Today’s the day.  It would appear that two home cooks assembled a tasting for an event with 800-1000 people.  10 days of preserving and an entire team behind us – today is time to get serving – and to say thank you to many.

I wanted to send a quick thank you to a lot of People – I’m writing this on Thursday night as I don’t think I’ll have a chance on Sunday so if I forgot you, my absolute apologies.

For those of you who are chefs and do this type of thing every day I’m sure this sounds like a bizarre deal – I have so much respect for all of you; so many who would have done what we’ve done without batting an eye. For a guy who has cooked for a maximum of 40, it’s taken an army of support to get through. How you all do it week after week startles me.

So, regardless of how today ends up, giant thanks to:

• Dana. There with me almost every minute of this thing. I am so proud of you and us – and so proud at HOW we’ve done what we’ve done. It’s been chaos but I’ve been really proud at how positive we kept the energy about us.
• Joshna. Without you, I wouldn’t be here – for more than just the invite. I don’t know if you’ll ever know how many people you inspire – and while many have had those words said about them I don’t think I personally know a single person who those words truly apply to.
• Peter. The dude made crackers and he made sauce. And he’s an Italian who does not like tomatoes.
• Paul. Jumping to be in the line of fire. I laughed many times late at night being super confident that he would make “the best looking arrangement possible” with the tomatoes and crackers. I love the enthusiasm and appreciate your help – if anyone gets an ugly cracker today, it’s all on me.
• Sue. My baker cracker ninja. You were my baking  secret up my sleeve and I knew that your arrival on Friday would help push us over the final hurdle. I also love your excitement about this whole thing.
• Nat.  Worked until she collapsed on the floor on Friday night.  Master cracker counter and awesome enthusiasm.
• Tony and Wheelbarrow Farms.Your product rocks – if we were in the west end we’d have dilemmas on where to get some of our food (and yes, I still have a partial freezer full of pig liver – we’ll talk soon because I’ll need to share).
• Mark, Shannon and Emma from Kawartha Ecological Growers. As the event neared I knew I could take on more veggies. They came through in a pinch (and were in the east end so I cheated).
• Carleen. A kick save and a beauty. The whole deal came dreadfully close to falling apart Thursday night and she came through (I’m not sure if she even realizes how close that was ). More when we share what we’ve learned.
• Support from Chefs who cheered us on. I was (and am) conscious of remembering that this is a hobby for us – so many have jumped out to help advise us despite our experience. Thank you, at a minimum, to Carleen, Mark, Dawn, Joshna, Ellen (Chicago),  and Rossy
• Trace.  So often with the rigt comment at a magical time.  Thank you.
• Rob at F’Coffee. Use of your kitchen and understanding of the curious smells of our house on a regular basis kind of astound me.
• Many dear friends who offered to help who I only omit mentioning in fear of missing one.
• My team and coworkers at my day (and sometime night, sometimes weekend job ). You’re used to me being crazy – being crazy and smelling like onions was both new and humbling. Thankyou for laughing with me (I think ).
• My parents. This is kinds of your fault in many ways. Thank you for always inspiring. helping and setting an example.
• Friends and strangers throughout the world and their comments here, twitter, email, facebook and elsewhere cheering us on. It was not lost on me when friends from New Zealand wrote “Stop writing and get cooking!”

No mater what happens today, I’m thrilled.  Thank you all.

Saturday morning. Giant thanks to Sue, Peter, Nat and Dana. We made 11,26 crackers by hand last night – we’re in good shape for tomorrow and it would have been impossible without them.

There’s a haircut ahead and a bunch of errands in addition to cleaning the house as it’s been a little upside down for the last 2 weeks.

I’m also planning a lot of time with our dog today. I can’t imagine what the smells in this house have been like for a hunting dog who can smell a tennis ball at 50 feet while running a hundred miles an hour. Shaeffer’s added a lot of work to our lives in the last year and a bit and I can’t imagine life without him – he’s certainly burst a lot of tension for me lately. The best had to be falling asleep while sharing a blanket curled into the carpet together.

Last night was a lot of fun – and a lot of crazy. We had a secret weapon in that our landlord let us borrow the kitchen of his coffee shop (everything but the dehydration has been done down there – we like to keep an eye on the dehydrator to make sure that things are going smoothly). Thank goodness for F’Coffee – their coffee and cookies really do rock (and you can visit our hidden, licensed back yard before it gets too cold). A giant thanks to Rob goes out as well.

