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?