New...residents? employees? pets?

Last night, I scurried up to Madison for a class at Olbrich Botanical Garden about Vermicomposting. It was an interesting class. She demonstrated setting up a worm bin using a small storage container and talked about caring for and maintaining the worms and bin, as well as finding supplies around town. With her description, it would have been quite straightforward to get the parts together and set up a worm bin, but she had sample bins for sale for $10 at the class. I figured that the convenience of not having to run errands up in Madison to collect parts and to find the time to put the pieces together made the price seem like a pretty good deal, so I came home with a worm bin complete with worms and a first bit of food for them to eat.
The bin:

and one of the residents:

We added some coffee grounds and scraps from prepping tomatoes for canning tomato today. We will still be feeding our compost bin in the yard, but picking out the choice bits to feed the worms. Especially this time of year when there is a whole lotta canning going on, we generate a ton of compost! All three kids are pretty excited about it, but my bug boy Beeb is especially taken by them. Before bed last night, he came up to me and said, "Thank you for getting us worms, Mommy."
So are they merely new residents in our household? Employees who are producing some fantastic soil amendments in exchange for room and board? Or pets that we have to check on and talk to regularly throughout the day?

I Survived the 2011 Peaches and Blueberries!

My new favorite thing that resulted from taking advantage of Tree Ripe Citrus deliveries is fruit leather!

I have made and stored lots of little snack packs of peach leather.  It is a little bit fussy to make, but will be worth it when we can snack on yummy peaches this winter.

To make it, I added ½ cup of water to each pound of peeled, pitted, and halved peaches.  I just used an average of 3 peaches per pound so I didn’t have to keep weighing.  It isn’t rocket science, close works.  I brought these to boiling over high heat and then reduced the heat and simmered for 20 minutes while mashing the peaches with a potato masher.  Next, I lined a strainer with damp cheesecloth and drained off the juice until it quit dripping.  The juice can be used for peach jelly, sweetened with honey and added to iced tea, or just drunk straight.  The drained pulp went into the blender with a bit of honey until it was pureed.  I had to experiment with the honey…no honey left the leather pretty tart, which the kids weren’t crazy about and too much left the dried leather sticky and hard to handle.  Since I do everything completely by the seat of my pants, I have no idea how much honey worked; I just eyeballed it.  But if I had to guess, I’d say 1-2 teaspoons per 3 peaches would probably be in the ballpark.  Then I smeared the puree onto the dehydrator fruit leather trays and let her rip at 135°F (which is what my dehydrator recommends for fruit).  It would also work to spread it on wax paper on cookie sheets and dry it in a warm oven.

Here is the finished leather.

I cut it into strips with clean kitchen shears and stuck the strips to wax paper.  I folded the wax paper in half and then folded it up…

…so it would fit in a snack size ziplock baggie.  Since there aren’t any preservatives, I tossed all the baggies in the deep freeze.  I can grab a baggie or two out of the freezer and toss it into my bag when we go to playdates or open gym or the park.  They should be thin enough and low moisture enough to defrost pretty quickly.

From 5 half-bushels of peaches and 40 pounds of blueberries, the final tallies for peachy and blueberry-y goodness put away are:

• Dehyrated Blueberries: 5 pints
• Frozen Blueberries: 2 quarts
• Blueberry Butter: 8 half-pints and 1-4 oz. jar
• Blueberry Pie Filling: 5 pints
• Blueberry Syrup: 6½ pints
• Blushing Peach-Almond Conserve:  10-4 oz. jars
• Honey Peach Syrup (for iced-tea): 8 pints
• Frozen Peach Halves:  2 half-gallons
• Peach Leather:  20 snack bags
• Peaches in Light Syrup:  35 quarts
• Zesty Peach BBQ sauce:  7 half-pints and 1 pint

Peachy Keen

After taking care of the blueberries, I turned to lots and lots of peaches.  It wasn’t until I got into the third box of peaches that I discovered the brochures that the Tree Ripe folks had tucked in and learned that our blueberries had come from Luduc Blueberries in Paw Paw, Michigan and the peaches came from Pearson Farms in Georgia.

I started with Blushing Peach Almond Conserves, which is a freezer jam with toasted almonds and almond flavoring that I had made last year.  I learned my lessons from last year and packaged it in tiny jars as I discovered that it gets brown and tastes funny after being in the refrigerator even a few days.  It is completely yummy so it was extremely tragical to have to throw away stuff that had gone icky.