Once everyone was here we poured some wine and got into the crackers. I’m a giant fan of having systems so we started by laying out 17 bowls so we could measure all of the ingredients at once (we made 34 batches of crackers). It took almost 3 hours to make our first test batch (getting set up, grinding the dehydrated veggies into powder, cleaning, etc). In the next 3 hours we finished the other 1,100 crackers.

We had 6 cookie sheets so we could be baking, cooling, prepping, breaking and counting batches at the same time. This meant that we were consistently cooking 80-120 crackers at a time once we found our rhythm. They cook for 10 minutes and once we had hit our rhythm we were knocking back about 600 in an hour.

We were also using the time to make buttons (a button machine was my romantic Christmas gift to Dana this year – she gave me the dehydrator), last-minute decorations, and some story telling.

Other than a few last-minute details (like seeing if our crackers will withstand a wet tomato slice for any length of time and tasting all of the components of our recipe together for the first time ever and seeing if this will actually work) I honestly feel as prepared as I could possibly be.

For our daily readers, I appreciate you reading about the same topic for almost 2 weeks straight. I promise we’ll return to regular programming real soon.

10.50PM.  Near delirious.  Smiling.

I have really neglected to say how thankful we are for all of the encouragement and support we`ve had from people in the last few weeks. Friends, strangers, new friends, old strangers and those near and far have offered hands, cheers, comments, emails and tweets.  I hope it sounds genuinely humble to express that we real feel we`re representing a far bigger community than just ourselves this Sunday. I`m not quite done loading the dehydrator for yet another night and I`m still smiling.

Speaking of dehydrating, it`s time to humiliate myself again.  I get an odd kind of joy doing so…

We loaded 5.5 pounds (2.5 kilograms) of sweet onions into the dehyrator last night.  10 ounces (a pound has 16; it`s also 283 grams).  Almost 90% of the weight of the onions has evaporated into the air and has left us with sweet onion chips that are going to be in our veggie crackers.

If you read that last sentence carefully, you`ll notice I mentioned `evaoprated into the air.`  That’s a key part to the rest of this story…

I arrived at work this morning.  It was a busier day than normal (this says a lot) and we had a meeting with 2 other organizations that is kicking off a rather large undertaking that will affect 100′s of our employees.  My role, in today’s meeting, was a pivotal one.

I arrived in the office and noticed a faint smell of soup.  Kind of like Mr Noodles.  I entered my office and the longer I sat, the stronger the smell got.  I figured someone was eating a really early bowl of soup.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was me who was actually the main course.

The temperature has dropped considerably in the last 24 hours in our fine city (Toronto for those keeping score).  When I dropped to the floor at the end of a long day yesterday (to cuddle with the dog), I noticed how cold it was on the floor.  I shut the windows and fell asleep hiding under a blanket-fort that I shared with our pup.

I stumbled to bed about an hour later with the windows still snug.  And it happened overnight – 5 pounds of  onion water evaporated and consumed the air of our apartment.  It filled the air, the carpet, couches and my closet.  Including my suit.

I was lucky I didn’t get stuck in the rain – I may have been attacked by a wild herd of noodles and served as some form of exotic lunch to onion loving purists (it’s not that far-fetched since people serve sushi on top of nude models for some unknown reason).  I was fortunate to avoid such a cruel fate and was instead lavished with attention from my team who were rather delighted at my amusing fragrance.

It wasn’t really all that bad.  See if you can find me in the secret security footage from work below:

A very funny moment happened when the CEO asked me if I could smell soup (he also saved a bit of ego when he stated the smell arrived more than an hour before I got to work – my team informed me this was likely the cloud in front of my vehicle as I drove 100 kilometers per hour on the way to work.

The onions are worth every bit of it – they can be eaten like the sweetest of candy

There’s another 3.5 pounds in the dehydrator tonight – along with 1.5 pounds of hot peppers and roasted garlic will follow as soon as this post is complete.  At that point we’ll be done all of our cracker ingredients and move to the last of the tomatoes which should finish almost 8 hours to the minute after we started dehydrating (Friday to Friday).  In that time our unit will have been turned off less than 12 hours in total.

