Plum boozy

Well, on Monday the north half of the planet tipped over to the Dark Side – and no, I’m not referring to the day’s usual bucket load of news crud. I’m thinking about the arrival of autumn, and with it the frantic last weeks of harvest time for lazy gardeners who have been neglecting their veggie patch. The Hubbit trundled next door with a large bucket swinging from a sticky-out thing on his tractor, and brought it back full of plums.

Okay, full disclosure: He did that a couple weeks ago, when I was inundated with dogs, and the plums in the bottom half of the bucket (we’re talking a 20 gallon bucket here, okay? Nothing small about the Hubbit!) went squishy and oozy and … Well, I sweetly requested more plums, and while he was off getting them I tipped the first lot into the sink.

They had started to ferment. But dang … that many plums was way too many for my few remaining hens. My flock has declined inexorably over the summer; two more fell to a visiting husky last week, and I’m now down to seven. Twenty gallons of fermenting plums is way too much for seven hens, even aided by a large roo.

Plus, I’d been googling plum preserving recipes on various websites, and some people intentionally ferment their plums. Meanwhile, regular fruit canning recipes demand juice. Long story short, it went against nature to waste these organically fermented remnants of juiciness, so I didn’t. I washed them off, picked out the pits, squeezed and massaged, and after adding water and straining off the chewy bits (for chickenly delectation), the resulting juice was quite pleasantly plummy. I put it in a large pot, added a couple cups of sugar and a generous slosh of lemon juice, and let it boil while I got busy halving and depitting the nice firm plums the Hubbit had brought me following his second trip to the neighbor’s tree. (Only half a bucket this time, thankfully!)

I filled seven quart jars and topped them off with the juice. Oh – I should mention, before adding the juice, I made it even more delicious by sloshing in about half a bottle of witblitz, aka mampoer, which the Hubbit insisted on buying on a visit to South Africa about 10 or 15 years ago, even though neither of us is an especially enthusiastic drinker. Witblitz (pronounced vitblits – it means “white lightning”) is the Boer answer to moonshine. It claims to be 50 proof peach brandy but it also works quite well as rocket fuel. Also, turns out it tastes not too bad when it’s been sitting in the back of a kitchen cupboard for 15 years.

In any case, the plum juice is bitchin’, and I know this because one of the quart jars didn’t seal properly during the canning process, so of course ice cream was acquired and … yum-meee!

Juicy plums and ice cream, with a hint of witblitz. Can life get any better? I think not.

Anyway, that took care of most of the plums. This morning, I processed the last of them while chatting with my bestie, Twiglet, via WhatsApp. Dang, I love technology – don’t you? Forget all the nastiness and spying and manipulation … I just love being able to sit at my dining table, sorting and slicing plums, while chatting to someone I love even though she’s clear around the other side of the planet. I ended up with a little over five pounds of sliced, still firm plums, which I dumped into a large bowl along with some cinnamon sticks, a slosh of vanilla, a sprinkle of cloves, a couple cups of sugar, and about five cups of non-witblitz brandy. (You’ll find the actual recipe here.) That’s now in a couple of jars, hiding in the back of a cupboard and waiting for the holiday season.

So much for plums. Tomorrow I tackle the tomatoes. And oh, holy cow, do I have a LOT of tomatoes! Well, one tomato at a time they will be peeled and cooked, and then canned or frozen.

I’m really not good at the domestic goddess thing, generally. Or the farm wife thing. But for all that, I find this work immensely satisfying. It will be so good, in the chill dark of January, to eat food that I raised myself in our good earth under a summer sun.

Do you find yourself feeling sad as the days start to get shorter? Or do you welcome the change in seasons? Would a dop of African moonshine make you feel better about it?

I asked my husband for a vacuum cleaner for Christmas

So it’s official: I’m a plugger. Either that or an alien has taken control of my brain.

A few weeks ago I told Himself that the one thing I truly wanted for Christmas was a Roomba. And when, two days later, he came home from Costco and plunked one down on the counter, and I didn’t see it until I was halfway through bitching at him for not telling me he was going to Costco so he could pick up the things I needed … well, I cried. Yes, really – tears of joy. And then I called all my friends to brag about how much he loved me.

Argh. I’d better check. Did we move to Stepford and I just didn’t notice? Nope, can’t be – there are still six dogs living here. That would never happen in Stepford.

And speaking of the dogs, they are the one disappointing element in this scenario. When we introduced them to Stella (yes, the Roomba has a name, and her name is Stella, long non-PC story), I was looking forward to getting some entertaining video to share on here. But apparently they are inured to my habit of adding new members to our pack. Their reaction was, essentially, “Gee, no butt. Nothing to sniff. Ho hum.”

Argh … those poor floors need refinishing. And the walls need repairing and painting. Oh well, such is the price of five years of rescue. I’ll get to it – and in the meantime at least hairballs are now history!

Shortly after bringing Stella home, Himself departed for Darkest California to spend a week with his family. In his absence, did I set up a comparative research study into local cocktail options? Did I splurge on chocolates and red wine and invite my girlfriends over to watch porn? Did I treat myself to a full body massage and facial, change my hair color, and acquire a boy toy, or even a new vibrator?

I did not. I am a Plugger. I truly couldn’t think of anything more exciting to do than to clean my floor. (Boring? Yeah, well, you try living with six large(ish) dogs. On a farm. In a wind-tunnel. In the heart of a dust bowl.) But as I pondered the logistics of this task, I worried that Stella might choke or have a seizure if I set her loose on the army of dust bunnies. She’s a tough little thing, but it was a mighty army.

