Any Day Now

Any day now, winter could come to stay.  So far we are enjoying the late fall weather. The air feels crisp and clean. Waiting for the bus in the morning is frosty and just barely daylight.  Colorful leaves have gone and trees are bare.  The only remaining color is the tamaracks with their golden yellow-y orange needles.  Birds are starting to flock to the feeders.  Today I saw our female Pileated Woodpecker for the first time since spring. (Joey calls them "fluffyated woodpeckers").

This knowing that the weather could turn any day has me feeling the rush to get projects done inside and out.  The gardens are all cleaned out and mulched for the winter, leaves have been mowed and mulched.  The last of the garden has been harvested and canned.  (My garden didn't amount to much, but thankfully I have unlimited access to another huge garden, a co-worker's mom who shares her excess veggies and a dandy farmer's market to find my treasures.)

Just for kicks, I took out all the jars I have canned this summer and fall.
This is about 2/3 of the total jars I canned in 2013.  

More canning than I have ever done by far.  I still have a little bit more to do, as my selection is a bit light on protein.  So, beans and turkey are still on the "to-can" list.  Preserving the harvest has been a major part of my weekly schedule for several months now.  I've expanded my selection away from just jams and jellies and included pickles, relish, tomato sauces, apple pie filling, and pumpkin. 

Isn't that pretty?

We have been making steady progress on our fall to-do list over the last month or so, being grateful for every clear, dry day.  We finally cut down a dead birch tree that has been threatening to fall over near our house, along with a few other standing dead trees and got the wood stacked by our fire pit.  The garage and shed have been tidied up, recycling has been brought in and the yard cleaned up (We even made a long overdue trip to the dump on our anniversary.  Try not to be jealous.).

Soon the gourds and jack-o-lanterns will be fed to the chickens, autumn scarecrows replaced with winter snowmen.  Rakes traded in for snow shovels.  Any day now.

Until that day comes, the kids will be waiting as patiently as they know how to get out their sleds and Matt and I will be enjoying these last mild days before winter sets in.

Summer, The Highlights

Looks like its been a while since I've visited my own blog.  Apologies to my adoring fans.  Summer is coming to an end and so many things are changing in our household.  Since the peach canning wrapped up, we've celebrated birthdays, had a few visits from the tooth fairy, went to our county fair, welcomed a new niece, and started school.  In between there were lots of hot days spent swimming with friends, the building of a bird trap, a fish hook firmly embedded in the hand of our boy and our usual berry picking & canning sessions.  

Natalie swimming at her cousin's birthday party

Joey admiring his selection of tackle

Joey & Dad with the bird trap they built together

Close up of the bird trap and all its features.  The metal latch on the top is the trigger for when birds come.  The marshmallows are the bait.  The gator grabs the birds so they can't get away and the jumper cable thing is to shock any raccoons that try to get in.

Joey fishing with the Pocket Fisherman.  These are great for kids, by the way.

Natalie lost her first tooth!

Joey made friends with a goat at the fair

Natalie is a fan of the roller coaster

Our new niece.

Natalie's first day of First Grade!  Joey is really excited too!

Next week Joey starts preschool.  With both kids in school, I will hopefully have a bit of time to better keep up on things, like my poor neglected blog....

Peaches!

A few jars each of my canned peach slices and peach preserves
and the few remaining peaches left from the  1/2 bushel I started out with.

Have you ever wondered why I make my own jam?  Because I can.  Get it, I can. Heh heh  OK, I'm done now.

Anyway, on with the story.  Every summer, a vendor comes to one of our local hotels and sells Georgia peaches out of a semi trailer.  They are fresh and juicy and just plain delicious.  I bought a case this year.

My friend Erin is always canning something or another.  She and her mother and sisters have given me so many wonderful ideas about canning beyond basic jam.  She has canned fruit every which way possible for years.  Every summer, she does tons of peaches.  This year I decided it was time to give it a whirl.  So, I blanched the requisite ten pounds of fruit and put the kids to work peeling it.  We have the neighbor kids over today, so I took advantage of my expanded labor force.  They made short work of the peeling and before long, we had them all pitted and sliced and ready to go in jars.  I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.  I used the recipe out of my handy canning book "Put 'Em Up!" by Sherri Brooks Vinton.  I love this book.  It is a great companion to the standard "Ball Blue Book" canning guide.

