1. Send your husband to Hudson, WI to purchase the Georgia peaches that have been shipped in by Tree Ripe Citrus Co (a wonderful company that makes living in the north less bleak by bringing amazing fresh southern fruit, plus Michigan blueberries). Try to keep four kids aged six and under happy while he is gone.
2. When the bushel arrives on your dining room table, lay the peaches out in a single layer on cardboard to ripen for two days. Bounce the fussing baby in one arm while doing this.
3. Sleep in later than planned the day you want to can because the newborn kept you up for too many hours in the middle of the night. Attempt to set up for canning once everyone is dressed and fed. Tell the 6 and 4 year old to play with the 2 year old and stay out of the kitchen. Nurse the newborn.
4. Nurse the baby. Soothe the baby. Watch your husband: wash the rings, wash the lids, wash the jars, fill the canner and bring it to a boil, make light sugar syrup, wash and blanch peaches. Put sleeping baby into carrier and help.
5. Peel and pit a 1/4 bushel of peaches. Re-soothe baby who is fighting the sling but wants to be asleep.
6. Fill jars with peaches and hot syrup. Place screaming baby in bouncy seat while hurrying to get load in canner. Place lid and ring on each jar. Process in boiling water canner for 30 minutes.
7. Order pizza for lunch. Nurse newborn. Get the older children into their quiet times and the 2 year old down for nap.
8. Repeat steps 5-6 until peaches are all canned. Optional: After lunch lay sleeping baby in cradle swaddled for an afternoon nap.
9. Clean kitchen and happily greet friend who is bringing you dinner for that night.
10. Boil the peach peelings for 30 minutes to make peach juice. Leave out overnight. Ask your husband to help make peach jelly the next afternoon.
Stats: We canned 3/4 bushel of peaches into 21 quart jars and froze 4 quarts of slices. We made 11 pints of peach jelly with the juice. The last 1/4 bushel we have been eating for a week. Yum!
Here we are on the verge of fall weather, holding onto those last few days of warmer weather with our windows open all day and all night. What a summer we had, in a good way! We planted our garden, had VBS, swim lessons, our three weeks in Georgia, Ohio, and Michigan, home again, breaking my toe, exterior house painting, visit from cousins, one week in St. Louis, and then the last week before we started school time. I felt like we barely had time at home to enjoy it being summertime. I do wonder if we need to do less next summer.
So, on Monday afternoon at the end of quiet time, I pulled the chicken out of the freezer, and realized that I had until the chicken thawed to do something with the kids. I don’t normally spend the four o’clock hour playing, but I had an hour to kill and M was not due home until 5. My toe has been fine with walking and some light jogging and I knew it was long past due for me to take the girls out on their bikes…
G (5) Photo by Paul Hasser.
I have never seen them clean up so fast as when I ask if they want to go for a bike ride. We get all ready, and when I tell F (22 months) that we were going for a walk, she replies with an excited, “Droller! Walk!”
We head out with G (5) in the lead. We had decided to go where they had walked with the neighbors last week: around the block and behind the church that is on the other side of our backyard fence. “Am I showing you all the way? Is that why I am in the lead?” G asks again and again. She pedals confidently to each street corner and then waits for us to catch up. She and M went and picked out the pink bike back in May as a late birthday present. It is still fitted with training wheels, but I think that if we took an afternoon with her to try without, she could bike on her own.
L (3) Photo by Paul Hasser
L (3.5) and I follow behind, stopping for every pine cone along the way and to give the occasional push up the hill. L chatters about everything she sees and when she realizes how far ahead G is says, “Oh! We better catch up!” So we do. F sits contentedly in the stroller, happy to be given something quiet to do beyond her normal active silliness. F has turned into a goofy girl this summer. We had hints of it back in the Spring, but now she is purposefully trying to get laughs from all of us by doing silly things and cackling at herself. But now she is silent and watching as I push her in the stroller.
F (1.5) Photo by Paul Hasser.
We reach our destination after 20 minutes of walking, talking, and on fall by L. Big tears roll down her face when she falls. But all she needs is for me to help her up and to store the pine cone she was holding in her hand in the stroller. It is easier to steer without a pine cone in your hand. Behind the church is a brick path to a big grassy hill. It is steep and long and wide. “Last time we rolled down the hill!” G tells me, “Can we do it now?” I tell her that they may and watch with delight as they roll down again and again.
L manages to get a lot of speed every time, explaining, “I am doing my tricks!” Her rolling technique is building speed on her hands and knees and then stretching out straight once she is going. As the girls dash breathlessly to the top of the hill they ask to roll again. So, I let them. Again and again and again the two girls roll, giggling and dizzy. G comes to the top, surveying the hill, “I want to see how this part feels!” And she gives it a try, only to come back and strategically try another spot. She understands that no part of the hill feels the same as any other part, and she wants to try it all. L always seems to go for the steepest parts of the hill, and I think she gets a thrill out of rolling dangerously. I get a thrill out of watching her go.
F has asked to get out of the stroller and is watching her sisters roll. She waddles over to a flat spot of grass, tries to roll once, but instead is content to lay on her belly, kicking her feet, and laughing. She comes back to the stroller and climbs on the front and around it, and then tries the grass again.
