Fabulous Pants - Tales From The Shop

Follow Up Friday - Cinamon Pears

2012-01-27T04:30:00.000-08:00

I canned these pears at the end of the season in 2010. While I do not recommend keeping canned foods forever, I have just recently gotten to opening up the last of these jars. I decided to get one of the cinnamon stick jars out and open it up. I was quite surprised at the result. Let's just say they are definitely cinnamon pears. I used Penzeys Spices cinnamon sticks in the jars. One of the things that I love about their spices is their freshness. The spices are always packed with oils and flavor. In this case, however, that was not a great thing. I added one cinnamon stick per pint as recommended in my canning book. This ended up with pears that looked as though they had gone bad, but in reality they were just that filled with cinnamon.

As you can see from this after picture, the pears are almost the same color as the cinnamon stick. They had a hotness to them, kind of like red hot candies. If that is your thing, by all means please use a full stick of this wonderful cinnamon in your canning. I felt that it over powered the pear flavors and ended up tasting like I was eating the cinnamon stick. In the future, I think I will only use half of a stick in the jars or use powdered cinnamon. I love how the full stick looks in the jars, and perhaps a single stick in a quart would be perfect, but for now I will try to use a half stick in my pints. That does not mean that I am not enjoying these pears for their spicy hotness. I am, but I would like more of the pear to come through. Live and learn, and make notes for next time.

Chocolate, Orange, and Cranberry Tart

2012-01-26T04:30:00.000-08:00

With people starting to make Valentine's plans already, I thought I would post this dessert recipe. I came up with this recipe for our date night. It is relatively easy, and it takes just a few minutes to whip together. As impressive as it looks, it is just as simple to make. The hardest part is the wait times. This dessert does need to be chilled so it takes time to make, but it could be made the day before the event and held in the refrigerator until needed.

Special Equipment:
~ 2 mini tart pans (4 inch diameter)
~ fine mesh strainer

Ingredients:
Crust:
~ 3/4 cup all purpose flour
~ 1 tbsp cocoa powder
~ 1 tbsp powdered sugar
~ 1/4 cup butter
~ a pinch of salt if you are using unsalted butter
~ 1 tsp vanilla extract

Filling:
~ egg
~ 1/2 cup sour cream
~ 3 tbsp sugar
~ 1 tbsp flour
~ 1 tbsp milk
~ 1/2 tsp vanilla

Sauce:
~ 1/2 cup cranberries
~ 1/3 cup sugar
~ 1/4 tsp finely shredded orange peel
~ 1/4 cup orange juice
~ 1 medium orange peeled and segmented

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Using some extra butter, grease your two tart pans, making sure to get into all the tight corners. Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, powdered sugar, and salt into a mixing bowl. Place the butter in a pan and heat gently until just melted, cool slightly. Add the vanilla extract to the cooled butter. Stir butter into the sifted dry ingredients and mix with a fork until it all comes together. Evenly divide mix between the two pans and press into the bottom and up the sides of the pans. Place in the refrigerator to cool for 20 minutes.

After the shells cool, make the filling by slightly beating the egg with a fork. Stir in the sour cream, sugar, flour, milk, and vanilla. Pour an equal amount of the filling between the two shells. Place the tarts on a baking sheet and pop them into the oven, reduce the oven temperature to 350, and bake for 15 to 20 minutes until the centers are set, and an knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool them on a wire rack for 1 hour. Cover and chill 4-24 hours.

Meanwhile, for the sauce, in a small saucepan combine the cranberries, sugar, and orange juice. Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat to a gentle boil. Boil until just slightly thickened, around 5 minutes. Transfer sauce to a fine mesh strainer set over a bowl. Push the sauce through the strainer gently to separate out the skin and seeds of the cranberries from the sauce. Add the shredded orange peel to the strained sauce. Cover and chill sauce 4-24 hours until well chilled. If the sauce is too thick to spread easily, gently warm the sauce a bit again and add a little water until it reaches a good spreading consistency.

To serve, pop the tarts out of their pans. Add a generous layer of the sauce over the top of the tart and arrange the segmented orange slices on top. Enjoy!

*** If you want to make one large tart for a dinner party of more than two, double the recipe in each section and use a 10 inch tart pan. ***

Wordless Wednesday - First Winter Garden

2012-01-25T04:30:00.000-08:00

peas, rutabaga, carrots, chard

New Start, New Year, New Growth

2012-01-24T04:30:00.000-08:00

While the new year holiday has long passed, I am still reveling in the idea of it being a new year. For me, a new year always represents a chance for new growth and a renewed excitement for personal development as well as improvement on the way things have been done from the previous years. This Christmas season was rather successful, with all but my Dad's gifts being sent on time. (And yes, I am going to start working on his gift finally tomorrow!) Once the holiday glow seemed to be finally ready to head back into its storage boxes for the year, I looked around the house to realize it was absolutely filthy. I guess with all the hustle and bustle of the holidays my cleaning, as usual, went by the wayside. So, I decided to make good on a promise that I made to myself around this time last year. We were moving from the old apartment to this new one, and upon finishing a 13 hour cleaning day at the old place, I promised myself to never let a place get that way again. Since one of my goals for the year is to follow through on things as well as finish up old projects, I decided to do a top to bottom cleaning of the house.

When I say top to bottom I don't just mean the whole house, I mean every nook and cranny of the whole house. Furniture was moved to ensure vacuuming could be done under every surface and not just around it as usual. This meant taking up the mattresses on the bed and going all under there, moving couches to make sure that was all cleaned. Shower stalls were scrubbed and then scrubbed again. Entire shelves were emptied, items sorted, dusted, and then either shelved again or placed in the donation pile. Floors were vacuumed, dust mopped, and then wet mopped. Papers were organized and either filed or shredded. Cabinets in the kitchen were scrubbed down thoroughly, and the top venting of the microwave was completely degreased. It has been a down right marathon of cleaning that I have not ever performed in a place that I was still going to live in, and I am so happy that I have done this. There was nothing more demoralizing to me than cleaning an old place top to bottom after moving out and realizing that I would not get to enjoy the squeaky clean that I had just created. I am currently enjoying the clean and organized house way more than I ever thought I would. I hope to keep up with the cleaning more in the new year.

Other goals I have for this year are also personal improvement aspirations. I hope to do more fancy cooking and to serve that cooking on the wedding china. So far, I have done it once this past weekend with an in home date night. It was fun, and I am looking forward to another one of them soon. Another food goal is to cook some ingredient that I have never worked with every other week. I worked on cooking a squash type that is new to me, and I still have quite a bit of that to work through. I also want to add some more things to my cooking schedule to remove more store bought items off the list. Yogurt is one of them, and I think that I may have it down to the point where i can share with you all. I also want to nail down that winning English Muffin recipe... it is getting close. I can feel that one being knocked out soon. The hardest thing for me on the goals list is the harp. I really want to be able to play that thing, and I want to commit to it more this year. I have gone through spurts and false starts with it since my husband finished it for me. I hope this year to move past lesson one on the DVD lessons I have. The last, but not least of the goals for the year is to keep in contact with friends better, including the writing of actual letters that you send in the mail. Unsolicited cards and mail from friends showing up out of the blue always makes my day. I hope to do the same for friends and family this year as I try to write more handwritten letters to people. This includes Thank You notes... yes I am bringing them back into my realm of being. I hope you all have not abandoned your goals for the year yet, and if you have perhaps now is the time to recommit to them. The year has just started after all. Forgive your lapses and try to move forward and commit to changing things you would like to see improved in your life.

Finished Friday - Nyan Cat!

2011-11-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

For the greater part of two days in October, I was madly cross stitching up this bookmark for my husband's birthday. It was a marathon session to make sure that I got it all done. I was quite happy with how it all turned out. I stitched it up on a blue canvas and used whatever colors I had in my collection to fill in for the colors needed. I think it came out quite well. I would like to thank m00nshine on deviant art for the awesome free cross stitch pattern. I did modify it a bit. I moved the rainbow up a bit on the poptart. I also made the background look more like the actual background in the video. This of course required me watching the video on the internet more than I would like to admit, but hey it does bring me quite a bit of joy to see the poptart covered cat meow its way across the universe. For those of your scratching your heads because you are not well versed in internet memes, I give you video of the Nyan Cat:

I hope you enjoy your weekend! I am looking forward to getting some crafting done as well as planning for the holiday craft onslaught! Look here over the next few weeks for pattern reviews for kid's toys. I hope it helps your crafting plans and eases you into the homemade gift world.

Recipe Review - Pumpkin Streusel Muffins

2011-11-03T04:00:00.000-07:00

One of the few catalogs I love to see in our mail box has got to be the spice catalog from Penzey's Spices. We received a gift box from them as a wedding gift, and I have become an addict ever since. One of the things that I love about the catalog is the recipes they include. The recipes are from fellow Penzey fans and illustrate how to use their spices in the dishes. This last issue was all devoted to Fall and Thanksgiving. I am a fall fiend, and I love all the flavors of fall. Pumpkin is decidedly one of my favorites, so when I spied their recipe for Pumpkin Streusel Muffins from Kathy Ness, I had to make them. They looked too good to pass up. The recipe is quite easy to make. The hardest part is remembering to take out the butter to soften! The big advantage to this recipe for me this particular week is that it does not need paper cups! I somehow ran out of them, so this was a perfect morning muffin for both flavor and no need for anything other than ingredients. In fact, after eating them this morning, I would say that the paper cups would take away from the wonderful texture of the crust on the bottom half of the muffin. It is very similar to making a pumpkin pie as it needs both pumpkin as well as evaporated milk, and this is where I have the smallest of dislikes for the recipe.

The recipe calls for only a 1/4 cup of evaporated milk. This is such a small amount that it makes me wonder what to do with the rest of the can of milk. I am planning on making a mini pumpkin pie with the left overs of the pumpkin and the milk, but there will still be too much milk, plus it would be great to be able to make this with out opening up a can of milk if I wanted to as I can freeze the pumpkin for later or use it in a pumpkin spice coffee. So to the internet I turned, and I found out that you can in fact substitute out evaporated milk for powdered milk and water. I will test the recipe some day soon and let you know how it all turns out in a Follow Up Friday. For now though, I highly recommend these super tasty muffins! If you try making them with the substitution, I would love to hear what your results were. Until then, happy baking, and I hope you are enjoying fall.

Wordless Wednesday - Baked Goods

2011-11-02T04:00:00.000-07:00

Apple Crisp Before

Apple Crisp After

Apple Pie Filling

2011-11-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

I hope everyone had a great Halloween and Samhain holiday. This year I made my first attempt at a more detailed jack o'lantern. I am pretty pleased, but I know for next year to simplify the design quite a bit. Too many fine lines results in me having to break out the toothpicks to hold all the pieces together. Luckily I have a super crafty husband who was great at hiding the toothpicks, so they are not super obvious in holding things together. I am sure glad that we made an attempt. Posting pictures of the Halloween pumpkin always start to set some fear into my soul though, and not for the usual reasons. My mind immediately turns to... yes Christmas. I start to think about all the things that I need to start work on to make sure that the holidays are homemade and happy.

But this is about apple pie filling.... so all those panic filled thoughts of crafting are out of sight and out of mind until I stop writing up this posting. Pie filling! It is a wonderful thing. There is nothing that I find more versatile than having this in my canning arsenal. I can use pie fillings for homemade danishes, pies, turnovers, crisps, cake fillings, pancakes, and cobblers to name a few. Canning pie filling can be a pretty easy and instantly rewarding activity. For doing apples the set up is a bit more complicated. I have a station setup with the washed apples on one side, cutting board in the middle. Once I peel the apples and take out the blossom ends, they get a quick dunk in the lemon juice and water bowl at the top of the cutting board. This helps keep the apples from turning brown and is mostly cosmetic. Once I have the apples cored and sliced, they go into the lemon juice mix again for a little while as I peel the next apple. From there the slices go into the big four cup measuring cup. After I fill the measuring cup generously, I dump any accumulated lemon water back into the first bowl and transfer the slices into the final big bowl. I know that it sounds overly complicated, but it works well for me and ensures that my pie filling looks great.

When I can my pie filling, I like a consistency of store bought. I know that many people do not like the extra thick goop that is in canned pie filling, but I quite enjoy that texture. In order to make sure that you safely can a goop filled pie filling, you need to use Clear Jel. Clear Jel is a specially manufactured corn starch that is safe for canning at high temperatures. If you use flower or arrow root, it will not hold up and from what I understand will separate out and create weird chunks in the filling. I follow the recipe from The Complete Book of Home Preserving from Ball. The recipe from the book has you use a base of apple juice for the filling around the apples. I find that cider gives the best flavor rather than straight up filtered juice. This year I used a combination of a gravenstein cider I found at Trader Joe's as well as the cider we bought on our apple picking trip. The cider is cooked with sugar, spices, and the Clear Jel. A quick tip on working with the Clear Jel is that it works best when mixed with the sugar before adding in the liquid. It makes it less clumpy and easier to stir with less clumps to break up. As the base liquid starts to reach boiling, the Clear Jel will activate, and small clumps of what appear to be burned filling will dot the pan. Don't panic! This is totally normal. Keep stirring constantly, and suddenly, the entire pan will be jelled up pretty solid. Add the lemon juice and then the poached apple slices. Bring it all up to heat and then can following proper procedures.

Now there is one thing I will say about doing this kind of filling... it is super thick! This viscous texture creates all kinds of interesting canning issues. It is virtually impossible to get out all the air bubbles. Try your absolute best. It is also more difficult to get all the filling up to a hot enough temperature to can with out siphoning issues. If the filling gets too hot it will scorch and not taste as great. Make sure you provide a generous inch of head space. Any less and it will be a complete mess. Every time I have done these recipes, for both apple and cherry, I have horrible siphoning issues. It is imperative that you have towels down when they come out of the water bath. There is typically some of the filling that runs out of each jar and all over the place. I don't seem to have the problem as much with peach, and apple is by far the worst for some reason. Once the jars have sealed and cooled, I take the rings off and scrub down the jars and rings with lots of water and elbow grease. I also make sure to not use hot water as I do not want the seals compromised. Yeah it all sounds like a pain, but it is great to be able to crack open a jar when there is short notice and whip up something that seems rather impressive to last minute guests. The only other suggestion I have for the recipe is halving the amount of nutmeg. I am not sure if it is because we grind our own or if we just do not like a super nutmeg filled pie, but I feel the Ball recipe has too much. This year I halved the amount and am much more happy with the results. Happy canning! Hopefully you can give pie filling a whirl!

Wordless Wednesday - Cut Out Cookies

2011-10-26T10:41:00.000-07:00

Fall Favorite - Apples

2011-10-25T04:00:00.000-07:00

Fall is one of my favorite seasons. I really do enjoy this time of year mostly for the foods that are in season. Root vegetables, hard winter squashes, brussels's sprouts, and most of all apples. I love all kinds of apples, and I think that there is not a variety that I have tried that I have not liked in some way. Usually, every fall, my husband and I head up to Sebastopol, CA for their annual Gravenstein festival. It is a great little fest, and I highly recommend it for anyone who loves apples and that small town feeling of a county fair. This year, however, we decided to try something different. This year we went all the way to Camino, CA for the Apple Hill Growers Association harvest weekends. We drove the two and a half hours from the San Francisco Bay area out to Eldorado county and the foothills of the Sierra mountains. Once there, it was a beautiful drive around the winding hills of the Apple Hill area. There were many different farms that had different kinds of activities and events. You can most likely find a farm out there that will fit the kind of day you wish to have.

Many of the farms had large tents with crafts for sale, pony rides for children, corn or hay mazes, and lots of food venders. We wanted a quiet day picking our own apples instead of prepacked boxes and jostling crowds. It took us a bit, but I figured out which farms I wanted to see. The first farm we wanted to visit was Sun Mountain Farms. We finally found this very small and picturesque farm after winding our way around the larger farms that had more for family type entertainment. Sadly, once we started up the driveway, we saw the dreaded sign: Sold Out. I quickly looked back at the map and picked Pine-O-Mine. We raced back down the road and found this farm. They luckily still had apples left to pick. They were a select grower and nestled amongst their tall towering pines were Granny Smith and Fuji trees; two of our favorite varieties for canning. We intended on only getting a few pounds to can as I am running out of empty jars, but we ended up with a half bushel from off of the trees there. Next we ventured to O'Halloran's Apple Trail Ranch. This was another cute farm that had apples pre-picked and sorted into large bins from cold storage. We got another half bushel from these growers. They had all sorts of varieties such as winesap, Rome, and golden delicious among others. They also had pears there, so we picked some of them up too. This particular farm also had pumpkins for ridiculously low prices. Our jack 'o lantern pumpkin was found amongst the sunflowers that dotted their pumpkin patch.

Yesterday was the start of working through the bushel of apples that we bought over the weekend. I love the delicate smell of fresh picked apples, and it was a delightful thing to wake up to that smell in our house. I decided to make sauce today with any of the marginal apples that could cause our good apples to spoil. Applesauce is a very easy thing to make, and it is a great way to use up windfall apples or those with some soft or bad parts to them. Just make sure to completely cut out the damaged parts and compost those pieces. If you are in good with your local grower, this is a great way to save money on your canning as sometimes you can get bruised and windfall apples for a much lower price than pristine apples. Just be sure to ask someone in the know as often times they keep these apples out of sight.

This year I chose to do the sauce in the slow cooker as I wanted to run a bunch of errands. Cooking it this way would free up my time for other things rather than attending a pot of bubbling apple goodness. I made a full recipe from my book; twelve whole pounds of apples were counted out. I made this sauce with a combination of Fuji, for softness and sweetness, and Granny Smith for a firm structure, sour under notes, and lower juice content. I peeled, cored, and rough cut up all the apples. Now I did not get rid of all the cuttings. Those go into a plastic bag in the freezer for later use making pectin for your canning next year or into apple syrup for pancakes. Don't let these things go to waste! Now many people like a totally smooth applesauce, in that case, do not worry about peeling or coring the apples. Just remove the blossom end of the apple and compost that. The blossom end has enzymes that can weaken the natural pectin in the apples. You can then just run the cooked down apples through a food mill right before canning.

The hubby and I personally like chunky applesauce, so the extra peeling and coring are necessary as a food mill is not an option. Once I had the slow cooker as packed to capacity as possible, I added a tiny bit of water to aid the cooking and a very scant cup of sugar. You can feel free to omit the sugar if you want an unsweetened sauce. I also added four tablespoons of lemon juice to help retain the color as well as for added acidity. This is one of those wonderful "set it and forget it" kind of things. I went about my day running errands and picking up around the house. When I would breeze through the kitchen, I would lift up the lid, stir, and chop up the apples in the sauce a bit. After quite some time, the sauce started to finally get saucy and cook down.

After seven or so hours on high, this is what I have. There are distinct areas of sauce and also quite a few big clumps. I could have let this cook longer and continued chopping up the chunks until they were the size I wanted, but dinner needed to be made and these jars needed to get into the water bath. Enter the immersion blender. If you do not have one of these things, I would highly recommend getting one. I never thought I would use one of these as much as I have, but it is a great way of doing many things that would otherwise be a total mess. I am looking at you soup recipes that say to blend them up in a food processor. Now the whole point of not running this through a food mill is that I want some chunkiness, so when I used the blender I only blended up certain areas. I made sure that, even though the immersion blender is a blast to use, I only pulsed it around a few areas.

From here you should taste your sauce. Add sugar if you need to make it sweeter. You can also add spices such as cinnamon, cloves, mace, or nutmeg. I typically choose to not add spices to my canned sauce because I can add it later if needed for a certain recipe. You cannot take it away once it is in the jar after all. Make sure that you leave a generous inch of head space for the jars. I did that this year and still had more siphoning out of the jars than I would like. Perhaps the slow cooker does not keep the sauce hot enough to avoid this problem, or it could be the chunks releasing more of their fluid during the processing. Some day I will figure this out. Twelve pounds made three full quarts and two pints. I also had a little left over for dessert that night. Hopefully this will be enough to get us through to next year... somehow I doubt it!

Canning Week!

2011-10-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

Despite my lack of blog posts, this has not been an idle year for canning. I have done quite a bit, although, I have not done nearly as much quantity as last year. I have tried many different kinds of things in small quantities. I am hoping that by doing some small batch canning I can learn what I like to make and perfect things with out having to eat many, many jars of it. It was very nice when I had my canning partner living out here. I could do full batches of a recipe and split it. It was a good thing to try things at their full recipe to ensure that they had the flavor they were meant to have. Sometimes when recipes are cut, even though the proportions are kept the same, the flavors just don't seem to be quite as vibrant to me. It most likely is just be a personal "perception," not the true reality of the situation. So, in the spirit of trying new things and attempting to get over my want for large quantities of jars bumping around in the water bath, I tried several new recipes this year when the peaches were in season.

I love peaches, and since I missed apricot season this year due to all the traveling, I decided to make extra peach recipes to fill in for the missing favorite of my husband's. I am hoping this stop gap helps me stretch the few jars of apricot that I have left. Often times I can make a one to one substitution for peach jam. This especially works in cases of glazes made for roasted meats. Peach or apricot jam with some soy sauce and freshly graded ginger makes an especially tasty glaze for pork roast or pork chops. A quick filling for crepes, cakes, and jelly rolls, apricot is my go to gal! Peach, however is one of my favorite fruits, so I hope that I can see it into rotation in place of the old family favorite.

Aside from making several jars of plain peach jam, I added some new flavors. One flavor combination I have always enjoyed is peach and ginger. I particularly like peach ginger iced tea. It seemed only natural to try out this combination in jam format. I added candied ginger to a regular peach jam recipe. I mixed up the sugar and peaches, and I cooked the mix until just before the jellying point. At the last most minute, I added finely diced candied ginger. I hoped it would add some nice bite both literally and figuratively to the jam. I have yet to try it, but I will post a Follow Up Friday as soon as I do.

I also made spiced peach jam. I added cinnamon, cloves, and allspice to the jam for this one. I have to say that there is nothing quite like spiced peach jam on a freshly toasted English muffin for a cold morning's breakfast. The warmth of the spice profile on this reminds me of the spiced peach slices I would get in Amish country in Illinois. I tried this one right away as I thought it did not set up correctly. While the set is a bit soft compared to most of my other fruit jams, this is nothing out of the ordinary. My peach always sets a bit loose compared to other fruits. I guess the pectin of the over ripe peaches you get in California farmer's markets must contribute to this, but I would not trade the flavor of the fully ripe peaches for the pectin of less ripe ones.

A new addition to the canning recipes this year was one I found in a Martha Stewart Living magazine. I decided to try out her recipe for bourbon poached peaches. It smelled delicious, and the combination of vanilla and my personal favorite, Jack Daniel's whiskey, made for a good combination. I have not tried any of these yet, but I am looking forward to some peach pancakes. The excess syrup for this recipe tasted wonderful, and I wanted to try to cook it down into a pancake syrup. This turned out to be somewhat disastrous. With the high sugar content, and my patience wearing thing, I tried to cook it down way too fast. I ended up making essentially a hard candy that I then canned into jars. I did not realize the error of my ways until the next day. I tried tipping the jars over to see their wonderful syrup ready for pancakes, but it was solidified in the glass. It almost took a jack hammer to get my jars back, but with enough hot water and elbow grease, I was back to having usable jars.

In the end, I had four jars of wonderfully poached peaches and no jars of pancake syrup. I made sure to cut up the vanilla bean into enough pieces so each jar got one. I hope that this does more than look pretty; I hope it creates an intense flavor of vanilla. I could see this recipe being a great accompaniment to vanilla ice cream or any number of cakes whether they be chiffon, pound, or angel food. As soon as I get a jar open and a good opinion on the recipe, I will also post back with a Follow Up Friday.

I also canned some straight up peach slices and spiced slices. It is a nice change of pace for me to crack open a jar of these summer fruits when in the dead of winter. Having a slight allergy to citrus fruits means that eating seasonally can sometimes be an itchy affair. While I love citrus fruit and do eat it quite often, I can only indulge so much. I have a feeling these will as usual come in handy, especially with that margarita made from peach canning liquid recipe floating around the internet lately.

While peach canning season is most likely over for you all, I thought I would just show off what I was doing all those days when nothing was getting posted up on the blog. I have my work cut out for me this week. I, like everyone else I am reading lately, am headed into a week of apple canning. There is sauce and pie filling to be made. Someday, this will include fresh pressed ciders, but until we have a house this will only be a canning dream. I am also excited to try out a new jelly recipe that is apple based. If it turns out how I am envisioning it will, I will have another thing to reside in the half pints.

There is so much to do, and with holiday crafting on the horizon, I am trying to get as much into every day as I can. Things on the agenda today include weeding the garden plot, hopefully some personal sewing, as well as some holiday crafting... yes I really am going to start in October this year! Then there is the matter of preserving the bushel of apples sitting in the kitchen... For now though, I am off to the garden to make sure all is in order there. As usual, so much to do and seemingly no time to do it in.

Wordless Wednesday - Indoor Cucumber Plant

2011-10-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

People thought I was crazy for trying, but here is the first cucumber growing on my indoor cucumber plant. Not the right conditions for it to grow, but the resiliency of plants is amazing.

