Since the Last Time I Saw You

Hello there! I'm sorry for my extended absence. It turns out that handmaking all Christmas gifts and then driving from Oklahoma City to Upstate New York (straight through) is both time-consuming and tiring. But I'm back now. And happy new year to you all!

I just love paperwhites. That's been a major event of the last few weeks is that the ones I bought from the farmer's market are blooming. And have to be continually re-staked because they are so tall!

Also in the past couple of weeks we spent New Year's Eve here at the house with a couple of friends, playing cards. The fire actually refrained from smoking and it was a cozy and lovely evening. We even had a potluck dinner between the 4 of us. ("Company chicken", toffee candy similar to 7-layer bars, and my favorite broccoli soup)

And finally, I'm happy to finally be able to reveal some of the Christmas gifts which kept me so busy throughout December. (Not pictured, I made several of Liesl's gorgeous little boats and 4 pair of Toasty Mitts.)

Perhaps the largest project was this throw quilt for my parents. It was actually completely finished (I am notorious for giving unfinished gifts, as perhaps are most crafters) and the largest quilt I've totally finished to date. I think it looks very nice in their living room so I'm happy that it got done, even if I had to go through 2 walking feet to get it there (I think the first one was just poorly made -- it only managed to quilt 3 potholders and half of this quilt before breaking).

Here I am wearing the hat I made for my husband's step father, Howard. I hope it fits him better than it fits me!

Snowmen from this pattern (found via 2MayBoys and the Trim the Tree swap). I love these little guys!

Thanksgiving Doings

Happy Thanksgiving!

Busy busy over here. But not with what I should be busy with on Thanksgiving.

I wanted to wear my sugarplum pullover for dinner today so I finished working in all the loose ends.

The first snow of the year is falling.

I'm so obsessed with my new cutting tool (and newly rediscovered rotary cutter) that I can't stop working on quilting.

And the first of Mildred Pearce's eggs to be used is being made into dinner rolls by the bread machine.

I hope you have a good one too!

Another Garden Post

Anyone who might be there is likely to be tiring of gardening posts, I would guess, but I still have one more to share. Garden season is coming to an end and crafting in front of the fireplace season is about to begin.

In the meantime, one more gardening post.

Tonight I made my first soup of the season! With lovely leeks from the farmer's market and broccoli from my garden (which wasn't very photogenic), I made Molly's Broccoli Soup with Lemon Chive Cream. So good! I even got to use some garlic chives from the same (most helpful to this new-to-gardening-few-vegetables-eater) farmer at the market. I hadn't had the soup since last winter and had forgotten how just good it is. Good way to start soup season!

Must remember to keep the woodchuck out of the garden next year so I can make a whole lot more of this then.

As for the lack of crafting, beyond soup-making, I blame the apples. Which are seemingly never going to end. But, luck of all luck, yesterday this new, wonderful gadget was sent to me by my thoughtful mother. Now I can peel and slice the apples in half the time. And, as an added bonus, my waste bowl was not looking quite so equal to my cookpot (in other words, the peeler keeps me from wasting so much fo the apple). Too bad it doesn't cook them for me too. . .

Apples Apples

Well. After that post last week in which I mentioned processing a few apples, I put up 3 apple pie fillings (in ziploc quart freezer bags into the freezer) and set aside 4 lbs of apples to use for the apple butter. And then there were only about 8 apples left. So I decided to go back to my friends' farm for a "few" more apples so I'd have enough to make sauce. Yeah. A few. They had other ideas and sent me home not only with my bag completely full (which I'd only filled halfway last time) but also a box that they'd ostensibly filled for themselves but decided that I needed to take with me.

At least it was a lovely weekend, weather-wise, especially after the constant rain of last week.

Not that I'm not happy to have all of the apples (because I feel very lucky to have them). Just feeling a little bit overwhelmed. Especially as I am still without an apple-peeler-corer (we tried to buy one yesterday but the store had run out).

Today I used up about 2/3-rds of that box to make 7 quarts of applesauce (all I did was fill my largest pot with apples, a fair amount of cinnamon, and about 1-2 c. of sugar, heat it on low for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, and then used a canning funnel to put it into 7 quart jars). As for the rest of the apples, I'm begining to run low on ideas. I'm going to do the apple butter and I think an apple-plum chutney from, again, my Small Batch Preserving book. Then maybe 3-4 more pie fillings. Patrick wants some apple leather which, apparently, is just made by baking applesauce spread on a baking pan. That should leave me with about half of the bag to go. Any suggestions?

Pop! There goes one of the applesauce jars. What a satisfying noise!

