I missed a few days of posting, sorry about that.
I'll start with Wednesday, 'cuz that was fun. As you may remember, Mike is on a flag football team at a local sports bar. It's not a terribly organized activity, it's played on a crappy half field and the ref is some local guy who gets paid in beer tokens. We're lucky if he shows up. There's one small set of aluminum benches and most of the illumination of the field is provided from the lights for the adjoining softball fields. There are three or four very nice softball fields and some volleyball courts and a batting cage. The other sports have much more participation and the flag football league is the rag-tag band who gets the scraps, and that suits us just fine. Mike's team is filled with either khaki or suit-wearing businessmen who get one day a week in the fall and winter to take out some frustrations on a drunk loudmouthed jerk on the opposing team. I love going to watch the games. I've sat through snow, rain and freezing temperatures. One day, it was actually nice out. There's not supposed to be any tackles or roughness, but it sometimes happens. The team they were playing against on Wednesday was particularly brutish. At one point when Michael ran into the endzone to receive a pass for a touchdown, someone hit him so hard he tumbled out of the endzone and rolled a few times until he slammed into a fence. He got right back up and started yelling at the guy, but the guy said he was pushed by a block into Michael. He was lying, but the ref sided with him, and no one felt like arguing. Michael had scored the touchdown anyway. They won that game. (Michael now has a big purple bruise on his right side from where the guy hit him.) After the game everyone goes inside to either cool down for the players or warm up for the spectators. There's a few pitchers of cheap beer thrown back and everyone talks about the game that was just played or digresses into relaxed barroom conversation. Michael and I sat next to Fergus, who was married the same summer Michael and I were. He happened to mention that of all the wedding gifts they received, he'll never forget the one from us. We gave them a card and a big batch of cookies. He then also mentioned that the batch of cookies I brought to a game last year were well appreciated and would also be well appreciated in the future if I wanted to bring them again. (I got the hint) So that started us talking about baking and we got on the topic of bread. Here, Michael and Fergus got into a heated debate about bread machine vs. artisan bread. Fergus brought up a good point, that immediate gratification can have it's place in bread making, so yesterday I broke out the bread machine to give it a try. The bread was chewier and denser than a traditional loaf, so I gave it another try today with a different yeast. Today I'm using instant rather than active dry. I'll let you know how it turns out.
Tuesday I finally made my first batch of blended preserves. I made apple mint jelly. It's a beautiful shade of pink from the apple peel and it tastes just like candy. Surprisingly this was really easy to make. I just quartered the apples, added a bunch of chopped mint, a little water and simmered everything until the apples were almost mush. Then I smashed everything up, put it in a cheesecloth and hung the bag over a big saucepot overnight to catch all the juices. The next day I added sugar and boiled to the gelling point then canned the jelly. The leftover apple and mint mush in the cheesecloth, I processed through a food mill and got mint infused applesauce. Score!
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