Next up was Zesty Peach Barbecue sauce.  Also extremely yummy and a half-pint has already been used on pulled chicken in the crockpot.  In the process of perusing peach recipes and flipping around in my canning cookbook I found a helpful tip that complete altered my life.  It turns out that you can peel peaches the same way as tomatoes…by dunking them in boiling water for about 30 seconds and then the skin practically slides off.  After some trial and error—if you go too long, the skin pretty much falls off and it is almost impossible to cut the peach in half and remove the pit since the peach is so slippery; if you don’t dip long enough, picking off the skin is annoying and piddly—I had honed halving, pitting, and peeling to a fine art.  When not distracted by kids or animals, I could do close to three peaches a minute.  Last year I peeled all the peaches with a paring knife and was almost ready to fling myself off something tall by the time I had gotten through all of them.

I applied my mad prep skills in putting up 14 quarts of peach slices in light syrup and 8 pints of honey spiced peach slices.  The leftover honey syrup practically begged to have more peach flavor and be put in iced tea.  There was enough left over that I made a couple small batches of peach juice to mix with the syrup and freeze.  The juicing left some lovely pulp that I pureed with a bit of honey to make fruit leather in the dehydrator.  I put the fruit leather slices on wax paper and then into baggies which went into the freezer.  They will provide a lovely taste of peachy goodness for snacks at open gym or running errands this winter.  When apple season rolls around, those will make great fruit leather as well.

The last few peaches got peeled, pitted, halved, dipped in lemon water and frozen on cookie sheets before going into two half-gallon canning jars in the freezers.  These will be great for smoothies or, as I discovered while packaging them up, a tasty frozen snack for the dog days of summer.

In between, I made two peach upside-down cakes, a couple batches of raspberry/peach popsicles (raspberries came from our CSA), and all of us just plain chowed down plain peaches.  Next Wednesday, the Tree Ripe folks will be back in Stoughton.  I am planning on getting more peaches and blueberries.  I would like to can both peach and blueberry pie filling, do a few more quarts of peach slices in light syrup, more blueberry syrup and butter, and more dehydrated and frozen blueberries!

Feeling kind of blue

No, not that kind of blue…blueberry blue.  And based on how many I have eaten, I might be looking at least a little blue as well!  The truck we bought Georgia peaches from last year also had Michigan blueberries this year, so last Wednesday, the kids and I trekked to the local bowling alley and came home with 15 pounds of blueberries and 1.5 bushels of peaches.  In addition to all of us eating a lot of blueberries, I also managed to put away a quart of frozen berries, two pints of dehydrated blueberries, 3½ pints of blueberry syrup, and 4 half-pints and one quarter-pint of blueberry butter.  The blueberry syrup and butter come from one recipe…the berries are cooked down, the juice and pulp separated and then the syrup is made from the juice and the butter is made from the pulp.  The truck will be back once more at the end of the month and I really hope I can get more blueberries then!  I would love to do at least one more batch of the syrup/butter and freeze some more!
Since the peaches need at least a couple of days to start softening up, I have only made a dent in those.  Collectively, we have eaten quite a few and I have put up 7 half-pints of zesty peach barbecue sauce.  Tonight I will be doing some blushing almond peach freezer jam.  In the morning, I am planning on making a peach upside-down cake for a homeschool potluck tomorrow afternoon and evening and possibly start canning quarts of peach slices.  There will be a whole bunch of peach slices as we went through them VERY fast last winter!.  I will hopefully also get some frozen slices or chunks and maybe a couple batches of fruit leather…we’ll see!

ETA:  Blueberries came from Leduc Blueberries in Paw Paw, Michigan

Peachy Keen

We have plowed through almost 2/3 of the peaches.   We had peaches and cream one night for a bed-time snack.  I made two small peach upside-down cake (that didn’t turn out…my pan wasn’t exactly the right size and the middle didn’t get baked all the way, but it was still tasty!  I made two batches of peach freezer jam (totally seven pints) and put up six quarts of peach slices in light syrup.  We have also eaten an impressive quantity of peaches just plain.  I guess one of the hazards of eating seasonally is gorging until you are dreaming about the produce item and never want to see another one (well, at least not until next year).  Blushing Peach Almond Freezer Conserve is up next tonight if I can pick up some maraschino cherries at the grocery store tonight and perhaps a peach cobbler for dessert.  Then, tomorrow a batch of spiced peaches and I think that will be the end of the peaches.  Any that are left will either be consumed by the locusts that disguise themselves as my children, or, if I can move fast enough, frozen.

