Coda: tomato jam, roast vegetables

About the tomato lemon jam, I had some on wholewheat Irish buttered bread for breakfast. The flavor is lovely,  just tangy enough. This recipe is for one fewer cups of sugar, from the other one I used,  and it's good. They're both good. Here's both. You choose.

The supposedly Amish one, probably just a traditional recipe, really, but it was in a book of Amish lore and food, I've used for years. As you see from the stains and the notes.

Here's the one I used yesterday

I would suggest longer boiling though, to get a better consistency. I might even try reboiling some as an experiment. You do boil the tomato pulp a while, but I think it would have been good to boil the whole mixture at least a few more minutes. It's also possible I over did the lemon, since I like it, and introduced too much liquid. I think that can be solved by reboiling. 

In other adventures, I embarked on resticking, with newly purchased scotch tape, the pieces of the trouser pattern (I made one pattern, so I'm an insider now, we say pant and trouser) which I cut yesterday.

And made the discovery which I should have realized, that parchment paper is processed specially to be nonstick, duh. Which is why you use it in baking. Oh. Explains the failing painter's tape yesterday. 

And when I unfolded the pattern to retape with scotch tape, it all fell into its components parts. Since I had labeled it once, only the main bits, there were now several anonymous shapes to puzzle over. I ended up having to get the master sheets out again and reassemble everything using them, then taping both sides of every seam. Hm.

It's fine now. It did make me wonder at my possible eptness or, more likely, ineptness, at my winter plan of jigsaw puzzling, though.

Anyway, that's done. 

And the next adventure, I wonder if Mercury is in retrograde, was to try sharpening my blunt old fiskars using the knife sharpener.

This did not go well. They will now not cut Irish butter. Nor silk, nor paper, nor anything. They just bite the fabric between the blades.

They're definitely safe. Useless, but safe. Even the one inch of sharpness they had before was barely restored by cutting then sanding with a nail file, the only available emery paper.

That's not cutting, scissors, that's gnawing! Martha Stewart uses a special Fiskars Sharpening  Tool, but I don't think I'll invest in a tool to repair my thirty year old scissors which cost about ten dollars new.  They're in the recycle as of now. I have a backup pair which I will leave alone.

Meanwhile here's what I like to cut fabric with, working fine. One small, one big.

And, to show that this morning has not been a total loss, I realized I have the makings of a great waistband for my forthcoming trouser, or pant. Look at that prestitched edge of the sari silk piece. Wheeee!!

Hope springs eternal. It better around here, considering the blunders executed by the resident human.

I'm off for lunch, pita stuffed with roasted vegetables. Onions, broccoli, mushrooms, hot sausage. Heavily seasoned with Old Bay.

Roasted yesterday to make several meals.

Then a fresh farm peach, like yesterday.

And there's a Stacey Abrams to read this afternoon. The day's looking up.

The morning, seems so long ago, started with a quick sortie out front to pull out the dying Montauk daisy plant. 

I have another variety doing fine, but this one was totally brittle and literally fell out of the ground into my hands. One bag of debris to the trees, back indoors to breathe again, it being a trifle warm out there. 

Who says life's short? Today's been about three weeks long, and it's only one o'clock. 

The garden looks better, all the other plants just instantly filled in the space. There's a lesson in there somewhere.