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Day’s Verse:
O LORD, hear my prayer,
listen to my cry for mercy;
in your faithfulness and righteousness
come to my relief.
Psalm 143:1
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Ian and I bought 3 lbs of heirloom tomatoes from our CSA on Saturday. The plan: Convert the tomatoes into tomato sauce following this recipe (it’s at the bottom of the page). Only two hitches in this brilliant plan:

1. The tomatoes have to bake for 6, count ’em SIX, hours at a very low temperature in the oven. We never have 6 hours straight on a weeknight, and we were busy Saturday (read “slacking”) and Sunday (read “actually busy”).
2. We need canning jars.

Oddly, we resolved the first issue easily when Ian happily volunteered to take a half day tomorrow to bake tomatoes. He’s always happy to take time off of work these days.

The second one, though, proved a bit trickier. We checked in our local grocery stores first: No dice. Also no Mason jars. I wasn’t surprised about the lack of dice — I mean why would a grocery store carry dice anyway? But the lack of canning jars at Roche Bros. did surprise me. As a specialty grocery store, I expect more from them. The we checked with Duck Soup, or favorite local fancy cooking supplies store. They disappointed me also, but less than the grocery store, because the Duck Soup lady told me that although she didn’t have any canning jars, hardware stores usually carry them.

I felt silly calling a hardware store for a canning jar; I can’t imagine why they’d have it. But by then I was starting to get desperate, because we have to have our jars by Tuesday. When I called Monnick Supply I even mentioned to the construction worker-sounding guy on the other end that I was desperate. He put me on hold to check for me. When he got back he called me ma’am, which made me feel all grown up (not something I feel often) and then made my day by telling me that yep, they have Mason jars!

Saved! So I learned something new today: Don’t underestimate your small local hardware store. They may pleasantly surprise you.

Edited to add: Success is sweet.