Sighs of Contentment

2011-10-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

I know that I keep promising to post to the blog in a regular fashion as well as roll out some new content, but things have just been so crazy. I feel like things are finally starting to get to a point where I can post here more regularly again. I think Juila of What Julia Ate sums up perfectly what I am feeling lately in this blog posting. I feel like I have so many plates spinning that something has to eventually be cut out or the whole delicate balancing act will fall to the ground. Lately it has been the blog that has crashed to the ground. Yet in amongst the crazy spinning, I have wanted to add more things and have been doing so. I have picked back up my cross stitch work and added working on a needle turn applique that I tried to learn at Chaos Wars this year. It was a great class taught by a dear friend, and it made me feel so guilty that the beautiful class piece was sitting there unfinished. There are gifts to be made for tomorrow's birthday celebration, and the up coming holiday crafting season as well. It all starts to feel overwhelming. The garden is humming along, but it is a new thing on the routine that needs constant care and looking after. Then there is the growing list of things to read and knowledge to obtain, dance lessons and being in shape for those strenuous classes. I hate to sound like a complainer, but it seems like there is so much to learn in this lifetime and just so little time to complete it all. I guess fall always turns my thoughts to this as the days become shorter and things begin to die off and go into winter modes. I am striving harder to get organized and make it all work, and I think I am making headway. I mean... here is a blog posting after all! I was also inspired this weekend after the mini Maker Faire to get back to creating and stop worrying so much about the small details... yes read that as house cleaning. I hope to have a canning update for you tomorrow, and I am adding to the schedule a wordless Wednesday. There are always too many pictures and, forgive me fellow 826'ers, but sometimes too little time to write as I would like. Look for Follow Up Friday's as well. I will go back to old projects and give reviews on how things turned out or updates on progress. I am hoping this will also help me stay on top of completing things. Thanks for sticking with me through the inconsistent writing and promises for things that don't ever seem to materialize. I thank you for checking back and reading.

Life is Peachy!

2011-09-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

Life is peachy lately. Things seem to be humming along at a fast pace, and my days are filled with all sorts of urban homesteading activities. Aside from the canning, I now have the garden to tend. Let me tell you, I am loving getting my hands dirty and weeding away. I am also staring Christmas crafting in the face. I hope to get an early start this year... just like every year. For now, though, I am thoroughly busy with canning. As you can see by my lack of posting, most of my time has been occupied with things like canning. At the end of August, it was all about peaches. I bought a 25 pound box of peaches as well as a couple of other pounds along the way for canning projects. The first thing I do when I take home a large box of any produce is to sort it right away looking for any bruised fruit. The bruised fruit gets quarantined from the rest of the lot to ensure that no further spoilage is encouraged. This box had just enough fruit with bruises and spoilage for an early peach cobbler.

This time around, I decided to try out the recipe from Cook's Illustrated. If you do not have a subscription to the website, I highly recommend it. The amount of recipes at your fingertips as well as knowledgeable equipment reviews are well worth the subscription fee in my opinion. I have to say that the recipe was rather fussy, but I felt like it was worth it, at least for the topping. One thing that I do recognize now is that I will no longer be using the boiling water technique in these pictures for peeling peaches ever again. I find that this method does not work very well for my favorite type of peach, the O'Henry. While this is a super freestone peach, it does not want to be skinned for some reason. I have, therefore, decided to only peel them from now on with my awesome Messermeister serrated peeler. Yes the peeler is a bit expensive, but I have to say it is well worth the price. I will, however, miss the beautiful color that the boiling water turns when scalding the peaches. It is the most wonderful purple hue!

The other big advantage of the O'Henry peach is that it remains firm even through cooking. I like that the flesh does not all go to mush when processing it or turning it into a cobbler or pie. The slices still have integrity and a wonderful texture. Here is where the recipe gets a bit fussy, and while the step is totally necessary for a good result, I wished there was another way. The recipe has you macerate and strain off the extra juice from the peaches so that the cobbler does not become a soupy mess. The topping was another story. It was as simple as most recipes, and it resulted in a very tender biscuit due to the addition of yogurt.

I do want to make one more of these before all the fresh peaches have left the market. I especially love the extra crunch on the top of the biscuits that the sugar crusting creates. I do think that I will add a bit more cinnamon to it next time as I am a cinnamon fan. I highly recommend this recipe and have saved it as a favorite. I do have to say, though, that this did not dethrone the Dutch oven cobbler that we made when camping. That was so good, and I am not sure if it was the long hike before dinner, or that it was just really that good that made it taste so delicious. Perhaps some day I will make both at once and taste them side by side. Until then, try out this recipe and for an added touch of awesome, serve it hot with a little scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream!

Grandma Was Right

2011-08-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

Grandparents can be a wealth of information. Mine are no exception. They always have little pearls of wisdom. Sometimes at the time I was not ready or old enough to understand what they were saying, but then I find myself in one of the situations they were talking about, and it all makes sense. When I was really young, I would tell my Grandma that when I got my license to drive I would take us out shopping. (My Grandmother does not drive you see.) She would always smile and tell me that by the time I was able to drive I would be too busy for things like that with her. It seemed kind of hurtful at the time, but she was right. I grew up and was too "busy" with things I thought were important, and I totally forgot about the shopping trip once I got that coveted license.

This situation returned to me in college when I became overwhelmingly busy. I remembered the talk and the missed shopping trip and always regretted it. When I talked to my Grandmother about it, she simply said that life was going to get busier and busier. She related that it was all part of becoming a grown-up and gaining more and more responsibilities. Your free time starts to evaporate. I am feeling that lately. I am not sure where it was that I got so busy, but lately it seems like there are not enough hours in the day to get all that I want done finished. The to do lists stretch out longer and longer, and the check offs become fewer and fewer. I have been wondering what I can do to make things run more smoothly. I have tried using an egg timer to make sure I am on task and not taking too long of breaks for lunch. I have tried to get on a schedule like a school day. I have tried electronic to do lists. I have yet to find my rhythm to successfully getting everything done. Add on this that I don't have kids yet, and it makes me feel even less accomplished.

Somewhere in here I need to find a good way of getting it all done. When I figure it out I will let you all know, and if you are the golden one who has been given this knowledge, please pass it on. Until then, I am off to bake bread for lunch, can peach jelly, make a run to the post office, water the garden, make dinner, and a bunt cake, and hopefully get to that sewing project I cannot seem to get to ever! There is more on the list, but well... I guess I should start that egg timer and get to it!

To Do List:

2011-08-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

Things I HAVE to Do Today:

- Water the garden and look to see if there are seedlings or only weedlings.
- Grocery shop for staples. Need to get sugar and flour especially.
- Can those peaches. Once sugar is obtained, 22 pounds of peaches from Friday await!
- Do some bill paying.

Things I Would Really Like to Do Today as Well:

- Work on some sewing.
- Write my Grandmother... it has been far to long. (This one may move up into the other column).
- Bake bread for the rest of the week's lunches.
- Write a real blog posting.

Golden Gate Garden... Finally a Plot of My Own!

2011-08-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

One of the things I have wanted most for myself lately is a garden. When we lived in Illinois before moving out to the bay in 2007, we lived in a condo. It was a great place, and while we could redecorate the inside however we liked, there was no gardening space. Sure I had some pots of tomatoes on the driveway, but that is not like digging into the ground and being able to plant just about anything you would want. My container gardening continued as an herb garden when we moved into our first place in Oakland. Once we moved into the second place, I had a balcony that I started up container gardening in again. While I did not get too great of results, it helped me to feel like I was still gardening in some capacity. Once we had to move for the third time, I lost my outdoor space to garden. It was something that I was determined to remedy as quickly as possible. While hunting for the current address, I saw the community garden for Emeryville. It was a very well organized garden all in raised beds. The plants in that garden are beautiful and well kept. I called to see if there was anyway that I could get in to the garden. There was of course a long waiting list. I placed my name on the list and was also directed to the Oakland Park District for their community gardening program. I contacted the head of the Golden Gate Community Garden. There was a waiting list there as well, but I was told to not panic as there may be a plot opening soon.

While on our trip across the country for the shuttle launch, I got the e-mail that informed me I would finally have a plot of my own! I was so excited to see where I was going to garden and meet all my new gardening mates. I had dreams of taking over a plot from someone that had a lot of great plants already established. I mean I am sure that whomever I was taking over from had to move or got to old to be able to take care of their space... right? I walked past great plots like this one that is next to mine. I saw beautiful flowers, vines of summer squashes, tomatoes ready to ripen in our late Bay Area summer of fall, and beans ready to be picked. Corn was a surprise to me in the garden, and all of it looked so good! I could not wait! Then.... I was taken to my plot and this is what I found:

Yikes! I was not quite sure what to make of it. If I pulled on one of the sections of the plot, the whole thing moved. I was not ungrateful by any means, but I know it was now going to be a lot of work to take over the plot from the neglect of the previous user. It was covered with lamb's quarters, which I have come to learn are edible and tasty to many people. To me, they were just a super invasive weed that had gone to seed all over the land. I wanted to get to work right away, but I was not ready that first day to start. It just seemed to daunting. I went back on Monday to start working on the plot. I pulled out the biggest of the lamb's quarters and the other plants that I could I worked for two hours on that first day. It seemed like it would never end. For every weed I chopped down with the machete or pulled out by the root, there seemed to be twenty more to come down. Once I got all the biggest stuff taken out, then there was all the grass that had taken root as well as some plants from the person who had the plot before.

I would take frequent breaks to inspire myself to keep going. One of the garden plots that I kept looking to for a boost was the plot directly in front of mine. The cosmos in this garden are a great shade of purple and would brighten my outlook. I would also go to the front of the garden and scope out a few ripe raspberries off of the community raspberry bushes. I would also just take a break in the shade and listen to all the hummingbirds zip and call through the trees and plants.

After two hours of work, this was the result... not quite where I had hoped but at least a good start. The biggest stuff was either cut down to the ground to get it out and prevent more seeds reaching the ground or it was taken out roots and all. There was still quite a bit of green matter all over the plot that needed to be raked out, and the most stubborn of the lamb's quarters needed to be dug out with a shovel. I decided to let it go for the day. Besides, I needed to get somethings done around the house, like making dinner! So, I put all the tools away, and I decided to tackle the rest of the job the next day.

I headed out for the plot with renewed vigor yesterday. I brought with me all sorts of seed packets, fertilizers, and bright eyed bushy tailed enthusiasm. I could see and end point in sight. I could see getting seeds into the ground! I was so excited. It should come as no surprise that when I get this excited about things, there is going to be something to put me back to Earth from my proverbial cloud nine. It was then that I met one of the other gardeners. She was a wealth of information and a great person to talk with and bounce off ideas. It was then that I came to the conclusion that I would not be planting anything today except weeds. Yes you heard that right, planting the weeds. My new gardening mentor explained that since the lamb's quarters had gone to seed and had seeded itself into the plot it would be better off to put my seeds for a week. I should turn over the plot, rake it, and then water it as though I had planted. As she told me she once heard from a gardening mentor: One year's seeds is seven years weeds. I am sure she is right on this one.

So while it seemed kind of disheartening to put off my planting for another week, it is a much better overall plan to let these seeds come to germination and then weed all the plot at once. That way I do not have to make sure I am only taking out weeds and not my seedlings. I set to turning over the plot. It was rather difficult as the grass and weeds had made quite the mat of roots to bust. Once I got all the dirt turned over and broken up, I raked it out to a even bed, and then raked one more time to remove any little clumps of root balls or more of the lamb's quarters stumps. I did find a few carrots, beets, and radishes that were left over from the previous plot user. Once it was all said and done, I soaked the plot well and crossed my fingers that I can get quite a few of these seeds out using this technique. I left for home feeling sore and ready for lunch... also rather sunburned. Next time I will remember the sunscreen and a shirt that actually covers my back fully rather than one that I think covers my back. You would think I would have learned this lesson by now! Look for more updates from the garden as I learn about four season growing, something new to this former Midwesterner. Till then, happy growing if you have a garden to tend or happy dreaming if you are still awaiting a plot of your own.

Month of Vacation

2011-08-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

So for the month of June, I kept alluding to the upcoming vacation that the hubby and I were taking. We finally took off for our vacation at the beginning of July. We headed out on a cross country road trip to see the last shuttle launch of Atlantis. It was a long road trip from California to Florida. I called it our coast to coast to coast trip. Since we have decided to no longer fly due to currently TSA policies, we have had to make some decisions on how we are traveling. This time we chose to drive, and it was overall a very eye opening, but fun trip. We would drive at least twelve hours a day in order to make it in time to see the launch. The days were long, but we would break up the monotony with my afternoon news reports reading the news aloud as well as reading about different topics that we would wonder about. I read about everything from armadillos to Saltair to The Thing?. Don't click on that last one if you love roadside attractions and don't want the I-10 The Thing ruined for you. The biggest stand out of the trip out was the great food at Peck's Seafood in Slidell, Louisiana. We tried our best to support as many local and small businesses on this trip as possible. Many of our meals were at small mom and pop type places or out of our cooler rather than going the usual fast food route. The food at Peck's was amazing and huge. The staff there was super friendly and attentive. My big favorites there was the crab and corn chowder as well as the oyster po boy. The shrimp platter had more food than you could shake a stick at. It was a great place, a little ways off the interstate but well worth the side trip for some good fried seafood.

Finally we ended up in Titusville the day before the launch, and we had to go to bed early. The wake up call for us on launch day was 2:30 in the morning. We needed to be at Kennedy Space Center at 4:00 am, so we made our lunches and headed out for the day. The trip out took only 50 minutes. Once we got to the center and headed through security, our next stop was to get on a bus tour. We got on one of the last bus tours for the day. It was neat to see the buildings in the dark all lit up with flood lights for the launch. The vehicle assembly building definitely gave me shivers as we drove past it. We went out to the Saturn V center to see the rocket (pictured above) and the control center. I have to say that aside from the launch and watching the sun rise over the launch vehicle from the Saturn V center, this was my favorite thing at Kennedy. It was a well done recreation of the launch sequences that used to take place out of the control room. The windows rattle, the room rumbles, and the screens on the desks show the views that each person would have seen.

We decided to just watch and experience the launch when it happened rather than try to take pictures or watch it with binoculars.I am glad that we did this. It was spectacular to watch, and I am so glad we got to be there to experience it. The light from the shuttle was so intense, and it was the best example of the difference between the speed of light vs. the speed of sound. We did not hear the sound of the launch until after the shuttle was out of sight through the clouds, around 22 seconds after the launch started. We did take pictures of ourselves in front of the exhaust trail before heading to our bus for the trip back from Banana Creek Causeway to the visitors center. I don't look too bad for having only a few hours of sleep before the early pre-dawn arrival time. It was on the bus that we realized we made the right choice to watch rather than try to capture the fleeting moment of the launch. Many people were lamenting that they saw nothing and had no pictures to show for it either. I was so glad that I saw it and love the memory of that moment.

After the launch we headed back across the country. We went to St. Petersburg, Flordia next. A quick stop was made at The Dali Museum. It was well worth the side trip. The museum has some very neat pieces, and while I wished we had a bit more time than we did, it was a nice diversion from the usual days of driving. We then went out to dinner at a great local restaurant in Maderia Beach called Walt'z Fish Shak. The staff can be kind of brisk, and the place is populated by locals, but once they realize you are there for their true seafood versus one of the many chain places, all that melts away. Make sure you arrive well before 6 pm as items from the small menu disappear soon after that time. All the fish is fresh caught that day and prepared very well. We had a great time there and headed off for the next destination. We stopped in Paducah, Kentucky for a quick quilt shop browse, and I left with some great fabrics for a few aprons before the main event, Kansas City Barbeque. This time through, we stopped at the original Arthur Bryant's. It was great, and I totally recommend that you visit the one in the industrial part of town. Looking at their smoke box was amazing. The crew there is fast and efficient, and we ate ourselves silly.

From there we headed toward Rocky Mountain National Park. That was a great camping trip. We spent three days at the park camping and hiking around the mountains. We took the Alberta Falls trail up to Lock Vale. It was a moderate hike, and it only became difficult once we hit the snow pack. We had no poles with us, so it was all sorts of hands and knees scrambling to get up to certain places. The waterfalls were spectacular as the snow was very heavy this year and the rainstorms in the area have also been plentiful. We packed in our lunch and took a leisurely six mile round trip hike. The weather was perfect, and despite my thoughts that we were going to get poured on from the rain in the afternoon, a drop never fell on us. It fell on the campsite, but not on us.

The Loch was worth the extra trip up. We originally planned a shorter hike, but we wanted to make it up to Thompson Falls. Once we learned from other hikers that the upper falls was obstructed from view by ice and snow, we decided the loch was far enough. The water was super clear, and you could see all the fish swimming by. The local YMCA camp was doing some sort of initiation rite by having the campers jump into the glacier fed water. It was cold for sure, and while I am sure the kids enjoyed it from their triumphant yells, there was no way I was going into that cold water. We made our way down for a night of star gazing back at the campsite and got to see some wildlife up and personal that night. Deer were feeding on the grass just behind our tent, and a huge male elk was also feeding at the front of the campground.

The sunsets up in Rocky Mountain were spectacular. This was the view from our picnic table one night. It was just a beautiful tapestry of clouds and color every night. From there we headed home after a two week journey. It was great. I then had five days to recover and get packed before heading off to Chaos Wars in Idaho for eleven days. That was also very fun. It is always good to get to see old friends and get some combat archery under my belt for the year. I danced at the bonfires, and was delighted to make some new friends as well as reconnect with some old ones. Now I am getting back into the swing of homemaking, and there is a lot to do. While it is a well oiled machine, starting back up from an almost month long absence is difficult to say the least. There are piles of laundry to do, rooms to clean, and equipment to store. Costumes need repair, and I need sleep to get over my usual "Chaos Cough." A lot has gone on, and new plans are in the works. Check back for more updates and a new feature to the blog hopefully starting this Friday! It is good to be back, and I cannot wait to start in on all that my mind wants to do!

Pickle Relish

2011-06-29T11:20:00.000-07:00

I often make up my canning plans for the week when I am at the Farmer's Market. You never know what you are going to find at a steal of a deal. These cucumbers for instance were one of those fun surprises. I was headed out of the market after arriving rather late in the day when I spotted a stall with these wonderful cucumbers bagged up together. Sometimes at the end of the day, the stall owners will bag up produce that has not sold yet and offer it at rock bottom prices. I asked how much for the bag, and I was told one dollar. Sold! I am totally in for figuring out what to do with some extra cucumbers. I decided to try my hand a sweet pickle relish as we were almost out of our store bought jar.

One of the things I forget about pickles in general is to take into account the soak time. I made several false starts on this project, getting all the ingredients out and washing up my jars, then reading the instructions and seeing a four hour soak time. I think next year I will take a page from Ashley English and do my soak over night rather than having to wait around for it. The other thing I will consider is trying the cutting part in the blender. I did this all by hand, and I agree with my husband that the pieces may be too big. Lesson learned. I have read about successful relish being made in a blender, but I was rather leery at trying it the first time out of the gate. I cut up all my ingredients into as small as pieces as I could manage. It took a LONG time. Then, they went into the brine for a nice long soak. Finally the pickling brine was made up in the pot and the now drained and rinsed vegetables were added to the hot brine.

I got the recipe I followed out of my Mom's old Ball Blue Book from the 1960's. They refer to this as "cucumber relish" not sweet pickle relish. I did tweak the recipe in a minor way, cutting the turmeric way back because we are just not big fans of a super turmeric flavor in our pickles. I ended up with four nice jars of relish. I cannot wait to see what this stuff tastes like. It is as though we have bough the endless jar of relish since we still have not finished it, and it has been several weeks since I made the relish. I guess I will just have to take a jar with us on the camping trip and "field" test it on hotdogs fresh off the fire. Follow up on the flavor and things I would change or not change will be posted as soon as I get a good opinion on the results.

Summer is Here?

2011-06-28T10:22:00.001-07:00

It has hardly felt like summer around here this year. The temperatures have been cooler than normal, and the rain has been around later than the last few years we have been here. It is in fact raining again today! Very odd for the bay area from what I understand. Under this odd set of weather, I have had a hard time getting it through my head that it is summer. One of the ways that I have tried to get myself into believing it is summer is by burying my head in camping plans. Thinking of being out in the woods in a tent makes my mind turn to thoughts of summer instantly.

I wanted to decorate a bit for the Independence Day holiday this year. Nothing big, but I wanted some little touch to further remind me that yes, in fact, it is summer. I decided to make some simple place mats for the table. We have been eating in front of the table more and more since it is no longer situated so close to the television. With the television being a floor below, it is quite a hassle to bring everything down to eat, so meals at the table have been adopted. This means that we go through table linens at a much faster rate. I thought some Independence Day themed ones would be a welcomed addition to the collection. I made these with fabrics I purchased off of Fabric.com. I have found them to be a really great company. They are helpful, and the free shipping after hitting the $35 threshold is also a nice touch. They often run sales, and the discount corner is a great place to pick up some nice deals. Overall, I find their prices to be competitive with retail giants. This does not mean that I am abandoning my locally owned shops, but they are a nice alternative to other places and carry some different things from my local shops.

I decided to go with double sided as it is the easiest option now with the serger. I did not want to work on mitering corners as this was supposed to be a super fast and fun project. If you did not have a serger, you could put the pieces right sides facing, sew them together leaving a small opening, and then tun the fabric right sides out, press, and sew your opening closed. I liked the added touch the red rolled hem added to the linens. I picked a less overtly Americana for the backside so they can be used off season as well.

Well I think I am going to take advantage of the rainy day seeing as those are my most productive. There is a birthday present that needs to be sewn up as well as some costume items for my impending Chaos Wars trip. Hopefully I get all these things done before I have to leave! There is always so much to do lately... I love it!

Refresh, Restart, Reorganize

2011-06-27T11:28:00.000-07:00

Short but sweet posting up for you today. I am currently looking forward with great anticipation both my vacation with the husband as well as my attendance at Chaos Wars. I am in dire need of some refreshment from the daily grind. It is going to be nice to break out of my usual routines and get out of the city. There are times when the city seems too closed in, and I long for some open space and a large canopy of trees overhead rather than buildings.

There is so much to do, and it seems like so little time. I am currently redoubling my efforts to get in shape for the event so that the 5000 foot altitude does not wipe me out quite as fast as it usually does. That takes a big chunk out of my day, not that I am complaining, just explaining. I am glad to be restarting on that part of my life again. Running went by the wayside during the winter due to the rain, and it kept off my plate due to the extended rain that we had this year. I am back at it now and enjoying myself very much. I just hope I can keep up the training while we are traveling.

Last but not the least by any means is the big kitchen reorganization project. The kitchen is the one place I need to get working immediately once we move into a new place. It truly is the engine room of our house, so when we moved this winter, I went about making it functional as fast as possible. Just because it was functional does not mean it is efficient. That is where the great reorganization comes into being. The pantry of this particular place is very unfriendly to anyone who cooks a great deal. We have one of those long thing pantries, with a small set of double doors, not enough shelves, and no pull out drawers. Essentially, if you want something toward the back of a shelf, you have to take everything out and put it on the counter until you can get back to the thing you need. Then, you need to take everything and put it back into the cabinet to regain the counter space to be able to cook. Forget an ingredient? Start the frustrating process all over again. Add on top of this design issue my massive amounts of canning, well not massive by most canner's standards, but massive by non-canners, and you have a recipe for disaster. So, for the past few weeks, I have been thinking and plotting and planning with my husband for how to redo this mess. I think we are in the beginning stages of a breakthrough, but it is hard to say as there is stuff all over the kitchen. Jars of jelly, pots and pans, live currently side by side with baskets of dried fruit. The chaos is maddening, and I feel like I cannot get anything done in the house with the kitchen all ripped up like this, but the end is near. The only way to get done is to go through, and that is what I am in the midst of doing. On that note, I guess I should try to tackle another shelf!

Tea for Two... or Four

2011-06-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

One of the projects that I completed in my time off from blogging was this wonderful tea set for one of the niece's birthdays. It was super fun to make, and while rather time consuming due to all the parts and pieces, it turned out beautifully. Hopefully my sister is not ready to string me up by my toes for invading their house with yet another toy with a million pieces. What can I say, I love felt toys and cannot stop myself once I get started on them. This project was inspired by my niece's love for all things girly and dress up. Her favorite colors of pink and purple are all over this set made just for her.

I got the main idea from the ladies over at Prudent Baby. I like the concept of the tea set that could be folded up in itself for storage. I found the cupcake fabric and purple dot fabric at the store and set to work. The sewing itself was rather straightforward and easy to do as their tutorial is very thorough with easy to follow directions. I did, however, use the serger to put together the double sided place mats as well as edging of the napkins. It was just easier on me to do it that way, so I did not have to iron under any of the seams. The rolled edges also gave it some contrast which I also liked.

In order to dress up the napkins more, I added a little applique style decoration. I used up some of the scrap from the cupcake fabric to add a little cupcake detail to one of the corners. Once I cut out the circles from the cupcake fabric, I simply zigzag stitched at an almost zero stitch length to cover over the raw edge. Doing this type of satin stitch in a circle can be challenging. Just go slow and take your time as well as perhaps adjust the bobbin tension a bit to ease around those curves. I liked this better for my personal project. It tied the whole thing together in a project specific way.

The tea set pattern was purchased from Ume Crafts on Etsy. She makes great felt food patterns that are just too cute to pass up. I have done several of her patterns, and this was just as high quality as the others. The only draw back to this pattern is the tea box. My nieces and nephew apparently really wanted a working lid on this. It resulted in much dismay when they could not put the tea bags back into the box. I don't think this is anything against the pattern, just a thing to consider if your particular tea party goers want super realistic functioning tea storage. I thought the tea pot was going to be difficult to put together, but it was just as easy as can be due to the wonderfully written directions. The set looks beautiful, and I love how it looks like a real grown up set versus the usual cartoon looking ones.

