Cooking the NYTimes and Other Assorted Retirement Activities

So about this Clean Food movement... I googled Clean Food to ensure I understand this concept.  Lo and behold, I do.  Clean Food is what my grandmothers and aunts and great aunts cooked.  Fresh meat and produce, often purchased the day of the meal, served as the backbone of our meals.  As kids, we preferred canned vegetables over fresh--what was wrong with us?--and a small box of frozen veggies provided a special treat.   Once my grandmother sent me back to the store with a head of broccoli because she thought it looked terrible.  Freshness was paramount to her.  She also knew how various foods were good for you.  Onions contributed to shiny hair.  Carrots kept your eyesight sharp.  An apple a day keeps the doctor away.  Red meat put protein to build muscles and iron for red blood cells.  I'm sure there were more and I wish I remembered them. The Panera commercials touting their clean and real food caught my attention...

A few years ago, I discovered how incredibly easy it is to can tomatoes. Time consuming, somewhat, and kinda messy, but nonetheless relatively easy.  I took, and continue to take, great joy in pulling a pint or quart of home grown, home canned tomatoes off the shelf to use in soups and other recipes during the dark winter months.  Yes, I know you can buy a can for less than $2 at the grocery store, but really, they don't taste the same.  The only ones I've found that come anywhere near to the taste of home grown and canned are Muir Glen Organic, which cost over $2 a can. So it's become something of a tradition for me to can on Labor Day weekend.  This year, because I am retired :) , I didn't have to do it precisely on the weekend.  Once you have the tomatoes ready to go, however, you are on a limited time span to get them processed and bathed in their jars.   Here they are, neatly displayed, ready for the pantry It ended up that I had an ex...