The Honest Courtesan

There aren’t many apples this year, but I’m sure I can get a few pounds of them. So I gathered all the remaining (mostly green) cherry tomatoes and small tomatoes from my plants, and was just able to get two pounds of those as well.  I was able to make serviceable mince meat last year, but only by fiddling and adjusting so much I couldn’t actually get a finalized recipe to write down.  So this year it’s back to the drawing board, trying to reverse engineer the recipe again, because the combined fruit volume shrunk by much more than I expected last time.  This time I’m going to go by weight rather than volume; I expect that won’t change as dramatically, because even though some water will boil off, I’ll also be adding sugar.  Even though I did make six pints of salsa this year, it feels wrong to not have enough fruit for even two pies; here’s hoping I can get the proportions finalized this time, so next year it’ll be a breeze.  Unless we don’t have any fruit again, of course, but I hope it’s unlikely that will happen two years in a row.