The other option about this set that is fun is the reversible sides. If the pink cupcake table cloth is too much for you on a particular day, flip it over and you have a more calm purple side. Then, you can flip over the place mats for a touch of the cupcake goodness. It makes the entire set look like a new toy, and I hope that keeps the kids extra busy with combinations of the colors and settings. This tea set also seems to have brought out the old cakes and even the sushi set that I made out of felt for the girls a few years ago.

Going with the princess and dress up theme, I made sure to add one more thing to the table, crowns and wands. I found these on the site of Lu Bird Baby. I tried to make sure that I had a color for everyone. There is green for the oldest as that is her favorite color, pink for the birthday girl, purple for Mom as I am sure she will be invited, and even this blue set for the younger brother or Dad. I was sure all would be roped into tea parties and wanted to make sure everyone had representation in the crown and wand category. The tutorial over at Lu Bird is also very easy to follow. This was a fun quick project that let me use up all sorts of odds and ends of saved ribbon.

All of these things can then get folded up into the table cloth that becomes a gigantic bag. The only drawback of the drawstring bag is the ribbon drawstrings. In order to make the strings long enough to gather up the whole cloth, they end up being way too long for practicality. Very whimsical, but also not super practical for the kids to use alone. Typically when putting this all away adult assistance is needed.

Overall I think this was a great project. The level of all the sewing/crafting on this is easy with a moderate for the tea set itself. The cutting level on this project is intense. I was very happy to have the Klick-n-Kut for this one. It makes felt crafting so much more fun due to not having to cut out all those little pieces. I hope this inspires you to put together something fun this weekend.

Meltdown!

2011-06-23T11:27:00.001-07:00

Ok so some of you are starting to scratch your heads. Some of you are giving me the stink eye or the brush off. I know, I know... I promised to stay up to date with the blog more often, and I truly wanted to do this. This time circumstances beyond my control kept me from writing. My computer suffered a total meltdown. I picked up a nasty virus somewhere, and it did some major damage to the computer. It required a total reformat of my hard drive and reinstall of everything. It also could not have happened at a worse time for my IT department. The husband had recently switched jobs and was working on a new start-up that needed to get code up and running in a timely fashion. Not being one to stand in the way of things like this, I patiently, well not always patiently, waited for the hubby's schedule to free up enough to get things running. While I had skeleton service for a while, specific things like my photo editing software and the Klick-N-Kut were not on and reconfigured for me until very recently. A lot has happened between late April and now late June. The new pictures are from.... Easter..... I know it seems kinda funny to post them, but they were so pretty that I felt the need to post them all the same even if they are out of season.

This year was the first year we had our new lamb cake mold. More on that in a later posting. It was neat to have one of these cakes during the holiday again, and now that we have the molds, it is even more interesting to know how they work. No you do not glue anything together with frosting, and yes that lamb was baked as one piece. It was a white cake interior with boiled seven minute frosting and coconut for the fur. When Easter comes around again, I will post up the recipe for those of you with molds and no guidance. I also thought this would be in a way timely to remind people that are hitting the tag sale/ garage sale/ yard sale circuit to keep your eyes open for things like this. It is hard to think about things like lamb cake molds for a spring holiday when Independence Day is right around the corner, but there are good deals to be had now on things like this. Storing them away after a steal of a price is much more satisfying than paying more around the actual holiday due to not realizing possibilities earlier.

Well now that the "situation" is explained, there is a lot that I have on my mind to talk about. I mean, I had a few months to accumulate pictures and thoughts. Needless to say there will be more postings up on canning, including a new feature on reporting my thoughts on last year's results in order to modify and inform my canning plans for this year. I hope you find those reviews helpful. I am also taking up embroidery in some other forms and hope to have some new projects to show off as well as the quilt that I have finally started cutting out. The time for talk on these projects is over; I am ready for action! Speaking of which, the library has just contacted me about a book I wanted to read and review for the blog, so I suppose I should put myself into action and walk over to pick it up. I am happy to be back and hope to win you all over to reading here again. Look for updates here as well as on my Twitter stream. Enjoy today, and I cannot wait to write something up for tomorrow!

Bagel Maddness

2011-04-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

In this past years of trying to eat healthier and get in shape, I have taken to really reading labels on food again. I used to do this a lot in college, mostly because I had to for many of my classes. It was something that was always interesting to me but not a dire thing that I lived by. It was not until I took a food and nutrition class that things like additives and preservatives became a concern for me, and I made some small changes. Margarine and butter like spreads were banned from the house. I tried to make some efforts to cut back on corn syrups and other additives, but then life took over. I was a busy working person and had less and less time to look at things, and the husband was right in the same boat with me, too busy to notice. Once I left the working world for my new calling as a homemaker, label reading came back into vogue for me.

We began to eat healthier foods, and most of our food began as pure elements into the finished product rather than prepared fair that was matched together in a menu. I was, however, still packing on the weight in a way that I did not particularly relish. One of the biggest culprits I found, breakfast. I love breakfast... it is my favorite meal of the day. I started to notice, however, that I was eating large breakfasts every day regardless of how hungry I was. One of the biggest issues in the big breakfast and portion size was the bagel. I love bagels, I could eat them just about every day, and sometimes I even substitute them in for dinner and lunch. It was looking at this staple of our house that I found a calorie culprit. I am not a big fan of eating only one half of a bagel, and that was the serving size on the package. Then I looked at the total calories when eating both sides. Yikes! Too many for a meal, and that was not including the cream cheese or peanut butter on top, or the yogurt or fruit on the side! I needed to find smaller bagels.

This search for smaller bagels resulted in finding only those tiny bite sized ones that people would use to make bagel pizza bites. This also, surprisingly only came in plain most times as well. I did finally find one type made for a local discount grocery chain that were small enough with few enough calories to qualify. I was, however, disappointed in their construction. No real chewy skin, few raisins to speak of, and the cinnamon flavor was severely lacking. I decided to go down the path of homemade. This, unlike my attempts at replacing English muffins, went smashingly. I turned to my trusty Reinhart's Artisan Bread Everyday book for advice. He had a wonderfully easy recipe for bagels. I thought this had to be too good to be true. I spend about 20 minutes tops at the mixer, let things rest, shape and then into the fridge for two days to ferment. This is by far the hardest thing about the recipe, remembering to start these with enough time to have a new batch before you run out of them. From there it is a trip to the boiling water concoction and into the oven. So easy, and so worth it to make bagels from scratch. I still have to work on my shaping skills, but they come out wonderfully.

A few notes on things I have learned from this. Make a double batch of the dough. It really is worth your time and effort to make two sets as the boiling liquid uses barley malt syrup, the only expensive item in the recipe. I like to get the most bang for my buck, so making a double batch means only making one batch of poaching liquid and less waste as the liquid is discarded after boiling the bagels. I also find that I eat them so fast that a double batch makes me have to work on this remembering two days in advance business. I also let my bagels cool completely, place them into a plastic bag, and then freeze them. This keeps them in good condition longest. Remember that with out stabilizers and preservatives, mold can creep into these breads faster. I hope that this recipe review is helpful. I find myself turning to his book more and more for things. Hopefully I can work on my English muffin technique more soon to come up with some notes on how that quest is going. I think I may have the right recipe, just not the right technique yet. Practice makes perfect, and eating my mistakes is at least not that painful.

New Shoots

2011-04-07T11:32:00.000-07:00

I find that spring always gives me a renewed need to start new things. I have been wanting to get into quilting for some time, and at this point I think I will actually start that soon. I have a few more pressing projects to attend to first, but that will happen this year before summer arrives. One thing that I am refusing to give up is working with plants and dirt. I love having a house full of living things, whether they be people or plants. For most of the time, I have to settle for plants. Being a homemaker in a modern world yields few others in my position to be in the home during a week day rather than just weekends. To fill my need for living things, I have decided to fill our new place again with plants.

One of the hardest things for me in the move was having to leave behind my outdoor gardening space on the balcony. We looked for a new place that would have the same accommodation for me but it was not to be. In some ways I am glad for this. I find it interesting in a way to work with plants in a way that they are not necessarily intended to grow. It is a personal challenge I guess. This started with my container gardens out on the patio in not so great light. Some things worked and others failed miserably. It really was not about being able to feed ourselves, but rather to see what I could make happen under non-ideal conditions. This new garden is under the same umbrella. I saved the Meyer lemon, rosemary, and chives from the outdoor garden. All of the other things I have started over. The first picture is my newest attempt at cucumbers. I found a packet of seeds specifically for container gardens rather than the vine style i have tried and failed with in the past. They seem to be enjoying themselves thus far, and I hope to get just one edible cucumber off of the three that I have tried. There is always hope right? The trellis from the jasmine is being used this time to support peas. I am not sure if the trellis will work well for them as the space between each contact point are kind of far from each other. It seemed like a fun thing to give a try to and see what happens. All of the peas have germinated, which is better than I can say for the patio. Hopefully we can get some peas off of the plants being indoors just like I did when they were outdoors. The plants did not bear enough for a meal by any stretch of the imagination, but they were good tossed on a salad or supplementing some from the farmer's market.

I am also trying some greens. The spinach was doing well on the porch before we had to leave, so I am hoping it can do something here inside as well. They have really taken off after germinating, and they are even bigger today than this picture I took yesterday. The front planter has another new try at something, baby butter lettuce. There was another potted plant style seed I found for baby heads of butter lettuce. I thought, hey why not try that as well, so I bought a packet and cannot wait to see what happens. The final thing I planted into dirt that has sprouted is a new herb garden. I did not take pictures as the shoots are even more tiny than the greens pictured here. Hopefully this takes off as I love being able to clip fresh herbs from my own planters right when I need them. What about the Aerogarden? It is still going. I tore everything out of it when we moved and took some time off from this one. About a month ago, though, I wen to a hydroponics store and bought some medium cups from them to try in it. What a difference the right material makes. I am currently giving my thyme a head start and it looks great. The sponges I have tried to use in the past end up becoming sludge and moss factories. This medium has stayed shapely and supportive for the plant. I cannot wait to start the other herbs and some cherry tomatoes today. While all of these experiments are fun, I am still keeping my fingers crossed that I get into the community gardens that I have signed up for. Till then, I will plant what I can around here and wait for the Alpine strawberries to germinate. For today, more bread baking experiments of the English muffin variety and planting of herbs before heading off to tutor and dance classes. I hope this spring brings new shoots of interest to you and that you find new enjoyment in the every day.

Thousand Island - Homemade Dressings

2011-04-06T11:33:00.000-07:00

Recently I realized that we had gone slightly overboard in the salad dressing department. We had an entire shelf on the door of our fridge filled with half finished dressings, some way out of date. It got me to thinking, I really like variety and choice in my dressings, but with only two of us in the house it is hard to finish them up quickly. Enter into this picture, Thousand Island dressing. I really like Thousand Island dressing, once in a while. It can be great on a seafood salad and is a necessary component in Reuben sandwiches. When Dan wanted to have Reubens this week, I realized that we had no dressing for them. The last time we bought Thousand Island, we used less than a quarter of the bottle, and it sat and sat in the fridge until it went bad and had to be thrown out. I decided this time that I did not want to waste money and food by buying a bottle that would never get finished. I decided to embark on my new food adventure of making my own dressings.

Thousand Island is a really interesting dressing when you make it yourself. You never really think about what is in dressing that you get from the bottle, but this one got me to thinking about it. I looked over several recipes from The Joy of Cooking to my trusty Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. I have made the occasional vinaigrette or specialty dressing for a specific salad, but this was new territory. I have to say that this dressing is very interesting as it seems to throw in every condiment including the kitchen sink. It starts with a mayo or salad dressing (read as the trade marked Miracle Whip) and then adds to it chili sauce. From there you heap in Worcestershire sauce and horseradish and add in olives and finely chopped onions and green and red pepper. Then, for good measure, add in a hard cooked egg and you have Thousand Island. I cut the recipe in half, and it still seemed like too much for us to have. I think for this particular dressing I need to only make a fourth of the full amount. This first dressing was mostly a success. I have to say that it turned out a little too sweet when using the salad dressing rather than mayonnaise. While I am not making my own mayonnaise yet, I do have to say I think this is the end of the store bought salad dressing era. I am going to buy some glass bottles to store it in and make small batches so none goes to waste. It is an exciting new area to expand into for homemade, and I am looking forward to it. Some will have to stay as store bought as we really like them a lot, but others I am ready to experiment with and learn to make. Here's to new avenues of homemade!

Jogging Again and .... Loving it?!

2011-04-04T11:46:00.000-07:00

Last year around this time I started trying to become a runner. I loathed running in all forms, and that may come as a shock to some as I was a soccer player for 12 years. In those 12 years, though, I played goalkeeper.... little running involved there. Also, when I would go to the doctor and have my blood pressure taken, I was always asked if I ran marathons due to my low resting heart rate and blood pressure. I usually felt kind of embarrassed and joked that I only run when chased, but as the weight started to build as my life become more and more sedentary by leaving behind my careers, I realized it was time to change all that. So, last year I started trying to jog. It was a really hard thing to start, and there were several missteps along the way to actually committing last year. I kept with the couch to 5K plan for the most part. I never got to doing the full 5K, but I was up to running two miles a day for three days a week. Running was still a chore for me though.

Then I read this psychological study about people who did not like eating chocolate. I really love chocolate, so this seems like a really odd thing to me, but I guess they found a bunch of people who hated chocolate. These people were to eat the chocolate and tell themselves they loved chocolate and were a chocolate lover in fact. At the end of the study, the people responded to questionnaires that they actually loved chocolate. Some even indicated that they could not go a day with out eating chocolate. I decided to apply this to my running. I called myself a runner. When people asked if I ran, I said of course and that I really love it. Over time, I think this has worked to me as well to some extent.... I love chocolate... I mean running!

So things were going well, and then the move and the holidays hit as well as the rain coming for the winter here. This made the running stop. Oddly, during the time when I could not run, I actually missed it. I wanted to get back to running. I am not sure if it is because I was becoming successful at jogging or if the psychology of "I am a runner" worked, but something was working. Finally I went for a walk or two last week to try to find a good jogging route, but there was a problem, my old jogging shoes had worn out and were giving me huge blisters when walking. This weekend, I went out and got new jogging shoes. No excuses this morning, I got out my new shoes and headed off. I was able to complete the two miles with way less walking than I thought. I was really proud, especially when I thought back to my start last year and how hard it was for me to even complete a half mile of jogging with lots of walking, it was nice to jog a half mile no sweat even after a five month break. I am already feeling sore though, but through the soreness I am also feeling way more awake and ready to do things today. I hope the energy boosts keep up as I start back into jogging. Day one this year down, day two on Wednesday... I am ready for you!

English Muffin Experiments

2011-03-31T11:23:00.001-07:00

The quest to find an English muffin recipe that I like as well as the store bought variety continues. I have tried several recipes, and this one ended up with the same results: not enough nooks and crannies for my liking. Through these experiments, I have come to find that there seem to be two schools of English muffins. The first is the Thomas' or Bay's school of thought, more like a crumpet and less like a roll. The dough on the outside is definitely all roll with some good chew and a little crust; the inside reveals a velvety softness that is held aloft by huge air pockets. Fork split is the only option as knife cutting mars the pockets left by the leavening. The other type is decidedly more bread like and no where near a crumpet. This has its merits too, but it is not what I am look to replicate. I would love to replace the expensive store bought ones for a cheaper but just as tasty and craggy delicate product.

This time I tried the recipe from Reinheart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. This recipe was one that is completed in one day, but it made a bread style dough. From the outset I was afraid that this one would end up like the old Fleshman's recipe I had tried. These muffins that are more dough based are more like a lightened up dinner roll style dough. There is kneading and shaping involved. I kept thinking that perhaps somehow these could end up with the airy middles, but that was not to be. They cooked up really tall and the browning I achieved on this set is probably the best I have ever reached. These also take some time in the oven after the initial skillet cooking. They had great flavor and were very soft and pleasant, but not what I was looking for in terms of school one of English muffins. I did make sure to fork split them just in case I was wrong, but alas, no really big nooks or crannies to be found. The crumb was nice and the muffin was rather light, but it was not the recipe I was looking to keep.

If you do fall into the more substantial English muffin school of thought, these were very easy to make with little hands on time. Their flavor was good, and we enjoyed using them with eggs Benedict as well as with some homemade jam and marmalade. I am looking at a new recipe that I think may finally be the winner. This one is more of a batter like dough that needs to be spooned into crumpet rings on the griddle and the muffins do not go into the oven at all. The pictures look promising, and other home bakers who have blogged about their use of the recipe have pictures that look exactly like what I am questing to achieve. As soon as we get more bread flour and finish off the last of these muffins, I will dive in and let you know my results.

Is There Anybody Out There?

2011-03-29T10:32:00.000-07:00

So I am sure a few of you have been wondering where I went, and I am sure for many of you, since I fell off your blog roll, have forgotten about things here entirely. It has been a very busy and tumultuous four months. I know that I usually disappear for the month of December and return in January with my holiday in review postings of the gifts I had made that year. I had hoped to do that again this year, but well life kind of got in the way. It has a way of doing that as we all know too well. However, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel, and end to the rush, a pot of gold under the rainbow? Nah, but it was a beautiful one out of the window of our apartment.

I am pretty sure I mentioned somewhere in the blog that we had to move. Our apartment in Oakland that we rented was bought by a new owner, and they wanted to live there. Sine we had no long term lease with the builder, we had to move. It was hectic trying to find a new apartment during the fall holidays. I was spending all my time working on gifts and apartment hunting. I am not sure if any of you have had to find a new place around the holidays, but if you have you know that it is not a pleasant experience. Most people move in the spring, so there were minimal places available to view. The ones that were available were not ones that would fit us very well. Then, a seemingly good thing happened. One building across the street from ours had an opening for February 1st. It was a great loft space, and we jumped at the chance to stay in our neighborhood. We contacted the new landowners and they graciously offered us an extension on our 60 terminate notice. All seemed to be heading in the right direction.

Then things got substantially more interesting. The TSA changed their security procedures, and Dan and I began to feel uncomfortable about flying. We decided to opt out of our plane tickets back to the Midwest and drive home instead of flying. It was an interesting time as the storms along I 80 were rather bad and very snowy. A three day drive turned quickly into a long four day trek. We had fun along the way and listened to a lot of holiday music as the blue Subaru and the two of us glided along the two lane interstates that had become one slow line of trucks and cars driving down the middle of the roadway. I had grand plans of getting the sewing done on my projects in the car as well as filling out our holiday cards. All lofty goals, none of which were completed. Some people had to receive store gifts this year and no cards were sent. It was a bit too nerve racking to sew when the roads were so slick.

The holidays went by quickly, and it was so great to see all my family all together in one place. It was especially nice to see the kids open their handmade gifts. They are finally at a fun age where presents are extremely exciting. After an all too short time at home, we packed up and headed out for the trek home, this time through the southern I 40 route in an attempt to avoid the snow. This winter it seemed impossible to beat it as we were held up for a four day drive again when the snow closed the roads through New Mexico and Arizona. We were never unlucky enough to have to sleep in the car, managing to literally wish on a falling star and get a hotel room late one night when the roads were closed. We wanted to spend some time in Las Vegas, and we did.... Las Vegas New Mexico. No casinos or floor shows, but a pretty nice hotel with a great staff that cut us a deal on the room due to the snow storm stranding us.

Overall, the road trip and holiday was a true Dan and Amy style adventure. The only setback, we had lost our apartment that we were going to rent. The person we were renting from was going to be transferred to work in Australia, but that fell through, and so did our apartment for the next year. We scrambled quickly to get our second choice place, and boy am I glad it worked out this way. We had to move from the old neighborhood, but the new one is much better for us in a lot of ways. There are grocery stores and fabric stores in walking distance from the house. There is a shuttle system to take us from our door to the BART, so I can do things on my own later into the evening without needing a ride from the station to our house anymore. There are lots of restaurants also with in walking distance and several community gardens that I am now on a waiting list for entry.

From there it has been the usual packing and moving... oh and unpacking that is still going on, yes since February. Having a completely different style of place from the last two has made this move more trying in the packing and unpacking department. We are now in a tri-level condo instead of a single floor and mostly open floor plan. This means lots of going up and down stairs, and unpacking is rather tiring. There were also setbacks with the movers being unable to bring our bed upstairs and some other minor issues with the washer and tub that our simply wonderful landlord worked out immediately. I have to say I really like him! Some of the hardest things of moving were leaving behind old routines to make new ones, downsizing my sewing space into a more cozy one, and losing the balcony for gardening. We kept the Meyer lemon tree, and I am working on killing the scale it has gotten infected with now that I am indoors with it all day. I did not give up gardening entirely. I have the Aerogarden started again, this time giving the thyme a month or now almost two head start before I plant anything else. The African violet seems happy enough since it is blooming again, and the chives are as nuts as usual. The rosemary is a bit harder to win over. I fed it today in the hopes of winning it over to the new place.

I have also planted some new containers indoors. Peas will now be on the old trellis system that held the jasmine. I have a special set of container cucumbers that I am trying out as well as some container strawberries that I am trying to grow from seed. Crazy? You bet! I also threw out the herbs I have had since we got here and am starting that all new as well. I added borage and tarragon to my usual sage, oregano, and marjoram. As soon as I get some more dirt and catch pans, I will also plant the parsley and cilantro pots. I am trying to grow some new container hybrids of bibb lettuce as well. We will see how that goes partnered with a container of spinach. I am not expecting much as the lighting conditions are not the best, but hey it is about the fun on experimentation right now. Figuring out how far I can push things so that when I have perfect conditions I feel extremely accomplished.

Bread baking experiments are still going on as well as several other cooking obsessions. I will share more on those items soon. For now there is a very late birthday present that needs to be made. Prepping for a dance show made that happen again, and I am sure there is a little girl that would really like her gift. More on that soon as well. It feels good to get back to writing, and I hope it feels just as good for you to catch up with me through your reading. Thanks for coming back, and I am glad to have you as readers. More homemaking hi-jinks and more frequent writing for consistent editions of the blog. I promise...

Scary Busy!

2010-11-22T10:25:00.001-08:00

I am not dead, just scary busy right now. It seems like for the first time ever, I was ahead of the holiday game. I had all my plans for my holiday crafting picked out, and most of the people on my list had presents already assigned. I even was starting to cut out all the pieces and getting ahead at sewing on some of the projects. Then the plans had to fly out the window. Our current place that we live in was under a month to month lease as the owner did not want to enter into another year long lease term. This resulted in us now having to move as they have sold the place. It is really sad for me as I really enjoy living here. I love the unit we are in and have made some good acquaintances here as well. It seems like I was finally in the groove of exercise, and a daily routine as well as feeling fully comfortable in the neighborhood. Since this time of year is not the best to move, one option may have to be leaving the neighborhood. We hope to not have to, but we may. I will let you know as soon as I do when we have a new home for Fabulous Pants. Till then, most of my time is spent working on finding new digs for us as well as making moving plans. I hope to keep on schedule with the holiday crafting!

Until then, I have become rather obsessed with this new type of bread from the Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart. The bread here is the second day, baking day, for the many seed bread in this book. I have been steadily loosing the weight I have been striving to shed, and I recently read some studies that people eating more whole grains and seeds are better able to lose and maintain a healthy weight. I decided to try to put aside the most wonderful white bread from this book and move onto this bread. I was worried at first that it would be too many seeds as it is many seed bread. The seeds were just the right amount and super tasty.

The seeds give the bread great texture. The best addition to this was the awesome nuttiness of the added pumpkin seeds. I love how these tasted in the bread, but the seeds are really expensive! I should really look for them in a Mexican grocery store to see if they are any cheaper. This year I saved my seeds from the pumpkin carving, and I hope to shell them once things calm down to use in the bread.

One of the best and yet worst things I found out about this bread is the awesomeness of it toasted with a smear of Nutella! It is so great! I have tried to resist the urge as Nutella has quite a few more calories than I would like to spend in the morning. It is also exceptional with blood orange marmalade. I have actually decided to stop making standard orange marmalade in favor of the blood orange variety. Thanks so much to my friend for introducing me to that tasty treat.

Well there is so much I need to get done in preparing for the Thanksgiving holiday. There is jogging to be done, vegetable stock to be made, chestnuts to be roasted, house to be cleaned, velvet wreaths to be finished (finally!), and a birthday present for my niece to be made in time for sending out. Look for more updates soon. I promise to not take a month off again if I can help it. Things just were so crazy and there was so little time. I promise to carve out more to show off what I am up to. Tune in soon for some more canning notes and a killer desert recipe in the next few days.

Mincemeat Minus the Meat

2010-10-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

On Monday this week I went in for my first attempt at a mock mincemeat recipe. Mincemeat was something we got to have at Thanksgiving around our house. It was made out of the green tomatoes that were left over from the summer. It was a wonderful filling for a pie; green tomatoes that should not be wasted combined with dried fruits, lots of spices, sugar, and some suet. Since I could not find green tomatoes last year at our usual market, I made plans to make this pear version of mincemeat. After my canning plans were made, I ended up finding lots of green tomatoes at another market I have started to attend, but I thought I should stick to the pear plan.

One of the big advantages of doing this recipe is the lack of suet. Suet is a beef fat that would take the recipe into the realm of pressure canning, which, for now is not an option due to my lack of a pressure canner. Another added benefit was the use of pears. Some people love mincemeat until they find out it is made from tomatoes. I know there are tomato sensitive people out there, so this is much more crowd friendly. The dried fruits I used in this recipe were currents, golden raisins I dried in the dehydrator here, and some dried apricots that I finely chopped up. It made me feel all warm and excited for the family fruitcake this winter!