The weather is lovely, with the sun shining and the breeze mild. It is time to go home to make dinner. After 6 “one last rolls”, we put the girls’ helmets back on and go home the short way. I wonder to myself how many more afternoons we have like this before the cold sets in, and resolve to take advantage of more of them while we still can.
In light of our visit to St. Louis, I am going to tell about some of our favorite things to do in St. Louis. If you have been reading my blog since the beginning, you may find this to be repetitive. We normally visit my home town twice a year, and there are several things that we always try to do. Here they are in maybe a particular order:
1. St. Louis Cardinals Baseball: We cannot do this when we visit at Christmas time, but we definitely can in the summer. In fact, I often choose travel dates around home stands so that we can get to a game. In the past we have taken the kids with us, but the past two years M and I have made a date of it since free grandparent babysitting is hard to come by most of the time. I recapped this year’s game yesterday.
2. Ted Drewes Frozen Custard: Even people from Canada and New Hampshire come to Ted Drewes. It is the best frozen custard you will ever eat, and if you want the best of the best, you have to head over to the original location. I grew up on this stuff and I will never find a better frozen custard, ever. We go about every other day when we are visiting. So, that balances out to less than once a month. I am pretty sure that is not gluttonous. 3. Amighetti’s Specials: Amighetti’s is an Italian sandwich shop on The Hill. My parents have been getting the Special for as long as I can remember. Taking a bite out of a special brings back every memory of eating them on special outings and picnics growing up. They are nostalgic and good. 4. Cecil Whittaker’s Pizza: This is a St. Louis style pizza which uses the yummy cheese blend of cheddar, swiss, and provolone called Provel. St. Louis style pizza has a cracker thin crust with a delicious sauce and the yummy cheese. We always, always order when we visit. We almost did not get it in January after the blizzard that hit St. Louis, but thankfully they ordered for pickup only and M braved the winter roads to get it. And we were like, blizzard, shimizzard, no blizzard is going to keep us from our pizza! After living in Buffalo, NY and St. Paul, MN we will not be stopped by snow…
5. Toasted Ravioli: Yummy! This is another St. Louis Italian thing. We have no Italian in us, but we sure love the Italian foods. Take ravioli pasta, bread it, and fry it. Top it off with a meat sauce and Parmesan. Yum, yum! I was so excited when I found frozen toasted ravioli at Aldi this winter in St. Paul, but it was not the same as the authentic St. Louis recipe.
6. And now that we are stuffed from eating amazing food, I will tell you about the places we like to do walking: We like to go to the Science Center, the Botanical Garden’s, the free Zoo, the Art Museum, and this summer we went out to the Arboretum (now called Shaw’s Nature Reserve). These are all impossible to do every visit, but we like to do a couple per visit.
7. Best of all is St. Francis de Sales Oratory: We absolutely love the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priests. One of our dear friends was ordained a deacon for the order this year, and we hope to see him ordained next summer if they do them in St. Louis instead of Italy. Getting to a couple of the daily Low Masses they have there is awesome and beautiful, if not a little nerve wracking with three little ones. If they ever open an oratory in St. Paul we are going to have to be torn between them and our beloved St. Agnes.
25 pounds or 1/2 bushel of ripening Georgia peaches.
Have you ever read through all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books? After reading listening to The Long Winter in the car, I will not complain too much about winter ever again. The poor Ingalls family (and the whole town) nearly starve to death and their only source of fuel is straw twisted into sticks, because there is so much snow that the trains cannot get through.
After blanching, these freestone peaches were easily peeled and pitted.
Plus, it is as bitterly cold as last winter was. M’s Uncle T, who has lived in Wisconsin for 20 years, thinks that long winter in South Dakota was exaggerated having never experienced blizzards like the ones described in the book. However, the Native American that warned Pa about the winter said that every 7 years is a bad winter and every 21 years is a 7 month awful winter.
The philosopher starts to lose his mind if he does too much manual labor.
So, my guess is that we are due for that awful winter with blizzards that blind you entirely and cold so bitter that last winter will seem warm. Or maybe, like Uncle T says, we won’t even notice it is winter, and then it will be April.
Melt in your mouth peaches. Yum, yum!
At any rate, after all those polar vortexes, I am feeling a lot of camaraderie with Ma Ingalls as I store away summer fruits for the winter. I don’t expect that there will be a lack of food in the cities, but I like the idea of having warm summer fruits canned or frozen and ready for eating this winter.
G says, “This is the most beautiful pie you have ever made Mom! It is like a pie from story books! It looks like a flower!”
After our 30 lbs of strawberries, I learned from a friend how to obtain 25 lbs of Georgia peaches and Michigan blueberries just across the border in Wisconsin. This company ships fruit in bulk in for us poor, sad Northerners that cannot grow our own peaches. The peaches were delicious and we canned 14 quarts, plus had enough to make a pie.
I can’t wait… well, I can really.
This summer is so nice as it is slowly wiping away the memories of the cold. The children run around in sandals or barefoot, and we do not even think of sweaters or winter coats. It is absolutely lovely out and everything is green. We have fresh peaches to eat now, home canned peaches to look forward to, and better yet, a livelihood that cannot be eaten by a massive flock of blackbirds.
