Hi there,

It's been a minute since I've sent one of these, mostly because I've been too busy fighting a cucumber plant for dominance to remember I have an email list. Update: the cucumber plant won. But there's a real backlog of stuff worth catching you up on, so here goes.

The harvest kept coming, whether I was ready or not. A wagon of cucumbers turned into 7 jars of pickles, which felt less like cooking and more like a hostage negotiation. Twenty pounds of frozen tomatoes finally became spaghetti sauce, heavy on the garlic, the way my ancestors specifically warned me not to make it. And a deer decided our cabbage bed wasn't tall enough to keep her out, which, fair — I've seen the bed, she's not wrong.

A few new recipes made it onto the site, including one I'm unreasonably proud of: Zapple Pie Filling — zucchini disguised as apples, canned the safe way, and nobody's caught on yet. Also new: Bread and Butter Pickles, and my scalable spaghetti sauce recipe that scales from 7 to 49 quarts and comes with a garlic ratio my own family has staged interventions over.

And I finally wrote the post I've been meaning to write for a while: Let's Talk About Rebel Canning — an honest, slightly unhinged conversation about what rebel canning actually is, why it's real, and why I will absolutely gossip about it with you but will not, under any circumstances, teach you to do it.

If you missed any of it, the full blog has everything in order, newest first.

That's the update. Go check on your tomatoes. They're plotting something.

— Sandy