Canning Week!

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...

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

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!

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

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

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

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.