Library Loot LVII

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! This week's Library Loot is at Marg's. 

Here is my latest library loot. This is from two different visits to two different local libraries--my town library and the library from the next town over which is actually closer to my house! Oh, plus a new release from the latter mentioned library that I asked my friend to get me because they don't allow out of town residents to borrow their new releases. And books are considered new releases for a whole year! Kills me. Thank goodness I have a few friends in that town who don't mind getting on the hold lists for me. ; )
 
Deep Kiss of Winter by Kresley Cole and Gena Showalter
Pleasure of A Dark Prince by Kresley Cole

I've been on a roll re-reading and catching up with Kresley Cole's Immortals After Dark (IAD) series, filling in the gaps of the books I don't already own with trips to the library. Omg this series is like candy! You stick your hand in the jar and you just want more, more, more! You can't stop eating. It's such a fun series. It's FUNNY and fun and lovable and adventurous and the characters go through hell for each other and their loved ones and get so torn up over their promises, their allegiances and their desires. It's oodles of alpha fun mixed with some seriously kick ass modern women who know what they want, or at least have a wild time figuring it all out. Anyway, I read Deep Kiss of Winter last week. LOVED the IAD story of Daniela the half Valkyrie and half Ice Fey Maiden and the vampire Murdoch Wroth. I wasn't crazy about the Gena Showalter short which is from her Alien Huntress series. The characters fell kinda flat for me and it just seemed everyone's motives were all just based on sex and instant desire without a whole heck of a lot of emotion. You can read my review of this book on goodreads HERE.

Next up is Pleasure of A Dark Prince, book NINE (!) in the IAD series. This one is the story of the Valkyrie named Lucia the Huntress [the Archer]--and Garreth MacRieve, Prince of the Lykae [werewolves]. This story is taking place around the same time as the other stories in this series, so in the beginning, Garreth doesn't yet know that his brother and the true King of the Lykae, Lachlain MacRieve still lives and is in fact in hot pursuit of his mate, the darling and timid half vampire, half Valkyrie Emma. That's book two. Anyway, I've already over a hundred pages into this story and really enjoying it. I like Lucia a lot and love the way Garreth is just over the moon for her. They're pretty darned adorable. I put it down, though, to read my September TBR Challenge book which I ended up not finishing in time anyway. Can't wait to get back to Pleasure of A Dark Prince soon!

Dream Lake by Lisa Kleypas 
This is third book in Ms. Kleypas' latest contemporary romance / chick lit Friday Harbor series. I'm looking forward to reading this one. The main character, Sam Nolan has some serious problems that will require a woman with patient and generous heart.

I haven't borrowed graphic novels in a while, so I browsed the shelves hoping to find some that might be fitting for the RIP VII reading event going on now. Here's what I brought home:




The Arrival by Shaun Tan.
Critically acclaimed, this one.

Fables: The Dark Ages 
by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Peter Gross, Andrew Pepoy, 
Michael Allred and David Hahn.
Winner of Twelve Eisner Awards! Saw this one on Marg's blog and I know Kelly reads them, too, so when I saw this one at the library, I grabbed it. I couldn't tell which book it is in the series, but it was the only one of the series my library had. Turns out it's the 12th one! Ho hum. Think I might like to hunt this series down and start with the 1st book.

Edgar Allen Poe's Tales of Death and Dementia
by Edgar Allen Poe, Illustrated by Gris Grimly
This is a re-loot. Borrowed it earlier this year and never got around to reading it. Thought it would be a great RIP book. It's actually a picture book for teens! I hope to review it and maybe post some images of the illustrations and text inside.

You just KNOW I had to go check out the new cookbook shelf, too. I do that every visit. Here's what I'm reading in cookbooks right now:

 
Food in Jars: Preserving in Small Batches Year-Round
by Marisa McClellan.
Written by a popular food blogger. So many food bloggers are writing their own cookbooks these days. Such an awesome opportunity for the home cook. Really fantastic. Anyway, if you visit my blog regularly, you know I love making food from scratch, including jams and more recently canned tomatoes. Looking forward to finding some inspiration and recipes to try with this one.

