It was a LABOR day

Happy LABOR day! I remember when I first met Ryan that whenever there was a holiday I would ask him what he was doing to celebrate and his answer was usually"working, it's just another day." I thought how boring is that because our family always celebrated in some way and had a picnic or went camping or had fun with our cousins down at the camp ground. Well today we celebrated the holiday like Ryan did when he was growing up and we worked! It actually started raining last night and we are so glad to see the rain because it has been so dry. I love it when it rains, thunders, and lightnings especially when I am inside and am in my bed reading. This morning it was still raining so I decided to clean the house and Ryan went up and fed the animals and came down and said we should do apricots and plums today. Now when he says that he usually means lets dry them on the food dehydrator but today he wanted to do jam and his idea for the plums was to pit them and put them through the Victorio strainer so that we could make plum jam. I thought the apricot jam sounded okay but doing the plum jam that way sounded like a little too much work even to do on a Labor day. So I went over to Preston to see if I could find a new steamer, juicer because the one I had has pretty much seen it's last days. So I went to Alco and then to Stokes and there was nothing, so I went over to the Preston's own Bob's Mart. Well because it was labor day it was closed but I noticed that King's was open. I had gone down almost every aisle when I found the place where the stock pots were and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a real steamer juicer. When I looked at the price I thought, "wow, the price has really gone up on these canning gadgets." It was priced at $89.99.. I pretty much had two choices, to buy it or to not buy it and go home and pit all of those plums. So I thought," well it is time to get a new one." When the cashier was ringing it up I mentioned that these steamer juicer things had really gone up in price and she then asked, When did you buy your last one?" Me: Umm lets see that would be about 30 years ago... wow do I ever feel old. The cashier just smiled and said,"Yes they probably have gone up in price."

I took my prized possession home and started making the apricot jam and then when Ryan came in with the bucketful of plums I opened the box and was pleasantly surprised to see how nice it was. After doing one batch of plums we found out that it made 5 1/2 quarts of juice and it was a beautiful pink color. Mel, it doesn't look like prune juice. I even felt older after talking to Mel and she mentioned that we were making our own prune juice. It tastes pretty good and now that Ryan saw how fast we made 5 1/2 quarts of juice he is up picking more plums.

The apricot jam was very good and I used my Grandma Shaw's recipe here it is if anyone else would like to make some:

Grandma Shaw's Apricot Jam

12 cups of ground apricots (I just pulsed them in the food processor until they were the consistency that I wanted.)

11 1/2 cups of sugar

2 oranges (quarter them and take out the seeds and cut off the stem on the end then put them in the food processor and chop them until they are very fine, leave the peelings on it makes the jam taste like apricot marmalade.)

2 lemons ( do the same thing you did to the oranges.)

3- 20 ounce cans of crushed pineapple

Mix it all up in a very large bowl because it won't fit in one large pan, and then divide it into 2 large pans. cook it on medium high and then when it starts boiling turn it down a little and stir it until it gets thick and then put the jam in pint jars and process them for about 10 - 15 minutes. It is delicious and just how I remembered it.


This is the new steamer, juicer. It works great!
These apricots are almost ready and if you would like to come and get some just let me know.

This is the little red hen or I guess rooster who planted the tree, watered the tree, picked the fruit, washed the fruit, put the fruit into the juicer, filled the bottles with the juice, sealed the bottles and will then drink the juice, I am sure he will share if you ask him.

It was a good LABOR day.