Tormented Kitchen

I had 10 pounds of tomatoes sitting in the fridge. I decided we couldn't eat all the tomatoes from the garden right away and that canning them (actually preserving them in a jar) was a good idea. It's a lot of work to preserve anything in a jar. I had forgotten this.  It's been a few years since we've had enough of anything to make canning worthwhile. Thankfully, Mom was around to help me. Also I relied heavily on my copy of the Ball Canning and Preserving Blue Book. I got my supplies together and washed. We blanched the tomatoes to get the skins off then cut out the stem-end core. We sliced them in half and loaded them into hot jars with 2 T. lemon juice and 1 tsp. kosher salt per quart jar. I did not add water or pre-cook the tomatoes. This was a pack-in-its-own-juice type of recipe. Then we boiled them forever, or for what seemed that long. They actually cooked for 1 hour 35 minutes thanks to the altitude adjustment. (Please research c

This weekend, I was hungry for something sweet. Not too long ago, we had dinner at Campo which was finished off by their dessert sampler. We got a tiny Mason jar of panna cotta topped with berries, a tiny slice of chocolate cheesecake, and another tiny Mason jar of salted caramel budino. I have been thinking of the panna cotta and budino ever since.  Budino is Italian for pudding. I did some Internet research and happened upon a recipe that I decided to give it a try. My littlest helper was happy to smash cookies, mix them with melted butter and spoon it into cups. I took care of all the hot stuff over the stove, like making the two separate batches of caramel, one to flavor the budino and another to pour over top of the completed product. It was a bit time consuming. I've never spent so much time making pudding before. I had to separate my eggs, mix milk and cornstarch, temper the yolks with the hot milk, them mix, mix, mix and cook some more. Then it went th