8/21/13

Just a Wednesday

So, I’m going to meander through some thoughts. 

Remember that I was growing cucumbers for pickles, even going so far as to pollinate my own when the bugs got sparse?  I finally hit the tipping point on Sunday, where I was going to start losing cukes if I didn’t use them. 

I ended up with 4 and a half pints of the best bread and butter pickles.  Yum!

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I’ll do that again, even if I have to buy the cucumbers.  They didn’t take too long, just some time slicing, and I used my Dial-O-Matic food slicer, as advertised on TV by Ron Popiel (please don’t tell me I’m the only one that remembers Ron Popiel).

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I never really took the thing seriously, but I sliced my way through a whole pile of cucumbers in about an hour, and while I thought that once I’d taken the end of my finger off, I had actually barely scratched myself.  Lucky me.  Because stuff from the 70’s didn’t have all that safety crap that comes on all the kitchen tools now.  You had to risk life and limb to cook.

Anyway, it’s slippery, so I put it on a damp dish cloth and just went to town until it was done.  Then, they had to sit in salt for several hours and after supper, I mixed the vinegar and spices and brought it all to a boil and packed it in the jars and that part was done in about 35 minutes. 

So, what is up with these two spools of thread?

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I bought them from two different sources.  They look just alike.  They’re silk, 100wt thread mini-cones. 

But, look at the bottoms.

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One says 200 meters and one says 1000 yards.  According to the internet, 200 meters is 218 yards.  I got the metric one first and was pretty upset that I’d bought a minicone that didn’t specify how many yards there are on a minicone (I got that information from the YLI website, which I thought would be reliable, right?), so I decided not to say anything to the vendor, someone I’d never used before, and ordered another cone from another vendor.  It came in saying there were 1000 yards, matching the YLI website, and looking just like the one I already had.  So, now I will have plenty of brown silk thread to start another heavily quilted project.  I have plans.  A pen and ink in silk and thread.

Be well.  Sydney said the yard was full of buzzards yesterday.  They don’t usually actually come down in the yard.

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She kept the dogs in the house until they were ready to POP!  This buzzard is as big as Sydney’s dog.

Lane

4 comments:

Karen's Quilts from Cape Town said...

Lane, they look identical is size. If you have a digital scale that weighs small quantities, please just see if they are the same! (to satisfy the curiosity of your reader!)

Rebecca Grace said...

Ooh, the silk thread looks EXCITING! I can't wait to see what you do with it! And if I had a yard full of giant buzzards, my rotties would break through the window. Bad enough when there's so much as a squirrel or a rabbit in our yard! :-)

lw said...

Thanks for the head's up on the identical looking but very different silk thread spools from YLI. I love using silk thread-- for me it's a godsend because it's so much harder to see mistakes.

I've had friends who had trees full of buzzards out here. Buzzards don't like certain sounds, one of my friends got a 48" square sheet of thin metal and would shake it to make thunder-type noises, and that got rid of them. The tennis ball cannon didn't help at all, even when he hit one.

Unknown said...

Another Veggie you can pickle the same as cuke bread and butter is to use small zucchini. Use the young tender ones. Same recipe as before. You can mix both yellow and green zucchini too.