Dirt Don't Hurt

Tomato canning season is upon us again, and not a moment too soon!  We are out of pizza sauce, pasta sauce, chili base, and salsa.  

I didn’t come to the canning and preserving game until just a few years ago.  Don’t ask me why.  Now that I have, it is one of those things where I can hardly contain my excitement at the beginning and by the end I am cursing every jar, every lid, every tomato.  But then, when I crack the seal on one of the jars to make a good home-cooked meal over the winter, I am back to excited and satisfied.  

So the first order of business this year is the pizza sauce.  Captain is a pizza fiend, and not the frozen pizza from the grocery store, either.  He makes it from scratch.  Well, sort of scratch.  

He used to buy the pizza dough mix and roll it out himself, and I have tried this as well, and neither one of us is any good at it.  It finally got to the point where we just decided to buy the ready-made pizza crusts and call it good.  However, the sauce is homemade and the burger is home grown, so I call that “from scratch.”  

Anyway, I had enough tomatoes yesterday to do a batch of pizza sauce.  I remember the old days when you had to blanch the tomatoes, ice-bath them, then core and peel them.  In today’s modern world, however, that process was greatly reduced when I bought a Sauce Master.  No more blanching, coring, peeling.  Just quarter the tomatoes, skin and all, and run them through the SM.  There are different sized screens to use for however chunky you want it.  For pizza sauce, I use the smallest screen made so it basically makes a puree.

After that, it is just a matter of adding the Mrs. Wages seasoning packet and simmering the sauce.  The instructions on the packet say 20 minutes, but I usually try for more like 60 to 90 minutes to get a nice, thick sauce.  While that is simmering, I am sterilizing the jars in the dishwasher and heating the rims and lids.  

Once the dishwasher is done, the hot sauce goes in the hot jar/lid/rim, and gets turned upside down for five minutes to seal.  I don’t do the water bath thing for tomatoes anymore, and in the last ten years, I have only had a handful of jars go bad or not seal.  After five minutes, turn the jars right side up and wait for the pings.  LOVE those pings!

I don’t know that we are saving any money by canning our own produce, but I do know that it tastes better from home, and I get such an immense sense of satisfaction at seeing all the jars lined up neatly on my pantry shelves for the winter.

On the flower gardening front, the mutant whiskey barrel of legend has done it once again.  I am not sure that this is how large flowering kale is supposed to get or not, but it seems rather large to me!

While I am digging in all this dirt, I think about a recent news story about how good old farm dirt can actually increase a child’s immunity.  Well...DUH...all of us farm kids/parents have known this for decades.  Did my kids play outside and get covered from head to toe with Lord knows what?  You bet they did!  In fact, I think Young Man took the cake on this one.  

He couldn’t have been more than 2 years old, and we were out in the barn visiting with Captain while he milked.  At that time, we had a tie-stall barn which is where the cows are lined up on two sides, facing the outside walls, with a center walkway for the humans.  The cow area was separated from the people area by a deep trench called a gutter.  Basically, that was the cows’ toilet.  It got cleaned out once a day, or two milkings’ worth of...stuff.  

Anyway, Young Man was tearing up and down in the center aisle, bundled up in his winter coat and snow pants, and the only way to get him to slow down at all was to give him a lollipop and tell him he couldn’t run with it.  Unfortunately, I didn’t say anything about not walking with it.  He toddled along, got too close to the edge of the gutter and went head first into the...stuff.  

Captain was quick as a flash and got him by the waistband of his snow pants and hauled him out.  Stuff was running out of both pant legs and one coat sleeve.  He had the other arm raised triumphantly over his head with the lollipop still clean and intact!  He’d managed to keep it out of the...stuff.  

However, as good as farm dirt can be for a child’s immunity, there are things on the farm that are extremely dangerous and harmful.  Young Man wasn’t so lucky this past weekend after an exposure to moldy corn in a grain bin, and he ended up in the hospital for two days getting steroids, antibiotics, and nebulizer treatments.  Thankfully, he is home now and on the mend but will always need to be extremely careful around grain dust from now on to prevent another attack.  

I would like to take a moment here to thank you all for your thoughts and prayers for Young Man and our family over the weekend.  I know that it made a huge difference in his recovery.  

Captain maybe summed this issue up best when he said:  Dirt don’t hurt.