We arrived back from Florida on Friday evening. My parents are still there, trying to get home in the middle of hurricane Jeanne. I haven't heard from them so I'm making the assumption that they're fine - the hotel we stayed at hadn't been touched in the last three (!) storms so I'm sure that everything's just ducky. A crappy way to end a vacation, let alone live a life as so many people seem to be doing lately. The problems from Charley, Frances and Ivan haven't been cleared up yet and along comes Jeanne fresh from causing so much destruction in Haiti, a storm that appeared last weekend to be melting away into a minor little nothing. She changed her mind, apparently.


This week promises to be a very busy one. In addition to all of the activity that comes with finishing a trip there is the matter of the Boy Wonder's fourth birthday party later this week, complete with aunts and cousins from out of town. Watch for later posts in which our heroine produces a spaceship birthday cake, star shaped cookies and eight goodie bags with appropriate astronaut-themed contents. I had hoped to make star and moon bean bags for use with our parachute as a party activity and then for the kids to take home, but I really just have to draw the line somewhere and that seems as good a place as any.


I also need to get the last of the tomatoes canned. We had a good amount of rain from Ivan which cause many of the remaining tomatoes to split, so before I left I picked every one that was still intact. They're mostly red now so I want to get them put up and off the counter. I'm also keen to finish a sewing project - a fabric book to be put aside for the Little Diva for Christmas. A nice, basic project to improve my skills. Plus, it's cute and just the thing for a babe to chew on and look at.


While I'm doing all of this, my husband will be bricking in a walkway, pruning hydrangeas and spreading mulch. Our household to-do list is getting seriously out of hand and I'm trying to adopt a zen approach to the fact that the kitchen floor still isn't completed. The floor itself is in, but the trim has yet to be placed. And, the user's guide has been waiting patiently for me. I've had no brilliant insights and no profound inspiration so I guess the only way out is through.

For the last several weeks I've been working on a client document that has been giving me terrible headaches. It's supposed to be a user's guide - a basic "how-to" to wrap up the project, scheduled to end in December. I'm only one of many who have come and gone, but I was brought in fairly early in the game by another of the senior consultants and between the two of us we've watched all kinds of bizarre things happen. The client didn't want a needs analysis, project plan retreat or a business case development or any of the other buzzword bingo products that are supposed to (and, if they're done right, actually do) guide the project and the team, making sure that every little piece ends up fitting and working together at the end when everyone disbands and the client is left with the product.


Fine, whatever - it's their deal, right? Well, writing the guide is torture because while using the product is easy to use but hell to explain. There's no rational reason anything is the way it is, it's just all action/reaction and many of the various functions were added along the way in much more complex ways than if they had been expected all along and could have been planned for.


It's kind of like you hiring a contractor to build you a house but you refuse to say what kind of house or what kind of features you want it to have. "It need to have four rooms and a roof," you say. Then, when the contractor builds a square house with four square rooms and is preparing the roof you ask, "Hey! Where's my attached garage? Or my dormers?" So a garage and dormers are figured out and added in. Then, as the siding is being installed you want to know why it's only one floor and where is the breakfast nook, anyway? And on and on until the final structure, although well-built and functional, bears no resemblance whatsoever to your original desire and you don't know why.


So this is the situation I'm in and trying to document.


So I'm punting and putting it all on hold for a week to take the kids on a vacation. I'm hoping that a litle time and distance will spark some kind of inspiration. Truthfully, though, I'd settle for a plain old good idea; inspiration seems rather pushing it at this point.


So I'll be back late next week. Stay tuned!

My August 23 post was a long rumination about how I am frustrated and disappointed at the lack of response and/or reciprocation to the various parties, meetings, lunches and dinners we have hosted in the time we have lived in Charlottesville. In that post, I stated that I knew even as I wrote that I wasn't really meaning to stop entertaining, I was just venting, that I'd be back in the saddle before long.


Just a couple weeks' break, as it turned out. We invited a friend and her partner to dinner for last night, an invitation that was quickly accepted and which followed the usual negotiations surrounding time and "what can I bring."


So yesterday we did extra careful cleaning, even removing the cobwebs you can't see (not just the ones out in the open!). I roasted a chicken, steamed the broccoli, baked a loaf of bread, chilled the wine, crisped the berries, made ice cream and...


They forgot.


I wish I was making this up.


We called after about an hour, figuring that "fashionably late" expired around then. My husband was worried, since it is most unlike them to be late for anything let alone something like this. As soon as the line was picked up I heard a woman screaming, "OHMIGOD! I AM SO SORRY! ARGH" and the conversation went on from there, with my husband assuring of no harm/no foul and expressing our gratitude that at least they're not hurt, that we were concerned and alternating with their sincere apologies.


But still. I think I need a longer break.

