Active Kitchen

I love when my kitchen is actively cooking but I am not actively in it.

The yogurt machine is incubating.

Dried chickpeas are boiling away on the stove so I can freeze them to use for recipes.  I read somewhere (actually I think many somewheres) about how its cheaper to boil up the dried ones and freeze them; than to buy the cans all the time.  Plus you don't get the BPA from the cans in the food.  I bought the dried chickpeas a month ago, but hadn't gotten around to boiling them up yet, and finally ran out of canned chickpeas to work with. 

The bread dough is NOT rising, because I forgot to buy flour yesterday to make soudough bread.  I love the recipe, but it's very flour intensive.  But never fear, soon enough we will be making some pizza crust to rise for  Sunday supper pizza.  Not sourdough crust though.  Jupiter will eat homemade pizza if I make Plain Pizza Crust, so that's what we make.  Added olive oil makes everything better though.

A few weeks ago it was Mango week.  Last spring I happened to be in WFM one day, when they were handing out mango samples so we jumped right in line.  And it turned out they were Champagne mangos.  I've also seen them called yellow mangos or some other name which probably references where they are grown, but I can't remember exactly what it is.  They were totally sweeter and not stringy or fibrous and it was the most delicious mango I had ever eaten, so I bought and ate bunches of them.  Even Jupiter ate them last year. Then the season ended, and I waited and waited and waited for spring to come again so I could buy more of them.

Finally Mango Week rolled around again.  This year I bought a whole case of them; on a Tuesday after swim class.

By Sunday morning they were still in the case, moving quickly beyond the ripe stage.

Thus began the day of "active cooking".  By 7am, I was up and scalding milk for the new yogurt, straining the whey out of the last of the old yogurt and cutting up 17 mangos.  Also had to cut up a pineapple for Jupiter because during our last visit to WFM, the sample was fresh pineapple and Jupiter tried it and liked it.

Odd how if I hand her something and tell her to try it she won't, but if store person hands her something to try she will.  But it's a healthy choice, so whatver workds.

By 9am the yogurt was incubating and I had made 8 jars of mango freezer jam, and put the rest of the mango cubes into bags in the freezer. Finished straining the old batch of yogurt, and put away the cut up pineapple in the fridge.  It feels like I made something else that day too, but I don't remember what it happened to be.  It might have been the loads of laundry in between the fruit and yogurt processing.

Then we went to church.

Jupiter does not want me to post the picture of her stirring the sugar into the mango.

So today, the appliances are doing most of the work.  And I will shortly be repotting some baby plants into bigger pots while the appliances are doing their thing. 

Weekends should be longer. Or workdays should be shorter.