Plus, as I pondered and contemplated and generally thought about matters housewifely, it occurred to me that a clean floor would look so much better if the walls, and windows, and doors, and counter-tops, and furniture, and everything else, were clean too. Because here’s the thing … We used to run a dog rescue. (I have mentioned this once or twice before.) And although we used foster homes, sometimes we had more than 20 dogs in our home. Technically, some of them lived in runs out in the barn, but Himself is a soft touch, and I insisted on giving all of them “indoor socialization time”, and the end result was, quite frankly, icky. I retired last January and I’ve been trying all year to fix the mess and damage, but even with the amazing FlyLady as my guru I couldn’t ever quite catch up.

And I thought to myself, “Himself deserves better. I deserve better. Stella deserves better, for crying out loud!” So I blew a hole bigger than the one in Kimberley through our budget to hire someone to help me clean our house. And I stayed up past midnight doing things like reorganizing the pantry.

It’s important to keep information in context … so I just want to mention that Crater Lake, in Oregon, is way bigger than the Kimberley Big Hole. No seismic event occurred here, and the hole in our budget was nothing at all like Crater Lake. That has to count for something, right?

So now, every morning when I get up to let the dogs out, I press Stella’s glowing green belly button. She chirps gleefully and sets off, humming a happy note, to tackle her mission for the day. When she’s done she puts herself away, and I empty her when I feel like it.

And here we are, just days away from hosting our Christmas Day open house for anything between five and 50 guests, and although I am feeling just the teeniest bit of urgency with regard to getting a bit of food planning, shopping and preparation done, as far as cleaning is concerned there are no emergency measures required.

Honestly, it feels just like Christmas!

The quantum effects of pantry organization on marriage, and vice versa

Himself is spending a week in Sacramento with his family, so naturally I have been spring-cleaning. (It’s spring in South Africa. That’s good enough for me.)

So this evening, after a leisurely day of procrastination, snoozing and reading a most excellent book (which I will tell you about in more detail just as soon as I finish reading it so watch this space), I am now tackling the most dreaded task of all: The Pantry.

To get this into context, when Himself and I launched our cozy barque upon the halcyon seas of matrimony, I simultaneously embarked on the great adventure of Keeping House. I mean, all by myself. No domestic assistance. Yeah, I know, but I grew up on the privileged side of life in South Africa, so I was pretty clueless.

Anyway, one of my first projects was to acquaint myself with the contents of my Beloved’s pantry, because this seemed a sensible way to learn what the man liked to eat. The kitchen was quite small, so the pantry cupboard was maybe 18 inches wide and six feet tall, and just a little deeper than the length of my arm … or maybe it connected with some kind of alternate universe, because you would not believe how much strange and terrifying stuff came out of there! I don’t actually remember all of it myself – this happened 16 years and many cupboard reorganizations ago – but I do remember finding an enormous quantity of Top Ramen, and four open but apparently full containers of oatmeal.

I tossed the Top Ramen, of course, and I lined the three older containers of oatmeal up on the kitchen counter, and I packed everything else away in an orderly, logical sort of way – you know, jam and peanut butter together; canned beans, tomatoes, soup and tuna all in their individual stacks; rice and pasta on the same shelf; and so on.

And when he came home from work I said, in tones of wifely inquiry, “So … do you like oatmeal, or don’t you? Because you buy it a lot, but you don’t seem to eat it.” And he explained that he usually disliked oatmeal but that every now and then he felt the urge to eat a bowlful, and he could never find it when he wanted it, so he would go out and buy some and have it the next morning for breakfast and that would be his oatmeal urge satisfied for the next few months.

I believe (although it was a long time ago) that I trilled a wifely sort of adoring giggle at his manly helplessness (yeah, that’s how long ago it was) and tossed out the old oatmeal. Because, you see, I just knew that from that day forward our pantry cupboard would be a model of orderly perfection, containing everything needed for delicious and healthful meal preparation by my sweet wifely hands. (Look, I was a late developer, okay? It just hadn’t occurred to me that acquiring wife status wouldn’t instantly transform me into Polly Homemaker, aka She Who Loves To Cook.)

What I did not know, but have since learned, is that Himself absolutely insists on Putting Things Away. Which, in husband-language around these parts, means opening the nearest cupboard door and shoving, with complete disregard for the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which clearly states that two things can’t occupy the same place at the same time. (I got a bit sidetracked looking this up and learned that this principle doesn’t apply to bosuns – a bosun apparently being something Schrodinger’s cat dragged in. So, granting Himself the benefit of the doubt, and also remembering that he spent many years aboard various ships and may in fact have known a few bosuns in his time, he may be onto something after all – except that I have now cleaned those pantry shelves most thoroughly, and I am very damn sure there are no bosuns in there.) Getting back to my original point, my far more logical and energy-efficient approach to keeping things where they should be is to put them down in a convenient, visible, horizontal location, and then pick them up and take them with me the next time I happen to pass by in the direction of wherever they actually belong.

Anyway, 16 blissful years of joyously learning about each other’s little quirks, and here we are. Darn, I wish it had occurred to me that I would absolutely have to blog about this, because I would have photographed the pantry before I unpacked it. Instead, here are some pictures of the work in progress.

This is what the mudroom looked like after the pantry cupboard vomited all over it

Pristine pantry shelves await. No bosuns here!

I would have sorted everything as I removed it, but honestly it was a lost cause. Empty storage containers, mouse traps (also blessedly empty), a diverse range of comestibles (including dog food), cleaning products and household hardware were all scrambled together, interspersed with a liberal scattering of mouse poop. Gah! This project is way overdue!

One hour later …

Aahhh! That feels better!

Okay … I’m not quite ready to share another picture of the whole mudroom, but this was a good evening’s work. I can sleep easy now!

So what mysteries and horrors have you uncovered in your pantry cupboard lately? Do you think your stuff behaves differently when you observe it? Talk to me!