Preserving Food, Farmer's Market Day, Chicks and Mishka

Saturday was Farmer's Market Day.  As expected, I went down to the market and bought a whole bunch of goodies.  My friends at Dixon Melons were selling their last melons of the season -- this really wonderful melon called the Honey-O which is very much like a cross between a honeydew and a cantaloupe.  Very sweet.

Bought salad, tomatoes, carrots, cheeses, butter, kale, green beans, potatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, honeycrisp apples, strawberries, beef steaks, celery and melons.  Today I'm going to try to bake a honey-white bread to eat with meals.

It's a rainy day today which means not a lot of walking Sid the llama.  If you want to read about our latest exploits introducing Mishka to Sid, check out my other blog.  It went really well.

With all that food, it makes sense to save it.  The best way, in my opinion, is to freeze the vegetables.  I remember for years just throwing the vegetables in the freezer, which didn't preserve them as well as I thought.  Then, I remembered my mom did something called blanching.  So, I broke open cookbooks and searched for blanching on the internet.  Yesterday, I blanched the kale and green beans.  I'm also going to chop up most of the green peppers and freeze them too.  I use a lot of green peppers in cooking, it seems.

I was pretty sure I had screwed up something with the latest incubation when this morning I heard some soft peeping from the eggs.  Yay!  I have a few chicks!  I turned the eggs that are later hatchers and made sure the humidity was high enough.  I end up getting my eggs in batches and I have only one incubator, so I have to kind of violate the single hatch rules.  Even so, I've gotten chicks out of multiple hatches.