October's Bon Appetit came today. There's a recipe for mango tea bread. You know I'm all over that one. We're having company for dinner on Sunday (gee, and less than two weeks after I said I wasn't doing it anymore - I know, I know, but this is different and for a specific reason) and I'm thinking that a slice of warm mango bread with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream topped with butterscotch sauce would be an awesome dessert. A little beige maybe, so I'll have to include some raspberries and mint leaves for garnish. Man, am I hungry. The rest of the menu is pretty basic: garlic puffs and sparkling wine for starters, then roasted chicken (stuffed with preserved lemons), risotto, wilted lettuce salad, homemade (well, the bread machine is in my home!) and steamed broccoli.

I've received a few questions lately that I don't want to hold for my next Q&A post. They concern matters of canning safety - even if the questioners don't know it yet.

Q: What is the hot water processing time for green beans?

A: There isn't one. Green beans are no longer recommended for hot water bath canning unless they're being pickled. Time was one was told to process beans in hot water for 30 or 45 minutes, but that day has long passed. All non-acidic vegetables and vegetable mixtures (like most spaghetti sauces, soups and salsas) should be pressure canned.

Q: Why should jars be hot when they're packed? You're heating them anyway in the canner, right?

A: While it's true that jars are heated and the contents are heated under pressure in processing, it's still important that your jars be hot when you pack them (even if your contents are not hot - known as raw pack, but then even this usually has hot liquid poured over). There are all kinds of food borne pathogens and, with such a variety, you need to make sure that different kinds of heat and for good lengths of time are applied to your materials. It's not such a big hold up to heat your jars for canning - you can either pour boiling water into them and hold while you prepare your recipe, put them on a cookie sheet and heat them in the oven or run them through a dishwasher if you're lucky enough to have one.

Q: You say that the recommended processing time for tomatoes in a hot water bath is longer now. Do I really have to process for up to an hour and a half?

A: Well, I'm certainly not going to write you a pass on this one! That's what the USDA says and there's no way little 'ole me is going to second guess them. The reason for the change is that newer tomato varieties have been bred to be lower in acid than older types. Since acidity is what makes hot water canning safe, going below a certain threshold reduces the safety of the method.

Q: Can I buy a canning kettle or jars from you?

A: Well, no, but it's nice of you to ask. I don't run a store or affiliate thing or anything like that (although, hmmm...there are the college funds that need attention and all...). You can buy canning stuff in pretty much any old-timey neighbhorhood hardware store or a zillion places on line. I buy most of my jars from some place called Odd Lots or Big Lots or Odd Big Lots or Lots of Big Odd Stuff or something like that. They're cheap-ish and, once you lay in a supply you can reuse and reuse as long as the rims aren't chipped and they aren't cracked. (My advice: don't use quarts unless you have a large family or really, really love whatever it is you're canning. They take up lots of space in the fridge if you don't empty them and they're harder to store on a shelf. Pints are great for most things and half-pints even better for specialty products that you don't necessarily want a lot of or won't use a lot of at a time.)

As I type this, the kitchen floor is down to the subflooring and our range is disconnected and pulled from the wall. The dishwasher is similarly disabled, and all the furniture has been removed from the space. My husband, with liberal help from the Boy Wonder, is replacing our beyond yucky vinyl with slightly more acceptable vinyl. I briefly salivated over some lovely Tuscan stone tiles until budget realities slapped me square in the face. No matter. What's important is that the dark, dank, ugly faux pebble floor is outtahere. Next up: counter tops. In a repeating theme, I'd love some solid-surface or granite or somesuch. What I'm getting is laminate. It's better than the alternative, which is no new counters at all. It hasn't taken me long to make peace with every budgetary compromise.


While the construction is going on, I've had ample opportunity to dream up new canning recipes, at least on paper. I'm still really hooked on the idea of working out something for caramel sauce. Using the chocolate sauce recipe as a jumping-off point, I'm thinking that melted caramel candies, with corn syrup, a bit of water and a pinch of salt will be a good start.


Other than marinated mushrooms, pickle season is largely over for me. I still need to do the blueberry pie filling with the frozen berries but the next big project I see on the immediate horizon is making up a batch of Joan Dye Gussow's Tomato Glut Sauce, the recipe for which she adapted from a previous New York Times recipe. Basically, you roast a boatload of tomatoes with chopped celery, carrots, garlic and whatnot seasoned with balsalmic vinegar for an hour or so until everything's falling apart. Then you process it to your desired texture and freeze. This can't (or shouldn't) be canned in a hot water bath, but it's said to freeze nicely and you can use whatever combination of random tomatoes you've got coming to ripeness. Since I have at the moment two types of plum tomatoes and three types of cherries this is what a certain household diva would call A Good Thing.


This is an awful lot of kitchen dreaming for a cook whose kitchen is entirely non-functional at the moment. Since I'm leaving in two weeks for some time in Orlando (at least I think I am - Frances seems awfully obstinate on this point) and the kitchen will require at least another five or so days of work (not including installation of the new dishwasher which is scheduled to arrive late in the week) it remains to be seen how much of any of this gets done soon. Hope springs eternal, though, does it not?