It's Getting All Steamy Up In Here

We consume a lot of salsa in my home, and I've never had a salsa I liked better than the kind I make. I think it's my heavy handed cilantro use. Many a wintry Sunday I've made my kitchen look like a pre-Industrialization battlefield with bits of red tomato carcass everywhere, the juice dripping down my arms, counter, cupboard door...all the while lamenting that I cannot wait until tomatoes have flavour again. Well, that time is now and I am loathe to let it slip past me, so I am embarking on a brand new adventure - canning.

Quaint, a little archaic, really, really messy and, as my Guy reminds me hourly, probably more expensive than just buying jars at the store (after all, my recent foray in making apple butter resulted in a destroyed blender. How a top name brand - it starts with a K like in kitchen *ahem* blender can crumble under the load of mushy apples that have been cooked for 4 hours, cooled in the refrigerator and  suitable for a baby sans teeth  is beyond me, but I digress).

This rekindled desire to cook, bake, preserve and generally work with all things edible has been brought on by the drastic turn in temperature from 40 C with humidex to 7 C in about a week. This summer was just too hot to contemplate anything requiring the use of more heat and I lived on smoothies for most of August. Also rekindled is my Guy's snickering about how he's "tamed" me and that he has "turned" me into a "house wife". The fact that I am neither a wife, nor a house being a fact that seems to have escaped him. (The use of house wife as a derisive term is a rant that I just don't have the space to go into, suffice to say, a woman's choice to stay home or work is her own, though I am sure most of the population just doesn't have the choice in this two income economy.) Lucky for him my desire to remain a vegetarian and stay upright, mobile and healthy prevents me from ceasing all kitchen activities immediately because nothing kills my desire to make dishes that will also feed him like being called "tamed". 

I have no idea where this smugness even comes from because the only version of me he knows is the good cook/bread baker. That former self, the one who still makes me marvel when anything turns our right, had already pretty much disappeared by the time he met me. He only knows about it from the stories, so I am not sure how it is he thinks he gets the credit for my healthier lifestyle or why eating properly, with fresh whole foods, somehow makes me tame.

Tame isn't being adventurous in the kitchen, taking on new and increasingly difficult recipes and even making up a few. Tame is eating a lot of processed barely food because it's easy, and that's what everyone else does.

I have to go burn myself over steaming pots now, and I plan to make the salsa inferno, that'll teach him.