Summer is beginning to make a graceful exit here in New England with some cooler temps and sunny days (which we have been lacking for most of the summer.) I’ve been away from Italyville for a while for several reasons that have kept me busy, busy, busy!  I’ll let you choose the best reason:

A – I was away for work August 26-Sept 4th… and was in Houston, Chicago, Las Vegas and LA during that time.

B – I’m getting ready for another work trip to Miami and Atlanta next week.

C – I’m getting married at the end of the month… friends and family start arriving from all over soon and it seems like the planning never ends!

What do you think?  Busy schedule?  Not to mention that we have been trying to get our tomatoes so we can jar our sauce for the year.  The tomato situation doesn’t look good here in New England because of a tomato blight that has affected many of the local farmers.  We actually visited a local PYO (pick-your-own) farm yesterday and there wasn’t much to pick, so we’re looking into other farms in our area… keep your fingers crossed.  A great site to find local PYO farms in your area is pickyourown.org The site lists farms all over the country that offer PYO fruits & vegetables.

I wish we had these beauties from last year.

I got an email from Johnny Tomatoes yesterday who was jarring some sauce… so I know I need to hustle to get ours done soon, otherwise we go the canned route for the year! You know how I feel about that.  If your planning on jarring tomato sauce this year, here’s a link to last years post when we made our sauce to give you an idea on how we do it.  I’ll start posting more soon.  Til then…