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Paul's Journal

paul
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09/21/2008 21:16 #45751

Pears Processing Continues
Category: food
I seriously still have a large bushel of green pears and a regular bushel of yellow/red pears and a lot of pears still on the tree. I seriously worked 3 eight hour days on pear processing. Thankfully this happens only once every two years and thankfully pears are one of my favorite fruits and one I am not alergic to.

I love this organic pear juice. Unfortunately, it is so expensive. More unfortunately, Wegman's stores it right under display lights, so close that the bottles get hot. I refuse to pay almost $4.00 for something cooked by a display light. Fortunately, I am a pear baron and can make as much as I want.

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Here is one of my cute jars of it.
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I started picking more pears at noon and I just stopped processing pears 10 minutes ago.

Okay, I look very special ed here, but it was scary with the pears falling on my head. (e:terry) didn't wear a helmet and one hit him in the head. Its like a twenty foot drop for some of the pears. I knocked a lot of them down using an old branch that fell off the tree during the wind storm. I kept thinking it is like having your arms ripped off and then being beaten by it.

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Today, my mother joined us and the four of us peeling, cored and slices pears for the entire afternoon.
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Boiling the jars is time consuming but so worth it. People say you can just make them for the freezer but what is the point of using energy and space all years long when you can just spend an extra 20 minutes and boil them. Preserving stuff is so worht it. Next year I am going to build a preservation cellar room and jar a ton of stuff, not just tomatoes and pears.

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Here we have 3 bushels of sliced pears in sugary yum, yum syrup.

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I made more pears sauce with the iregular ones. This time it was a little more pureed like baby food. I like it both ways.
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The sauce is really good with pork chops. They were so cheap for some reason. Eight of them for $9.00 which is way better priced than the lame chops for which I got 8 for like $20.00.
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The pork chops were really good cooked.
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fellyconnelly - 09/24/08 07:12
lady in white is actually a germ-o-phobe!
i can't remember who it was who told me.
libertad - 09/22/08 23:01
I'm not sure anyone knows the white lady's story so that is a good question. I suppose someone knows.
heidi - 09/22/08 18:50
Um... does anyone know the story of the lady in white?
hodown - 09/22/08 17:14
Ok fine- rock the helmet. Please just don't start rocking it all the time. It's such a fine line between you and the lady in white- you're already so close..
jason - 09/22/08 17:09
Paul, you were right to rock the bike helmet. Fuck how it looks man, sometimes things just have to work.
hodown - 09/22/08 16:57
a few things:

Pear Barron- awesome

You look special ed with the helmet- so funny
in one of the earlier posts you look muscletastic-totes hot.

are you ever going to email/call me back? or should i just talk to you in bianary code? 01101001011100001010101
fellyconnelly - 09/22/08 08:49
My grandmother cans pears every year and I actually asked her about it for the first time 2 weeks ago. You guys have the right idea. You should do peaches too!
tinypliny - 09/21/08 21:38
I just realized that I actually have never had pear sauce. I used to buy pears by the tonloads in my first year but lately I have not been very super-enthusiastic about them because they get spoilt so easily. Maybe I should have made pear sauce all those years. Late realization dawns...
paul - 09/21/08 21:36
Oh, I could have made like 30 gallons with all the pears we had. That wasn't all the juice, just one cute sample jar. It was the only small jar I own ;( I wish I had more small jars - maybe next year.
gardenmama - 09/21/08 21:33
Hey Paul - when you consider how long it took to make your pear sauce and/or juice, and how many pears it actually takes for a small amount, $4.00 for a bottle of the juice probably isn't really so bad. Of course, they cheat and do everything with automation. Your stuff looks great and I bet it's delicious.

09/20/2008 22:44 #45744

Pear Sauce Batch One
Category: food
I started with 15 lbs of pears. Which is only one of four bushels and decided to make pear sauce. This represents about another 5+ hours of work. Not including the 4 hours I picked and shook down and collected the pears yesterday.

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I decided to use the bushel that was all broken and smashed. The ones that hit rocks when they fell or that hornets had eaten holes in.
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It stakes so long to peel and and gut them. Not as fun as gutting fish as there is not much fight.
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Here I am hiding behing them trying to pose. Its really ahrd to do self pics with the iphone.
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That is only half of them, I had to upgrade to a bigger pot.
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Cooking them. About 15 pounds of pears with one cup of water. I added a little bit of lemon juice and some sugar. Seriously, it did not really even need that much sugar.

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The cook down a bunch. The juice I strained out and made s delicious pear juice drink.
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After burning my hand severly, get electrocuted and breaking the vacuum I managed to get he pear sauce in the jars. I cannot believe that no one even heard me as I screamed while being burned and electrocuted. Sometimes, I think that having a big house can be a bad idea.

