Another productive weekend

While many others were out and about, enjoying our great weather over the weekend, we stayed home to work on projects.

Friday evening I ended up canning smoked salmon for my inlaws. It was a late night, showing them how everything is done safely....the handling of the fish (thawing, cutting, brining, drying, smoking) the prepping the jars, right on to the ins and outs of pressure canning for the required 105 minutes. They learned why it is a three day process, but are sure pleased with the tasty results! I am sure I will be helping them can up other items over the next year or so, until they feel confident that they can tackle it on their own. In the meantime, I think I need to get them the bible of food preservation: Putting Food By.

Saturday was my birthday. Not one person remembered, I was quietly snickering to myself. Not even after I made myself a box cake, complete with frosting, haha!! I gently reminded my wonderful husband about it, well after 7 pm. He was suitably contrite. Even my sister forgot!

Work progresses on the woodshed/hay storage structure. The beams for the roof were put up and secured and yesterday the BCIs were manhandled up top too. Today, with our BILs help, my hub will get them set and blocked and then we are ready for roofing material. Which will happen as soon as the budget allows. This means we can go ahead and start stacking the firewood-manual labor at its worst, ugh.

In between my cousin from Oregon showed up a couple of times. He comes up almost every year to fish, and this time his trip to the Russian River really paid off-he took home nearly 80 pounds of salmon. He's a big fish eater so this was a real treat for him. He'll skip next year and then come back the following.....he's probably one of the most avid fisherman I know, actually.

I managed to get the veggie garden weeded, again. It's a weekly thing, gets way out of hand if I don't. My son and I went through a bunch of pots, flats, and miscellaneous garden stuff on Saturday, which needed sorting very badly. At least I have it pretty much categorized into sizes and shapes, all neat under the benches of the greenhouse out of the way.

Yesterday we ended up helping the inlaws again, when they latched onto a whole bunch of salmon, fresh. The BIL has never really done any filleting, so my hub patiently showed him how its done, and why we do it the way we do. We don't cut the fillets whole, which is time consuming. Instead, the fish is cut into jar lengths and then the spine and bones are trimmed away. Some people have a real knack for the whole fillet thing, I don't, I just make a mess of it. In any case, I spent five or six hours in the kitchen, rinsing off slime, letting fish drain, then patting it dry enough to vaccum seal. I'll just skip over the two very frustrating hours trying to find vaccum seal bags, haha! Anyhow, there will more fish to process this fall, yippee!

Yes, a lot done over the weekend, thunderstorms and all :)