My Tireless Retirement - Week 176

 

Hello my friends!  School begins on Monday here, how about where you are?  I’ve decided to stay out of the stores for several days as I know they will be crowded with last minute back-to-school shopping.  I am so glad I am no longer participating in that part of the rat race.  Instead I stayed home and enjoyed some time in my kitchen.

 

Last Thursday’s trip to take a group of ladies out to the orchards to pick peaches and blackberries worked out well for me too.  I went ahead and picked some for myself this year with the idea I’d make some jam.  With plenty of funds left in my Fun & Leisure budget I went ahead and filled up a couple containers with beautiful and very ripe peaches and a container of delicious blackberries.  The flavors of the peaches and blackberries were amazing and they were huge too.

 

I ended up putting the blackberries in the freezer so I could get to work on the peaches.  I cut up two of them to freeze for my smoothies and turned the rest into the best peach preserves I think I have ever made.  The peaches were so sweet I didn’t need much sugar.  I added three shots of whiskey to the pot near the end and it really enhanced the flavor of the preserves and also gave it a really nice deep orange color.  I labeled each jar and decorated them with fabric circles I had cut out from scraps with pinking shears.  I love how they look and seeing them on the pantry shelf makes me happy.  I took a jar to work and gave it to my boss which seemed to really make her day.

 

I tried some of the peach preserves in my homemade yogurt and it was amazing.  By making my own homemade plain yogurt I find that stirring in a spoonful of homemade jam or preserves is perfect for flavor and the right amount of sweetness for me.  It tastes so much better than any store bought yogurt, that’s for sure.

 

Because this past week was another very busy work week where I was covering for an employee on vacation I didn’t really have anything planned at home as far as projects.  Instead I just puttered about watering flowers, doing laundry and tidying up.  In the spirit of my pantry challenge I made a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies, all from scratch, and was able to use up the last of a jar of raisins and a handful of white chocolate chips that had been hanging around for a while.  I also added a handful of chopped pecans.  They are delicious!  I put some away in the freezer so I wasn’t tempted to eat them all, although I seem to have no problem eating a frozen cookie.  Ha!

 

I relied quite a bit on some of my meal prepped dinners that were squirreled away in the freezer as well as some home canned soup for my meals over the weekend and after work.  It made it fast and easy for me to get a healthy and nutritious dinner ready.  I had some cabbage and carrot chopped up as well as spinach leaves in the fridge to make a quick salad to go alongside.  The only thing I needed to prepare this week was a batch of salad dressing.  Needless to say not a lot of time was spent in the kitchen preparing meals.

 

Midweek I was able to carve out some time to pull out my frozen blackberries and make a big pot of the most glorious jam to add to my pantry.  I also took a very large zucchini a co-worker gave me and shredded it for the freezer.  It was very good timing because I only had one package of zucchini left in my freezer.

 

Throughout the past few weeks I’ve found myself very much drawn to watch the news (trusted sources, not false news) more than what I typically do.  I also find myself praying more about the issues plaguing our nation at this time as I am deeply concerned about where our country seems to be headed and how we will be fairing once our president leaves office in three and a half years.  My gut tells me we are in for a very bumpy ride.

 

A large part of my readers are from outside of the United States and I very much appreciate that.  I feel that by staying silent about the current political situation it may give off the false impression that I may condone and support what is going on and I want to be clear that I definitely do not.  Am I shocked or surprised by what is going on?  No.  In fact, I pretty much predicted this was going to happen.  What has shocked me is how accurate I was and that so much of what I speculated has already happened in such a short amount of time.

 

I am not a republican, nor am I a democrat.  I have always voted cross party tickets based on a candidates experience, their platform as well as their ethical and moral qualities.  I do my research.  With that in mind this is not a president I voted for in 2024 or in 2020 and 2016.  In all three cases I had very grave concerns about this particular person being giving a position of power.  This blog is not a political platform by any means but I’ve felt that I needed to address the elephant in the room a little bit.  This is where I stand.  To anyone who has been offended by anything our president has done or said know that, as a proud American, I am so very sorry.  At the end of the day, regardless of which way you align yourself politically, wrong is still wrong.

 

On that note I am signing off and wishing everyone well.  Please be kind in the comment section.  Take care my friends.  God bless you and God Bless America.  We can use all the help we can get.