Encouraged by Potatoes

Who knew that digging potatoes would be fun? It reminded me of the time that my family went digging for diamonds in Arkansas (no one found any) but I could eat what I found in my garden. And anyone who knows me knows how much I love eating potatoes. Plus, as an added bonus, potatoes take practically no effort to grow. No pruning or tieing up or constant worry over bugs, just bury them, add a little more dirt a few times, keep them watered, put up tomato cages, and dust for the obnoxious earwigs once in a while. And look at what came out of that little patch of dirt! I'm estimating that I have 3 pots of Yukon Gold Potato soup from my 4 little seed potatoes that I planted. Next year, I think I'll try growing the potatoes more vertically (although I plan to build wooden boxes rather than using tires) but, for a first try, this year was great!

And, as an added bonus, from under the dying potato plants (I was told that the potatoes would be ready when the plants started to die), I unearthed another lovely butternut squash. I so hope that these guys ripen before the frost hits!


I also have an obscene amount of apples, given to me by a friend who wasn't going to use most of the yield from his trees. These are being peeled, cut, cored (by hand -- I need one of these cool gadgets), mixed with cinammon, sugar, lemon juice, flour (a la Joy of Cooking), put into quart freezer bags, and frozen for wintertime apple pies.

If I can get back to cutting today, I plan also to make apple butter from my favorite canning book.

And, in the meantime, I leave you with a photo of my flower bed and my favorite snapdragon (my favorite flowers in general).

Pickling Part Two

The pickling of the 4 beets I picked from the garden (supplemented by a few from the farmers market) and more of my cucumbers became quite a saga. I started it all on Monday, only to have the power go out about halfway through. It certainly made me miss my gas range in Brooklyn! The power stayed out for 8 hours! I've seen tornadoes in Oklahoma but that storm was quite scary, even compared. It blew down all of my garden plants and even blew a few pictures off of the walls in the house (before I closed all of the windows)!

But, luckily, I'd just finished the cucumbers (although not the "processing" as directed by my book -- the lids of the jars did pop so I'm hoping that that's good enough) and just poured the water off of my half-boiled beets and put them back in the fridge. They were finished today. I definitely could have used a few more beets but they're still pretty to look at! Fingers crossed that both of the batches are safe. . .

This enamel canning pot (even with a wire jar rack inside!) is the treasure of the junk I cleaned out of my basement earlier in the summer (the house was completely packed full when we viewed it and the sellers only took about 3/4 of the things away). It made the 3 days spent in the mildew and bugs kind of worth it. Isn't it pretty?

Refrigerator Pickles

An overgrown garden


yields a ton of cucumbers (these were just the ones picked in one day)

which make some lovely pickles. Very strange and interesting but good pickles. From this recipe (which seems to have a typo in that all of these ingredients fill a one-quart jar rather than a two-quart jar). We'll be making more of these ones for sure!

The Past Week

With my parents' visit over the past week came

my birthday and fennel ice cream (we had to follow Molly's suggestion since she's from Oklahoma City),

lots of hiking

and work on the house (my birthday gift from them was this wonderful faucet which doesn't spit water all over the place as my old one did),

a trip to a local sheep farm I'd been wanting to visit, and much much more.

Thanks for the great week mom, dad, and Patrick!

Jammin'

I kept reading about various people making jam lately — especially strawberry-rhubarb jam. So I thought that it might be fun to get my mom to help me to make some when I was in Oklahoma as I remember her making grape jelly from our grapevines when I was little but I've never tried to can ANYTHING before. It was SO much more fun than I'd even hoped it might be. In the end, not only did my mother help, but also my grandmother, who was raised on a farm and had lots of helpful hints on the canning. We had a flat-out jam dance of it!

Although we couldn't get any strawberries or rhubarbs in Oklahoma (which makes sense, really — when my mother tried to grow strawberries in a whisky barrel in our backyard, they came out to be about 3/8-inch berries — the climate is just NOT right), we could get Stratford peaches, which are fantastic! If you're ever in the area, I recommend giving them a try. And I do love peaches so this all worked out well for me.

Beautiful peaches, waiting patiently on the counter.

My mom's collection of lids. From 1973. . .

Blanching the peaches beforehand (we left them in the hot water for about 1 minute and then dunked them in cold water).

Oklahoma honey too! I feel very local-farm-supporting. This seems to have come from down the street from my college.

The vintage lids out of their box.

I really liked the recipes (one spiced and one not) I used here. They seemed pretty simple to me and I LOVE the jam that resulted. I don't know yet how well it will keep but all of the little buttons on the jars popped down so we'll see. If anyone has any tips, please be sure to let me know!