer version of Annie's Salsa - BWB only Annie's Salsa 8 cups tomatoes, peeled, chopped and drained 2 1/2 cups chopped onion 1 1/2 cups chopped green pepper 3 to 5 chopped jalapenos (for milder leave out seeds and ribs) 6 cloves minced garlic 2 tsp cumin (optional) 2 tsp pepper 1/8 cup canning salt 1/4 c fresh cilantro (optional) 1/3 c sugar (optional) 1 cup cider vinegar (see note on subbing lemon or lime juice option) 16 oz canned tomato sauce (to adjust density) 8-16 oz canned tomato paste (to adjust density) Mix all ingredients, bring to a boil, boil 10 minutes. Pour into hot jars, process pints for 15 minutes in BWB. Makes 6 pints. _________ A lot of changes have been made to this recipe over the years. Some people like lemon or lime juice in place of some or all of the vinegar, that's fine. (Note from Sheila - I like half lemon half lime.) Some people leave out the cilantro, that's fine too. Do not increase! Some people add more hot peppers or fewer onions, fine as long as you keep the same total measurements. (Note this is what NCHFP does in their new Choice Salsa recipe.) Some people leave out the sugar, that's fine. You can scoop out the goo in the middle of the tomatoes with your thumbs when I'm peeling and chopping for a less seedy version, so it's 8 cups of chopped tomatoes without the seeds and goo. Most who make it regularly as well as Annie recommend using a variety of different slicing tomatoes, not paste types, for best flavor and consistency. (Note: use the tomato sauce and paste to adjust the consistency of the final product to a "sloshy" consistency.) According to Annie "My salsa is not as thick as Heinz catsup but it's thicker than taco sauce. If you don't like it quite as thick or sweet, cut down the amount of paste. I would add some, then taste. Reducing that ingredient shouldn't affect the safety of the recipe. I use equal amounts of sauce and paste. You can pull it off the heat at any point and adjust for flavor. Before I cook it I check for salt, sugar, check the consistency. Add more pepper or cumin if I want. When I first started making this salsa, tomato sauce and paste came in 8 and 16 ounce cans. Like everything else, they've now been downsized, so now I have to use partial cans." Does anybody have good versions of the other recipes that have weird symbols in them for measurements?

In a previous post clinresga wrote: "We can debate the technical attributes of a LC versus a BS endlessly, but if the exposed screws and sharp metal edges don't bother you, the "generic" look of a pro-style range works fine for you, and you don't feel your heart pound when you look at a picture of "your" LC range, then I'd agree totally that it is not a purchase that makes sense for you." I agree that the look of the Lacanche is incredible and certainly timeless. It did indeed make my heart pound with that "got to have it" pang at first sight. However, cooking performance is ultimately more important to me than looks (within reason of course). The few times I actually did get to talk to Art Culinaire, I engaged them in an indepth interview focused heavily on performance and they, in substance, spent a lot of time rationalizing as to how the average peformance of the LC cook surface was compensated for by look and design. I was seriously considering the then SULLY 2+2 so much so that its rough deminsions were the initial ones provided to the cabinet shop during the layout stages. As I was early in the game, BS was not even in my sights yet but, as mentioned on another post, I could never get the folks at AC to send me the info packages and color samples they promised on numerous occasions even after repeated emails and phone calls. In the interim, Bluestar did enter the picture. While certainly no match for the classic beauty of Lacanche, it became over whelmingly evident that Lacanche was, by an equal margin, no match for Bluestar's performance. My first upper end range was a Wolf with 16K burners. While it performed well enough, I was at times disappointed in its top end performance and power (once I got used to it) and Lacanche's delivered range top performance was marginally comparable with Wolf but its beauty was indeed breath taking making it a true contender. However, the LC was no match for the exceptional power delivered by Bluestar once it entered the picture so looks started to lose its luster a bit. Similar to your comments regarding the predisposed genes necessary to justify the look of Lacanche, if you do not have the same predisposition for cooking performance, then Bluestar may not be your cup of tea in that venue. My perfect solution would be Bluestar performance with Lancanche (or LeCornue for that matter) looks and styling. However, that was not available. IMHO, my Bluestar and its peer group are a handsome enough bunch and not rudimentary hunks of sheet metal. I guess in the end what turns my crank more at the end of a meal I have labored over is to hear "That was an exceptionally exquisite and perfectly prepared meal and you have a very nice range" as opposed to "That was a very nice meal and your range is exceptionally exquisite and perfect to look at." And for some of the dishes I prepare, it takes all of the power BS can deliver to achieve the results I am looking for in that dish.