It’s a peach!

This morning, I got two half bushel boxes of Georgia tree-ripened peaches out of a truck in the bowling alley parking lot.  My weekend plans include peach freezer jam, Blushing Peach Almond Freezer Conserve, Peaches in light syrup, and Honey-Spiced Peaches.  The house is going to going to smell so good!  That is, if the kids don’t eat them all before then.  Also, I wouldn’t be TOO upset if the humidity were to drop a teensy bit before then.  Maybe a peach upside-down cake…oooo, or peach cobbler?  Maybe I should have gotten a couple more boxes!

We are tentatively planning to do U-pick blueberries up in the Dells next week, so canning season is gearing up.

Finally finding a kitchen system

Making grocery lists and planning meals have long been a bane of my existence.  I have A LOT of trouble finding the mojo to sit down and plan a week’s worth of meals, especially doing so the evening before I might actually have a chance to get to the grocery store during a part of the day when the kids aren’t completely tired and acting that way.  For a couple of years now I have been compiling a binder of recipes we use and like so I can flip through it for ideas rather than dragging out a bunch of cookbooks.  Also having my own copies makes it easier to make out a grocery list as some cookbooks have some of ingredients tucked into the instructions, which I never discover until I am standing in the kitchen, knee-deep in prep.  I have a standard format for my binder, so I can find ingredients or prep time in the same place for every recipe.  More recently, I have been experimenting with ways of listing out meals so I can remember what I have ingredients for.  I rarely plan out which meal for which day, but I may make a note that a particularly quick meal would be good for say, Wednesday, when we have park day in the later afternoon and I don’t have a lot of time to get supper together.  I also like to have notes to myself with reminders of things that need to be defrosted (e.g., big ol’ pork roast) or that need some attention first thing in the morning (e.g. crockpot).

While this system has been better than panicking nightly when it is time to start supper there were still a couple of big obstacles.  First, I was having trouble making the list of of odds and ends that come up during the week mesh with the list I sit down and prepare before doing groceries.  Second, I wasn’t very consistent with checking the meal plan list to actually notice the reminders for night before or early that morning jobs.  Nothing like discovering that the only meal that you have ingredients for is a crock pot meal and it is just an hour until dinner.  Third, I rarely get everything we need in one place.  Now that we are in summer, I get my pastured meat and eggs from a nearby farm, my veggies from our CSA on Thursday, other veggies from the local Farmers’ Market on Friday, milk from the mystical milk fairy on Thursday.  Occasionally, I need to run up to the Fitchburg Farmers’ Market if I need pastured lamb.  Several time throughout the summer, we go berrying (strawberries in June, blueberries in July, raspberries in August or early September) or pick up canning quantities from either the CSA market or the local Farmers’ Market.  So…complications combined with the attention span of a fruit fly…not pretty!

There have been two recent additions to my method of madness that seem to fill in the missing pieces.  First, a homeschooling mama at park day said something about using dry erase markers directly on the refrigerator.  Genius.  My dinky dry-erase board wasn’t doing the job, but a big space…

I can list out what is in the crisper drawers from the CSA so I don’t have to go digging.  Upcoming meals are easy to see.  I can make lists of other kitchen business.  The notes in red were items stuck in the upstairs freezer without labels when I finished a roll of masking tape and discovered that we didn’t have anymore (Ms. Bean, the artiste, goes through a LOT of tape these days).  Once I got the tape, I got the jars labeled and in the deep freeze.  I have made notes with cookbook pages for recipes.  Plenty of room for everything I need to remember and easy to wipe off when I don’t need it anymore.

The second element is ZipList in conjunction with my iPod touch.  Since I can no longer live without my iPod, it is always close at hand, so I can add a couple of items to my list as I am standing in front of the fridge.  I can add other things when they occur to me.  Plus, ZipList has all sorts of neat tricks.  List items can be assigned to stores (Co-op vs. Pick-n-Save) and aisle order can be set up for each store so the list appears in the order you go through the store.  There are a few minor kinks that I am sorting out and or getting used to…for example, the last time I added ‘hot dog buns’ to the list, the default aisle was pet supplies.  I am also still working on getting the aisles in order for the stores I use.  Plus getting used to how it works and where things are.  But, I think it will be a workable system in the long run.