Next went in the spices. The recipe I used from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving called for cinnamon, nutmeg, and ground ginger. I debated exchanging the nutmeg for already ground mace, but I stuck with the nutmeg. I thought I should try the recipe as is for one year and then start tweaking. This recipe also called for brown sugar rather than a white sugar. This seemed to lend a nice warmth to the mincemeat. It smelled just like the holidays around the house.

Next came the peeled, cored, and cut pears. This took what seemed like forever. I wanted to make sure the pieces of pear were not too big as I will be making this into mini-pies for the two of us. Big fruit does not work that well in mini-pies. It works even less in the pocket pie mold I got from a kitchen store. After the pears were folded in, it was time to cook the mixture down. It made the house smell even better. This was one of the first recipes I have made for canning that I could not help but taste periodically during the cooking.

The taste was rich and layered. Everything a person looks for in holiday cooking was in that pot. I cooked it all down until it was a pretty solid mix with little liquid. From there I went to the canning process, and after 20 minutes in the water bath, I had four pint jars ready for pies, tarts, or pocket pies later this year. I am so excited by this recipe and cannot wait to crack a jar open. I decided to hide them in the pantry hoping that out of sight out of mind will work. I think that I will make up one of the mini-pies for a change of pace this year at Thanksgiving along with the usual pumpkin pie that I always make.

The clouds are rolling in fast for the storms we are expecting this weekend, so I should sign off and get my walk in before it gets too nasty. Then it is time for some Christmas gift making... yes you heard right. I am starting extra early this year in the hopes to get done in a sane and happy manner. Today is some experimentation with the computerized cutter in the hopes that a couple of projects will be easier with out having to cut all the parts by hand.... ah the wonders of technology. Well off to walk, craft, and cook.

Jars of Sunshine

2010-10-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the radio silence on the blog as of late. I have been super busy with commitments and blogging has not fit into the schedule as I had hoped. The seasons have drastically changed here. We went from a super chilly summer into a couple of short lived heat waves after summer was officially over. Then, the temperatures around here dropped like a rock and the rains returned to the San Francisco Bay area. This weekend is supposed to be rainy just like last weekend. This rainy weather is not met with worry though as I have jars of sunshine to get me through the winter months.

A while back, one of my acquaintances blogged about buying a house and acquiring a new lemon tree. She was looking for things to do with all the lemons. She also was looking for some canning lessons. I traded her canning lessons for some lemons, and out of the trade came not only a great friendship, but also these awesome jars of strawberry lemonade concentrate. She had made some of this as well, so I had her notes to go off of for tweaking mine. I used the Ball book that I have for a recipe, and she got her's off of the internet somewhere. In her recipe, she said that the concentrate ended up being way too sweet even when watered down. This was good to know, so I cut my sugar levels by quite a bit. I like lemonade to be a bit sweet but not cloying by any means. I also strained my strawberry pulp, as Dan is not a big fan of the seeds in strawberries. This extra step took quite a while and also cut the yield I had on strawberry pulp by a bit.

I ended up with four pints, one from Dreah and three of my own, to take me through the winter. I had a little left over that I placed in the fridge and recently got out to test. It was quite good. The mix of the different types of Meyer lemon and regular lemons made for an interesting lemon flavor that was not too harsh. The strawberry flavor was a nice enhancer but was also not overwhelming. The sugar being cut down was also a good move as it was just the right amount of sweetness for me, and if someone else wants it more sweet, they can always add more to their glass. I think this could also be great as a daiquiri or margarita base if one wanted to use it that way or it could be cut with lemon lime soda or club soda as the Ball book suggests. Needless to say, I will be trying to get more lemons from my friend next year to make this one again! Now off to work on those perplexing socks I am trying.

Pumpkin Butter - First Attempt

2010-09-29T12:31:00.001-07:00

One of the things that I used to really love about fall in central Illinois was the trips to the local apple orchard. When we were there, we would always pick up jars of their apple butter as well as a jar or two of pumpkin butter. For a birthday gift for Dan one year I even had it shipped out here for him - a much too expensive solution for our long term pumpkin butter needs. I decided to try my hand at it this year. Since it was a spur of the moment decision, I used canned pumpkin rather than doing it from scratch. From scratch is definitely a future goal.

I guesstimated out how much of the spices and sugar to use. In the end, it was not enough for our liking. Once I have the recipe down, I will share it with you all. I think that more sugar would have made this batch much better. As it was, the pumpkin flavor was good but not sweet enough for a butter. The cloves and cinnamon amounts seemed correct but having to use powdered ginger over fresh was also a big disadvantage. I am also contemplating replacing the fresh ground nutmeg with some mace to kick up the nutmeg flavor in the butter.

I mixed all the ingredients and put them into the mini-slow cooker that came with our big one. This mini slow cooker has always done a good job of keeping appetizers warm for parties, but would it actually cook down the pumpkin into a butter? We plugged it in after dinner, and I wondered how many hours it was going to take. The recipe I was working off of made it sound like this would take several hours - around 10 or so. I was wondering if this was just too long of a time or not, so I placed the lid with a vent on the mini cooker and watched a movie coming back to the pot to stir every now and then.

The mini slow cooker worked very well, actually too well. Too much of the liquid cooked off for our liking after only five hours. It made for an extremely pasty butter. I was slightly disappointed in the results and wished I would have watched the cooking better than I had. It also tasted good, but it was not an exact match for the one I was trying to mimic. A tasty first try to be sure but not the last try. I suspect that I will be making more of this during the fall and winter months.

From one can of pumpkin, I got two half pints of my butter experiment. Now I know that there are differing opinions as to water bath canning versus pressure canning, vs freezing of pumpkin purees. I decided on just freezing mine. I am very much a safer than sorry kind of person and tend to want to follow the guidelines on this kind of thing. One of the reasons they recommend only freezing pumpkin is the viscosity of the puree makes it hard for the heat to fully penetrate the jars, and with how thick this butter turned out, I believe them. Another thing that I have read is that pumpkins have a very inconsistent pH level and therefore it is hard to pin down processing times. Who knows? I not being a food scientist have decided to err on the side of caution and just freeze it.

Hopefully more experimentation will result in a recipe I like enough to share. Till then, let me know if you have any killer pumpkin butter recipes you think I should try.

Raspberry Jam - Hot and Not

2010-09-27T10:36:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite things about going to my Uncle Glen and Aunt Chris' house when I was a kid was the raspberry bushes. Uncle Glen hosted a huge garden for the entire family on his farm, and many weekends out of the summer were spent there picking beans, sweet corn, beets, potatoes, zucchini, carrots, and apples. My favorite things, besides the gigantic pumpkins he grew for Halloween, were the raspberry bushes.

Boy do I miss those free berries! I splurged this year and decided to make some seedless raspberry jam for this year. There were raspberries on sale at the store, and I also picked up some more at the end of the day at the Farmer's market on Sunday. I washed the berries in small batches and then put them into a pot. I then heated them through and mashed them down with a potato masher. This made a raspberry slurry that exposed just how many seeds there were.

From there, I took a fine mesh sieve and pushed the raspberry puree through. This was a super time intensive but easy to do task. I was surprised that when I dumped the filtered juice and pulp into the pot for the cook up of the jam there were still some seeds present. They were super small, so I am not sure if they just happened to fit through the mesh or if I was a bit sloppy at some point and lost some seeds into the filtered juice.

I ended up with four cups of juice. I added three cups of sugar and the juice of a lemon to preserve the color of the raspberries into the cooking pot. I learned when doing this jam that it reached a solid jam state two degrees sooner than my usual jams. I am wondering if I would have pulled the cherry earlier if it would have turned out. Perhaps I just cooked that jam too much which turned it into the odd texture it is.

I ended up with three jars of jam. I put crushed red pepper into one of the jars to make a spicy and hot version of the jam. It is great for an appetizer when poured over warmed brie, baked under pastry with brie, or poured over warmed cream cheese and served with crackers. I hope that one jar of it is enough for this year. Two of the jars are plain jam, but one is going off to a friend. That leaves me one highly prized jar for myself. I am thinking about trying a recipe out of one of my canning recipe books that cuts the raspberries with apples to stretch the jam out into a bigger batch without using more berries. It sounds like an intriguing way to make this without the high cost. Things to ponder for next year, till then, I will be hiding this jar away, so I don't open it until I really need a pick me up.

Final Peaches of Summer

2010-09-24T12:37:00.000-07:00

With the final days of summer over, I thought I would post up the last of the peach canning I did before my sister came to visit last week. The peaches still seem to be going strong here, and while I am a bit sick of eating peaches, I know that when the winter dreariness sets in I will be glad I did all this work while they were plentiful. I tried out two new recipes this yeah for the winter months.

One of the things I did was peach pie filling. Peach pie is not Dan's favorite, but I need a change from his favorites, apple and cherry, once in a while. I did three small pints of the filling. My canning books did not have a recipe for straight up peach. Most of them called for a peach and apple blend, but I wanted a peach only pie. I decided to follow the general way that the apple filling was made. One of the disadvantages of this was the lack of liquid for a starter for making the filling. With the apple pie filling, you used natural apple juice. I decided to macerate the peaches with the sugar the recipe called for and then use the juice from this as the starter. This was an okay way of doing it, although it was rather messy to fish out the peach slices from the liquid for the cooking step with the Clear-jel. Once I try out the filling, I will let you know how it all went.

Speaking of updates, a small one on the Gravenstein pie filling. It was really too nutmeg heavy when I made the pie out of the remnants from the canning pot, but when I made this last pie, it had mellowed substantially. I think I will keep that recipe as is, however I think I will choose an apple more suited for high heat cooking as the Gravensteins got very mushy for my liking.

I also made the Zesty Peach BBQ sauce out of The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. I have a feeling that the five jars I made are not going to be enough for the year. I love this recipe, but I ended up tweaking it a bit in terms of heat and texture. It seems like it will be great on grilled shrimp skewers and also as a dipping sauce for this winter's fondue dinners. I already have people wanting jars of it just from my description of it to them. Sweet, spicy, and just the right amount of vinegar. Yum!

Well I am off for the Friday market. I want to get more grapes for raisins and hopefully more cucumbers for late season pickles. There are just a few more items on my canning list, and then it will be time for the Christmas crafting! Oh my! I cannot believe how fast time has moved this year. It seems like I was just writing my holiday wrap up from last year. Well off for the market.

First Day of Fall

2010-09-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

I thought I should usher in the first night of fall with an apple pie, so yesterday afternoon, I grabbed one of the jars of Gravenstein pie filling from August and went to work. I made up some pie crust quickly and chilled it while I got some housework done. From there it was as easy as pie! ;) I rolled out the dough, popped open the jar, filled the shell, topped it off, egg washed the top, cut the vents, and added some rough sugar. I thought it looked just as good as a professional pie and tasted wonderful.

Last weekend, while my sister was visiting, I found some Concord grapes at the Friday farmer's market. They were super huge in size and very juicy. I picked up five pounds, so I could make both jam as well as some juice for later this year. It was interesting seeing people taste them at the market. Some knew what they were and expected their tart and sour taste. Others thought they were some kind of black sweet table grape. They were the fun ones to watch as their lips puckered up and comments of dislike followed.

I love these grapes for jelly. Here I have placed three pounds of stemmed, rinsed grapes and a half cup of water into the big stock pot. This mixture is brought up to a boil and then reduced to a simmer for ten minutes. During this time, I use my spoon to separate the skins and their flesh. This results in the green "grapes" that you see in the picture and the purple skins tend to sink to the bottom during this. When they sink, it is easier to see which grapes still need to be separated, so go after those next.

Once the mixture has simmered for the ten minutes, it should look something like this, a bright royal purple mess. There will be skins, seeds, and some still solid pulp. All of this will go into your jelly bag or jelly strainer. I let it strain for two hours, but there was still quite a bit of juice left. I stirred the pulp down in the bag for a while until all the juice was removed from the skins and uncooked pulp.

I measured out the juice and had the four cups that I needed. My Mom's old Ball Blue book is almost always right about the weight to juice conversion as it was here. I added the three cups of sugar to the juice and started my boil. I have read in some places that it would help to let the grape juice set overnight to be able to remove the solids that contribute to crystals that can form in the jelly. I skipped this step and did not see any form when the jelly was finished. To make the jelly, cook the juice and sugar mixture to the jellying point, or eight degrees above the boiling point of water.

This jelly did not have any foam form as well, so I got four good jars of foam free grape jelly. I was rather pleased. If you find foam on your jelly, skim it off quickly and start to fill your hot, sterilized jars. Fill to a quarter inch of headspace. From there take the jars and place them into your water bath, and process the jars for 15 minutes. Once the process time is over, remove the lid from the canner, turn off the heat, and wait five minutes before removing the jars of jelly.

I finished with four jars of the darkest grape jelly. It is a beautiful purple black. I like that we now have the final store bought jam out of the house. Grape is Dan's favorite, and I had not been able to find the grapes until this year. Now, with the smaller jars, we can hopefully finish the jelly before it goes bad in the fridge. Somehow, with homemade jelly, I do not see finishing them up as a problem.

I also made some grape jelly in the way my mom made it. In the hot, sterilized quart jars, add a half cup of sugar and one cup of grapes. Then, fill the jars with boiling hot water. I did find this to cause some problems. I am not sure if my mother used less sugar or if I just did not have the water fully boiling before adding it to the jars, but my jars had some residual sugar at the bottom of the jars when filled and also after the processing time.

I think the next time I make the grape juice, I will add the sugar to the pot of boiling water and make sure it is all dissolved before adding the liquid to the jars. This will prevent the crystallized sugar from forming at the bottom of the jars like it did this time. I cannot wait for this to finally be ready. This is one of those tastes of my childhood that I miss the most. I hope that I got the sugar to grape ratio correct. I am banking on the thought that my Mom did not use the full cup of sugar that the book says you can use.

Here are the jars after just a few days. It takes a few weeks for the juice to fully be extracted from the grapes that are canned inside of the jars. Once the juice is finally dark in color, it is time to enjoy. My Mom would crack the lids open and use them to strain out the juice from the spent grape pulp and seeds. I can barely wait to see if the juice is the same. I hope it is!

Pickles and Plums

2010-09-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

The week before the steam show was not all tomatoes and savory, I did sneak in a jam for my sweet tooth. I love plum jam, and while I like red plum jam a bit better than white plum, this mixed batch turned out quite well. With the plums being $0.75 a pound, it also helps me to overlook the fact that the red plums were in the minority in this batch. I keep the peels on the plums because I like the candied feeling they give to the jam. The plums were also really juicy, so the need to macerate them for a while just did not need to happen. It helped me get much more done in a short time since I did not have much time to spare.

I did let them sit for a bit in the stock pot with the sugar to let some of the juices start to flow before I started the cook. This jam cooked up quickly, and I wished I had made a larger batch. I did temper this desire with a trip to the pantry to look over the large number of other jams that I made this year and to ask myself seriously if I would be able to eat them all this year. My answer was no, and my plan to make a second batch of plum dissolved as quickly as it solidified in my mind.

I ended up with four beautiful jars of jam. I really love the color of purple that this combination of different varieties of plums gave to the jam. I also like the size that I cut the pieces this year versus the last year. The peel pieces last year, while wonderful texture and super candied pieces of tastiness, they were just too big. The peels could become almost distracting to the rest of the jam, so this year's smaller pieces will be better I think. I will have to see when a jar finally gets cracked open.

I also made some pickles on the day that we left for the show. It was a final canning project that I could fit in the morning before our red eye flight to Iowa. I wanted to make several types of pickles this year, so that if I did not like one type I would not be stuck with lots of jars of them for the year. I decided to make a half order of a recipe from a family friend as well as a refrigerator pickle recipe that I hoped would be a good impostor for Dan's favorite commercial pickles.

The pickling cucumbers that I bought were also a great steal at $0.75 a pound. Needless to say I got some great deals that week at the Farmer's Market. For the hot processed pickles, I had to brine them for three hours with sliced onions. While the Pickle Crisp I bought said this was unnecessary, I was worried that if I did not brine the pickles that it would be missing the key ingredient of salt in the pickles. I made sure that the cucumbers and onions did not float to the top of the liquid by weighing them down with an inverted plate. As years of pickling experts will tell you, this is the perfect technique to make sure things stay where you want them to when soaking them.

I then made up the storing brine for these pickles. It was rather simple, using white sugar, white vinegar, mustard seed, and celery seeds. After simmering that up for a bit, the cucumbers and onions went into the pot to get warmed over before going into the hot jars. For once I was able to pack the jars correctly on the first try so that things were not floating all the way to the top with all sorts of liquid looking lonely at the bottom.

Next, I made up the brine for the refrigerator pickles. I did these as spears, so they would be just like the store bought version. I made up my own version of a pickling spice mix for this. It turned out rather well, and then I threw that into the vinegar, sugar, and added the specific spices to the jar that the recipe needed. The biggest thing was the garlic. We like garlic flavors, so I chopped up a bunch for the two jars. I tasted these earlier this week, and I really like them. While they are not the exact same as the store pickles, I really like them on their own.

Tomato Sauce

2010-09-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

This year I took my first stab at making my own tomato sauce. I was hoping to get this done before we left for the Labor Day trip. It seemed like a really easy process, and overall it was rather easy. It is just very time consuming in the sense that there are lots of pots that are in need of watching and occasionally stirring. The nice thing about making tomato sauce... no peeling! Peeling is not that bad of a job, but the ability to just slice the tomatoes into four sections and throw them into the pot was a great ease in the labor time for this. I started out with around 25 pounds of Roma tomatoes at the beginning.

Once all the tomatoes were sliced up, I placed them into the pot until it could not hold any more. I cooked and mashed them as much as I could, but overall it was a waiting game for them to cook down. Then, I started a second pot. As the tomato slices would cook down in the first, big stock pot, I would add some of the warmed through slices from the small pot behind the big one. Once things were in a good state of cooking down, I ran out of room in the big pot again. From there, I stated ladling out some of the cooked tomatoes into the food mill and then added some from the back pot to the front. It was really quite efficient way to cook that many tomatoes all at once. The next problem I ran into was the largest bowl in the house filling with too much tomato pulp and still having more tomatoes to run through the mill. I ended up having to pour the cooked unprocessed tomatoes into another bowl, washing out the stock pot, and then adding the milled tomato pulp to that pot.

This all seemed to be a good idea until I ran out of room in the stock pot as well. So, I ended up starting the cook down process of the tomato pulp into a nice thick sauce. As space would be made in the pot, I would add more of the milled tomato pulp to replenish the stock pot until it was all finally in there. Then, the long but thoroughly easy job of a slow simmer until the right thickness was reached on the tomato sauce took up most of the night. I ended up starting this process around three in the afternoon and ended around midnight with the cans all popping closed.

In the end, I had nine full pints of tomato sauce. I am really excited to get to try this sometime soon. It is a nice thick sauce that will lend itself well to making pasta sauces or pizza sauce. I did not place any spices or herbs into the sauce, so I can tailor it each time I want to use it for something. Now I can use the sauce for cooking in the slow cooker or making up a quick marinara or even better making a from scratch pizza.

After working with 45 pounds of tomatoes, I was glad to be done with them. I know there are many out there who did more pounds of tomatoes, and my hat is off to you. 45 pounds for the two of us seems like it is going to be more than enough to keep us in the tomato products for the year.

Today I start some more canning. Hopefully the blog can catch up with my current canning soon.

Tomatoes in Jars

2010-09-09T11:53:00.001-07:00

It looked a little like a tomato stampede when I started unpacking the bags of tomatoes in the kitchen. They were piled up on counters and even took over the top most counter top. I did, however can this batch as whole tomatoes only. It took another trip buying just as many to get to the sauce portion of the canning. These went whole into jars. I only took a few jars last year during my canning with Annie and ran out faster than I thought I would. This year, being solo, I had to make a decision as to how many cans to make up. At first, I thought about doing around five maximum, but I quickly changed my mind when I thought about Dan's homemade chili and other yummy slow cooker recipes I like to make in the fall and winter when I get busy with crafting, tutoring, and dance studio things.

All the tomatoes had to be peeled, and this year the boiling water bath worked for all but two tomatoes. Out of 10 pounds of tomatoes, I would say that two not peeling easily was true luck. I think part of the success with peeling this year was due to me not over crowding the pot with too many tomatoes. Last year when it was the two of us working, we filled the pot up pretty full with tomatoes. I was, however concerned as I ran out of ice for the water bath. It took a lot of water changes, but the tomatoes did cool down eventually. The longer time they had heated up may have also contributed to the faster peeling since I have a tendency to pull things earlier than I should.

After peeling, it was time to core them out. Dan helped out a bit with this step. I think he felt a little bad for me working with this volume of tomatoes alone. It was nice to have a helping hand get me through this stage faster than the previous ones. The process became more streamlined and assembly machine like at this point. I would peel and set down on the cutting board, he would core them, and then the prepared tomatoes would go into the bowl. I was happy to see that the tomatoes were not just red skinned but also had nice red flesh through out the whole tomato. Nothing is worse than a ripe looking tomato that turns out to be tasteless and pink in the middle.

Next the tomatoes went into the canning kettle with water for their boil. I am wondering if I just don't boil them enough the first time, if I am bad at packing jars, or if I just do not pour off enough liquid the first time when packing the jars because this year I had tomato float again. It was rather frustrating. It caused me to actually lose sleep and begin to ponder if I have a canning perfection problem.

I ended up getting up the next day to open up all the cans, repacking, and reprocessing them all. My 12 cans went down to the eight you see here. Now they are nicely packed as I want them to look, but the tomatoes may end up being more stewed rather than whole tomatoes as I did two heat processes on them. As always, I did add the extra lemon juice to make sure there was enough acid in the tomato jars to make them safe for water bath canning. Hopefully eight will be enough. ;) For now I am off to sneak more boxes of cans into the house. Then it is off to 826 for tutoring and the dance studio. When will crafting get done around here again? Not till canning season is over I suppose.

The Start of Tomatoes - Salsa

2010-09-08T12:43:00.000-07:00

During last week's canning madness, tomatoes went on super sale at one of the local markets. I could not resist; they were Romas. I went into full tomato canning mode. I decided it was time to make salsa. Now some of you may be scratching your heads looking at this ingredients picture as there are no tomatoes in this one. Well that is because I also wanted to try my hand at peach salsa this year as well. I cut up all the ingredients that both salsas shared in the morning and then cooked them up that afternoon. I made one critical error however.

After cutting up all the peppers, onion, and garlic, I peeled the peaches and started to notice my hands were tingling a bit. I decided to ignore this and start cooking up the peach salsa. My hands seemed to be on fire, but I just thought it was the overly hot day and the hot items on the stove. I gave it no thought as I stirred away and then put the very pretty peach salsa in the jars. I loved the way the colors all complimented each other in this salsa. It looked pretty and while I did not taste test it, the salsa also looked mighty tasty.

The burning started to get worse as I was working on cleaning up from this batch of salsa to prepare for the other one. By this time two hours had passed from the cutting of ingredients to now, and as I washed off the pots and canning equipment, the burning got worse. It was then that I realized the error of my ways. I had cut all the jalapeno peppers with no gloves on... all six of them. Now it is a big joke around the house and family as to my whimpiness when it comes to spicy food, but at this point I was in full on pain. I was having an allergic reaction to the capsaicin in the peppers.

Now some of you may be wondering why this did not happen last year, and I was doing this too as I was trying to wash off my hands as well as I could. Then it dawned on me that my wonderful husband had cut them last year and had a similar, all be it less crazy, reaction to the capsaicin. After much soap and water, nothing was improving. I turned my attention to milk. I rinsed and soaked my hands in milk. All seemed to be fine. We left to go out to the Eat Real fest for lunch.

Once in the fest, I thought all was okay. I figured that at this point the burning was just part of my mind thinking it was still burning. I hoped that the distractions of the food and festivities would make it all go away as it was just in my mind after all. Wrong! Dead wrong. The burning came back with a vengeance. My hands started to swell and turn purple. It was time for some serious intervention. We returned home quickly and moved up in butter fat, from skim milk to half and half!

After repeated dunks into the half and half interspersed with alcohol scrubbing, my hands finally were free of the burn. It was a six hour odyssey of skin numbing pain, but it was finally over. I vowed to only use the food processor or rubber gloves from here on out when touching any spicy peppers. It was then time to cook up the tomato salsa. I slipped the skins off the tomatoes using boiling water and then an ice bath. Boy did that ice bath feel good. It helped with the residual swelling that my hands were still experiencing.

From there it was just dicing of the peeled tomatoes and then adding in all the already prepped vegetables into the pot for their cook and then filling up the jars and water bath time. I was happy to see this project end. I ended up with some left over in the pot for this batch, so I let it cool in the fridge. The taste test of the left overs made me very happy and made Dan ask why I did not make more. This salsa was much improved over last year's salsa debacle. I cannot wait to pop open a jar of the peach to see how that one tastes. I need to remember to save some from now on to taste later. I guess my zeal to stop the burning of my hands and to finish off two canning projects in one day just took over. The pantry is starting to fill up to capacity, but there are more projects to show off and still finish. Check back tomorrow for tomatoes day two!

End of Apples

2010-09-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

Last week was a super busy one, so busy in fact that I could not get to blogging about any of the canning I was doing. All was being done in short order and on a deadline since we were headed out of town for the Thresher's Reunion in Iowa on Labor Day weekend. One of the first things I finished off was the last of the box of apples! I am sure we will go apple picking at least once more this year before the winter, so this will not be the last of the apples for the year to be sure. This time I was experimenting in making my own pectin for use for next year. I got the idea from the fine folks over at Fig Jam and Lime Cordial. They have a really great tutorial that you can follow over there for making your own.