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Here I am looking cute with my favorite jar.
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And then when boiling the jars one broke wasting 1 quart of pear sauce which consitutes like 20 pears and like 2 hours worth of work. I was so mad. unfrotunately, when (e:terry) put them in the boiling water he forgot that you have to boil the jars with the water and not just drop them in the boiling water.
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buffalotshirts - 09/23/08 22:21
Dang, theres alot of pear talk around these parts. I love pears.
paul - 09/21/08 00:01
Or maybe I can eat it again. They really have free range veal now? I guess the crates were not working for the industry either. :::link:::
paul - 09/20/08 23:58
I am dying to have lamb with pear. Frankly, I am dying inside to eat veal with pear sauce but I stopped eating veal in 1995 and I don't think I will ever eat it again. I can't imagine how good it would be though.
jbeatty - 09/20/08 23:20
Pear sauce sounds delicious. Tiny, cooking well is always worth the risk.
tinypliny - 09/20/08 23:05
Are you alright? That seems like an ordeal! I hope all this pear sauce is worth all this effort and pain.

09/19/2008 15:52 #45730

Picking pears
Category: food
Basra and the bees are both fighting me for the pears. Plus I fell
out of the tree and smashed my mousing arm. I wish I could just go to
home depot and pick up some migrants. If only we lived in California,
LOL. The pears smell so yummy.
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Look how crazy this pic is. It is like that jesus pic where he gets shined on by light from heaven that used to be in Nonna's bedroom. But instead with basra as the central figure.

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It was hard to keep him away from the pears.

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I ended up filling all three bushels and there are still a lot more on the tree and so many rotting ones on the ground. Unfrotunately, I cannot get to the ones that are high up and I shook down all the ones I could.



I was also battling these hugh bees that could eat right through the skin of a pear. I watched them eat one in about five minutes as a swarm. Then the little bees cam ein and finsihed it up. The big bees got made and i saw a big one pick up a little one and throw it, I swear.
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gardenmama - 09/19/08 23:49
I had a pear tree in the yard at my old house. The pears were great - my husband & I canned some with cinnamon sticks in the jars once. We also made combination apple/pear sauce. The rotting pears on the ground and the bees were definitely a problem when it came time to mow. It was kind of funny though because you could smell them fermenting on the ground - I wonder if the bees got drunk.

The turtle is pretty cool.
matthew - 09/19/08 23:39
I think Basra has had a great pear filled summer.
tinypliny - 09/19/08 19:46
Yikers, do these bees sting?

09/18/2008 10:25 #45721

Terry changed his name?

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tinypliny - 09/18/08 21:05
Oh man! And I didn't even get my passport back yet. Why did you go and blow it, Terry! Darn it.
james - 09/18/08 19:06
I actually got a dozen estrippers to legally change their last names to Visco. It was part of an elaborate but hilarious april fools day joke. But the cat is out of the bag now...

09/18/2008 09:19 #45719

Melamine, why I don't use it.
Category: plastic
Apparently, no one cares about schools in buffalo, lol - e.g. last post.

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Anyhow, I was reading google news this morning and I saw that 6000+ chinese babies have become ill aftre consuming formula that has the same toxic compound that killed pets when consuming chinese pet food a while back

Melamine, a white crystalline powder used in making plastics and tanning leather that was found in the infant formula, was at the heart of China's troubles last year, too.



That compound is melamine. Here is the wikipedia article

I really don't understand how it ended up in the infant formula after it was known to kill pets but it did, and now the babies are dying.

The crazier part is I noticed these really pretty hard plastic bowls and kitchen wares are showing up everywhere and are actually just called melamine bowls.

You can get them just about anywhere that has kitchen supplies and goes from fancy to more common ones at target

So my question is who uses these and why. Clearly over time, either through heat or scrapping, litle peices of melamine end up in your food.

libertad - 12/11/08 13:47
I'm looking for glass storage containers and all I found were these. :::link:::

Everything else has plastic lids. What do you use? I really like those that I found but they are expensive and they don't come in any other sizes for some reason.
tinypliny - 09/19/08 19:58
I hope not. :/

All my kitchenware is either Corelle (Vitrelle - a type of 3-layered glass) or stainless steel and some aluminium.
paul - 09/19/08 17:28
It doesn't break down easily unless you get it hot by putting it in the microwave. Don't tell me people don't forget and do that.
tinypliny - 09/18/08 21:07
To answer your question melamine doesn't break easily and is cheap. That's why people would use it. :(
ajay - 09/18/08 14:56
Melamine tests the same as protein when added to food.
So, when a bulk food supplier claims that his <whatever> contains at least 22% protein, the buyer can test it and verify. If the seller is unscrupulous, he can add melamine to the food and the test results will show a higher concentration of protein. Since melamine is so much cheaper than actual protein itself, it makes financial sense to cheat like this.
It's a different matter, of course, that melamine is DANGEROUS to your health. But anyone interested in making a quick buck at all costs will not let such a silly little thing like that stop him.

BTW: melamine was also at the root of the pet food recall a couple of years ago. It's bad that they added it to pet food; but to baby food? Even hell is too good a place for such assholes.
zobar - 09/18/08 10:05
I like these in particular :::link:::

But they're probably not as toxic as these keen uranium-glazed bowls they made in the '40s:
:::link:::

- Z