The ONLY good thing about the hot weather…

…is that it make green things grow.  After a largely coolish pleasant spring, we have been beset with three days of 80’s and 90’s and plenty o’ humidity.  Not my favorite weather.  But look what it does to the plants:

That was only six days ago!  And wee little things are sprouting all over:

And crazy little herbies (cumin on the left and on the right is basil with its volunteer lettuce friend…I figure we might get a bitsy salad before the basil needs the space):

And crazy little kidlets:

And finally, since I had to be outside to limit the amount of chaos and mayhem generated by the Beeb, I finished some planting:

I wasn’t real clear on which were the roots and which were the shoots on the Lily of the Valley, but I figure they’ll be smarter than I am and figure out which way to grow in spite of my efforts to confuse them.  The rhubarb isn’t looking too pleased about the change, but I am optimistic that will perk up once it gets a chance to acclimate.

Gotta run for now…I have a pan of gyro meat ready to come out of the oven…made with New Glarus ground lamb from Patty Reedy.  The tzatziki sauce, made with homemade yogurt is waiting in the fridge.  Jealous yet?

From the files of “A village no longer in search of an idiot”

First a little animal husbandry.  I’m sorry if this insults your intelligence as I know for a fact that my five- and seven-year-old already know this, but clearly not everybody knows this.  This is the bovine food pyramid (borrowed shamelessly from the Raw Milk Facebook group):
As you can see, the typical bovine diet is very complicated.  Lots of stuff to measure and provide in proper proportions, etc.  Thank goodness for dairy science.  Okay, enough sarcasm. 
Prior to Doyle’s veto, this impassioned plea for a veto appeared in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.  It’s the fifth one down with the heading “RAW MILK.”  While I have plenty of compassion if anyone’s child is sick, I have a lot of trouble with her misleading letter.  Given the cow nutrition lesson above, do you want to know what this self-proclaimed expert on farming and nutrition feeds the cows on her family’s dairy farm?  Do you?  Are you sure?  Okay, you can look here at her blog*, but don’t say I didn’t give you a second chance to back away from the crazy.
How can you compare healthy milk from healthy cows that are fed a diet that is perfectly adapted to how cows have evolved to the so-called milk that comes from cows that eat inappropriate foods that make them so sick to the point that antibiotics are par for the course.  I would say it is like comparing apples and oranges, but I think a better analogy would be “comparing apples to sewage sludge.” 
Sorry for turning into rant central…I have some happier post drafts in the queue and will get to them sooner rather than later, but at the moment I have a whole bunch of ticked off to work through…

*ETA:  If you read Laurie Kyle's blog entry be sure to scroll down to see her response dated 5/30.  Apparently, she needs a copy of the bovine food triangle.  Preferably wrapped around a stick and applied firmly about her head, neck, and shoulders.

Garden Time

Aaaaand, turning to a happier topic…

We will be doing the same CSA as we did last summer so we are getting very excited for lots of wonderful veggies to come.  The things I selected to plant around the yard were things for canning and/or to fill in CSA gaps.  I thought I would photograph, label, and blog so there is at least a remote possibility I’ll remember what is where when things start sprouting.  First, the little garden plot:

Herbs in front…we got the onions as transplants from a friend, the cilantro was just seeded today and the oregano and sage are back from last year

Tomatoes around the edge…three varieties.  We ran way short on canned tomatoes last year, partly due to the late blight, so my motto is “Never too many tomatoes.”

The three sisters in the middle…corn, beans, and squash.  Since we get a ton of regular squash from our CSA, we did half in sugar pumpkins and half in birdhouse gourds.  We will experiment with dried corn and cornmeal with the corn, dried beans to be canned for chili, pumpkins for canning, and birdhouse gourds to dry and make into projects.

Next along the side yard:

Watermelon for eating and rinds for watermelon pickles and a little bit of soybeans for edamame snacks.

In the front:

Lavendar for drying and making lavender syrup.  I have gotten fatally hooked on lavendar white chocolate iced mochas at the ‘Bou and rose white chocolate iced mochas at the Ear.  Wild flowers are for the pretty.  I will try again with bulbs in the fall.  I planted bulbs in the fall shortly after we moved here, but they keep getting nibbled by critters.  Not enough to completely kill them off, but enough to keep them from budding or thriving.  The little SOBs were tunneling under the steps and up into the bed.  So this spring I dug all the dirt (down to clay) out of the planter, made a five sided wire cage out of wire mesh left over from the compost bin project, and put the dirt back.  We’ll let the rodents give it the old college try over the summer and plant bulbs this fall if it is a success.