One cool thing about this recipe is that it calls for 1/2 cup honey.  Just so happens that the aforementioned wonderful Erin sent me a QUART of raw honey for Christmas.  That worked nicely in the peach syrup.  Thank you :)

A closer look at the sliced peaches

Last year, my friend Amanda got a case of peaches from this same vendor and she made the most beautiful peach preserves I have ever seen.  After the sliced peaches were canned, I still had quite a few left, so I decided to make a batch of this too.  It tastes as pretty as it looks.  As my Aunt Iris would say "Oh my heavenly days."  I'm so glad she shared her recipe!  You can find it here.  Her blog is really spiffy.  I hope you like it.

Up close and personal with peach preserves

Thanks to my canning gals for all your ideas, inspiration and trusted recipes!  Oh, and thanks to my teenage neighbor girl for showing me how to work Instagram on my phone  and to Dion for telling me how to get the pictures off my phone :)

Treasure Hunting

  It is full on rummage sale season around here.  The not so great part is that the big rummage sale days in my town are days that I work.  Fortunately, I wind up with a few hours to kill in town each week.  And sometimes when I'm really lucky, there is a sale close to my work that I can check out on my lunch break.  It has been a good couple of weeks of thrifting.

There are so many things I love about rummaging/thrifting.  I love to look for unique things.  Maybe they were very average household items in their day, maybe they're a one of a kind creation..  I like to take these things and give them another life in our home.

While overly theme-y canned decor isn't my thing, I think I have come to have a more defined style.  I know what I like and what I don't.  This is a huge help when trying to find an item for a certain function. I like certain styles of things, so I no longer buy the first cheap thing I find.  I wait until I find one that I'm going to want to look at every day. As you can see, I kind of have a thing for enamelware and vintage linens.

I've been wanting a vintage kitchen scale for quite a while.  Every so often, I need to measure produce by weight, and it would be nice to have a measurement when packaging meat, instead of just eyeballing what is a pound.  I found this snazzy one for $15.  This is the highest ticket item I've bought in a long time, but so worth it.  I got the cute little beehive that is sitting up on it for $1.25 at the same shop.  I just love that place. 

Sorry this isn't the best picture.  Oddly,
this was a hard thing to photograph.

The purchase of the scale led to a total revamp of my kitchen storage situation.  See, it didn't really fit on my counter like I had hoped it would, so I had to come up with plan B.  Plan B turned into clearing the top of our fridge, cleaning it (you know how they get that weird gunk on them), and putting out some of my other items that had been stored in a cabinet and moving the other stuff to the cabinet.  The top of the fridge has been a real eyesore forever.  I have no idea why I didn't do this about five years ago.  This concept isn't original.  Obviously I'm not the only person who decorates the top of their fridge with this kind of stuff, but it is actually very functional.  And, it looks a lot better than having our lunch pails and electric griddle up there.  This just makes me smile when I walk by it.  Best of all, I spent next to nothing to put this together.  All this stuff was either a gift or was purchased at rummage sales or thrift shops. Oh wait, I lied.  See that wooden jobbie the squirrel basket is sitting on, that's from The Pampered Chef.  It is a stand for mounting an apple peeler.  It was taking up space in the cabinet, so I decided it could be a stool for Matt's squirrel basket (yes it is my husband's basket.  It was a cheeky birthday gift from his sister).  Even though its all pretty up there, it is still the place where our bread goes and where we stash the candy away from little hands.

This nifty little dish is a piece of vintage Pyrex.  It originally had a ribbed glass top and was part of their refrigerator collection.   I found it at Goodwill.  No lid, but I liked the size and color of it so I got it anyway.  It is a great place to keep the plug for my sink and my scrubbies.

This apron was too cute to pass up.  It was 99 cents at Goodwill.  I bought it a while ago and wasn't sure what to do with it.  Lucky for me, Dion gave me a great idea to hang it on a vintage hanger.  We found this gem the on the same treasure hunt as the scale.  It has an advertisement on it for the E.R. Moore Company in Chicago and set me back a buck and a half.  They hang in the laundry room.  Don't they look cheerful?

It has been great to have all my little treasures find homes. Finding cool stuff is only part of the fun.  Figuring out just how its going to fit in the house is the real adventure.  Its even better when one item brings together a display of stuff that has otherwise gone unseen.

Have you found any treasures lately?

The Runaway Rooster

Friday night I went to shut the chicken coop and noticed that our rooster was missing.  I looked all over thinking that he was accidentally locked up in the garage or something. When I couldn't find him, I started to feel guilty that I left the door open too long and turned my  chickens into a drive through meal for a hungry critter.  Thinking that he had come to an untimely end, I went to bed feeling a bit sad.