So, I'm back now to read thoroughly and try to respond. Amy, I do treat lima beans pretty much like snap beans except for planting them slightly later since they are heat lovers and I'm using them to fill that legume role after the snap beans are pretty much done. I have tried planting lima beans at the same time as snap beans, and in my location it doesn't work out well. Maybe that's our cool spring microclimate getting a bit colder at night than the lima beans like or something, so I tend to plant them about a month or six weeks after snap beans. However, I plant snap beans sort of on the early side to beat the heat and the spider mites, so maybe the limas just don't tolerate being planted too early as well as the snap beans do. One thing I do ponder is this: if I have snap beans, the spider mites are going to show up on them...sometimes insanely early. Why, then, do the spider mites not bother the lima beans at all? Beans are beans, right? I wonder if anyone has researched this. We are not big fans of celeriac either. We have tried it, but about the only way I use it nowadays is chopped up in a big pot of vegetable soup. I don't blame you for being mad at Wal-mart. Ours never has enough electric carts for all the folks who need them, and they've taken out the benches they used to have at the front of the store. I guess the benches got in the way of one of the little banks, or the vet, or the hair salon or whatever that now populates the front of the store outside the checkouts. I fight the blahs in dreary, cloudy winter weather too. I need sunshine! This winter has been tougher than most because the sun has been hiding behind the clouds almost every day, and often (I blame the warmer temperatures for this) we have had fog until noon. I feel like we've sort of had Pacific Northwest weather this year with all the incessant fog, mist, clouds and drizzle and I have not liked it at all. Jennifer, In my garden, beans as a group are relatively pest free, except that the spider mites really love them. Some years the mites arrive early and are horrible, and other years the beans pretty much finish producing before any spider mites arrive at all. You might see occasional damage from Mexican bean beetles. I will see a little of that here and there, but not enough to worry about. Some years, if there is a heavy population of stink bugs (like we had last year), they will be on the beans. I have noticed that southern green stink bugs are more of a pest on beans than the brown stink bugs are. I run across the green stink bugs on the plants when harvesting beans so I try to always have my garden scissors with me so I can snip those stink bugs in half. (Don't squish stink bugs with your bare fingers unless you want for your fingers to stink all day long, even after you have thoroughly washed them.) Because you have coyotes in your neighborhood, I would not have a miniature cow unless I also had a guardian livestock dog (like a Great Pyrenees, for example) to protect the cow from the coyotes. Or, maybe a donkey. Donkeys are great at protecting livestock as well and even will take on large dogs and cougars to protect their herd. Okmulgeeboy, I have grown a gazillion types of beans over the years. There are hundreds of varieties available commercially and it has been fun to experiment with all the different kinds. If a person is going to binge on something in the garden, beans are a fun crop to experiment with. I do not grow dry beans. They are so incredibly cheap to buy in bags at the store, or in bulk at some stores, that they just are not cost-effective to grow in the garden by comparison. That's why I don't grow pinto beans or black bean, and I always harvest our southern peas green, not leaving them on the plants to dry. I prefer to use the garden for fresh legumes that I can harvest weekly, and then either snap or shell, and eat fresh. We just freeze the excess for winter when I grow more than we can eat fresh and that is possible because we have three freezers in the garage, though all of them are not full year-round....one of them usually empties out as we devour our fresh-frozen food over the course of the fall and winter months. Then, as soon as the harvest starts in Spring, I refill that big freezer with garden produce over the course of the growing season. It is a big chest freezer divided into compartments by blue plastic dividers, so I fill each section with a different veggie, which keeps it organized and makes it easier for me to find what I want when I'm removing frozen produce from the freezer to use in meal preparation. Larry, That is great cow advice! Rebecca, I have