And finally, herbs on the porch:

The only planting I have left is three topsy-turvey planters that I will plant with seedlings that I’ll get when our CSA has its open house, a rhubarb plant I got at farmers’ market last week and some Lily of the Valley that will be put along the back of the house.  I’m thinking a cherry tomato, a jalapeno, and maybe a green pepper for the topsy-turveys.

Dear Soon-To-Be-Former (but not nearly soon enough for me) Governor Doyle:

Good-bye, good riddance and don’t let the door smack you on the backside on your way out.

I hope the dairy industry and/or public safety have a nice big cushy chairmanship waiting for you.  I’ll bet you’ll be getting a nice fat paycheck for having your name on some board of directors with no actual effort involved.  Why else would you choose to have your legacy remembered as the Governor that killed the family farm and criminalized healthy food?  Here I thought I was living in a democracy where the people had a say.  Turns out I live in a state where the governor can be bought by the highest bidder.  I hope you are pleased with yourself. 

If you weren’t purchased by Big Ag, then you heard Public “Health” telling you the sky was falling and ran into the cellar like a good little chicken little.  That would mean that you think I am too stupid to decide what is healthy and safe for myself and my family.  I hope not.  That is probably the only thing that would piss me off more than having an elected official living in Big Ag’s pocket.

Yours truly,

KittyMommy

Yogurt 101

I have been making my own yogurt weekly and eating it most days for breakfast.  It is much yummier than the stuff that I have gotten at the grocery store and it (fortunately) isn't very difficult to make!  I got the culture (more on that in a sec), a recipe, and some helpful hints at Dairy Connection, Inc., which is a short hop away up in Madison.  After some experimentation, I think I have it down and thought I would share.

The equipment and ingredients are pretty easy.  First off, equipment:

An appropriately sized seal-able container.  I find that canning jars work swimmingly as I usually make a quart or half-gallon at a time

A kitchen thermometer.  I love my nifty digital thermometer, but I have a cheapy analog that works just as well.  The important temperatures are 185°F, 115°F, and 110°F.

A sauce pan.

A picnic cooler.  It just needs to be big enough to hold the container upright.

Next, the ingredients:

• milk (a quart to make a quart of yogurt, a half-gallon to make a half gallon, etc.)
• the culture.  I have done this two different ways.  One is using 1/8-1/4 tsp of a freeze-dried culture (I use ABY-2C).  The other is using about a 1/2 cup of a yogurt that you like.  I have had consistently good results with the freeze-dried culture and generally good results with the second option using yogurt from the previous week's batch.  I have found that the results have tended to dwindle with time, but I suspect that as I get more consistent from batch to batch the piggy-back results will be better.  I have had a couple of batches that have wandered away from the ideal temperatures and I think that may have degraded the culture for reuse.

The process (taken from here):

Heat milk to 180°F.  I use medium heat and I stir pretty frequently to prevent scorching on the bottom of the pan.  Since I have a tendency to be easily distracted I keep some knitting or a book nearby so I can keep myself from wandering off.  I have been known to run to the computer to check my email and then head right back to the kit---ooo, shiny.  *time passes*  Hmmm, I wonder why this scorched milk is sitting on the stove?  Oh crud.  Yeah.  Not pretty.

Put the milk into the jar and cool to 115°F.  I use a sink of cold tap water.  When cooled add culture and stir gently to mix.  Put lid on jar.

Fill the cooler about 2/3 full with warm tap water (110°F).

Put jar in water in cooler.

Put lid on cooler and leave for about 8 hours.

Put finished yogurt in refrigerator and, when cool, enjoy!  I usually eat with some granola stirred in or some combination of nuts and/or fruit, a little honey or maple for sweetness, some cinnamon or nutmeg.  The possibilities are pretty much endless.

Yes I Can!

and have been doing so frequently. Can, that is. I got a pressure canner for my birthday and have been using it a lot. So far this summer I have "put up" strawberry and raspberry (both red and yellow) freezer jams, concord grape jelly, pickled beets, watermelon pickles, crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, sauerkraut, beans, greens, creamed corn, and pinto beans. I did the pinto beans as an experiment with my new pressure canner and many other kinds of dried beans will follow when the weather gets cold! The low price tag of dried beans without the hassle of always remembering to soak them the night before? Priceless! At some point, I need to get some pictures of my stash. The grape jelly is particularly lovely if I do say so myself. When I held it up to the light for Miss Bean, she said, "It shimmers like purple diamonds!"

