domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

The crazed fit of preserving over the weekend was mostly a success. I didn’t quite finish everything I’d hoped to, but I was pretty close. I also figured out where to store everything–my kitchen’s quite small, and doesn’t have nearly enough storage room for the sort of cooking and pantry-stocking that I do.

Aside: Pantry stocking. I have issues. I was rearranging the cupboards last week, trying to fit in the umpteenth box of cereal, (it was on sale!) and in the process I pulled out all the pasta. All of it. All thirty-nine boxes of it. Thirty-nine boxes of pasta. I mean, we eat a fair bit of pasta, but thirty-nine boxes just seems excessive. That’s like a six-month supply! And I say now that I realize that I totally, definitely, absolutely positively have enough pasta, but I’m willing to bet that next time it’s a dollar a box, I’ll buy more without even thinking about it.

Oh, look, there’s some jam to distract you from my pasta. But hey, that jam’s in a china cabinet! It totally is. I realized that I have no china, but I do have a surfeit of cans of food. They’re kind of pretty there, I think. The pictures suffer from the fact that the dining room gets almost no natural light, but whatever.

This is what’s in there, in order like you’re reading.

• peach-poblano jam

• cherry-vanilla jam
• plum jam
• various types of peach jam from Livia
• raspberry jam
• strawberry jam
• maple-spiced applesauce
• salsa, salsa, and some more salsa

There’s also a huge quantity of pasta sauce in the deep freeze, plus about fourteen dozen pierogi. (And the filling for about ten dozen more–we’ll see if I can convince Nick to go through that again.)

I didn’t manage to make more tomato sauce (because I ran out of tomatoes), and I didn’t have a chance to put up any peppers–I’m torn between making a spread of them and just roasting and jarring them. Opinions are welcome. I also need to make more applesauce (which, thankfully, is a simple enough thing) and I didn’t get to make onion jam, which will happen sooner or later. Still, between the already made jam and the near-infinite supply of pasta, I should be good forever.

Lola would like some jam now, please.