Dumped another 6” from the rain gauge and the lake is catching up fast. According to the weather folks, even with the June surplus, we’re still in a seasonal deficit of 6”-7” but at the rate we’re going, we could easily have a surplus by the end of the month. This hot wet weather is great for the compost pile. In the cooler, drier winter I struggle to get one or two piles in 6 months but as it is now and will be for the next 4 months, it cooks up really fast. That may be one reason the fall/winter crop does so well – the soil is loaded with freshly composted material.
Nancy picked up another Palm Coast bridge game on Friday and it looked like the weather was going to cooperate for another surf fishing expedition this week. In any event, I tracked down another new (to us) brew pub in Ormond Beach. This one supposedly offers up a fine pizza selection along with the brew plus it’s not too far out of the way going home. Report – kind of hard to find but we tracked it down. Great beer and pizza’s but a little pricey. It’s on the beach in the high rent district which means high overhead. So this ended up being a good day – I cut a tree down in the morning, went surf fishing in the afternoon, and hit a new brew pub in the evening. Does it get any better than that (other than actually catching fish)?
The Thursday sauce batch this week is literally over the top. Nancy bumped it up to her largest sauce pan and I picked two “buckets” of cherry tomatoes, the supposed plum variety. The pot was brimming right to the rim and we had to back out a few pints to be added a little later after some of the liquid had been cooked out. A normal Thursday load gets us 6-8 pints; this will be twice that. The good news is that Talenti is BOGO this week so Nancy can restock the containers. If you’re wondering how many more tomatoes we have, I could pick enough cherries today to do this same size batch again – on Tuesday. The large plum and round tomatoes are just starting to come on. When I say large, I weighed a couple of the recent picks and they came in right at 1 lb. Today’s harvest was 10 lbs of regular round and plums plus 8 lbs of cherries. I think I may have over done it this year. I even dusted off the green tomato cake recipe. A cake takes 4 cups of chopped green tomatoes so making and freezing a couple of those will help. That’s how we handle the zucchini overload. One thing for certain, I’ll cut way back on the fall tomato crop – if I do one at all. When we went to the grocery store I checked on the price of cherry tomatoes and found them at $3/ 8oz pint, $6/lb. Holy cow, that means this batch of sauce alone has $60 worth of tomatoes. Take that Ragu!!
Tom and Tina solved a problem for me with a great birthday present. On my beach days I’m having to wear shoes to drive, flip flops to walk on the beach between the car and where I fish, then barefoot when wading the surf. I can’t wear the flip flops while gathering sand fleas or wading out to cast because they stick in the soft sand and are easily lost. What I need is footwear that I can put on when I get up in the morning and then take off at bed time. Very multipurpose and virtually indestructible. Chaco’s. These are halfway between sandals and flip flops with great arch support. Simon first introduced them to the family when he was a camp counselor at Tremont in the Smokies. They needed shoes that could comfortably and safely handle mountain hiking and stream wading and night life and Chaco’s fit the bill. All the camp people had them. We bought a pair for Simon and then earlier this year, Nancy got a pair. Her need was stability, non skid, arch support and “stylish”. She raved about them but I personally never game them a thought until I started having to do the shoe switch and chase on surf fishing days. As if by magic, they showed up for my birthday courtesy of Tom and Tina. I thought maybe that would happen because I had mentioned to Nancy that I was going to pick up a pair next time we got to Daytona and she suggested waiting “until after your birthday”. I thought she had probably bought me a pair. This past Monday, official surf fishing day at Palm Coast, I broke them in. Perfect.
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