Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Harvest!

My harvest season has begun! I'm trying to get as much done as possible before I leave for vacation next week...

This weekend, I canned about seven pints of corn relish (on the left in the picture below) and about 19 half-pints of tomatillo salsa (on the right). For some reason, my tomatillo salsa is more brown than green this year. I wonder if it's because I used purple onions? These recipes are from the PDF SALSA RECIPES FOR CANNING by Val Hillers and Richard Dougherty. I used all locally grown produce that I got at our farmer's markets. The tomatillos came from my own garden...

I bought a meal kit from a farmer's market vendor that included the following purple heirloom tomatoes (sorry, I cannot remember the entire name), swiss chard (left), and several types of summer squash (not pictured). I sauteed these vegetables into a delicious sauce that we put on a pizza crust with other pizza fixings and then put it on the grill. It was delicious.

In the background you can see tomatoes, which came from my garden. I'm gearing up this week to can a tomato-peach relish. This tomato-peach relish is from the Preserving Peaches document located at the Clemson University Home & Garden Information Center.



Before the season is done, I hope to can more salsa (tomatillo and regular tomato), plus some seasoned tomato sauce.

We have had an extremely humid and wet summer...and I'm looking forward to fall...wearing sweatshirts and jeans, watching football, making delicious soups from my frozen/canned tomatoes, and enjoying my jellies and salsas.

Moving On…

I am wrapping up my final couple days in the office, then I’m off on a vacation next week to Portland and Sacramento and I’ll be starting a new position in another department the following week.

I have to admit, the private office was a major selling point for this new position. A real office with four walls, a door, and a window. I have spent most of my six years here in a very communal, cubicle environment with no windows and way too many people in a small space... every detail of everyone’s lives becomes common knowledge…

I’ve spent several days this week packing up my office…weeding through file folders and tossing what’s outdated and handing off current project materials to co-workers. I’m left with two small boxes to take with me. It occurred to me that one benefit of having moved offices every year for the last six years is that I had relatively small amount of material to go through. It’s amazing how work becomes so much of your daily life…years of meeting minutes, product deployments that have long since come and gone, pages of notes about things learned and forgotten…

Now that I’m leaving, Management and Administration have begun discussions as to how to redefine my position. I thought it was ironic that it took me leaving to begin discussions as to how to do things differently. But then it also occurred to me…that maybe I had become my own biggest obstacle. Maybe after a certain amount of time in any position, we become our own biggest obstacle and we don’t even know it. Bringing in someone new means they can start fresh here, and I can take what I’ve learned and begin in a new environment. I’m looking forward to the change of scenery.
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