hesitated to try to put words to how I feel about this year's winter/spring weather because I am getting mixed feelings about it. Does that make sense? I don't have a strong feeling that we will have late cold weather. I don't have a strong feeling that we will have early warm weather. It all just feels sort of "blah" in my brain. Good heavens, I hope I'm not losing my garden intuition as I age! That would be terrible. So, my best guess based on my garden intuition is that we are going to warm up early in general, but need to watch carefully for late rounds of cold weather. We aren't going to warm up extraordinarily early. You know, there have been some years when January was so warm that I actually put tomato plants in my 4' round galvanized metal stock tank in February...around the third week of February, and I did so expecting they would do well and would produce early and they did, though I had to cover them up on 2 or 3 cold nights. Well, this is not one of those years. It doesn't feel the same as those years. This is more of a middle-of-the-road year. I want to believe it will warm up early and stay warm, but there is a little voice inside my head (picture a miniature Three Stooges type guy jumping up and down in my brain, yelling at me to get my attention) warning me not to get into too much of a hurry to plant too early. Do I wonder where that voice is coming from, given than the signs around me outdoors have been hinting at an early Spring since at least December? Of course I do. I've learned not to question the voices in my head (hope I don't sound like a schizophrenic here) because they are coming from somewhere I cannot explain. I just know that when I follow my intuition, things tend to work out well in the garden. So, I'm not getting in a big hurry with anything, but I'm also not going to drag my heels too much and start seeds too late relative to the weather we are having. I have wondered if my garden brain is being lazy this year because I'm not planning on a big veggie garden? Because I'm rotating my favorite crops, all the nightshades, out of the front garden and replacing them with a lot of flowers as a form of crop rotation, am I losing my focus and not listening to my usual garden-planting intuition? I suppose that is a possibility. However, I am strongly feeling the urge to plant veggies even though that really is not supposed to be a part of my gardening in 2020 since I want to focus on renovating our landscape. I'll talk about that more sometime this week in the Week 5 thread as there are some rational reasons for that, and maybe one irrational one. So, now I'm thinking the front garden won't be 100% flowers and herbs. Maybe it will be 60% flowers and herbs and 40% veggies. We'll see. I promise that when I am starting seeds and planting and transplanting, I'll say so, and just by my actions y'all should be able to see if I'm feeling an early spring sneaking into the garden...or not. Early for me is much earlier than early would be for those of you further north, so if I start things early or on time, you all still have plenty of time to start things early too (and Jennifer is ahead of me this year, I've noticed, and there is nothing wrong with that--I think she is listening to her intuitive garden brain too.) My biggest fear as an intuitive gardener always has been that my garden intuition will fail, one of these years, to send me the right messages and I'll plant too late, but it really hasn't happened yet, so I try to listen to the voices in my head and behave correspondingly. This year, as usual, I expect to start seeds on Super Bowl Sunday....which is next week! Yikes! In a way it is sneaking up on me, but I already have seed-starting supplies and seeds on hand, so I'm ready to start the seeds next Sunday even though it doesn't really feel to me like it should be Super Bowl Sunday yet. I have one plant shelf set up indoors (long story) and the actual light shelf is going to be set up, hopefully today, in the mudroom, so it will be ready for next weekend's activity. Jennifer, I will go find the outlooks and link them, but the last time I looked at them, which I think was early January, they were showing February warmer than usual overall, and were iffy on the rain---no real hint there. At the time I checked them, there were equal chances of us having above average rainfall in February, average rainfall in February or below average rainfall in February. When they put up the EC on the map to indicate Equal Chances, I think that normally means their models are in disagreement so they cannot conclusively predict what might happen. Let me go retrieve the