Also, it turns out that the veggies in my chili recipe fit nicely in a quart jar:

So this winter, if I get kidney beans canned, there will be some super easy batches of chili this winter! Other than dumping jars and cooking, the only thing I will need to do is measure and add seasoning, water or beer, and ground been and/or TVP.

There will be at least one more trip to the orchard for apples for apple butter and apple sauce. We got a big bag of eating apples and all the grapes for jelly there last weekend. The concord grape jelly? Between that and the freezer jam, I don't think I am ever going to buy jelly at the store again. The homemade is SO GOOD, that I believed I have been completely spoiled rotten for the other kind. This weekend will be another big batch of sauerkraut as we currently have two CSA cabbages in the fridge.

There are FOs to post and lots of other stuff coming soon...I hope!!!

Spring Cleaning

Whoa! How did it get so dusty and cobwebby around here? I hope the chirping crickets have kept you company while I was away.

Of course, away is figurative. We have been here doing much of the same-old same-old. I figured I had finally better pop in and get back in the blogging groove (well, if not in, at least near...will being on the same landmass be close enough? same planet?). At least we are finally getting someplace close to being adjusted to daylight savings time. Clearly a flexible, roll-with-the-punches kind of crowd. Anyhoo. What have we been doing?

Knitting, of course. Lots o' stuff happening, but not a lot to show for it. The only finished objects that I haven't blogged about is a wonky little hat for the Beeb (in Peace Fleece that coordinates with his blue longies and mitts) and the February dishcloth from the Sow's Ear Dish-Cloth-Along. Then I missed March's due to a crabby mood and an illuminated engine light on the van (which has since been fixed). The close, but no cigar pile is immense right now. The third market bag is very close...just a couple more rows and then working the handles in and doing the top edge. The first Raspberry Charade sock is getting close...about 10 gram of yarn left on the leg and cuff. Bug's and Bean's hats are also almost done. Bean's is technically done, but they eyes keep falling off and Bug only has the tail, fins, and eyes left.

Spinning. I have finally been spinning again, semi-regularly. Perhaps quasi-regularly would be more accurate. Last August was my last "Spin my Spindle" check in, so I'll update since then.

Spin My Spindle
	September 2008		February 2009
Activity:	Spinning	Plying	Spinning
Fiber:	Targhee	Targhee	Targhee
Spindle:	Schacht 3"	Ashford	Schacht 3"
Amount:	9 grams	25 grams	5 grams

That is actually more spinning than it looks like. I have been spinning the Targhee quite fine and the singles are about 9 yards (27 feet) per gram. So I'm lucky if I can get through a gram or two at a time. Plus, having put it down for a while, I just don't think to pick it up sometimes.

Planting and thinking about planting. Our Fast Plants are going great guns...going to seed already! The gory details are here. The kids and I have been reading about plants and pollination and all that a lot a bedtime. We are also working on planning a small garden in our yard. We're going to grow some beets for pickling, carrots, radishes, onions, and maybe garlic for cooking and eating and freezing, herbs, and lots of tomatoes. We are also planning to put a couple of pumpkin vines in the landscaping rock beside the house so they can spread without taking over the whole garden and lawn! We are also deciding what to do for a CSA this year too. We did JenEhr last summer and loved it, but are thinking about trying something a little bit closer to us. With the kids, I really like the idea of driving to a farm to pick up rather than to someone's garage and I know there are some closer to Stoughton. However, the drive to JenEhr was just stunning, so I wouldn't be completely opposed to sticking with them. The local CSA open house is next weekend, so hopefully we will be deciding soon.

Organizing. Still chipping away at the chaos that has accumulated with three move and three small ones over four years. I have finally made headway with my recipes. I had started a three-ring binder to organize recipes I had typed up, but fell sadly behind and had to dig through folders and files and other piles of crap to find recipes I was looking for. I finally tamed the piles, printed out things that I had on my computer but not in my binder and have started formatting and printing other things that I want in my binder (goes pretty quick with recipes copied from the internet and a scanner with OCR!). I just do a couple at a time out of that folder and eventually will be caught up. I am also planning on sorting the other piles of recipes by type in an expanding folder, so I have a place to go looking when I need inspiration.

We found out that we have guests coming in early May, so there is some additional inspiration to get my studio/the guestroom organized. We also need to get loft beds built for the bigger two so we can move the old futon down to the guest room, so there is an actual place for them to sleep!

