A weekend of extremes

I had planned to write a post titled "the summer I fell in love with Milwaukee" but that one will have to wait. Right now I think the weekend is much more interesting.

Friday night I went out with a small group of girls to watch "Grease" on a huge outside screen with about half of the people in downtown Milwaukee. This was really fun and certainly not extreme but was part of my weekend (and goes to show how little time I've spent alone in the last three days).

On Saturday I canvased local farmer's markets looking for 8 bushels, approximately 400 pounds of tomatoes in preparation for Sunday's tomato extravaganza. My co-workers and I have been planning a huge tomato canning day for awhile now and I'm a little impressed that we actually pulled it off. For anyone local: West Allis had the best selection and I convinced a farmer to give me nice bushels for the price we had been paying for seconds. We will go back to this place next year. Since I went to the West Allis market alone, I was super thankful for my co-workers push cart to get everything to my car.

Saturday night we had a house warming/end of summer picnic at our house. We invited a lot of people and about 35 people showed up, including many families new to Marquette as well as our neighbor girl who didn't understand the concept of veggie burgers. We had a great time and I am especially thankful for a husband and a friend who made and cooked all the veggie burgers. It was neat to have a houseful of friends and entertaining to watch the kids and dogs (our friends brought their puppy who is one of Loki's few doggie friends) run all around. 

Sunday was the tomato extravaganza. We had approximately 9 bushels (450 pounds of tomatoes), two pressure canners, two water bath canners, two propane heat sources, one grill, two food processors, one huge turkey fryer pot and one equally huge wooden paddle/spoon to stir. About 16 hours later we ended up with about 240 jars of various sizes filled with various kinds of tomatoes. It was crazy!!! There were six of us so the yield is about 40 jars a piece. Needless to say, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, we will survive on salsa. We even have some tomatoes left over -- after the three ladies who had to work that night left, we remaining three decided to conveniently forget about the remaining two small boxes in the garage. We are already talking about a big apple canning day in a few months but we all need some time to recover first.

Now I'm sitting on the couch with Loki trying to decide what to tackle around here. We have lots of tomatoes from our CSA box and I may just make some salsa. True story.