Why I haven't been blogging

This. 

This is why I haven't been blogging. What with traveling, photo editing from the wedding I just did, and needing to keep up with the demands of my garden, yikes, I have barely had time to blog at all. 

Yeah, I know canning stresses me out. I put that on myself every single year. And yet, if I want to live that back-to-the-earth type of lifestyle, these are the things that I need to be doing. 

I struggle a lot with feeling hypercritical. After all this blog is called returning to the land and I definitely have my air conditioner blasting right now and I had box mac and cheese for lunch. I can't wait for my garden to be done. 

I didn't can green beans this year, which, at first made me feel guilty. But now I am so glad. I do want to do other things besides stay in the kitchen every waking moment in my free time. (I did wear an apron all afternoon today so I wouldn't get boiling jam or pizza sauce on me).

It's all about finding the balance right?  Sometimes I am better at this than other times. Levent just shakes his head at me and tells me that I am the one who is stressing myself out over a box of peaches. He has a point. And this weekend was not a very good example of being realistic about what I can and cannot accomplish. 

Oh well. I'll keep trying. But at least I got some canned peaches, peach jam and pizza sauce out of it. 

Speaking of which… 

I decided to make peach jam this weekend since the peaches I got from CO were not the best this year. (boo). I haven't tasted it yet, but I tried a recipe from the blog Food in Jars that my co-worker Tina introduced to me. As you can probably guess from the title, it's all about canning. I'm pretty hopeful it'll be delicious. Either way, it's bound to be better than the peach jam my sister and I made a couple of years ago that tasted like feet. "Toe-jam" is how she referred to it. I still have no idea why it tasted like that. So as long as today's batch of jam does not taste like feet, I've made progress.

This will be going on our pizza tonight

There is one nice thing about having a boxes of peaches, making random recipes that I wouldn't otherwise get around to. Yesterday, I made Joy the Baker's Peach and Cardamom Lemonade. It's so tasty.

Now, I think I should follow sleepy foxes advice and rest.