Canning update: thirteen quarts of tomatoes yesterday, plus a potful of sauce destined for the freezer. As an added bonus, yesterday, during one of my brief forays away from the stove, I found a handful of puffball mushrooms in the yard. We had them for dinner with with spaghetti and some of that red sauce cut with heavy cream.

My red sauce more or less follows Marcella Hazan's "simple, fresh-tasting" recipe, which appears in her Classic Italian Cooking. Peel, seed, and quarter a bunch of tomatoes. Put them into a heavy-bottomed pot with a whole peeled onion and half a stick of butter. Cook till soft. Run through a food mill into another heavy-bottomed pot. Cook till you like the thickness. Cool and freeze. This sauce lends itself to further intensification with meat and/or herbs. Or you can keep it plain and light. Or (as mentioned) you can mix it with cream.

In-between-canning update: I've been reading Larry McMurtry's Texasville, the paperback that wins the prize for possessing the number-1 tawdriest cover illustration of any book on my shelves. This novel is both well written and supremely lightweight and is stuffed with amusing characters. The subject is middle-aged sex, which (if one can take this book as fact) is a busy cottage industry in backwater Texas.

Post-canning update: I'm loving all the book comments you've been leaving. Apparently, the general consensus is that we need to speed up this project. How does three chapters in each book sound as our goal for next weekend? That would bring us up to chapter 4 in both novels. Complain if this seems unreasonable or too easy.

And now I'm off to feed animals and attack Tomato Day, Part 2.