Missing out. A certain knitting celebrity was in town for the Madison Knitters' Guild annual knit-in. I did the responsible thing and stuck to the budget rather than dropping everything and signing up. I'm clearly an idiot. Rumor has it that it was even cooler than I imagined. Damn you, recession and fiscal responsibility...

Darwin Day

Sheesh! Can someone tell me what happened to February? I have been dithering from thing to thing, rarely finishing things before getting distracted by something else. Plus, a few days of deceptively spring-like weather has made us even squirrelier about enduring the snow and cold! So I have a couple of blog items to get caught up on. Here's the first.

For those of you not in the know, Charles Darwin's 200th birthday was the 12th of February (as was Abe Lincoln's...quite the auspicious day back in 1809!). As Kitty Daddy has been on a bit of a evolution kick lately (elbow deep in Stephen Jay Gould and we have been getting the videos from the PBS Evolution series out from the library), we were unnaturally excite about Darwin's birthday! First off, the weekend before, we went to a Darwin Day up at the University. They had tables set up with displays and activities for all ages. At some of the tables, we collected stamps on our tree of life leaflet to win a prize (a shark tooth fossil for each kid). One table that caught my eye was the Wisconsin Fast Plants. The guy who developed these bred them for a rapid life cycle, for use in educational settings. They can be used for activities at most any age level. For small fries, they can watch the life cycle unfold, learn about pollination, and harvest seeds. For bigger kids, they can change environmental factors and observe changes. For even bigger folks, there are different varieties of seeds available (fuzzy stem, purple stem, yellow-green leaves, taller species, etc.) so there can be experiments with breeding and genetics. We ordered some seeds and have been getting ready to grow some. I may or may not post some of our progress here, but for excruciating details, you can find them here.

For the actual day of Darwin's birthday, we made fossil cookies for Daddy. When I was growing up, I remember having made cookies with ceramic stamps, so I had my mom send a couple of the recipes that came with the cookie stamps and we used some of the kids' dinosaur toys to make our "fossils." Before baking:



and after:

I make a mean sauerkraut!

Well, it appears that my German heritage is coming in handy. I made 3.5 quarts of sauerkraut out of one of the cabbages in our fall CSA share. By late December/early January it had sat in its cool, dark place long enough, so we pulled out the first jar. It was yummy! Way better than grocery store sauerkraut. Best of all, we have finally found a good use for CSA cabbage. After completely burning out on coleslaw after the first head of cabbage, we wound up with a couple of heads going bad over the course of the summer. We are having the second quart for supper tonight...yum, yum, yum!

Catching Up III: Halloweenies

This year for Halloween, we have a pumpkin, a princess, and a pflamingo (you know, like the pfabulous pfaucet with the pfunny name?? Didn't want Beeb to feel left out with the p-thing). We started our week of Halloweenies at the zoo, which was fun, but a bit of a disappointment compared to previous years. Here are the pumpkin and princess posing:

and our widdle flamingo hanging out with his peeps.

Bug and Beeb are both wearing hand-me-down costumes. The pumpkin has a long, sordid history. I was the pumpkin in grade school, my little brother had his turn as pumpkin, and my mom has worn it to work for Halloween. We will have to pass it along to my little brother's family when I have subjected everyone here to the pumpkin. Bean was the first Flamingo a three years ago, though that was the year that Bug and Bean ended up swapping costumes, so technically, Bug was the flamingo for trick or treating.

We have a whole week of Halloween fun going, so we will get lots of mileage out of these costumes. On Monday, our homeschool playgroup had a halloween party, so we dressed up again and made some ghoulish treats:

Finger Food, a la Molly Bees and

Mummy toes (aka monster toes). Wednesday is a Halloweenish story time at the library and Friday is Halloween!

Catching Up I: Fall Fun

Although I am very much a winter person, I still think fall may be my favorite season. It has a lot of thing going for it...fun activities, cooler weather (winter's coming!), it doesn't hang around forever (yes, February, I'm looking at you.)...

We've been puttering around, mostly tending to day to day stuff. We've been doing a homeschool playgroup, library story time, and Farmers' Market pretty much weekly. In addition, I have been doing a little canning and freezing while we can still get fresh produce. And since the weather has cooled down, soup season has started again! Yum.

We had miniature caramel apples for a treat one afternoon:

Just one bite (ballpoint pen for scale)! They solve the problem of how to eat a caramel apple without getting caramel all over your face and hair. I got the idea here.