Preserve It! by Lynda Brown
This cook was right next to Food in Jars, so I thought it would be a nice complement to my cookbook reading this week.

What are you reading from your library right now?

What was the last cookbook you bought or borrowed from the library?

Home Canning Tomatoes

Today was tomato canning day as I joined two of my friends and their families in their annual tomato canning project. We ordered 12 bushels of plum tomatoes from a local farm and washed, cooked, crushed, cooked again and canned them all into 180 quart jars of homemade tomato sauce! My friends have been doing this every August for at least the last decade, so they have the process down pat by now, but wow--what an impressive project. I kept my phone in my pocket so I could snap a few pics along the way.

This is about half of the tomatoes...
washed and ready to be cooked.

Tomato day started bright and early at 7am in my friend's backyard with five adults and two helpful teenagers. We were set up on her driveway, patio and a bit of her lawn area with the different stations--cleaning tomatoes, cooking tomatoes, processing tomatoes, and cooking and canning the sauce.

The first cooking process.

Giving the tomatoes a stir.

While the burners for cooking the tomatoes were being set up by my friend's husband, the rest of us started washing the tomatoes in tubs of water and cutting away any damaged or moldy parts, of which there was very little. Out of 12 bushels of plum tomatoes--which is upwards of 636 lbs of tomatoes, we may have had only 1 or 2 lbs of tomato waste when we were done washing.

Tomato cooking well under way.

Once the three burners were set up and lit, tomatoes were put in the huge stock pots with a bit of water to prevent burning and they were cooked until they started to break down. In the meantime, we kept washing more tomatoes and several bunches of fresh basil.

Fresh basil for the tomato sauce

Cooked tomatoes waiting to go through the tomato mill

Once the tomatoes were turning into stewed tomatoes, they were spooned into a mill made especially for processing tomatoes. The tomatoes are essentially crushed and skin and seeds of the tomatoes are separated from the sauce. The skins and seeds go into a bucket and the sauce goes down a little chute into another big huge stock pot.

Processing the cooked tomatoes into sauce.

Below is another view of the tomato mill. You can see the skins and seeds going into the bucket on the left and the sauce goes down the chute into the pot on the right.

Another view of the tomato mill

The huge stock pot of sauce now gets put onto another burner where it cooks down some more, this time with handfuls of fresh basil and kosher salt.

Tomato sauce with basil
simmering away,  almost ready to be ladled into jars.

When the sauce gets a little thickened, it gets ladled into quart-size canning jars. One person ladled the sauce into the jars using a funnel and two others put the lids and bands on, wiping the rims as needed. The sauce is so hot that a proper seal was created as the sauce started to cool without having to process them in water. I've always processed jam in water, so I had a little trouble trusting this process without the water, but soon we heard all the lids popping sealed, so it worked! An hour or two later I checked all the jars I brought home and they were all sealed.

Gorgeous jars of homemade tomato sauce.

By the time the last of the jars were filled, clean up was well under way. Pots were scrubbed, the mill was cleaned and all supplies were put away. By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, you'd never know tomato day had taken place. Unless, of course, you visited the basements of these three families. There you'd find dozens of jars of homemade tomato sauce just waiting to be cooked into spectacular meals for our families over the next year. :)

I've canned homemade fruit jams many times in the past, but have never canned tomato sauce before. Nor have I been a part of such a big production as this was today, but thanks to the years of experience and fine tuning, the work was efficient and the day went very smoothly. I'm curious to see how long my 30 jars of tomato sauce last me. February? April? Will I make it to the next tomato canning day in August 2013? We shall see.


Have you ever canned your own tomato sauce? Jam? Pickles? Anything else? 

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Weekend Cooking, a weekly blog event hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food related post to share--a food related book review (fiction or nonfiction), cookbook review, movie review, a recipe, random thoughts, gadgets, food quotations, photographs, etc. Please visit Beth's blog for more information and join the fun! 

Note: your post does not have to be posted on the weekend, but do visit Beth's blog over the weekend to link up your post.