This project took the second bag of apple cuttings and scraps and put them to good use. This last set of scraps was not as fruitful as the other scraps with the added apples that I used for the apple syrup. I also squeezed the jelly bag this time in an attempt to get more juice out of the scraps to supplement the meager amount that had drained out using gravity alone. This made for a cloudy final product, but I think that I can drain off the pectin without adding the solids into the jam that I am making when I get around to using it.

Once the peels were juiced, it was into the fridge as I had run out of time that day. I could have drained off the solids here at this stage, but I was in a rush on that Friday to get it all finished up as I had a sick husband who came home early from work and a seemingly million item long list on my to do before Wednesday. Having a sick spouse at home was not going to make this to do list go by quicker. Needless to say, I cooked down the apple juice and then performed the pectin test outlined on the website. I got a good test, but I forgot to take a picture of the results. It was neat how the alcohol and juice just looked like liquid until I put the fork into it and scooped up. Then I got to see all the pectin globed up and solidified.

From there it was a quick trip into the two waiting jars and a 10 minute trip into the boiling water bath. They sealed down and then after sitting on the shelf for a day separated into the two layers you see here. I cannot wait to try them out. I think this year when I make my Pinot Pear jam I will use one of the jars instead of adding an apple like I did last year. From that experiment I am sure I will be able to tell if this will be strong enough for cherry next spring. If it turns out or not I will let you know. It is always good to hear about experiments and their end results. I hope it works well as this would be a great new way to use up something that otherwise would not have a use for me.

Dehydrator Fun - Fruit Leather

2010-08-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

Dan and I love fruit roll ups and fruit leathers, but we really do not like their steep price tag. One of the reasons we bought the dehydrator last year was the possibility of making fruit leathers at home at a much cheaper price point. Yesterday was my first stab at making them in our dehydrator. Let me just tell you, it was so easy, I think we will be buying more leather trays for the dehydrator so that I can make more leather each time we hook up the dehydrator.

I tried my hand at both plain apple as well as apricot fruit leather. The plain apple was easy, and the apricot was just as easy to make. I peeled and cored the apples as well as cut them into some smaller pieces. They then went into the blender. I added a tiny bit of all natural apple juice into the blender to help it get started. Then, I blended the apples until they were a smooth, baby food like consistency. I found it easiest to start with a small amount of apples in the blender and then add to that amount and blend again. This seemed to be better than packing too much into the blender on the first try. I found myself having to stop and stir much more when I over packed the blender.

Once the apples were blended, I poured the puree onto a fruit leather sheet. Two important things were learned here. Make sure your leather sheets are already placed on the trays before filling them with puree. Although I did not make this mistake, I could tell that the puree would be everywhere when trying to transplant the flimsy try into the more sturdy drying rack. The second thing I learned is that putting a thin coating of oil onto the fruit leather sheet is a must. I forgot to do this with the first set of leather, and it is quite stuck down onto the sheet. The second one that I did remember to oil peels up quite easily.

Once I had one tray loaded with plain apple, I tossed in the pitted and cut apricot pieces into the blender along with some more peeled sliced apples for their pectin content. For the apricots, I left their skin on, and it seemed to add a nice texture to the puree. I placed that on the sheet and both went into the dehydrator. In the end they look like this picture here. I did over dry them a bit as I forgot to tell Dan to check them when he got home from work versus me shutting them off when I got home late that night from the dance studio. These first ones seem to have the texture of store bought fruit roll ups rather than a fruit leather, but hey I am not complaining. I love both kinds of dried fruits. I can see this is going to become a new habit around here, and I hope that the dehydrator and blender can keep up with our demand.

Happy 8/26 Day!

2010-08-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

As most of you know from reading this blog, I am a volunteer tutor at 826 Valencia in San Francisco. It is a wonderful tutoring and writing program in the Mission district in the city, and it is also the only independent pirate supply store in the city! ;) I have to say that this is one of the most fun things I do all week. I go into the center and partner with with one, two, and even three kids to work on their homework together. It is all the fun parts of teaching that I miss and none of the stuff that I did not like about the teaching field. It is just pure fun. While the center has all sorts of great volunteers, it still needs money to operate. Now I am not usually one to go out and solicit people for money, but this is really a great place to put your extra cash if you have some. 826 National has chapters all over the United States that help out students with homework as well as in schools programs that help teachers do all those fun and enriching projects they would love to do but need extra hands for. We also do bookmaking field trips to get kids into the love of reading and writing. So, in celebration of 8/26 Day, you could help out the national organization by donating $10, $8.26 of which goes to us by texting "WRITE" to 20222, or give on line at http://www.826on826.org. It really is that simple. Spread the word if you are so inclined to help us out. If you choose the texting option, a one-time donation of $10.00 (an $8.26 donation and a $1.74 service fee) will be added to your mobile phone bill or deducted from your prepaid balance. Messaging rates and additional fees may apply. All charges are billed by and payable to your mobile service provider. Service is available on most carriers. Donations are collected for the benefit of 826 by the Mobile Giving Foundation and subject to the terms found at www.hmgf.org/t. You can unsubscribe at any time by texting STOP to 20222; reply HELP to 20222 for help.

Also today, we are holding a Write-A-Thon at 826 Valencia from noon until 8:26 pm. I will be there writing for a while after tutoring before I head over to the Fat Chance studio. Some of you are wondering what this Write-a-Thon may be. Well, the fine people at 826 Valencia wrote the following about it:

"What is a "Write-a-thon," exactly? It's just like a marathon. Well, maybe not just like a marathon. Our ambitious, inspired, industrious writers will recruit friends, family members, housemates, and hairdressers to pledge to support them in their writing goal, be it two poems or 200 pages, at a suggested donation rate of $10 per page. Donors can choose to support writers in whole or in part—if your friend is going to write those 200 pages, you can pledge to support twenty of them, or ten, or two. It's entirely up to you!

We're going to write and write and write some more, for a grand total of eight hours and twenty-six minutes of writing frenzy. Pledge to support your favorite writer, or come join the whirlwind of writerly activity! This event is open to students, 826 Valencia volunteers, and the public. For details, please visit our website. Hope to see you later today!"

Well I am off for some quick sorting around the crafting studio before heading in to tutor, write, and go to class. Thanks for listening to my little speech about 826. It really means a lot to me. Check in tomorrow for some more dehydrating and canning fun.

Raisin Experiments

2010-08-25T11:25:00.001-07:00

Things have been rather hot and steamy here in the Bay Area as we are experiencing a bit of a late summer heat wave. During this time, I have been scaling back the canning because it is no fun in the heat to stand over bubbling pots of hot liquids. I decided to try my hand at drying grapes into raisins. I love fresh raisins from the farmer's market, but often times I just cannot justify the expensive price tag. I thought that perhaps I could get similar results at home with my dehydrator as the grapes dried in the sun.

After a good washing, I decided to follow the guide book and blanch the grapes in boiling water. My dehydration book suggested a three minute dip in the water, but I think this was just too much. The skins of the grapes split open and the flesh started cooking. I think the next time I make raisins I will just not blanch them and see what color loss I have. The split skins made for a sticky finished product.

From there the grapes had to be plucked off of their stems and placed onto the drying sheets. This was made a bit harder due to not only the split skins but the searing heat the grapes retained long after being taken out of the water bath. The nice thing about making my own raisins though is that I can make sure there are no little pieces of stem still attached to the finished product. Nothing is more annoying than eating oatmeal or a cookie or other baked item and finding stems in your food.

The grapes were rather large, so the estimated drying time was quite off. It took nearly a full day for them to dry rather than the 10 hours the books predicted. There were also some still way too hydrated to store, so I just ate them immediately. I am not sure which type we are going to like better. The flame grapes have an almost candy like flavor and texture to them. It is more similar to a date rather than a raisin. I also love their bright pinkish purple color.

The black grapes look and taste more like commercially produced grapes. The biggest problem with them is the size. They were not dry for quite some time, and they also were quite sticky due to the split skins. They are, however, the nice dark color that grapes generally have. I will have to stir some into oatmeal soon to determine if I like them better. If I do, I will be buying end of the day grapes for the dehydrator soon.

I could not leave the canning completely behind. I did do a small batch of Brittany apricot jam yesterday. It was a hot job even in the morning. From there it was on to reorganizing the sewing room. There is a lot of sorting and putting away to be done after the big "renovation" that I did. I had to make room for the new computerized cutter, so furniture was cleared off and moved around the room. I like the new layout of the room much better than any of the other incarnations. The computer is now easier to use as the glare from the windows is no longer a factor, and the sewing table is closer to the windows for some much needed natural light. Now I just need to sort through all these little odds and ends that I have wanted to organize for some time. I think this requires a trip to the store for some organizational bins, my biggest weakness. There is a mess to clean and new software to learn. If you don't hear from me for a while it is because I am cutting up a storm with the new cutter!

Apple Syrup and Pancakes

2010-08-23T11:14:00.000-07:00

Apple canning and preservation continues into this week, and while I am happy to be canning, I will be kind of glad to be done with apples soon. On Friday I dipped my toe into new territory, flavored syrup. I wanted to try my hand at making apple syrup without the addition of corn syrup to the mix. I started off by using one of the two gallon bags of apple cuttings from the freezer. To the bag of cuttings, I also added three whole apples to the pot.

I followed the same procedure as making juice for the apple jelly. I measured out the apple parts and added the proportional amount of water to the pot, brought it to a boil, and then simmered to for a full 25 minutes. From there I drained it all through the jelly bag. This time, it was quite a bit more substance in the bag with less juice since I used mostly peelings and cores and very little overall flesh. Also, I missed the jelly bag a bit when emptying the pot. I had to run the juice through another mesh to make sure I got all of the solids out of the juice.

I got around three cups of juice out of the cuttings and a few apples. It was more than I had hoped for, and the experimentation was on. I looked over several recipes from my books and settled on a method rather than an actual recipe over another. I picked a couple of good cinnamon sticks to add to the syrup and also lemon juice for color and acidity boosting. From there it was crossed fingers and hopes for a good result.

I made a sugar solution and then cooked it until I made a very thick syrup. I brought the sugar syrup to just under the soft ball stage of heating, 230 degrees F or 110 degrees C. (You may have to adjust for altitude depending on where you live.) This seemed like a rather dicey operation as I loathe sugar burns, and I was not too sure how the introduction of the room temperature apple juice to the super hot sugar syrup would react. I added in the cinnamon sticks first to cook for a bit and to loosen them up a bit for the short cooking of the syrup. Next, I slowly but constantly added in all the apple juice.

From this point, I brought the solution up to a boil again over high heat. I boiled this all together for five minutes, stirring occasionally. I then removed this from heat, added the juice of a lemon, and then I commenced the canning. I processed the jars for 10 minutes with a 1/4 inch head space. We opened one jar right away on Saturday morning to see how it all turned out. I was really pleased with the flavor of the syrup. It was not too sweet, and the apple flavor was the main star with cinnamon playing a supporting rather than starring role. I think that the next time I make this I would definitely cook the apple juice and syrup mixture together longer. I think the extra cook time would have helped make it more solid and a bit less runny. It was overall a great first attempt I think.

We ended up with five half pints of the syrup. It was great over apple pancakes with whipped cream and some extra cinnamon. I also plan on using it as a topping for apple cinnamon ice cream or it could be used to soak pieces of sponge cake or angel food cake in for a quick fall flavored dessert.

No Corn Syrup Apple Syrup
3 cups of apple cuttings
3 apples, washed and rough cut with only seeds removed
2 cinnamon sticks
2 1/2 cup sugar
5 cups water separated
1/8 cup lemon juice

To Prepare the Juice Using cuttings from apple canning earlier in the week and a few whole apples to equal 3 cups of apple parts or starting with fresh apples, select about one fourth under ripe and three fourths fully ripe tart apples. Sort, wash and remove stem and blossom ends. Do not pare of core. (I do remove all the seeds though.) Cut apples into small pieces. Add 3 cups water, cover and bring to a boil on high heat. Reduce heat and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, or until apples are soft. Extract the juice using a moistened jelly bag. This takes around 2 hours. If you want a clear juice, do not squeeze the bag. For clearer juice, refrigerate the overnight and skim off any solids that are in the juice. If using fresh apples, keep solids from the jelly bag to make apple butter.

After the juice is extracted, prepare canner jars and lids, In a clean stainless steel saucepan, combine sugar and water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat stirring to dissolve all the sugar. Cook the mixture until it creates a syrup and reaches the temperature of 230 degrees F or 110 degrees C, adjusting for altitude. Add cinnamon sticks to the mixture and cook for a minute. Slowly and constantly add the apple juice to the sugar syrup. Return to a boil and boil for 5 minutes or until a thickness you desire. Stir occasionally. Turn off heat, add lemon juice. Ladle hot syrup into the hot jars. Leave 1/4 inch headspace. Place jars in canner and process for 10 minutes.

This yielded 5 half pints when I tried it.

I will see how the syrup reacts over time to both being refrigerated as well as shelf storage. I am not sure if it will thicken any, but it was super tasty. I doubt there will be much time to watch it on the shelf as I am sure it will be eaten fast.

Brandied Apple Rings, Apple Jelly and Butter Recipe

2010-08-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a whirlwind of activity, with tutoring starting again and house straightening to be finished, I managed to squeeze in a some quick canning. I decided to try out a recipe for brandied apple rings this year. I cut down the recipe considerably as I wanted to see if I would like this at all before making big batches of it. I selected out the prettiest red apples for this recipe as the skins are left on the apples.

After a good scrub, it was time to slice them into rings on the v-slicer and a quick dip in lemon water to keep the slices nice and white. I also use an apple corer to get perfect circles cut out of the centers. I do have to go back sometimes to clean up sides of seed casings that are left behind, but I try to maintain a rounded shape as best as I can. I thought these turned out very pretty. Then it was time to cook them in a sugar solution. I did this following the recipe, and I am not sure if the apples have become too soft or if they are just not a good fit for the recipe but they started to disintegrate after only 7 minutes in the syrup. They were supposed to cook for 15 minutes.

I took quick action and just started loading up the jars before I had nothing left. I then added the brandy to the sugar syrup, added it to the jars, and capped them off. Then it was into the water bath for processing. I think they turned out very pretty with the red color that naturally permeates through the jars. The recipe said you could add food coloring if desired, but I kept them plain to see how things naturally would develop. I hope they taste good, but for now, they look pretty and will be an interesting surprise for a later day.

As promised, I am going to post the recipes I use for apple jelly and butter. Please make sure you follow proper canning techniques when making these recipes, including processing finished products as well as maintaining the proper sanitation needed for safe canning.

Apple Jelly
4 cups apple juice (this takes about 3 pounds of apples and 3 cups of water)
2 tablespoons strained lemon juice
3 cups sugar

To Prepare the Juice Select about one fourth under ripe and three fourths fully ripe tart apples. Sort, wash and remove stem and blossom ends. Do not pare of core. (I do remove all the seeds though.) Cut apples into small pieces. Add water, cover and bring to a boil on high heat. Reduce heat and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, or until apples are soft. Extract the juice using a moistened jelly bag. This takes around 2 hours. If you want a clear jelly, do not squeeze the bag. For clearer jelly, refrigerate the juice overnight and skim off any solids that are in the juice. Keep solids from the jelly bag to make apple butter.

To Make Jelly Measure apple juice into a kettle. Adjust proportions of sugar to juice if necessary. Add lemon juice and sugar and stir well. Boil over high heat to 220 degrees F,if you are at higher elevations to 8 degrees above the boiling point of water, or until jelly mixture sheets from a spoon. Remove from heat, skim off foam quickly. Pour into prepared and sterilized jars leaving 1/4 inch head space. Seal and process for 10 minutes in water bath.

Yields 3 to 4 eight ounce jelly jars.

Recipe amended to take into account higher elevations. Also look at the comments section below for my comment to learn an easier way to test for the set of jelly rather than the sheeting from the spoon.

Apple Butter

2 quarts of cooked apple pulp
4 cups sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
dash of allspice

Use apple pulp left over from preparing the apple jelly. Run the pulp from the jelly bag through a food mill or fine sieve to remove seeds, skin, and seed casings from the pulp. Measure the pulp and adjust sugar and spices proportionally to the pulp measurement. Add sugar and spices. Cook on medium low until the flavors are well blended, about 15 minutes. To prevent sticking, stir frequently as he mixture thickens. If the butter gets too thick for your liking, you can add a small amount of apple juice or water to thin. Pour hot apple butter into hot, sterilized jars leaving 1/4 inch head space. Process pints and half pints for 15 minutes in water bath.

Yields about 5 pints.

Fresh Bread and Pie

2010-08-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

I tried Reinheart's soft sandwich bread out of Artisan Bread Everyday yesterday, and I have to say that I was very pleased with the results. The dough is rather easy to make and took me only 20 minutes the night before to mix up. The recipe makes two loaves, and since there are only the two of us, I debated cutting the recipe in half. I decided on making the full recipe and trying to freeze half of it after the overnight fermentation. I will let you know the results of this experiment when I need to make sandwich bread again in the coming weeks. The dough the next day was velvety and soft feeling. It was just a great feeling dough.

I segmented into the two loaves, rounded one and placed it into the oiled zipper bag and froze it just like I have done with the lean bread from this book. The other loaf was shaped, placed into the greased tin and left to rise for two and a half hours. I slipped the risen loaf into the oven for 40 minutes, the shortest cook time, and found this beautiful golden brown bread. The crust on the top was just right. I have to say that the gold touch pans from Williams-Sonoma really do a wonderful job with bread and the crispness of the crust around the full loaf.

When I cut it open, I found this beautiful crumb with just the right amount of bubbles in the dough for lightness. It is a more dense bread than store bought to be sure, but it is also velvety and moist. The texture is soft yet firm enough that it does not collapse into a compressed mess. What did I put on this too too decedent bread? Why peanut butter and homemade jelly of course! I know, it seems so unclassy for this royal sandwich bread, but it was what I was craving. Now to just find myself a perfect bread box, so my bread can last a bit longer. Currently it is wrapped up in waxed paper in an attempt to keep it decent for the next few days. I had it for toast this morning, and while the interior is still wonderful, the crust is starting to lose a bit of its crunch.

After bread baking, I went on a quest to find more lemons as I had run out. I needed them to start the next project, apple pie filling. I processed more apples into the dehydrator and then I was off to the races getting the pie filling made. I have to recommend the v slicer or a mandolin if you are thinking of doing apple pie filling or dehydrating mass quantities of apple slices. It really does make fast work out of the slicing, and it also ensures that your slices are all the same perfect size.

Once the slices were treated against browning, they had to be blanched for a little bit to facilitate the canning process by bringing them to a hot temperature. Next the goopy filling that goes between the apple slices was made. I followed the recipe from The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, and I think this is another winner out of that book. The Clear Jel really makes it all work well. After the goop was made, in went the apple slices and a quick boil was reached. Then packing them into the jars and into the canner for processing.

I found that this recipe ran a bit short on its estimate of yield. I only got five full pints and a scant sixth when the recipe says it makes seven pints. Perhaps my half circle slices were too large to measure out the 12 cups as exactly as they did in the recipe. No matter as I am sure this will not be my only batch of apple pie filling this year. I am sure once we go apple and grape picking this fall that more will be made.

I can my pie filling into pints rather than quarts because a quart perfectly fills our mini pie pan. This pie was made last night out of the scant pint that was left over. It had just too much air space in the jar to reasonably store it, so I used it right away! Hey, no one is complaining here!

I had some requests for the apple jelly and apple butter recipes that I used for yesterday's blog posting. I will post them tomorrow in the blog. Check back to get those recipes then. Today is a really busy day as it is the first day back for me at 826 Valencia for after school tutoring. I still have some canning I am going to try to get done before I leave for that as well as getting my dance class clothing ready and the house straightened up a bit. I promise wholeheartedly to post those recipes tomorrow.

Apple Jelly and Butter

2010-08-18T12:30:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was an intense day in the canning process. I did both batches of apple jelly and apple butter as well as drying more apples in the dehydrator. Apple jelly and apple butter do go hand in hand as the jelly uses only the juice from the fruit, so the butter uses up the spend flesh from the juicing process. The only waste is the skins that are stripped away when making the apple butter. I did a batch and a half of the apple jelly as it has always been one of our favorite things to spread on fresh rolls with dinner.

I rough chopped up the apples after washing them. It was kind of nice not having to peel and core everything. I did, however, remove all the seeds from the apples before putting them in the pot with the water to cook out their juices. An episode of G.I. Joe once had them destroy a blob like monster by running it into an apple orchard. They reasoned that the poison in apple seeds would kill this monster, and it did. Hence, my paranoia of apple seeds was born, and my fear of cooking the apples with seeds present continues to this day. The apples cooked at a low simmer for 30 minutes, filling the house with a wonderful perfume smell. It is one of the aspects of the Gravenstein apple that I really do love. From there, the pulp and juice was carefully and slowly poured into the jelly bag to drain.

Now last year I did my jelly using a pair of nylons as my jelly bag, and this is a wonderful and cheap way to do jelly. I just recommend using a new and nicely cleaned pair when you do this. My kitchen, however does not have any place good to hang a nylon from, so I splurged and bought a Fox Run jelly bag set. I found this to be a nice set so long as one does not over fill the bag. It is held onto the ring with elastic, so if the weight is too much it will pull itself off the ring. My batch and a half of apple jelly was right on the edge. I did not squeeze the bag this year either as I had more time to let it all drain. This jelly bag did a tremendous job of not letting any solids through, so I did not have to restrain the juice before putting it into the pan for the cook.

Here is the small amount of overrun from the jelly. I took this picture from the top, so you could see how clear it turned out. I also had minimal foam to skim which resulted in five beautiful jars of perfectly clear blush colored apple jelly. The especially nice thing about having a little left over is that you can taste the early results of your work. We had this with some bread and soup for dinner. It was very light and fragrant, and the set on it was firm yet spreadable. I could turn the cup over without the jelly moving or sliding. A good set indeed!

From there, I squeezed the pulp back out of the bag and into my newly acquired vintage Foley food mill. This was the inaugural run for this, so I was super excited to try it out. The food mill worked like a charm, and with some prodding and poking, I got all the pulp out that I possibly could and left behind only the small scraps of skins from the pulp. It felt very satisfying to be able to use the spent pulp this year to make the apple butter. If you are not making apple jelly and want to just make apple butter, I posted my sister's wonderful crock pot apple butter recipe last year around this time. I used her spice ratio to season this year's pulp as well.

Cooking the pulp and spices to get the flavors through the mixture made me wish fall was here already. All the sweet smells of apple, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice created the biggest turkey and stuffing craving I think I have felt in a long time. From there it was a quick trip into the jars, sealing them, and then into the water bath. In the end, I had five half pints of jelly to four half pints of butter. I guess that is a good guideline for future jelly to butter recipes, that the butter will be one jar or so less than the jelly side of things.

Today I have already baked some bread using the Reinheart's Artisan Bread Everyday cookbook. It has made me want to dig right in, but I still have to wait for the loaf to cool. Once it has, I have a feeling that I will be digging in for a sandwich! This loaf looks like one of the best ones I have made yet, and I promise to post pictures and baking notes on it tomorrow. This was my first attempt at his Soft Sandwich Bread, so I hope it all turned out. If it tastes as good as it smells, I think I am in for a real treat.

Hopefully I can try out his recipe for pull apart rolls. Those are our favorite way to convey apple butter to your taste buds. Today I am off to take a quick walk to pick up more lemons. I do not have enough for today's canning plans: apple pie filling! I cannot wait to get this done and make up a pie for tonight's dinner, even if it means more peeling and coring. After that, more apples are going into the dehydrator, and then perhaps some work on my velvet wreath. I hope to get it done before the end of August, and it looks like I am rapidly running out of time.

Apple Invasion: Applesauce

2010-08-17T11:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I mentioned that Dan and I went to the Gravenstein Apple Fair over the weekend. Just like last year, Dan and I picked up a box of apples from Walker Apples - a 40 pound box! It sounds like a lot of apples, but once I am done processing them into all their different components, I wonder if a 40 pound box is enough. I am sure once we have a family, we will be a two or three box purchaser at the fair. As it stands, I am already a good fourth of the way through the box.

Yesterday I made applesauce. I am not quite sure if I would ever buy applesauce again once we started making our own. My mother made ours when we were kids, and I always liked it much better than store bought. This applesauce is also so sweet due to the natural sugars in the Gravenstein apple that I added only a half cup of sugar to the entire pot of apple sauce. I also saved all the peel and core scraps from making it up, so I can make my own pectin and apple syrup experiments. I hope that they turn out as well as the apple sauce did this year.

All I do for my applesauce is I peel, core, and rough chop up the apples and place them into a pot. I then add a bit of pure apple juice if I have it otherwise I add a little water. I adjust the sugar I add depending on the sweetness of the apples, and then I let it cook away over low heat. As it cooks, I periodically stir it up and mash some of the big chunks down. Dan and I like chunky applesauce, so I do not use a food mill. If you love a smooth applesauce, you can skip the skinning and coring and just rough chop your apples and run it through a food mill once it is done cooking. If you like spiced applesauce, you can add cinnamon or cloves or whatever you like to the mix. Since some people don't like spices, I tend to can mine with out the spices and add it later when I serve it up. This way everyone can have their sauce exactly as they like it.