I woke up Saturday morning hoping to see him pecking around in the yard.  I didn't see him, but I did hear him.   Looking like some kind of vagrant, I set out in yesterday's clothes rattling a bucket of corn.   I walked down the road and came up our back trail and still hadn't seen him.  Then I heard him again and followed the sound to the neighbor's boat shed.  With the T-Roy the rooster located and safe, I headed home to get Matt and some tools.

A bit later, we set off down the road.  Natalie on her bike, Joey wearing his "fire tiger" boots (Natalie's old neon rainbow cheetah print rubber boots which he is positive are really boys boots), me pulling the wagon with a cat carrier and a fishing net in it and Matt walking along beside me with his big gloves on, we really were a sight to behold.  It was a regular parade.

It felt a bit like being in a Ray Stevens song.  "So there I was" with a fish net in my hands, chasin' a runaway rooster around the neighbor's yard.  Two adults and two small children running around in circles after a ten pound chicken for the better part of an hour.  At one point, he hid under the porch and needed the persuasion of a water hose to come out.  I bet the neighbor felt like he got front row seats at the circus.

In the end, we gave a wet rooster a wagon ride home and returned him to his coop full of waiting hens.  The story has a happy ending, but I have to say that this really not how I expected to start my long weekend.

Potato Salad, The Official Food of Summer Potlucks

I like potato salad.  More specifically, I like home made potato salad.  The way my mom makes it.  No pimentos, no vinegar, nothing weird.  The most exotic thing about it is the paprika sprinkled over the top. 

Some will say that its not worth the hassle to make potato salad when you can walk into any store and buy it by the bucketful.  It is a fussy dish, I will agree.  Lots of chopping.  Other than that, its not hard.  Just a little time consuming.  But so worth the time.  Trust me.  The ingredients are simple and easy to come by.  This recipe makes a big bowl full.  Enough for about 16 man size servings.

Potato Salad:

5 lbs. potatoes

3 ribs celery

1 sm. onion

2 big dill pickles (plus a little juice, optional)

half a jar mayonnaise

yellow mustard

3 boiled eggs

paprika

fresh chives (optional)

Boil potatoes with the skins on until just tender.  You can use whatever kind you like, but just plain old white russets work the best.  When they're done, drain and let cool completely.  Stick them in the fridge if you like. I usually do this the night before I'm going to do the salad.

Here comes the tedious part.   Finely chop the onions, celery and pickles.  Once potatoes are cold, peel and roughly chop them into bite size pieces.

Dump all your chopped stuff in a bowl and add enough mayo to coat.  Then add a good size squirt of plain yellow mustard. If you like, you can add a bit of pickle juice here.  Stir it up and smooth out the top.

Slice or roughly chop boiled eggs and put on top for garnish.  Three is enough for my bowl, but you might want another one, depending on the size of your dish.  Don't skimp on the eggs.  Sprinkle with paprika.  If you really want to get fancy, snip a few fresh chives and add over the top.

Refrigerate for a few hours before serving.

Take it to your potluck and don't plan on bringing home leftovers :)

Hello Sunshine!

As I mentioned in my last post, we've been spending more time outside now that the weather is nice.  These mild, sunny days seem like a reward for making it through the long snowy winter.

The seeds Natalie and I planted a few months ago have done remarkably well.  As in, they GREW!  This has never happened for me before.  A few days ago, I moved them out to a makeshift cold frame to harden off.  Some of the biggest ones were ready to plant, so they went into Natalie's little barrel garden.  The big garden isn't ready yet.

Natalie's little barrel garden with grape tomatoes,
cucumbers, peppers, nasturtiums , zinnias and creeping  jenny (on the left).

The chicks are completely feathered out and have moved into the coop with the big chickens.  Egg production is up.  Probably as high as we've ever had.  We've been getting about  6-8 eggs every day and we have twelve adult hens.  I'm pretty sure that my dear little Peg doesn't lay anymore, so I figure eleven layers.  Some of them are pretty old too. So, not too bad.

Our little ladies peeking out into the yard.  The one in front is a Rhode Island  Red
and the stripey one is a Marans.  They are roughly half grown.

The flowers are coming up.   A cluster of yellow mini daffodils bloomed all last week, and the regular daffodils are in bloom at the moment and I think there will be bleeding hearts very soon.  The real treat is going to be when the crab apples and lilacs bloom.  They make the whole neighborhood smell wonderful.

I even found ants already hard at work on peony buds this morning.  I love peonies.  Maybe even as much as  Matt loves them, and I'm so happy to have them again after so long.  (We used to have peonies growing all along the side of the house and they got ruined by a careless contractor).

If you look closely, you can see tiny red ants working their way around the bud.  Yay, peonies!