Tomorrow night has to create the final project plan, recipe for Sunday, ensure we have everything we need or a plan to get it and put some checklists together for Sunday.  In the meantime, it’s time to squeeze some garlic, grab a beer and stretch on the floor or couch.

We’re in the homestretch.

We’ve been preserving for 5 days now and there’s 5 days to go before the picnic.  Of course work and life are also keeping us busy (a disappointing soccer game for our TFC tonight) but we’re living an extreme balance and making it all work for a week.  I’m writing this at 11.50 after loading the dehydrator with almost 6 pounds of onions (the dried onions will be part of our vegetable crackers).

Dana pulled the dehydrated roasted garlic (which will be turned into garlic powder) and whole hot peppers out of the dryer this afternoon.  I pulled out the slices of green and hot peppers from the dehydrator in the morning.  Things are really starting to hum.

It’s odd that we’ve been cooking for 5 days and are still making the ingredients we will cook with.  Our house is quickly being overtaken with jars (incoming and outgoing), veggies and other supplies.  It’s going to get even more full as some swag starts to roll in through the week and I still haven’t figured out how we will store (and transport) the 1,200-1,500 crackers I hope we get made on Friday night.

I have figured out that we must be mad.

Last night I described the aromoas of our house as being reminiscent of a bath house filled with tomatoes.  A new friend smiled and then pointed out that my description didn’t sound entirely appealing – much like the smell of our house.  We’ve evaporated a lot of tomato water through the air we live in – I’m sure it’s permeated my skin by now.

I also had an absent-minded moment in the morning when I sampled the wrong dehydrated pepper.  The tiniest flake of dried pepper lit my mouth for 2-3 hours (to be clear, I adore hot stuff – this is simply crazy hot).  I’ll add a bit more care the next time I blindly grasp for a taste of something in my own kitchen at 5AM.  This is proof-positive that I’ve learned something today.

I’m absolutely smitten with the garlic.  We’ll partially freeze it right before making our crackers and then pulverize it with a blender.  The slow dehydration really brings out a sweetness in it that can’t be matched – something that has also happened with our carrots and will transform our onions as well.  Tempted to find a bunch of celeriac to make a mirefois cracker.

That’s the recap for today.  I should mention that if the writing sounds choppy, it likely is.  We’re largely going on adrenalin these days and haven’t had much of a sit down and chill for about 2 weeks.  If all goes well we should have a really chill day on Saturday before the big day that will require rested minds and bodies.

We’re continuingto get ready for the Brickworks Picnic next weekend.  A huge pile of the work is done though there will be some early mornings to fill the dehydrator for the day ahead – and of course there is the matter of this Friday night when 4 of us take on 1,600 crackers but we’ll worry about that later.

It’s just before midnight.  The low hum of the dehydrator is the only sign of work being done after a 16+ hour day of preserving.

The weekend produced 20 more jars of sauce, 1,000 more tomato slices, 6 liters of diced carrots (waiting for the dehydrator in the morning) and some smoked/roaster peppers which will join the orange dudes.

Dana (and friend Peter) helped with the sauce today – so much fun to be able to ssit with those you love and working your way through baskets of tomatoes.  Dana’s also been busy with all sorts of WellPreserved Design stuff – we’re really using this event as a kick starter to take the site to another level.  It’s been super fun.

The next step is an early rise of 5:00AM. I’ve sliced carrots with a mandolin and have 6 liters of carrot slices keeping them fresh until they can jumpinto the heat.  We’ll pull those out tommorow night and see how we’re coming along.  I’ll likely add somemore dehydrating after our CSA (Communite Shared Agriculture) so we can crank the flavor into our crackers Friday.  Saturday should be fairly restful before the controlled chaos of Sunday.

I have to admit that this has been both fun and odd.  I generally stay motivated through the work by remding myself that what I’m creating will feed many through an entire winter.  To think that all of this is meant for 3-4 hours is a very bizzare feeling.  The challenge has been a lot of fun and it’s really great to get to push ourselves this hard and see what will happen.

After 2 days of sprinting, we’re that much closer to being ready.

We’ll return to our Preserving Autumn series in short order – time to get some needed rest.