This batch ended up being three quarts and a pint in size. I am told this is simply not enough sauce for the year, so I may be making another batch up this week if there are enough apples after all the other projects are made. Currently I have some of the apples in a jelly bag juicing for apple jelly. Pictures and a synopsis of the progress on that tomorrow. I am also going to take the apple pulp from the jelly and make it into apple butter. I am trying to make as little waste of things as I can this year. I have always been a "waste not want not" kind of person. This year I am hoping to be way more efficient at this than last year. I threw out skins and cores last year. This year, nothing will be wasted if I can help it. For now, I just wished I had a bigger freezer to hold all the apple scraps. I am starting to run out of room!

English Muffin First Attempt

2010-08-16T00:41:00.000-07:00

Friday brought about my first attempt at English muffins using Reinhart's recipe from Artisan Bread Everyday. The recipe seems really easy, and at its core it is very easy. Making up the batter like dough the day before baking makes it even easier. The biggest difficulty I had with the recipe was an equipment issue. I was using our cast iron griddle, and it is not quite seasoned enough to do breads. I needed to use a ton of oil to keep the muffins from sticking down.

Once I got the griddle cleaned up a bit from the first few that stuck down, I also realized that you need to let the muffins just tell you when they are ready to be flipped. I know this sounds kind of funny and odd, but they really will tell you when they need to be flipped. I found that if they were sticking to the griddle, they were not cooked enough to flip. By being patient and waiting for them to easily slide onto the spatula, I had a perfectly browned side ready to flip. I do, however, need to practice my flipping technique. It requires a steady hand as you are flipping over a rather tall pancake like dough. The dough is still rather liquid when you flip them, so a couple of the muffins slid over resulting in a lopsided muffin.

In the end I was really pleased with this first attempt at a somewhat hard to make bread. The methods of making the batter were easy; the techniques are the only hard part about it, and with time and practice, I am sure I will get them down as well. The other important thing that the book tells you to do is cool the muffins on their sides. It is a necessary thing as the ones that did not get enough cooling time on their side did collapse down quite a bit and become more dense than the others.

The only other disadvantage of making these at home was the colossal mess made by all the cornmeal that seemed to multiply itself across the counters and cooking surface of the stove. It took me quite a while to find all the granules of the meal and dispose of them. We split the first ones open for a tuna melt dinner on Saturday after returning from the Gravenstein Apple Fair in Sonoma county. They were good, and while not as craggy as a commercially produced English muffin, I thought they tasted great. It was a good dinner to go with apple sorting. We bought a 40 pound box of apples again this year and will be working on processing them into jelly, sauce, dried rings, pectin, and syrup this week. Look for those postings in the coming days.

I did get to canning up those O'Henry peaches that I bought at the Friday Farmer's Market. They were rather unripe, so they should hold for a long time in the syrup. The other thing I got to relearn this year, is that the O'Henry variety of peaches does not peel in the hot water bath like other varieties. I am not quite sure why this is the case, but the 10 pounds of peaches had to be peeled by hand. Luckily we had received a great peeler for Christmas that is designed for peeling peaches and tomatoes. It worked like a dream, and while I felt irritated that I could not just slip the skins, it was much better than peeling with a paring knife.

I worked hard to try to get them done quickly, and as usual I underestimated the time it takes for me to can a bunch of produce. I did get them done from start to finish out of the water bath in two and a half hours. I guess that is not too bad. I ended up with eight pints of sliced peaches for this winter and enough left over that I made a mini peach pie in our 7" pie plate. Despite my cramming into the jar as many slices as could reasonably fit, the fruit is still floating. I guess I need to get better at packing my jars. I know that some of the floating is due to the peaches shrinking up after they are processed and the air inside of the peach flesh collapses and cooks out, but it is still a bit disappointing. Someday, with practice, I will get perfectly suspended peaches. The pie, on the other hand, was wonderful. Dan said it was the best peach pie I have made to date.

Today will be filled with apple processing after I complete my jog. I am hoping to get a bunch of sauce on the stove and then turn my attention to the dried apples. This year nothing will be going to waste, as I am going to make an attempt at homemade apple pectin for next year's cherry jam. I hope the pectin works in that jam so that I don't have to cook and cook the cherries until there is nothing left. I kind of ended up with a cherry spreadable candy this year rather than jam. My attempts at jaming a low pectin fruit without added pectin turned out just as I had predicted. Hey, it never hurts to experiment a bit though. Well I am off for that jog and lots of hours peeling apples.

Peachy Friday

2010-08-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

Today has been incredibly busy, hence the late edition of the blog today. Yesterday was peach day, and today will be peach day again if there is enough time. I underestimated my peach needs, so I only got a few jars of this one. It is alright though as I still have a few jars from last year that need to be eaten still. I also was so busy yesterday that I forgot to take a picture of the peaches before they ended up in the pot, so here they are ready for the jamming process.

I did a full cook on these, and they turned into a beautiful golden color. The two and a half pounds ended up to be four full and one half jar of jam. The refrigerator is starting to get rather cluttered with half jars of jams, so I think I will need to make some refrigerator cookies next week to clear things out. It is so cluttered I cannot even imagine fitting the watermelon I just got in there until some of the space is cleared.

I also got some great deals on end of the day produce today at the Farmer's market in Old Oakland. I need to find out what to make with some of the cauliflower and broccoli that I got for cheap. Of course I got all of this just as the weather warms up, so soup is out of the equation. I also got quite a few O'Henry peaches for canning for this winter along with the watermelon. I also made my first attempt at English muffins today. They look pretty good from the outside, but I have yet to fork one open to see what the insides look like. Hopefully tomorrow I can convince Dan to have one with me for breakfast before we head out for the apple fair. Oh and the apple fair... that means more canning goodness! I suppose I should sign off and head into the kitchen to get some jars clean and some peaches peeled.

Canning Week Day 2 - Apricot Jam

2010-08-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was apricot jam day. I got these late season apricots at the market on Sunday and could not wait to get them into their jars. Apricot was the one jam that I did not make enough of last year, and I opened up the last jar of it just a few days ago. I love apricot jam as it is a very versatile thing to have around the house. Aside from the obvious spreading onto toast and English muffins, I also use this jam for jelly rolls, freezer box cookie filling, it makes a great filling between layers of chocolate cake, bbq sauce bases, and glazes for ham or pork roasts.

I think this year's jam will be quite stiff just like last years. The apricots seemed under ripe, so their pectin content was really high. I also figured out why my strawberry was so foamy the day before. I was cooking too quickly and that caused the crystallization problems that resulted in the foaminess. I wished I was able to retain these kinds of lessons better from year to year. I suppose I need to write myself some sort of notes to keep around and review from year to year to ensure no knowledge is lost from the year before. It is kind of like sending a kid on summer vacation, and they remember the big concepts but lose the finer ones until they are back in the swing of things again the next school year.

This year's jam is a bit more golden than last year's deep orange color. I used a different lighter variety of fruit, so I am sure most of that is from the fruit selection. I have found out that apricot is my brother-in-law's favorite jam, so I will be making another batch to share with him if the Brittany apricots come in late this month. If not, I guess it will have to be a rationed out product this year. I am really banking on those Brittanies as they made stellar jam with just the right amount of sweetness and tart undertones.

Today I am tackling the peach jam. I am also hoping to hop on the sewing machine as I did not get to that yesterday. I want to get this project finished and some notes written up before I share the project with you. It is a fun one and also eco-Friendly money saver if you are into that. Well there are the first round of peaches to peel, so I am off.

Canning Week!

2010-08-11T11:40:00.001-07:00

Canning week has begun! It all started on Sunday at the Farmer's market here. I usually wait until the end of the day when good deals can be struck on overruns of produce that cannot be sold in time for the market to end. This time I got strawberries, apricots, and peaches for canning. I am doing mostly jam this week, with one exception. I am a lover of banana splits, and I just cannot justify the expensive toppings in the grocery store. I decided this year to embark on making my own toppings from one of my canning books. In April, I made pineapple sauce from left over Easter brunch pineapple. It has been awaiting the partner sauce of strawberry, and now I have made it.

I have to say that this sauce is not set as hard as the pineapple, which I feel is a good thing. The pineapple was really stiff. This is much more saucy. The flavor is amazing, and the secret ingredients really do bring out the strawberry flavors while not distracting or detracting from them. In fact, I cannot taste them what so ever! It was a big surprise. We made banana splits last night for dessert, and while I did not make the ice cream or the hot fudge, the two sauces I made were phenomenal! It makes me want to make more sauce to ensure we have enough for the whole year! I am not sure that the five half pints will be enough after tasting the left over half a jar from the day I made it!

I also made my fist batch of strawberry jam. This seems to be really popular with my friends, and I am noticing more "orders" for this one. I think that I may have to make another batch, so there will be enough to go around. This year I got a lot of foam on the jam, and I am not quite sure why. Perhaps I needed more lemon juice to cut it down. I am unsure. I ended up canning the jam with out skimming, and while it is not quite as "pretty" as skimmed jam, I still think it tastes pretty darn good. That is what matters in the end is taste, right?

Canning has been quite odd this year as we are in a winter like weather pattern here in Oakland. This morning's jog was done in the misty and almost drizzly fog and cold. It seems odd to be preserving summer's bounty when it does not look or feel summer like at all. Today I am going to work on the apricot I could not do yesterday due to a lack of lemons. I am also thinking about diving headlong into the peach if there is time. The peaches look like they are getting ripe, and I do not want them to go bad on me before I can jam them up. If there is time before I head off to the Cub's game I will also work on finishing up a sewing project I hope to share at a future date. Well the motivation is here, so I am going to seize it and set of to some canning.

I'm Not Dead, and I'm Not Resting...

2010-08-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

Needless to say, the moth of July is always a busy one for me. This year was more busy than usual. The month started off with some frantic crafting. One of my nephew's has a birthday on the 4th of July. You would think that this would be easy to remember, and it is, but somehow the day always creeps up on me. I think I have all the time in the world to work on stuff for him, and then bam, it is time to send out the gift. His was a bit late this year, but I think the utter coolness of the present more than made up for it. I made him a set of felt toy trucks. Each has moving parts, and they are just so cool I almost wanted to save them for myself.

The back roller on the steam roller moves around an axle. The dump truck bed on that truck lifts up to dump the large rock out of the bed. Apparently the rock must be very heavy as it looks like the back axle on the dump truck is now "bent" under the weight.

The cement mixer on the cement truck rolls around just like the real truck would. The front of the bulldozer moves up and down. It is also a fun thing to use with the rock in the back of the dump truck. I suppose you could bulldoze the rock into the bed of the truck.

The excavator was my personal favorite in the bunch. The basket rotates on two different points, so it is the most mobile of the toys. While the rock would not fit in the basket, I am sure that Craig will find something to scoop up with this toy. I am will to bet some Lego people will be taking that basket for a ride up in the air high above the construction site they are working on.

For our wedding anniversary the next weekend, Dan and I went camping around Yosemite. It was a pretty spot and very relaxing. Aside from our neighbors running a generator with really bright lights for a large portion of each night, it was a beautiful place to set up camp. The lights luckily did not drown out the stars. We sat around our campfire and made dinner, smores, and fruit pies with our pie iron. It was a great junk food filled first day. We even kept the rain fly off the tent so that we could fall asleep looking at the stars. It was really pretty and just as nice as camping out by the fire minus the mosquitoes.

The next morning, we pulled out our "new" camp stove. I had gotten it off of freecycle, and while we were told it needed a new hose, what it really needed was a lot more. Something had gotten disconnected in the main part of the stove, so only one of the burners was operational. We warmed up the cast iron for a while to get it hot, so Dan could work on the unlit burner and the tea pot could warm on the functional one. Once we had hot tea, we moved the cast iron back onto the stove and began cooking the egg portion of the omelet. Just as the eggs went into the now newly warmed pan, we realized that there was a serious problem with the stove. The flame under the pan kept getting big, then small, then big, then small even though we were not touching the knobs. I looked down at the regulator cap to see it totally frozen over. Then, as if planned, the propane started shooting out of the regulator and out of the canister. Dan quickly cut the flame, and then we disconnected the canister. Thinking all was lost we started to make contingency plans for breakfast. Dan put the lid on the pan, and we hoped for the best. We were in luck as the remaining heat from the cast iron carried the eggs through to fully cooked awesomeness!

After the breakfast excitement, we were off for our day hike. I knew that Yosemite in the summer is full of people, but I had no idea it would be that crowded. It took us a long while to wind our way down to the valley floor in the bumper to bumper traffic. We then went to hike our "less popular" trail to Nevada Falls. It was a beautiful hike, but still had many people on the trail. Moments alone were just not possible. The falls were beautiful though, and it was nice to get some pictures of the two of us hiking where we are both in the frame. (This is not one of them though) The hike lead us along the water most of the way, and just when I was so hot I wanted to stop, we came to the misty part of the hike along the main falls. It was quite refreshing. We picnicked along side of the busy trail and people watched. Once we were off the trail, we went to Camp Curry to swab off a bit before our Anniversary dinner at The Ahwahnee. On the way there, I got to see a bear along the road. My trip was now complete as I was bear paranoid the whole time we camped. This did not stop me from taking any food, wrappers, and water bottles out of the car an into the restaurant with us.

The next weeks were filled with preparing for my trip out to Idaho for Chaos Wars. Last year I determined that I would not make any new costumes. This year, I took it as a challenge to make all sorts of new costumes. I took many old costumes that I made incorrectly the first time apart and resewed them into a corrected garment. I also made many new things from scratch. In the year of the stash bust, I did some major damage getting ready for the event. I made myself four new cholis out of fabric that I had longed to make them out of for some time. I also made myself a new feast outfit. In keeping with my want to make costumes I can use in multiple venues, I made a Ghawazee coat that cut under the bust line. I wore it with my newly remade coin bra and two skirts I had made for the event. I also made a new tassel belt to finish off the outfit. My hard work paid off as I won best feast garb this year. It was a total thrill, and there were lots of great costumes I competed against. Niobe being chief among them, and I was flattered to beat her. She is by far one of the best costumers in Belegarth. The event was fun filled and packed with things to do and friends old and new to hang out with. It all went way too fast.

I returned home on the first of August to a house that looked like it had been neglected for a month.... because it had. It took a week to transition from event life back to real life, but the making of a cake helped ease me back. I attempted sponge cake for the first time with our mini tube pan. A half recipe worked out perfectly. I have since been cleaning and taking stock of costume repairs that need to be made. I am also starting my canning this week, and it has been going smashingly. I will update you on all that tomorrow.

The last update is on the balcony garden. It was the hardest hit item on my neglected list from July. The aphids really got the upper hand on things while I was busy and took out several of the bean plants. They then moved onto my tomatoes and all other plants on the porch. My lettuces that would be ready on my return from Idaho were mush. The beets were being attacked. The tomatoes had yellowed and been attacked over half of their leaves. The green peppers were doing no better. They had moved to every plant they could, including eating the heads off of several of my now blooming violets. The aphids had also called in their friends the spider mites to the Meyer lemon, and scale to the jasmine plant. Needless to say I was unhappy. I finally gave in and got myself a commercial insecticide and went to town yesterday. I sprayed everything in sight. I also did the painful cleanup of the plants. I pulled off dead and yellowing leaves. The plants look much greener, but also much leaner. I hope the extra fertilizer, water, and pruning helps them bounce back. I noticed that the tomatoes have sent up some new flowers, so here is to hoping for something productive from things. Between the bugs and the unusual cold we are having here (sorry to the rest of the States that appear to be sweltering), I am not sure I will get one tomato. Keep your fingers crossed for some sort of yield for all the work.

Well I guess this has been a pretty good catch up of the last month. I will be back tomorrow with a canning update as it is a canning week around here. Jam session is now in progress!

Garden Picture Show

2010-06-23T09:38:00.000-07:00

The balcony garden is exceeding last year's version. The plants are much taller, greener, and in general happier than the year before. I think part of the reason for the success is that the plants started here in the Bay area climate rather than the plants I got last year that started in the hotter part of the outer Bay area and then summered in the cool area of the Bay. I think this has resulted in happier plants over all. The jasmine is now blooming again. I am happy to see that it is happy on the new trellis, topiary form that I got for my birthday in April. The flowers smell so great that I hope to get outside and read next to it sometime soon. It is all dependent on the costuming getting done in time for Chaos Wars!

The zucchini plants are mixed results. One plant seems to be very happy. It is blooming constantly, and while I have no male flowers for the female ones, the fruits seem to be doing fine. The other plant is in some sort of distress. It is developing blossom end rot, and I am not quite sure why. I was told that I was over watering them and that is why it was occurring, but now that I have cut back the watering there is still no improvement. I also read that it can be a problem with the plant's ability to take up calcium from the soil. I am not sure if my early flooding of the roots have caused this problem, but I am sad to see this happening again. The fruit look good and then they turn soft and black on the flower end and then fall off. I hope it is not something fungal or bacterial that will spread to the other happy plant.

The violets are starting to come along. I started them from seed, and I am glad to see that they seem to be taking off. I cannot wait to see what color the flowers are going to be for each plant! I am waiting with great anticipation as the package of seeds is a mixed variety. I hope to get some interesting color varieties. I love the purple and whites, but I also would love some golds or oranges. I would especially love a red velvet style like the ones my Dad got from a nursery when I was home visiting. They looked just like a red velvet cake! They were beautiful. For now, though, I am playing the waiting game. I hope to be able to press and sugar some of the flowers eventually for cake decoration.

The old lettuce seeds that my Dad sent me have been doing better than I thought they would. They were quite a few years old, so I did not expect any germination. It was a great surprise when quite a few came up. Only one of the original plants survived the week we were gone without water, so I planted a few more, and those have now poked their heads out of the soil. Hopefully they start to grow larger so I can harvest some leaves soon. I love their deep purple color at the tips and the bright green bottoms. I am not sure that the lettuce gets enough sun during the day to fully reach its potential. The white roof of the meat smoking building next to us is helping quite a bit with the reflection to add some light during the day, but there is very little direct light.

The beets seem to be happy in the box. The greens seem to have stopped growing, and I hope this is a good thing. I hope this means that the beets are forming and growing underground and not that something is wrong. I know that the boxes are quite small for beets, but I am going to pick them when they are young and small. This will keep them from being woody, but it is also convenient since the box will not accommodate large ones anyway.

The radishes from round one are almost all gone. I have replanted seeds in the holes of the old plants. There are still a few in the box that never developed radishes, so I need to pull them out and plant some new seeds there as well. It is fun having a crop like radishes as they grow quickly and are a tasty reward for little work. I also have some scarlet green onions that are in this box. They are slow growing! I am thinking about starting some more seeds right now so that I can get a second crop perhaps before the end of the growing season. These are still too small to be picked, and I think that they suffer from the lack of enough direct sunlight as well.

The Meyer lemon tree has suddenly gone into bloom all over the place. I am acting as a "bee" pollinating the flowers with a cotton swab as they open. I am slightly worried as the leaves are still quite sparse on the tree. Hopefully it gets more lush soon. I this flush of flowers as a sign that the feeding I am doing to the soil is helping the tree out. It was dropping leaves left and right, so I started the feeding as recommended in my gardening book. This resulted in the flush of flowers. I hope that once the initial flowering is over that this food helps the plant to grow more leaves. If anyone has any pointers about the leaf loss and how to get them back, let me know.

On a side note, I wanted to congratulate the USA world cup team. You game we quite the heart attack this morning, but I am glad to see that we are through to the next round! Now to beat England and advance on to the Quarter finals! Today I advance to day two of week five of the Couch to 5K. I am slightly intimidated by this day, but I felt the same way about Monday, and it went very smoothly. Here is to hoping the same for today. I also hope to finally, and I mean finally finish up my 25 yard black skirt. I need it for a Sunday performance, so I am running out of time. That is the focus today! Check back tomorrow for skirt progress notes.

Lots Going On!

2010-06-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

There is a lot going on around the shop and life lately. I have been so busy between crafting, Fabulous Pants, gardening, and watching the World Cup. I have been uploading items to the Fabulous Pants shop lately. I finally have the olive filigree pants uploaded to the shop. I have to say that I am really in love with this fabric. It is a very beautiful tone of olive, and the border on this sari is really quite stunning. I am hoping to get my costuming done for Chaos Wars quickly so that I can move on to another pair of pants for the shop. I am thinking about starting on another pair of purple pants, but there are also some red and raspberry fabrics that are also calling for my attention. It is hard when you are surrounded by such beautiful fabric to pick the next one to work on.

On Friday, I met up with the lovely Dreah, and we worked on making some pickles. It was her first time pickling, so it was a fun experience. We made a sandwich slice style pickle, and I think I may really like these as they have a slight sweetness to them. The brine has both brown and white sugar in it, giving it a real depth. There is also mustard seed and celery seed in the brine, which are also favorite spices of mine. I cannot wait for them to cure, so I can pop them open and try them out. I did not find the pickle crisp in time, so hopefully they are not too soft. We did soak them in ice water for a while, so hopefully this mitigated this a bit. I wished we had more time that day to do the full three hour soak, but that just was not possible. We would have been canning long into the night had we followed that.

On Sunday, we had some culinary goodness. We started the morning off with crepes and World Cup soccer games. I had mine filled with Nutella and bananas with chocolate sauce in one and homemade apricot jam in the other. Dusted with a little powdered sugar, it was a delicious way to start off a day. I am a big fan of crepes, and they are not as hard to make as people make them out to be. I make my batter the night before or even the morning of if I have enough time to let it sit for a hour in the fridge before it is time to make them. I like to spike the batter with some amaretto liquor for a great overtone to the crepes. Perhaps someday I will make a tutorial for making them.

We then moved on to a great pizza! I think it was one of the best pizzas we have made to date. I used a ball of the lean bread from the freezer for the crust. It works out well and is really convenient. We used store bought sauce, and I hope to change this soon. I have a recipe from one of my canning books that I would like to try out. I hope that it is a sauce we like because I would love to find a sauce that we really love that I can make rather than buying sauces that we just find okay. Once I find a recipe I love, I will share it.

Today I am hoping to make some actual progress on my newest 25 yard skirt. I have been "working" on it for a long time. Today I need to actually work on it... that is if World Cup does not get in the way too much. I hope to get my arrows repaired during the game and get them packaged up for shipment for Chaos Wars. Also, I want to get my new belt design started. I want to test it out at Chaos Wars before introducing it into the shop. I am taking some balcony garden pictures and will have them posted for you all tomorrow.

Chocolate Pinstripe Pants

2010-06-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

I know that I promised garden pictures, but lately it has been too cloudy for pretty pictures. I will however share this picture of the chocolate pinstripe pants that I listed yesterday in the Etsy Shop. I like the variety that this new listing gives to my shop, and if some of my new pairs of pants will photograph well in this location, I am sure I will use it as a back drop again. I am currently editing the pictures for the olive filigree pair that I showed a few days ago. I hope to have that finished by the end of the England v. Algeria match. Once they are finished they will be up on Etsy. Once the clouds clear, I will take updated pictures of the balcony garden for the Monday edition of the blog. Also, I have a canning date today, so look for pickle pictures next week as well.

Baked Goods

2010-06-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Ah baked goods! They are the reason why I am now jogging three times a week. I love them so much, and I cannot be stopped from making and eating these treats. I can however monitor their size. This pie is in the new lineup of mini baked items that I am making. It helps me keep the size of my portions smaller. As with the mini cakes, this is a mini pie. I found a 6" pie plate on Amazon, and this size plate uses a pint jar of the cherry pie filling I made. It also takes a single crust recipe to make a double crust pie! It makes me so happy to also not have a huge pie sitting around that we get sick of before finishing it. I also made a fancy top to the pie by using a mini cookie cutter to cut heart shapes out. Sadly, the filling did bubble out of the outside hearts, but the center one remained clear as to what it was.

I also made zucchini bread this week. I used the first zucchini that I successfully grew out on the balcony. I planted a zucchini plant last year but was unable to get any zucchini successfully off of that plant. This year, I think I will do better as they are in a deeper container, and I know not to water them quite as much. There are several more zucchinis growing on the two plants now, and I cannot wait for them to get bigger so we can have more bread as well as grilled and fried zucchini for dinner.

Interestingly enough, there were no seeds in the zucchini, so the bread did not have as much juice from the squash. It turned out a bit dry, and while I would like to blame it on the squash itself, I also think I over baked it a bit. Even with these setbacks, I still feel it is the best zucchini bread I have ever made since I grew the squash myself with no help from anyone but nature.

The balcony garden is doing much better this year, and I will take pictures this afternoon to share with you. Lots of things are blooming and producing. I have eaten almost all the radishes, and I am planting replacements as I pluck each one out of the dirt. I hope to get three or more harvests out of them.

On the couch to 5K today, I kept with it and finished out strong. I am really proud of myself. I did not let myself slink back to week three. I feel so refreshed and recharged to take on the day. Speaking of which, there are projects to be tackled, World Cup games to be watch, Long Now to be attended, and a kitchen floor in need of a good washing.

Rainier Cherry Jam

2010-06-15T10:46:00.001-07:00

Last week I finished off our cherry picking adventure by making jam out of the Rainier cherries. It was interesting as I was worried the cherries would not have enough pectin to gel the jam completely. I am not sure if the pectin or the complete and total boiling I did of the fruit and sugar that made it actually solidify into a jam. If it were not for the peels I left in the jam, it would have been outright jelly.

