The Morning Bounty

Every morning,  I send the kids off to school about an hour before I need to be at work.   This leaves me with 15 minutes or so of free time,  which I often use to read email,  drink coffee,  and just get centered for the day.  

However,  this morning I used that 15 minutes to do all of the following:

Start a pot roast in the slow cooker.
Chop roughly 30 jalapeños for canning -- the ones on the left are in a Korean soy recipe,  while the ones on the right are more traditional vinegar pickles. 
Put bbq sauce that I made a few days ago into jars for canning. 

Tonight when I get home,  dinner will be ready and I'll have half a dozen canned items ready to process in cans.   Anyway,  that's the idea. 

"Off The Fruit"

Mr.  X and I took our plum wine -- soon,  hopefully,  to be plum brandy -- "off the fruit"last night.  This just means that we removed the fruit from the mixture and poured off the yeast,  mostly stopping fermentation.

While we stopped to sample each,  we're going to be aging them a bit while we acquire a still and hope to be distilling them into brandy in a matter of weeks.