Grape Pie!

You should try this.  Concord Grape Pie is wonderful, even if it is a bit of work.  I grew up with this as a special treat and decided we should make it with our grapes.  It's popular in the East, especially around Amish country, where they know their pies.  Martha Stewart has a fancified version in her pies and tarts book, but she has you cutting each grape individually and pitting them by hand.  Can you imagine?! This is much simpler.

First you wash your grapes and make sure there are no spiders on them.

Then you pick each grape, one at a time, off the bunch and squirt out the innards into one bowl...

... and drop the skins into another.  Splurt...splat.  Your kids will want to help, of course.  What surprised me was that the older boys wanted to help before the little girls.

When all the grapes are separated, dump the innards (the green part that looks and feels like frog spawn... or eyeballs) into a pot and cook for about 5 minutes.  You know what homemade applesauce smells like when it's cooking?  This smells like grape sauce.  But you still need to get the seeds out: run the sauce through a food mill to strain them out.  Then combine the strained sauce from the innards with the skins.

To each quart (4 cups) of the grape mixture, add 1/3 C flour, 1 C sugar, pinch of salt, a squirt of lemon juice, and a few tablesoons of cut up butter, and dump it into a prepared pie plate lined with pastry.  You can make a lattice top or a regular top crust, or you can leave it open.  Bake at 400 degrees for 40-50 minutes, but make sure there's a pan underneath to catch the drips.  If you have more grape mixture, you can make up extra batches of pie filling and freeze them for the future.  Because once you have made this, you will want it again.

Grapes and socks

These are seedless grapes from our own vines.  They are fabulous.  We have a few yellow-green ones too; equally fabulous.

I finished the Stashbuster Spirals for Secundus and he seems to approve.  I was able to do a Sherman Heel for them, but it was too easy to lose count of the stitches so one of the heels is slightly askew.  Oops, I see I missed trimming an end.  I've cast on a pair of these for Tertia now, in girly colors.

Schlepping Day

Some people do their shopping weekly.  Mine is more like schlepping, that wonderful Yiddish description of what my life is like.  If I'm not schlepping $304 and slightly more than my body weight worth of food home from Costco, I'm schlepping kids and just slightly less than their body weight in books and sporting equipment to cross-country practice.  I have avoided having a complicated car pool routine thus far in life, but my days are numbered now.  I may even have to learn how to text.  And I swore I would never do that.

So let's make some salsa.  I improved my salsa recipe last week (above).  I put the hot peppers (stems removed, seeds left in) and onions (quartered) and a half a bunch of cilantro in the blender and pureed it - because chopping hot peppers and onions is no fun, and because I like the heat and flavor distributed fairly evenly.  Then I chopped the tomatoes by hand, because chopping tomatoes IS fun, and added them until the bowl was full.  And I stirred in about 3/4 t. of salt, and we schlepped it right up so there's none left and I have to make more.  Because no matter how much time and energy you spend schlepping -- it's never enough!

Turn of the Seasons

I think a squirrel used our front step the other day to eat his picnic lunch while watching traffic go by.  All the walnut peelings in a neat pile.  Around this time every year, our yard becomes like the I-5 corridor for squirrels, as they fetch walnuts from our neighbors' tree across the street and bring them back to their nests in our trees.  Every once in a while they'll taunt the cats.

Blackberry season didn't really start this year until September, because of our late, cold summer.  When I was picking these I noticed one cane that was still in blossom, with only a few tiny green berries and one bee who had crawled into a blossom to die.  Our week of hot weather has changed and we are back to cool for the last few days.

There are only a very few of the precious golden raspberries, but they are wonderful.  Right now, Primigenitus is peeling our apples and making homemade applesauce while watching Morgan Freeman in Invictus.  Pizza is in the oven for dinner: I'm finally finished with Grandma's Lanterns quilt after working on it most of the day.