Making this jam was interesting as it foamed and would boil up quite high in the pot. It would rise so quickly that I had to lower the heat under the pot resulting in a really long boil time to reach the jellying point. The fruit, for the most part, disintegrated into juice only and there seems to be no real body to the jam aside from the peels, which are what is floating to the top of the jars. The jam also was really runny for a while, and I was concerned that I would have cherry syrup rather than jam. As the jam cooled it did solidify, and now it is a very solid jam that does not move much, so I guess those fears were unfounded.

Last week was spent mostly at home in Illinois visiting family and friends. It was great to get to see some of them and spend some real quality time talking and catching up. It was also nice to get in some Midwestern things I missed. I ate at Portillo's and listened to song birds. I dug in the garden with my parents and went to Grandma's house. I even got to have my storm, and while I did not want to be caught in it during my 14 mile walk with Christine, it was still nice to hear thunder and see lightning.

I was proud of myself for mostly keeping up with the running plan while on vacation. While I was not able to keep the food end of my getting in shape plan, I did run on Wednesday and try for a long walk on that Saturday. I came back and moved on to week 4 yesterday in the couch to 5K plan. It seems like such a big step up, but I am determined to not back down like I usually do. I am going to keep going on week four and then move on to week five next week. Today I am watching World Cup games and trying to get some personal sewing projects started for Chaos Wars. Well the Brasil/North Korea game is starting, so I am off.

Bowls of Cherries

2010-06-07T08:29:00.001-07:00

This weekend was filled with joyful and fun events. Friday night we went to the DeYoung museum to see the end of the quilt exhibit. It was neat to see some Amish quilts from Arthur on the wall of a museum. It made me miss all the quilt auctions I have attended there and the beautiful quilts that were always offered. We also saw the newest exhibit that is visiting from France highlighting the beginning paintings of the Impressionists. It was a great show, and some of my favorite paintings were there for me to see in person and up close. It was also nice that we went on the Friday night as there were few people in the gallery when we were in there, so you could spend some good quality time with each canvas. On Sunday I went to a friend's baby blessing ceremony. It was beautiful and very relaxing. The setting was just gorgeous, and the women there were so friendly and wonderful. The above picture is of the blankets I made for the new baby we are all awaiting. They were fun and quick to make. I got the wonderful idea for them from a knitting group friend's blog. Brilliant and easy! I did mine a bit differently though by doubling up the fabric for each blanket. That way there was the pattern on each side of the blanket.

Saturday was my favorite day of this fun filled weekend. Dan and I went cherry picking in Brentwood. I was on the hunt for sour cherries. There is only one place to find them in the Bay Area from my research, so we headed out to Bacchini's Fruit Tree for their Montmorency cherry trees. They had more of them than I thought, so my panic to get there before they were picked clean was a now calmed fear. Ladders were at a premium since these cherries are a taller tree compared to the sweet trees. Having a tall husband was very much appreciated. Once a ladder was abandoned, I seized it and began picking high up in the canopy. Most people were there for the sweet cherries and not the sour ones. It was fun to hear people come into our grove all thrilled that here were "tons of unpicked ones here." Then they would undoubtedly taste one and exclaim how awful and sour they were along with the obligatory "Who wants these!" comments. Those of us on our ladders and with in eye contact range would look at each other with knowing smiles and laughs. It took us a few hours, but at the end we had 11 and a half pounds of sour cherries and three and a half of Rainier cherries for jam.

After getting some lunch, we drove home, and I set to work pitting. Cherries went into the sink to be cleaned and rinsed, stems were pulled, and then they went into the hopper of the pitter. The pitter I bought from Noropro was very good. It went through all 11 and a half pounds of cherries in a quick two hours. It beat doing them by hand any day! The big keys to keeping the pitter working was to make sure the metal plunger did not get clogged with cherry flesh or skins. Also, making sure that the plunger had some vegetable oil on it for lubrication was also key to clean and easy operation.

I loved that most of the cherries stayed whole! The only thing that told you there was no pit any longer was the two small holes in the cherry. The other fun thing was all the tiny X's that the pitter made of punched out cherry flesh where the pit was extracted. The pitter was also more gentle to the extra ripe cherries than I expected. very little juice was in the pit hopper each time I had to empty it out, and there was also little juice in the finished cherry bowl. This resulted in my having to smash the cherries in the colander to get the four cups of liquid I needed for making the goop part of the filling.

It was my first time using Clear Jel, and it was interesting. I would recommend that you whisk together your Clear Jel and sugar before adding in any liquid. I did not do this and just added the liquid to the unmixed powders which resulted in lots of clumps I had to beat out of the mix. Once it gelled up, it was super thick and hard to stir. Next the cherries went in all at once, and the stirring became even more difficult. I tried to stir as best as I could with out making a total mess of the stove. Then it was into the jars for canning. I ended up with two quarts and five full pints with almost another full quart in the fridge. I cannot wait to make a pie with it once I get back from my trip this week.

Today I am off for jogging day one of week three. I hope it goes well. This week is usually the last successful week I have in the program, and then I usually repeat the week or just stop all together. I am determined to do "week three" once and then move on to week four next week! The Rainier cherry jam is on the list of must do things today. I also have a birthday gift to finish for Jozef and some house cleaning and prep to do before I depart. It is going to be a busy day, but I am sure I can get it all done... especially with that handy dandy pitter!

Gearing Up for Canning Season

2010-06-04T10:49:00.000-07:00

Canning season for me will officially start this weekend. I cannot wait. This year I have added two new pieces of equipment for my canning plans. I bought this used food mill to make tomato sauce, juice, and paste this year. It is just like the one that my Mom and Dad have, and I am looking forward to using it. While I would love to make applesauce with it as well, Dan and I both like the chunkier style applesauce, so that means no food mill for making that. I am looking at perhaps making some berry jam with it as well to chop up the seeds a bit more than just jamming the whole berry. Hopefully I can get some pointers and instructions from my Mom when I go home to visit.

I also went and bought this cherry pitter from the kitchen supply store yesterday. I went to get one off the shelf, as I knew right where they were due to my wanting one since pitting the 5 pounds for cherry creek beer two years ago. When I got to the shelf, to my dismay, there were none there. The was not even a tag for the place where they would be. I walked the rows looking for the pitters, no luck. I finally asked one of the people who worked there and wonderfully they had some in their stock room. I could not have been happier seeing as I would like to kick off canning with cherries this year. I plan on doing 4 quarts and 4 pints of sour cherry pie filling, a batch of sweet cherry jam, a batch of Rainier cherry jam, and if I am feeling crazy, a batch of white cherry jam. I of course will make the obligatory fresh sour cherry pie. Today I have to calculate the number of pounds of each I want to bring home for canning. I am sure it will be a lot. I plan on taking a comfortable chair into the kitchen and putting the new pitter to work.

Today I am off for a jog. It is day three of week two. I hope I can make it through as I am really sore from back to back jogging days and a killer session at Fat Chance last night. You wouldn't think doing the orbit for 45 minutes would make your legs this sore, but it does. Then I am going to do the usual Friday housework of laundry and kitchen cleaning. I am also hoping to get the birthday present for Jozef finished off today. It is a lot to try to accomplish before heading into the city for the art museum, but I hope to get most of it done. Now, to get things accomplished!

Jogging, Canning, and Art Oh My!

2010-06-03T11:04:00.000-07:00

Jogging has been going.... pretty well I might add. I am only through day two of week two, but I am feeling pretty good about myself. Jogging outside by the waterfront is turning out to be way more motivating than the workouts I used to try to do in the weight room of the old apartment. There is so much to look at that it takes my mind off of the running itself. I look at the city and the fog, the sailboats with their bright or stark white sails, and the container ships when they are in port. I have to say that I am liking the running skirt. While the shorts underneath are still a bit creepish, the skirt keeps all that covered up, so I am less self conscious about it all. It is also really comfortable to run in for the most part and looks rather nice. I feel way more stylish than just running around in some ill fitting shorts. The only disappointing thing was that the zipper broke on the key pocket the first day I used them. I am looking to repair that today if I can get the key back onto the teeth. My first attempts were thus far unsuccessful.

I am also gearing up for the fist major canning operation of the season. This Saturday I am going to go cherry picking. I have found a place with sour cherries, and I am so excited to finally be able to make a sour cherry pie! I miss those so much. I have already purchased my clear jel and cannot wait to try out my first canned pie filling. I am also going to work on a couple varieties of cherry jam. I am hoping to do small batches of bing or dark sweet cherry jam of some sort, Rainer cherry jam for my Dan, and perhaps some white cherry jam. I also introduced Dan to the concept of spirited cherries. I think they would be a unique addition to his Manhattans, so I may also be canning some of them. I am going to go to the kitchen supply store this afternoon to buy a cherry pitter in order to prepare for this onslaught of cherry goodness. I usually do my pitting by hand, but I think with these huge plans I will need the faster mechanized method to get through them all in the weekend before heading home for a quick family visit.

I am also pumped to go to the DeYoung museum tomorrow night! We are going to go and see the Paris exhibit of the Impressionists. I cannot wait to see this awesome display of some of my favorite painters. It will be nice to get to see some pictures in person without the expense of flying to Paris. I also want to go and see the Amish quit exposition before it closes to give me the inspiration to finally start cutting my first quilt. I have always admired the bold colors and unique use of shapes that the Amish quilts embody. Our current quilt on the bed is a handmade Amish quilt I bought at an auction back in Illinois when we lived near the Illinois Amish country. While my first quilt will not be the typical solid color combination of the Amish quilts, I hope it is crafted as well as the one I bought... with modern conveniences of course. I am going to cut by hand, piece by machine, and quilt by hand. I figure it is a good mix for my first quilt. This is also going to be a challenge since I cannot strip piece my quilt. I am making it out of scraps, so all the diamonds are going to have to be cut individually by hand and then pieced and sew together. It seems daunting, but I am sure I can do it.

Well I am off to finish up some gifts for people and perhaps pick up my black skirt before giving in to this new quilt project. There are also some costumes to be made before the end of July when I leave for Chaos Wars. So much crafting and homemaking, so little time!

Updates

2010-06-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

Baking Updates

Lately the cakes are going gang busters! It makes me joyful and thankful that I have started jogging for exercise. If I had not started that, I am sure it would be a sad state of affairs. This was a lemon layer cake that I found the recipe from, yet again, the wonderful people at Cook's Illustrated Magazine. For this recipe, I had to make lemon curd for the filling. It was interesting to work with eggs in that kind of concept and to get experience in cooking with out cooking the eggs as a separate element in the whole package. There is nothing worse than cooked pieces of egg in your curd. I also had to learn to make a seven minute frosting variation for the frosting. That time I did cook the eggs on the fist try, so I had to take another stab at it. The frosting turned out rather meringue like. It was delicious, and also worked well in the small cake halving territory of things.

Bread making has been rather so so. I have been trying to make the San Francisco sourdough recipe from my Peter Reinhart baking books. The loaves are turning out with a good crust but way too dense. I am wondering if I need to cast off my "purist" dream and do his mixed method with both starter and commercial yeast. I will try that once I return from a trip I am going to take and post those results here.

Garden Update:

The peas finally decided it was too hot for them and turned yellow this weekend in the pleasantly warm weather. I pulled them out of the trellis and planted a few more bean plants. Hopefully they sprout and catch up with the rest of the pack soon. I tried soaking them to give them a faster germination rate, so hopefully I helped them along. The tomatoes are crazy this year. One has grown out of the cage already, and the flowers are blooming away.

I found some aphids trying to attack my tender and small herb plants, so it is back to the soap spray regiment to rid myself of the pests. I am glad that I happened to catch them early. There were few of them and not the large swarms that I usually find later when the damage is already done.

The zucchini plants seem to be really happy this year. One plant already has four small zucchini and this other larger one:
I also tried some of the radishes from the box in a pasta salad this weekend. They were great. Just the right amount of hot and not very burp educing. The other plants are trucking along and looking rather happy. I even noticed a new little shoot in the zucchini plant box from a replacement cucumber that I planted when the other one started to die while I still had hope for a cucumber season. I guess I should not have given up so easily. This shoot is rather shaded by the now large zucchini plants, but one can always hope for it to shoot up and claim its own place.

Shop News:

I took several shots of the new pairs of pants at the end of the week. Here is the olive filigree pair in a rough picture. I may have to take some more pictures of this pair today as I am not sure the ones I have will be good enough. I am also awaiting a few new supplies to start some samples of new projects. I cannot wait. What about the old projects I keep saying I will complete? Well I am still working on them actively. After a "rewiring project," I can now work on things at night. Our apartment, while awesomely spacious and full of electrical outlets, is a challenge for being able to plug in a light by the couch in the middle of the room. It creates a trip wire which is bound to inspire an accident. This weekend we ran the wire for a large power strip under the side of the area rug ending behind the couch and bookshelves, so now I can have light to work on things in the living room when we are watching the television or movies without cords running everywhere. This also hides all the laptop cords as well, making the room look much more pulled together and less chaotic. I expect my productivity to increase quite a bit with the new light for working.

Life News:
This weekend, Dan and I cut the cable... literally. We decided that we no longer wanted to pay for cable when most of the television we watch is over the air, PBS, or available on line for free. Why pay for something that is free right? We have fully signed on to Boxee and Hulu for most of our television as well as using a new high powered antenna in our front office window. I have to say, the picture is amazing; the HD looks better without the cable. I know that sounds bizarre, but the picture quality is better due to it not being compressed down by the cable company. My PBS cooking shows have never looked so good! I am also hoping that this increases my productivity as well since I will not be a slave to my want-to-know addiction to the 24 hour news cycle. Cutting the cable means no 24 hour cable news. Already I am feeling a bit lighter.

I also found my new running shorts solution over the weekend. I am going to try out my new running skirt! I will let you know how it works out for me in tomorrow's installation of the blog. For today's goals, I want to get my jog done, make up some baby shower gifts, hem some pants for a friend, start back on my personal black skirt, go to dance class tonight (really actually go), and work on some falls or the belt when I get home. Lots to do and hopefully with fewer distractions I will get it done!

Reasons To Write

2010-05-28T13:14:00.000-07:00

I have been rather busy as of late, but I felt like writing about it would not be the best use of time. I have learned through a odd serendipitous set of circumstances that I may in fact be wrong. Yesterday was the last day for tutoring at 826 Valencia for the school year. We held a party for the kids, and I also worked with some of them on last minute end of the school projects. As I went along saying my end of the year "so longs" to the staff, one of them showed me this treasure chest full of handmade leather bound journals. They were gorgeous, and I was, I have to admit a bit jealous of whomever was going to get one. Little did I know that would be me. I was offered one but had to make a promise to fill the pages with writing. This used to be something that I would have never blinked an eye at in high school as I was a prolific writer back then. I felt as though this was my calling back into the fold.

I selected this one as I liked the fact that the hands of the clock were frozen in time. To me writing it the ability to freeze moments in time forever, allowing you to share them with others if you so choose or keep them for yourself to cherish later. I also really liked the saying in this particular journal. It really clicked with me and how I feel about friendships. I have decided to fill this book with thoughts I have through the day or things that catch my eye. Hopefully that can bud into some more serious writings. It is almost like my jogging program to get me back into shape, only with writing. So to whomever made these beautiful journals, thank you. Your time and effort has paid off for one writer at least. It was by far one of the more thoughtful things I have gotten to be a part of lately. It is always nice to be surprised with an act of kindness like this to keep you from becoming jaded to the modern world.

In other news, I finally got product pictures taken on Wednesday and will be posting those pairs of pants for sale most likely on Tuesday and Wednesday in the Etsy Store. Want a sneak peak? Go to the Fabulous Pants Facebook page and become a fan for pictures of new items before they hit the store. New pictures will be posted over the weekend sometime for your purusal. Now to get down to some sewing. Hopefully I can manage this after today's workout. ;)

Jogging for Dessert

2010-05-26T10:52:00.000-07:00

I know that I have said it before, and I am going to say it again. I love desserts... apparently too much lately. I gained weight after leaving the working world before we left for California and briefly lost some, then gained it all back. I blame my love of all things dessert. When we went to Vegas I ate more desserts at the buffets than anything else. A whole plate of them I am sad to admit, and so it comes with great regret that I am back to the couch to 5K jogging program. I just cannot give up that slice of cake or pie or pudding or cookie after dinner. Something has to give, and for now that is my rear being attached on the couch. I know that I have chronicled my exercise program start last year when we were at the old apartment that had a weight room. I have also been tossing around the idea of buying an elliptical, but when I really got down to thinking about it, we live in California. It never gets so cold that I would have to exercise inside like I would in Illinois. So, with out the weight room to hide me, I have started trying to redo my progress on the couch to 5K by jogging outside. It was terrifying at first. People will probably laugh at how out of shape I am even though I don't look it, but really I decided their opinions did not matter. I wanted to be in shape. I want to be able to run and catch that train and make it without getting on board and panting like I ran a marathon in the 500 feet I ran. I have decided this is the best course of action, and I have to stick with it. Day one was Monday, and it went well. I am going to leave for day two as soon as this posting is done before the predicted afternoon rain showers show up. I always learned in my exercise and behavior classes that one of the best ways was to publicly state your goals. So, here it is. I want to do the couch to 5K running plan on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of each week. I also want to make sure that traveling is not a hindrance to this, so no vacations from the program aside from Chaos Wars, which is physically very demanding.

The first picture in this entry (before the exercise commitments) is my first attempt at making flan. It turned out really well and was a perfect compliment to my cake baking obsession of late. Most of the cakes I make need just egg whites, and I hate to throw out the yolks. Custards take up the slack of the yolks perfectly. I guess that means when I make cake one week look for a custard the next! I made these to go with our taco night on Monday. The peas in the other picture came from the patio garden. I am thinking about ditching the beans next year in favor of a round of peas only. This may be amended if the beans suddenly start to do something good. Perhaps I will sneak in a late fall round of peas out there. I used them in a beef stew that I made last night for us to combat the nasty rainstorm we were having. Lately it has been more like California winter than spring or summer here. I made some lean bread to go with it from the freezer. Have I mentioned how wonderful those new bread baking books are?

Well it looks like it may be sunny enough for the jog and hopefully some product pictures. Now... off to jog away that flan!

Shop Progress

2010-05-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was surprisingly productive, partly due to the rain storm that did not arrive. I was getting ready to go out for my walk, and I saw what seemed to be impending rain clouds. I checked the radar and decided that it was too risky, so I went into the studio and set to work. While the rain did not show up until later it must have inspired my African violet to bloom. Spring showers and May flowers and all.

In this burst of productivity, I tried to get some pictures of the chocolate pin stripe pants in our blue stairway. There was just the right amount of light, but I could not get the pants to fit right. They fit much better before I started loosing weight, so I guess I will have to figure out how to model these or break down and get someone else to model them for me. I may have a few fitting ideas up my sleeve, so that I can get them uploaded to Etsy without them looking too weird. I would say, though, that these pants are great for someone a bit bigger than myself. They are also great for a business casual setting.

I have been working on these wonderful olive filigree style Jakarta pants. I really love this fabric. It is an unusual fabric for me to pick, but it just looked so great I had to have it. Here they are just after I finished sewing them up. I will have to wait for a sunny day with low wind before I can photograph them and get a listing up on Etsy. It is, as I have mentioned before, rather difficult to photograph these fabrics. They often times will look washed out or the embroidery designs will not show up on the photograph. Full sun seems to be the only solution to this. I am rather shocked to see how well this fabric photographed just in the craft studio. It is pretty close to correct for the color and the embroidery actually comes through.

I also settled on the final motif for the bottom parts of the elephant and peacock belt. I drew some flower doodles that I make often and satin stitched them in and also added fern stitch for the vines. I have one finished and another one started. There are three more to be done, and then all I have left is some mini tassel making for the elephant's tails and decorations for their mirrors. It will be rather intricate once finished. I am almost there on finishing this, and I can't wait to reveal it to you all. First, though, I need to buy more floss for the tassels. I can't seem to estimate exactly how much I need. I am keeping notes if I ever get crazy enough to make a belt like this again.

I got so many things done that I could not believe there would be time for a personal project, but there was. I worked on a 25 yard skirt for myself. I have the black fabric all cut and began serging the edges tonight. Today I am going to work on the stitching of the tiers and the gathering stitches. If I am lucky, I can get the first two tiers tied together before I leave for tutoring at 826 and class at Fat Chance. Here is to hoping I am as productive today as I was yesterday.

New Walking Route

2010-05-19T10:18:00.000-07:00

My new walking route is, in fact, five miles long. This makes me a happy woman. I now know that if I take that way I do not have to rely on the pedometer and can leave it at home. Sometimes in my want to get fit, I find myself obsessed with those step numbers rather than enjoying the act of walking. My new walk takes me around Lake Merritt in Oakland. It is a nice and picturesque route. There are plenty of people about as well, so that makes me feel more comfortable in taking it as well. There are all sorts of things to look at, so it makes the walk go just that much more faster and is more relaxing. I saw all manner of birds on the water like pelicans and egrets. There were ducks of several varieties and also tons of Canadian geese. The lake renovations have also brought about some new gardens with plants to look at, and some very tall trees were spared as well. They arch high over head and provide a nice dose of shade here and there.

One of the nicest things about the walk yesterday was seeing all the new baby geese. Seeing all those goslings bobbing around made me flash back to my childhood walks with my Grandmother around Lord's park in Elgin. We would take corn and bread with us to feed all the ducks and geese and the deer, elk, and buffalo that were at the park as well. Those were some of the most fun times of the summer. This is of course if there was no rain. It was a continual joke around the house that if we were in need of rain, I should be sent to Grandma and Grandpa's. It seemed like every time I would go there over the summer for a sleep over, it would rain, and we would be stuck inside rather than being able to go to the park. This trend seems to be continuing with this latest walking route. After my walk yesterday, there were unpredicted pop up showers. Today, I am preparing to go on this walk again, and, you guessed it, there are rain showers in the area. I am not going to let this deter me, but I will not be bringing the library books for fear of them getting wet.

Then it is time to really finish up those pants and also work on the belt. I finally decided on the final motif for the embroidery of the bottom parts. Today I will get those done... I hope. Here is to getting out earlier than I thought to get started on the day!

Coconut Cake!

2010-05-18T10:24:00.001-07:00

The last week and weekend was a busy one. My parents came to visit from Illinois, and it was a fun time. They arrived on Thursday, and after finding out there was water in the basement back home, we tried to relax and have fun. I made homemade gyros and pita breads with a nice Greek salad while my Dad tried to find an earlier flight home. For dessert I made the chocolate strawberry pie recipe of my sister's.

On Friday, we went and leisurely walked around the Union Square area after a great dim sum lunch. It was fun doing some window shopping, and my parents picked up some kitchen items to take back with them. I managed to be good in all the kitchen supply places but broke down and bought myself two shirts. They are super comfortable and look great. On Saturday we went wine tasting in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was a fun trip, and I really enjoyed myself. Most tastings were free, and most of the wineries were small and very intimate. I enjoyed the small family run ones the most. Dan and I even bought six bottles of wine along the way.

On Sunday, we dropped off my parents at the airport and started working on cleaning up the house and resetting ourselves for the week. There was laundry to do as well as picking up all the items that were left around by myself during the whirlwind of activity of the visit. Now the chocolate strawberry pie is not Dan's favorite. He is a huge fan of coconut though, so I decided to make the coconut cake that we saw on a recent episode of America's Test Kitchen. Currently you can get the recipe on their website for free. If you are interested, I would go and get the recipe now before it goes away from being a free one.

It was a really easy recipe and only required two odd items, coconut extract and creme of coconut. They are both available at most local grocery stores. This cake was the official final nail in the coffin for me with boxed cake mixes. This took just as much time to make as a boxed cake, and the results are just so much better. I had made boxed cupcakes recently, so it was a good comparison in texture and flavor between homemade and boxed. The texture is just so much better. I also tested all the items one by one as I was making them. The low sweetness of the cake balances out the very sweet frosting. The toasted coconut is also a great texture on top of the whole package. I cut this recipe in half successfully for one of my mini cakes, and it halved easily with wonderful results. The only adjustment I would recommend is cutting the time used to toast the coconut. I had to cut my toasted with some raw because it was all too well done and not enough raw. Now, I just need to find something to do with the saved egg yolks. Any ideas?

Today I am off for a five mile walk since I could not yesterday due to the rain. I am also hoping to finish up the olive filigree pants that I started yesterday. They are coming along beautifully. I am hoping that I can finish them today and get them photographed tomorrow, but they are predicting rain again. I guess that means more sewing if I cannot photograph to list. Well I am off for that walk. I cannot wait to test out the new walking route and see if it is exactly five miles. I am also timing myself to see how long I take. I would ideally like to take less and less time each walk. Here is to getting in shape to continue eating cake!

Quilt Plans

2010-05-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

I don't really need any more hobbies, but ever since I started sewing, I always held onto my fabric scraps. I just could not see throwing away what seemed to be good fabric that I could someday find something to use it on. I have always admired quilts, especially Amish style quilts, and I thought perhaps someday I would start quilting as well. I even bought my first quilt, a hand pieced and hand sewn Amish made quilt, at a quilt auction in the Amish area of central Illinois. I love it and admired the careful handwork and designs sewn all over the simple patches, but I am constantly worried about over using it. We need another one to help rotate it out of service now and then.

Now, I finally think the scraps are out of control enough to have to put them to a purpose. I am working on designing my first quilt. I am looking at using these fabrics from some of my first sewing projects and some more recent acquisitions in a broken Lone Star style design. I need to decide on some other fabrics that I would have to buy for the framing pieces of the Lone Star. I am not sure which of the colors I would match up, but I am thinking about the yellow and blue as being the ones I highlight. I have used an on line coloring program to work out different ways to place the colors of fabric. I just cannot decide. I know I want the yellow in the middle, and then I think the blue, then black, the red, and finally yellow tips. The other configuration that I am thinking is yellow middle, black, blue, red, and yellow tips. I guess I will just have to cut out some pieces and play with it before deciding. Any thoughts on what you think would look better? I will post pictures of any progress that I make.

