Today, Mom and I made tomato juice, which we then turned into spaghetti sauce and vegetarian vegetable soup. I think we ended up with four gallons of tomato juice all together. (Three gallons go to the spaghetti sauce, which boils down into about seven quarts.)

My hair smells like spaghetti sauce. My skin smells like spaghetti sauce. I'm sure I reeked of spaghetti sauce when I ran up to the grocery to pick up some milk right before supper.

Although our vegetarian vegetable soup wasn't completely local, I'm going to count it as my One Local Summer Week #8. We had no homegrown cabbage, carrots, potatoes or celery. (At home I had potatoes, carrots, and lovage for celery, but they didn't get to Mom and Dad's house for the soup.) Everything else, except for salt and pepper, was either homegrown by us or locally grown, including a bag full of zipper peas from 2002!

The spaghetti sauce was all local except the olive oil, salt and pepper. (Unless I'm forgetting an ingredient.) We had it over non-local spaghetti, but I may just try my hand at making it over the winter so I can see how it's done. After all, I do have a pasta maker and a pasta machine. I should use them, no?

I am drying peaches at the moment, and the peaches are from Pennsylvania, which is close enough, considering that the peach orchards were all hit by the late freeze this spring. And I've been snacking on Mom and Dad's apples--the few they've been able to wrest from the squirrels this year. Strangely enough, the squirrels left an entire branch (about a dozen) apples of one particular unknown variety (that was supposed to be Granny Smith but isn't, which Mom calls "Myapple") which taste quite good this year. Unfortunately, we're not going to have a great apple harvest, and the grapes are drying up on the vine. But I have eaten about a dozen and a half raspberries now--with more coming on. Not many, but some. And I have a handful of blackberries ripening, too.

And I forgot my camera at home, so no pictures, sorry. I'll do better, picture-wise, next week.

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