Spaghetti Sauce and Swim Goggles

It is harvest time again.  Last week we froze bags and bags of peaches for our winter green smoothies.  We also ate all the fresh peaches we could possibly want.  Our family looks forward to peach season every year for this very reason.  When there are boxes and boxes of peaches ripening in the basement, we all get to enjoy peaches for breakfast, lunch and dinner….and in between as well…if we want.

We are bringing in quite a few tomatoes from the garden.  Last Saturday I had the girls help me turn them into spaghetti sauce.  We roasted some in the oven with garlic, onions and olive oil for our special roasted sauce, and then we got out the "Goliath" pot and made a great big batch of our neighbor's special spaghetti sauce recipe.

The first step is to cut up mountains of onions and bell peppers.  We did this in the food processor and got the job done quickly.  But the odor of onions was filling the kitchen and our eyes soon began to water.  Olivia and Emily had a great idea.  They ran upstairs after their swimming goggles.  Now they were prepared.  Olivia cooked the onions and peppers without so much as a tear with her new eye protection.  We added tomatoes and seasonings and after it had simmered for hours and filled the house with a wonderful smell we let it cool and froze it in bags for dinners through the winter. 
 
I was so grateful to have my daughters' help in this project.  It made the work much more enjoyable as we talked as we worked.  We were also able to get done so much quicker.  But I also hope that by including them in the process,  they will find satisfaction every time we pull out sauce to use for a meal, knowing that they were part of creating it.

Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles taught that:

“Teaching children the joy of honest labor is one of the greatest of all gifts you can bestow upon them” (“The Joy of Honest Labor,” Ensign, Nov. 1986, 62).