Got the pickles made. Didn’t have enough cucumbers to fill the half gallon jar so cut up 4 carrots and added them to the batch. Used apple cider vinegar and salt for the preservatives with some dill weed and garlic thrown in for flavor.
Cut up an apple and some of the tomatoes and put them in the dehidrator. Started the charcoal and cut up the ham to where it would fit in the dutch oven and got it started cooking. Used 36 briquets to cook it with 24 top and 12 bottom. Quickest I have ever cooked a ham (about 2 hours). Or really over cooked it. Ended up at 190+ degrees F which is 30 over done for ham. Turned out quite well though. Doubt I will ever use a standard oven to cook one again. The dutch oven does such a good job!
Still got to get the rest of the tomatoes cut and dried as well as the other fruit. Guess I will work on that tomorrow and/or Sunday. Also got to get up and pick the rest of the blueberries. Again the weekend will get it done I hope. Tis late and I need some rest to try to get this soreness out of the arms and hands so will close for now. Till tomorrow… 😉
Technoprimitive Too 
Had a really INTERESTING Friday. The morning was extremely busy, with multiple things going on at once for quite a while. The afternoon/evening settled down some, with even more love for Vista welling up in my being. Oh, you say I sound bitter? Oh, my.
You know, I have come to believe that how you feel about Vista probably depends on how well you know Windows PRIOR to Vista. The more you know, the more you hate Vista. I truly cannot think of ANY reason for so many things to be moved/renamed/just plain fscking HIDDEN other than some upper-middle-management droid saying “Gee, you know, if we don’t move a bunch of stuff and rename it, nobody is going to believe that we did anything worth spending money on!” Dude–I have a message for you–you STILL don’t have a damn thing worth spending money on.
Oh, well, if you are just USING a computer, Vista isn’t so bad. And by using, I mean the Big 4 of home computer use: E-mail, web surfing, office-style apps, and watching movies/listening to music. Really, I can’t say anything about e-mail, I haven’t tried it on a native Vista app. And honestly, I end up using VLC or something like that to do the AV stuff, because Media Slayer has its panties wadded up about SO many things that getting it to work on anything that isn’t hand delivered by a card-carrying member of the RIAA/MPAA who then gives the computer a BJ just won’t play. Gee, am I sounding bitter again? Sorry.
Came home and made my oven-baked hash, and generally didn’t do anything else. I was rather more tired than I at first thought, and wound up going to bed about 2 hours after I passed out on the love seat. And then napped there a while this morning after the wife went to work. But I’m up and at it now–scanning Santa’s saved files for bad little elves before I move them back. Ho, ho, ho….
Later….
I’ve created a link to your post in the newest “Cast Iron Around the Web” entry at http://www.cookingincastiron.com