We have also been going on homeschool field trips at the Aldo Leopold Nature Center. We have been to two classes, and even though Bean is technically not old enough to participate, the leaders have let her tag along with big brother and do the activities. The first class was on birds and each of the kids made birds' nests using things that birds would use (pine needles, straw, leaves, etc.) and a few that birds wouldn't use (e.g., glue and paper). We came home and made origami birds for the nest.

Here is Bean's:

She has declared the black birds to be vultures.

And here is Bug's:

He insists that the red birds are canaries. I suspect that he means cardinals, but he insists that isn't the case when I asked. They are canaries.

We have also done one on trees and seeds. Currently, we have only signed up for one other of the remaining four (Bats!!!), but we have had such a good time at the two we have gone to that we might go ahead and sign up for the others, too.

My new love

Isn't she a beauty?? After peeling 20 pounds of apples and then picking another batch, I finally threw up my hands and gave in. All I can say is "Wow!" Not only does it peel, core, and slice way faster than I can with my paring knife, I can also use it to extract a certain amount of slave labor from my children before they lose interest. Mama's little sweatshop: gotta love it! I made three quarts and two pints more applesauce and will make some apple rings tonight! Seriously, I think I love this gadget more than I love the kids (well, at least while I am peeling, coring, and slicing apples!).

So, if "Mama's little sweatshop" and loving my apple gadget more than my kids isn't enough to put me out of the running for Mother of the Year, how's this?

While I was making applesauce, little Mr. Beeb managed to get in the drawer with the hot chocolate and popcorn (what can I say, I have a unique filing system). You know the hockey pucks that break into wedges to make Mexican hot chocolate (like these or these)? He got a wedge (1/6 of a hockey puck) and thought he had hit serious pay dirt. In addition to be adorable and working on a killer sugar high, he has almost reached toddler status. He can stand up in the middle of the floor all by himself and can shuffle out a teensy step or two before going down on his tushie.

Just Beet It!

We have been getting bunches of beautiful beets in our CSA box. The first time we tried a recipe that was in our newsletter...I'm too lazy to look up the name, but it was basically hash browns made with beets instead of taters. Yummy, but messy to make and fried, which kind of defeats the whole wholesome veggie thing if you do it every time. The second time we got beets, we also got a cabbage, so I added a couple of shredded beets to a half of the cabbage to make coleslaw (twice). I call my masterpiece "Pink Coleslaw." I thought it was tasty...a bit of earthy beetiness without being overwhelming. The color however was another thing. It made Pepto-Bismal look positively subtle. That didn't bother me either, but by the second batch, I realized I was the only one eating it.

So we needed a new beet strategy. This time I tried Norma's Pickled Beets. Beets, getting ready to roll:

The syrup, put together, but not yet boiled:

How I dealt with the fact that I KNOW I have a tea ball for the pickling spice, but I couldn't put my hands on it to save my life. I boiled everything together first, then put the prepped beets in a larger saucepan and poured the syrup through a strainer over the beets. Then put the strainer with lemons and spices in the pan too to let a little more flavor out.

It wasn't particularly elegant, but it worked! And the finished product:

Yup, just two pints of beets. Neither Kitty Daddy nor I know if we even like pickled beets, so I thought this would be just about right. We used the bunch of beets in this week's CSA box plus a couple of little ones left over from the coleslaw batch and a half a batch of syrup. We'll give these bad boys a couple of weeks to cure and then we'll see.

Oh and the fiber person in me just couldn't bear to see all that lovely colored beet boiling water go to waste, so a small experiment was in order. I snipped a couple of yards of KnitPicks Bare laceweight off the ball, soaked it in vinegar, then put a splosh of vinegar in a little jar, filled it with beet water and plopped in the yarn. It sat in the sun for the rest of the afternoon and I have it back out in the sun this morning. I will report results when I know!


And a postscript for Stephany and anyone else interested in my ratatouille. I followed this recipe, instruction-wise, but played fast and loose with ingredients based on several other recipes. For the layered part, I think I used a monstrous summer squash, a normal sized zucchini, a half of a humongous sweet onion, a green pepper, and a good-sized tomato. It filled a 9x13 Pyrex dish. My biggest complaint was that there was too much summer squash compared to the other ingredients, which was a bit on the bland side. Next time, I would scale back on the monster squash and maybe add some fresh herbs (basil, oregano?) interspersed in the layers.