Today, the goal is to finish up the hand embroidery of the belt. I ran out of the thread that I needed for the double feather stitch, so a store run this weekend was necessary. Now that the threads are back in stock, the sewing can commence. I also want to get my new black skirt cut out and mostly assembled today. They are lofty goals, but doable ones. I also would like to get my walk in today for the 10,000 steps, but I think the weather will prevent me from doing so. Late rain showers are in the area again today, and while I love the gloomy weather and we need the rain, I don't particularly want to walk in the rain today. Hopefully I can figure out a solution for the exercise. Well so much to do and so much inspiration. I am off for sewing goodness.

Belt Progress

2010-05-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

The belt has been making some progress. I sat down yesterday and started on the final group of hand stitched embroidery. I am doing a double feather stitch in the gold color of the elephants and other designs on the belt. It is turning out quite well, and I am very pleased with myself and how even the stitches are turning out. I guess all the practice with hand sewing over the years is finally paying off.

I hope to finish up the feather stitch today. Then I need to trim the tassels and sew the belt all together. It is turning out so well, and I am loving it. Will I make one for myself? Doubtful. I think this is destined to be a one of a kind belt due to the many hours of thought, labor, and love that went into its making. Throw in the fact that I cannot get the yarn that I made the tassels out of anymore, and you have a one of a kind piece. While I could replicate the embroideries again, I could never make the same kind of tassels for this. A big part of the design for this belt was inspired by those yarns. I cannot wait for it to all finally go together and be the show stopping belt that it is meant to be!

Cheater Cream Puffs

2010-05-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

As I talked about yesterday, I love desserts. Cream Puffs are up at the top of the list. I used to beg my Grandmother to make these for me, and when I was a kid I was sure they were so hard to make. Once I headed off to college, I asked for the recipe from her, and I found out that they were really not all that hard to make. I did not think about blogging this recipe until after they were in the oven, so there are not many pictures of the early steps. I apologize for that. Hopefully from descriptions alone I can walk you through the process. Why do I call these cheater cream puffs? Well they are filled with instant pudding, so no need to be a custard making master for this recipe. They are fast to make and easy too. It makes for a quick midweek dessert. So, without further ado, here is the recipe for cheater cream puffs!

Ingredients:

~ 1/4 cup butter
~ 1/2 cup water
~ 1/2 cup flour
~ 2 eggs at room temperature (this is important)
~ Your favorite cook and serve pudding. I usually use vanilla. I think it turns out best
~ Semi-sweet chocolate chips

Let the eggs sit until they reach room temperature. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Heat the water in a saucepan until boiling. Add the butter, reduce the heat to low, and melt the butter. Add the flour and mix until it is fully incorporated. Remove the pan from the heat and add the eggs one at a time, making sure to fully incorporate them. The dough should be really thick and putty or pasty like. It will also be a lemony color. Place the dough by the spoonful on a parchment lined cookie sheet. The dough should make six full sized cream puffs. Make sure to pat down any tall peaks in the dough. I am not sure if you can make mini cream puffs with this seeing as I have never tried. If you do try it, let me know what you find out about the cooking times. Bake the cream puffs in the 450 degree oven for 10 minutes, and then reduce the oven temperature to 400 degrees and bake for an additional 25 minutes. When they are done they should look like this:

While the cream puff shells are baking, make your favorite filling. I typically use Jello brand vanilla cook and serve pudding. Once I cook it, I make sure to pour it into a bowl and cover the top with plastic wrap so the skin does not form on the pudding. While I love pudding skins, I need all the pudding that little box provides for the filling for these shells. Make sure to cool the pudding completely. When you are ready to serve them, slice them in half with a serrated knife. The interior should be rather hollow. If it is not, you can just push the middle out to make it hold more of the filling. Fill with pudding. If you like a chocolate top like I do, melt some semi-sweet chocolate chips in the microwave and spread on the top of the cream puff. Simple and easy! Make sure that you do not fill the puffs until right before you want to eat them otherwise they will get soggy and not be pleasant to eat. You can keep uneaten shells in a plastic bag for a few days before they get stale, but I am sure they will be gone well before then!

Walks and Library Visits

2010-05-05T10:56:00.000-07:00

I am a sucker for desserts, and lately, I have noticed that I am not keeping up with my eating. So, after a disastrous first bout back into exercise by trying to run the stairs in the building, I decided this week to start more slowly. I have started walking with a 10,000 step goal for each day. On Monday I met it, and yesterday I was just a few hundred steps short. I tried a route on Monday that was pretty long but not quite long enough for the full 10,000 steps, but it was supplemented by more walking to meet with Dan to go to a Long Now talk for the full amount.

Yesterday I walked a new route, to the library. I decided to try and visit the Asian branch of the Oakland public library. It was a wonderful find. There were so many books dedicated to Asian forms of crafting, from Asian forms of quilting and Sashiko techniques to paper lamp crafting and bamboo work. There were also many books on traditional textiles of different regions of Asia. I also picked up a book that was full of neat sewing projects for different types of quilted handbags and pouches. It was inspiring and a place that I am sure I will be visiting often. There is nothing like piles of free books that I can borrow to make me a happy woman. Plus, using the library saved me a $40 mistake, purchasing an out of print book that really did not have the information that I needed. It feels good to come out ahead of the game once in a while.

In looking at all of these books, it got me motivated again to work on the elephant and peacock belt. I have some more tassels to make for it as well as some more hand embroidery. Once those things are done, I should be able to sew all the pieces together. I am not sure why I am so hesitant to finish off this belt, but I think some of it may be due to the extreme care and amount of time I have spent on it. I am going to make a good go of getting close to finishing it by the end of the week. I would love to photograph and list it next week. I will post rough pictures of the finished belt here as soon as it is finished. For now I need to look for a longer walking path for today's walk before I sit down for some embroidery work on that belt!

Weekend Discoveries

2010-05-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I finally got the picture of myself and Mr. Keller off of Dan's phone. It wasn't the best of photos of myself, but then again I was not planning ahead, so the phone photo is the best I can do. He was really nice and even listened to me extol the virtues of his pie crust recipe. It saved me from my recent run of awful pie crusts and turned the act of making pies back into a joyous one. The food at Fleur de Lys was also so wonderful. It inspired me to get back to trying my bread baking, especially after eating the very tasty fig and pistachio bread that they were serving. I set to reading my copy of Peter Reinhart's Artisan Bread Every Day on Saturday. Bread making started right away.

First thing on Saturday night, I started my bread dough. I also resisted my usual urge to skip ahead and make something complicated. I instead did the responsible thing and started with the first recipe. It was for lean bread, and it was really quite easy to whip up. All I had to do was mix all the ingredients in the mixer for two minutes, then it was time to let it sit for a while. Next, instead of kneading the bread, I performed Reinhart's stretch and fold technique. It was really easy and involved stretching and folding the dough four times, flipping it over, and letting it rest again for ten minutes before repeating the process again a total of four times. At the end of this, it all went into the refrigerator for an over night ferment. When it was two hours ahead of baking, I found this glorious dough waiting for me.

The next step was to divide the dough. This recipe makes two large loaves or four to six small loaves. I opted for the six small loaves because, let's face it, fresh baked bread is the best and most tastiest bread! Plus with there being only two of us eating it at a time, small loaves mean less day old bread. The other wondrous thing about this recipe is that it can be frozen or held in the refrigerator for up to four days. This means that one could start their bread over the weekend and have fresh loaves for that week and the next in the freezer and refrigerator. Your baking day involves only the shaping, resting, and then baking of the bread itself! Brilliant! I shaped one loaf, saved two in the refrigerator, and froze three.

In the end, this is the loaf that came out of the oven. I think it was a bit too brown, but it was the best bread I have ever made. It was also the least time consuming and least work I have ever done for a fresh baked bread. It makes me think that I will be casting off the plastic bread bags forever. Later in the book, Reinhart covers rolls and sandwich breads, and if they are all this easy, I will be making my own bread from here on out. This also opens up the possibility for true Chicago style hot dogs because I will be able to supply us with the poppy seed buns.

We served the bread with a broiled salmon. We marinaded the salmon in some olive oil and fresh squeezed lemon juice, salt and pepper, and then broiled it quickly. Both mangoes and avocados were on sale this week, so we made a fresh mango salsa with red onion, cilantro, jalapeno, and red pepper to go with the fish as well as fresh guacamole. While it broke my usual one grain per meal rule due to the chips and bread, it was a great tasting meal. I truly enjoyed every bite.

A quick gardening note before I head off for a walk outside. When I was watering the plants on Sunday, I found the first pea pod forming. I thought I would share a picture. It looks like I will have several more soon. I am so excited to think about some of my own fresh peas off of the balcony. There were also some new seedlings popping up in the soil as well. Some very small green scarlet onions have shown up as well as cilantro and thyme. More of the red sails lettuce and some more beets have also joined the ranks. It is exciting to see something you plant appear from the dirt. I will keep my eyes peeled for more little shoots and hope to see more soon.

Apron Finished

2010-04-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

I finally finished up the Kaleidoscope apron that I talked about earlier. It was an interesting project, and even though I used the corrected pattern and directions, I still had to fiddle with the project a lot to get it right. I am not sure if some of this came from my using the opaque projector for the first time or not. I would say that if I was to do this project over again, I would make sure that the image I was copying using the opaque projector was small enough to fit into the 3.5 inch viewer. Moving it around an image was rather challenging and involved a lot of patience. If it were not for the small size of the projector, I would go and buy an old overhead projector instead due to its convenient image projection size. They are just so large to store in our small space. I really liked how the project turned out though. The pin tucks on the obi like top piece are a wonderful design touch. I also feel like this apron hides any tummy that I am currently trying to battle. While I would not say that this project was particularly challenging, I would say that it is an intermediate project as I had to play around with enlarging the pattern as well as deciding how large to make the side seams since there were no indications in the pattern directions. I ended up doing them twice because the first time I made them too short and the red part of the apron did not fit the black top. I still have to add buttons to the ties. That is going to be something reserved for later today as I would like to find four matching buttons out of the button boxes, no small feat to be sure. This project was in keeping with working out of the stash, so the fabrics were from the box of stashed pieces. That means I would love to use buttons from the random button box to have a total stash buster success! I even used up black cone thread ends from the serger to sew it up!

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was a really fun day. I received these wonderful flowers from one of my best friends. They arrived just as I was getting ready to go out to my big birthday dinner. Dan took me to Fleur de Lys in San Francisco. It was a wonderful meal. I will review it in more detail Monday once I get my pictures off the phones. Needless to say, I enjoyed myself. I also feel the need to take a long walk around the neighborhood to burn off some of those calories.

I also got some awesomely thoughtful presents from Dan. He went back to the antique store and picked up one of the cake stands that I really liked. While it has a distinctive lean, I still love it. I want to make a cake right away to use it, but I have to wait until we finish up those rocky ledge bars. That recipe made just too many for two people. Next time I am definitely doing a half batch of those. I also received some books that I had wanted for some time. One of them is Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hays. I am always trying to define exactly what it is that I am to people, and hopefully this book will give me more things to tell people about what I do. I know that homemaking is not exactly the most glamorous to many people, but I surely enjoy it.

I also received two of Pete Reinhart's books, Artisan Breads Every Day and The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. I am looking forward to reading these books and studying up on the art of bread. I love making bread, and while I am not that great at it, I hope to improve with these two texts. Look for pictures and updates here as to my progress. I have already made the pretzels with Annie out of one of the books, and she served us a luscious loaf during a dinner party last weekend. I hope I can reach her level of bread baking through these new instructions.

So much inspiration and reading, but for now I am off to laundry and some sewing. I still have inspiring projects for both myself and Fabulous Pants to work on. I wish, like many people, that there were more hours in a day!

Truly Content

2010-04-27T11:00:00.001-07:00

Today is one of those days where I feel truly content with life. I am currently sitting on the couch watching wave after wave of gentle rain come into Oakland from over the bay. I love grey rainy days. I suppose I would be better fit for the Pacific Northwest because of this, but I think overall the sun is better for my mood. Too many rainy days like this in a row, and I get incredibly brooding and down to match the weather. I am reveling in these later than normal storms this season, and I am also thankful for the water. It will be appreciated later this summer when we get into our usual pattern of months without rain.

I bought myself these lilacs yesterday during my busy day out. Nothing speaks of spring to me quite like lilacs. I have a close association with their scent and spring, especially when their perfume and the smells of fresh rain mix. We had lilac bushes at our house where I grew up, and the best lilacs were a huge tree that had gone wild on the neighbor's yard behind our house. Mr. Hahn was not someone you wanted to cross, as he was a "get off my lawn" type of adult. As a child he scared me, but I always would try to creep close to his wild lilac bush that had turned into a tree. When I could, I would steal smells from the tree, but I would never dare take any of the flowers. I would, however beg my mom to cut me some off our little bushes. It was quite sad when the trees were taken out of the yard to be replaced by some other landscaping when I was a teen. That is why, when I saw these at a flower stand in the city yesterday I simply had to have them. I have been sitting next to them to be enveloped in their perfume. It brings me such wonderful happy thoughts and memories.

Yesterday I also broke out of the normal routine and started my exercise program again. I am back to square one. I ran and walked, but mostly walked, the stairs in the building. I am not sure how many times I went up and down, but it felt like a lot. I was going for time and did a whopping total of ten minutes. It is a pathetic start, but it is a start. I am hoping to add a minute or two tomorrow. Today I am going to do some yoga. My calves probably could not take stairs again today. I need some deep stretching.

I then headed into the city for a fun lunch with Dan. Then I was off to buy myself an opaque projector. I have always wanted one of these for those situations when you get a pattern in a book that needs to be enlarged. For all of those fun occasions, I have had to either try to enlarge it by hand or head off to the copy shop. While at the copy shops, I usually spent most of my time frustrated that I could not get the enlarger to work well. You would think after my short teaching career I would be good at this skill, but I am horrible. The opaque projector is supposed to fix all of these problems. I am going to try it out today since it is so nice and dark due to the rainstorms. I want to copy the Kaleidoscope Apron that was posted to Etsy's Storque a while ago. Luckily I waited to work on this project because in going back to that posting I found out there were pattern and direction problems with the copy supplied. If you are interested, the corrections can be found Lark Book's corrections page. Now I will hopefully be able to get the projector working and in correct ratios to enlarge the pattern the 400% necessary.

I also made cookies yesterday. Sweets are my definite downfall, and I have just come to the decision that I cannot cut them out, so I need to add exercise instead. These were a wonderfully rich cookie, so I don't need much of them to get my fill. Hopefully this makes them last. If you are looking for the recipe, it can be found at Martha Stewart's website They are called rocky ledge bars, and they really remind me of rocky road ice cream in cookie form. Definitely a delight for those with a sweet tooth.

In news of the balcony garden, my whining about wanting more new plants to show up must have worked. There are a ton of radish shoots that have pushed through. I also have spotted a beet shoot and a few red sails lettuce shoots. The green onions, pansies, and herbs that I planted have yet to do anything. I am going to try both patience and pleading again. I am not sure what worked last time, but I would like to think my anticipation somehow spurred Mother Nature into giving me some more instant gratification. Well off to enjoy this rainy day with some pattern copying, sewing, and tea!

Garden Update

2010-04-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I finished up planing the balcony garden, and this weekend I am already saw dividends paid out. These are some small radishes that have pushed their way up through the dirt just yesterday. They are looking really healthy, and I hope to have some good, full radishes this year. Last year's were very small and also not all that round. I always love the crimson color of radishes, and their early clover like foliage is also a favorite of mine. None of the other seeds I planted a week ago have appeared. I still am awaiting action from cilantro, parsley, scallions, beets, and lettuce. Hopefully I will see some new shoots pushing through the dirt in those containers. I know that in gardening you must have patience, and that patience is a virtue, but I would love to see some results now.

The peas seem to be rather happy, and while they are not as tall as I thought they were going to get, they have already flowered. I will have to settle for peas from the farmer's market for now as these are just in the pretty stage and not in the food stage. The beans have just stalled, and I have no idea why or what to do. My speculation is that thing have been so chilly, especially over night, and also so wet with all the late season rain, that the beans are just not happy. Two weeks ago, I took out some of the rather sad plants that were never going to make it and replaced them with new seeds and inoculate. I have not seen any action from those seeds either, but they are also no where near their usual incubation time. I am just hoping that the rain that is going to come this week is not too soaking, so the soil can finally dry out.

I have to say that one of the things I am most proud of this year is my from seed tomato plants. I usually bought my tomatoes in ready to plant seedling form. I just never really wanted to try my hand at starting from seed until this year. My father, mother, and grandmother are phenomenal gardeners. My dad's tomato starts are so good, he had to have extra every year to give to the people he worked with. They were in high demand. I was so excited to see my tomatoes grow up to be this big. I did baby them quite a bit at the beginning, especially due to the windy conditions on the balcony. It was hard to let them go. I finally cut them loose, though, and have quit taking them indoors whenever I thought the wind was too much. They are now on their own.The other plants that I have recently cut loose are my peppers. Last year the pepper plant I bought never got very big, and these are almost as big as the plant I bought last year, only these were more from seed plants. I should have been a bit more vigilant with them as they lost a few leaves in some of the wind storms we have had lately. I hope that they recover the loss. After looking at them this weekend, they seem to be growing and not too bothered by the leaf loss.

The zucchini and cucumbers that I started from scratch are doing okay. One of the zucchini plants has many blooms, but they seem to be missing the interior structures of the flowers for the making of the vegetables. Also, all of the flowers that have opened have appeared to be female flowers only, so even if the plant structures were in place, there would be no way for me to fertilize them. I also am thinking that the cucumber plant is not going to make it. Recently it has been turning brown, and it also tried to bloom with a very small flower that fell off quite early on. The other cucumber seeds I tried to start did not make it, so I direct seeded another plant into the pot. It has also not shown through the dirt yet either. Another place where time will tell and the patience that I need to have is wearing thin. I want to see something soon.

The lemon tree is still kicking around. I am worried about it as the leaves are still dropping off of the tree at a somewhat alarming rate for me. I tried some fertilizer this past weekend, so I will have to see if that helps. I also keep spraying for the two types of pests that it may have. I really hope that the spider mites and potential scale are eradicated soon. I really enjoy the lemon tree and hope that the food does the trick. I know that it does not get nearly enough sun during the winter and late fall months. I am thinking about wintering it indoors in Dan's office this winter, so it can get more sun than it would on the balcony alone. Hopefully Dan and I can learn to tolerate the moths that come out of the soil. We were unable to do that last winter, but knowing the potential harm to the lemon tree, perhaps we can get over it this time. That, however is a long way off.

Today I am hoping to kick back into gear with getting into shape again. Since the move from the old apartment building, there has been little exercise for me. The current place we live does not have a place to exercise, so I am going to try running the stair cases. At least, I am going to try walking them today. I am also hoping to finish the deep cleaning of the kitchen. I need to get all the dust off of the top of the cabinets and wipe down the rest of the cabinet facings that I did not get to last week. There are also some belts that I am working on getting to the finished stage. Soon... I know I keep saying that, but soon!

Personal Projects Completed

2010-04-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

It is always nice to get some personal projects completed in a somewhat timely manner. Usually I start a personal project and kick it around for a few months while I work on things for other people or Fabulous Pants. This, however, seemed to defy the odds. I guess part of it was that I really have loved this particular fabric for a long time. I bought it when Dan and I were trying to see if we should move out to California from Illinois. I purchased this wonderful piece of batik at a fabric shop and carried it home with me. It was a well traveled piece of cloth as it came back to California when we moved, still uncut. Packed away, I had forgotten about it for at least three years until a recent dig through my stash for the tiny little dresses project.

This particular piece of fabric was a little over a yard and a half in length. It consisted of two different patterns. One is the darker background with the blue and green flower motif that you see in this choli. It made up a third of the total cloth piece. The other motif is the lighter color for the background with the darker tan on top along with the blue and green flowers and vines. I loved the entire piece of fabric, but the darker tan section seemed to really want to be turned into something beautiful.

It took me the good part of an afternoon playing with the pieces of the pattern before I found a way to get it all harmoniously arranged in the small section of the fabric I had to work with. I then let it sit and marinate for a while. I was too intimidated to cut into it. I did not want to mar the fabric and find that I miscalculated somewhere, leaving out a piece for instance, to only find that I could not complete the project. The bad part of working with old stashed away fabrics like this is the small margin of error. If you miss the mark, there is no running out for a new section of fabric. It does not exist at a store any longer.

Once the project was fully finished yesterday, I realized just how much I love what I did with that small section of that beautiful fabric. I think my favorite thing I achieved is the row of roses that run down the back side of the choli as well as the cuffs of the sleeves. The lining of the choli is made out of scraps of muslin from the first thing I ever sewed, a peasant top for an outfit for my first events in Belegarth. It was a full circle moment for me being able to use that fabric from my first project and integrate it into a project that I put together so well, including splicing the bottom band together out of the sides of the original piece of fabric.

Seeing at it is Earth Day today, I wanted to recommend a great program that I watched last night. It was an American Experience episode called Earth Days. It was a great program and was also a really interesting look at how the observance of Earth Day began. I am already a big fan of American Experience, and this was yet another winner. I thought I would add this picture of last night's sunset with this recommendation for viewing today. The picture does not do the actual sunset justice. The colors were much deeper and darker, and the reds were more fiery. I never can seem to get a good photograph of sunsets like this. I guess that is what your memory is for. Happy Earth Day.

Canning Projects

2010-04-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

The last few days have been filled with spring cleaning and the beginning of a new canning season. It all kicked off on Monday with a trip out to Brentwood for a canning and baking session with Annie. We have both been busy, and she is currently wrapped up in research and moving plans, so the girl day was just what we both needed. We worked on the strawberry and rhubarb jam that is pictured here. It was a recipe that called for pectin, and while no longer my favorite jam method, it was nice to do a quick batch over the long cook method. I have to say, though, that I enjoy the flavor of a cooked to the jelly point jam over the commercial pectin flavors. I also like the looser texture of the jam over the pectin. I feel that the powdered pectin makes a jam that is a bit too stiff.

We also worked on some pickled asparagus. It was pretty easy after doing the dill pickles last year. The method is pretty easy, and our skill at properly packing jars has increased immensely. Seven pounds of asparagus is quite a bit, but cooked down into six pint jars. We pickled the spears with some green and red pepper, jalapeno, and garlic as well as dill and mustard seed. I am wondering how these are going to taste, but I have to wait for a month before I can find out. Pickling takes time, and I would like to make sure they are mellowed and fully pickled through before I try them. I am not sure how to use them other than adding to a salad or in a Bloody Mary or eating straight from the jar, so any suggestions for cooking with these would be welcome.

Yesterday, Annie came over to work on some sewing lessons, as it was too rainy for her to check traps. It was fun getting together two days in a row to work on things. After she left, I took to canning up some oranges that I bought on Friday. I made an orange dessert sauce. I sliced the oranges up as thin as I could on the mandolin, and then they were heated through in a syrup of water, sugar, Grand Marnier, and white wine that was spiced with cinnamon sticks and cloves. I got a bit gun shy after seven oranges were cut out of the nine that the recipe called for, so I quit early. That was a bit of a mistake as I would have been at the called for eight half pints. Instead, I canned up the remaining syrup in the empty two half pints. I figure I can boil them down into a glaze for an angel food or pound cake sometime for a quick dessert. The orange slices can be used for cake, or as my recipe suggests, for an ice cream topping. They turned out a little more yellow than I expected, but I figure it is more of the syrup's doing that than the oranges themselves.

All in all, it has been a busy last few days. I am looking forward to finally getting to sit down and finish off that personal choli. There is so little left to do that it is kind of embarrassing that it is not done yet. Then I am going to work on the new fabrics I have gotten in to make up a prototype of the new products. Hopefully I can round out the day with some deep kitchen cleaning. It isn't that I want to do it necessarily, but it has been put off for too long and just needs to get done. Right now though, the rainy day outside is screaming for some hot tea and sewing at the machines.

New Hairfalls - Lime Green and Black

2010-04-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

After long last, I am finished with the lime green and black hairfalls. I have been slowly working on them since October, and recently found them again in the yarn drawer. I got them out and began working on finishing them while watching movies and television over the past few evenings. The are now up for sale in the Etsy Shop. They are a really fun set, and one of my most full sets that I have ever made. A total of one-hundred strands of braids are in the pair. I am thinking about making one-hundred per pair a goal of mine from here on out. It seems like they are fuller than the average pair and look spectacular. They looked so good that I have already started a new pair to work on, a short set in red tones and black accents. I find them quite calming to work on while spending time watching my favorite shows.

Finding this lost project and finishing it up makes me want to finish up the belts that have been languishing in the shop for a while. I want to dig into the new products and fabrics I just bought so bad, but I think that finishing up the belts should be a priority. Part of me wonders if I drag my feet on these because secretly I want them to stay here forever. Perhaps deep down I want them to be my own and to not actually sell them. I am going to try to satiate this need for something of my own by finishing up a personal choli then setting to work on finishing up a belt today. After yesterday's house cleaning craziness, I want to sit at the machine and wind down. Perhaps the deep clean of the kitchen can wait until tonight or tomorrow. Crafting inspiration is here, and I intend to capitalize on it!