latest outlooks now. This first link shows the quarterly climate outlooks for temperature. Essentially, the tan or brown areas are showing above average temperatures, white will show average or equal chance type temperature forecasts, and if they were showing blue, that would be below average temperatures. Is it scary to anyone else that all the long-term outlooks consistently show us above average? Seasonal Outlooks Now, here's the rainfall outlook. Overall, I find the temperature outlooks to be more reliable than the rainfall outlooks, but since they prepare the rainfall outlooks, I want to post them as well. I'll tell you in advance that there is nothing in the rainfall outlooks that strongly hints at a wet year....and, yet, many of us have had a very rainy January, so I feel like there are mixed signals here. Quarterly Rainfall Outlooks Okay, I'm out of time and need to go make breakfast before it ends up being brunch. I'll be back later to finish catching up. Dawn

I went through my stuff and came up with a list that might satisfy the glampers. :) Pot holders/trivets/oven mitts/bbq mitts--Don't over do, but don't short yourself. Too easy to grab a damp towel and get burned. I like silicone ridged grabbers which can be pot holders, trivets and non-slip pads for bowls and cutting boards, and are flat and easy to store. Scrubbie/sponge/dish cleaning device Dual veg brush, soft and stiff parts Tea towels--bulky. Expect to wash often rather than having more. Silicone mat for work surface Sieve-mesh strainer The flat drum kind (no handle) is the real deal, and easiest to store. You could also make an even lower sided one yourself, or even use a spatter screen, especially if you might want to use it for spatter, as well. Lettuce drier/colander old fashioned fold flat wire. Cutting board + skins for meat, fish, etc. The super thin skin mats on top of a proper cutting board help contain cross contamination while your knives are protected. Not sure if this is a gimmick or great. Nesting prep and mixing bowls--no lids, use plastic wrap or foil. Lids are a mess to deal with, even if they fit inside the nest. Pretty ones that can be used for serving. Collapsible silicone funnel Folding digital scale Frying pan Dutch oven Hotel pan (perhaps two) to fit oven and be sheet pan/ roaster/ lasagna/ brownie/ pie/ bread/ pizza Paddle grater. Some have two sizes of holes on one paddle. There are folding box graters, but they take a lot of room. Do you need a masher? They make fold flat ones. Can (rotary)/bottle opener. Make sure there's a bottle top puller as well as a pointy "church key" can piercer which can also loosen jar lids. Or get a smaller plain can opener and a flat, stamped military style church key. Whisk--I haven't used the kind that twists flat, so I can't guarantee how well it works, but storing a whisk is a pain. Peeler Tongs Rubber (silicone) scraper Solid cooking spoon Slotted spoon Wooden spoon Ladle Turner Cork screw Measuring cup/spoons There are collapsible dry measure cups, but I don't know that they actually save any room, and I'd think they'd be less accurate. I'd probably get an OXO one cup liquid measure jug and use it for everything. Scoop that can be used for ice cream or meatballs. Nesting plastic cutters for biscuits, cookies, ravioli etc. Plastic won't cut the silicone mat. 1" dowel rolling pin. You can roll anything you can fit in your oven with one, and it's easy to store. Papers for muffins/cupcakes/potato puffs, etc. They can be made hotel pan, or silicone "papers", which are easy to store the way a muffin tin is not. Pitcher with lid, pref. rectangular. Bulky, but one always seems to be needed. Parchment Foil Plastic wrap Food storage bags Mop--depending on your storage availability, telescoping may be better, or solid. Broom--ditto Bucket--a good solid, multipurpose bucket is a joy. Stuff can be stored in it. They make collapsible, which may or may not work better (see telescoping mop). Wet sponge etc. holder. The sink is going to be too small to just leave the sponge in, and you'll have more important things to safely store in the sink while traveling. A disposable container is sufficient, but there might be a specific to the task one that you prefer (and is prettier). Chef's knife, paring knife, serrated knife, with edge guards Plates, bowls (cereal size and shape), mugs, tumblers, knives, forks, spoons, chopsticks, for 4. Unbreakable if possible. More guests, use disposable. Wash up after every meal. Mixing bowls and sheet pan, cooking spoons, can double as serving pieces, but if they're all employed in making the dinner you might need to add a few bits.