THE GOOD LIFE

Hello dear friends!  Hope you are having a wonderful start to the last month of summer!  When we go outside we can feel a cool breeze coming off the lake.  Autumn is on it's way.  In the garden the russet and golden flowers are making their appearance and the pinks and whites are ebbing away.

In the vegetable garden, we are harvesting things daily.  Lack of rain has caused our onions to finish up early. 

Not our best harvest, we usually get about one hundred pounds, but we are thankful for any this year.  We are picking our beautiful Turkish eggplants, and eating lots of eggplant Parmesan.

BTW, in between tasks, I've been weaving those old-fashioned cotton  loop potholders shown in the picture.  The best potholders ever!  And so easy to make.  They are a great craft to keep the youngsters busy.

We're picking lots of berries too.  They're on the smallish side, but still wonderful.  Time for a mixed berry pie.

A simple recipe for a berry pie is to fit a pie plate with a pie crust and sprinkle with 1 tablespoon of flour and 1/3 C. sugar. Add enough berries to make a nice rounded pie and sprinkle with another tablespoon of flour and 1/3 C. sugar.  Sprinkle with some cinnamon,  if you like, and dot with some butter.  Cover with a top crust.  Bake at 350 degrees for 35-45 minutes or until the juice from the berries starts to bubble through the top.  We like to top our pie with a thin icing made from confectioners' sugar and a bit of cream or milk.

Pie isn't the only thing keeping me busy in the kitchen this week.  On Friday and Saturday I had a massive canning session; 24 pints of corn, 32 pints of carrots, 8 quarts of crushed tomatoes and 8 pints of yellow wax beans. 

Whew!  Carrots are a lot of work!  Usually we root cellar them, but because they had to be harvested so early this year, do to the drought killing their tops, we had to can them all.  They simply wouldn't last in this heat.  We bought the corn from a very generous gentleman that gave us 14 ears for the price of a dozen.  Truck farmers are some of the best people in the world!

Speaking of carrots, here's one of our favorite recipes for them:

Honey Glazed Carrots

1 lb. carrots, cut up
2 tbsp. butter
2 tbsp. honey
1 tbsp. lemon juice
salt to taste
pepper to taste

In a medium saucepan bring water to boil.  Add carrots and cook until tender. Drain and add back to the pan.  Add the remaining ingredients and cook until the glaze coats the carrots.

Even if you don't grow your own carrots, they should be on your shopping list.  They are one of the cheapest and readily available vegetables out there.  And so good for you too!  Around here, the carrot farms sell big 10 pound bags of "deer" carrots for cheap.  They are perfectly good carrots, just misshapen or small that can't be sold commercially because consumers must have straight large carrots.  Heaven help us if we eat a crooked one!

Anyway, that's a good start to restocking the pantry.  Just thinking of all those chowders, soups, stews and pot pies I'll be able to make with those jars, makes the effort well worth it.  Happiness is a well-stocked pantry.   One thing that helped this year is that I bought a steam canner.  Heats the house up a lot less than the old-fashioned water bath canner, with it's gallons and gallons of boiling water.  Now though, I sterilize my jars in the oven by heating them to 225 degrees for 10 minutes.

Less you think I'm all work and no play, on Thursday two local villages were holding village-wide garage sales.  Although, I must confess, I do take my garage sale-ing very seriously, for me it's an opportunity to purchase things to make our home a quiet little respite from all the craziness out there.  I've discovered over the years that the more content I am with my home, the less I desire to be away from it spending money on dining out and entertainment.  I purchased these lace-edged curtains for $3.

They're a nice change from the linen insulated ones that I use in the cold months.  Another thrifty little buy (50 cents) for the sitting room were these pillow shams that I intended to make into a valance for the kitchen, but couldn't bear to cut, I love the prints and the colors are perfect for the sitting room. 

So I sewed them together to make a cover for a chair.   I don't know what possessed me to upholster that chair in white fabric!   A very impractical color for gardeners.
But the best buy of the day was this antique green wire planter that will be used for our bay tree.

These things are so expensive in the antique stores and the reproductions look so shoddy, so I was happy to pay ten dollars for this one. Other items I purchased were 3 vintage white tea towels with tatted edges for 75 cents each, a pair of 1928 jewelry company earrings for a dime, a pretty hanging oil lamp for $5, two antique pieces of door hardware (so beautiful) for $3 each, and an antique hand crochet lace panel for 50 cents.  

Not all my "treasures" came via garage sales this week.  I framed the cover of a catalog that I got  in the mail with a picture frame I had for the bathroom. Thank you Victorian Trading Company!

Makes a very striking picture for free!  So you see, I live the good life on a pauper's budget.  One part imagination, one part inspiration, one part perspiration equals a very good life indeed!


THRIFTY THINGS WE DID THIS WEEK

Harvested about 25 pounds of onions.

Harvested blueberries, blackberries, raspberries,carrots, yellow wax beans, eggplants, zucchinis, peppers  and tomatoes.

Canned 32 pints of carrots, 24 pints of corn, 8 quarts of tomatoes and 8 pints of yellow wax beans.

Bought things for the house at garage sales.

Framed a free "print" with  a picture frame I already had.

Ate from the garden, and the pantry.

Made a batch of refrigerator pickles.

So that's another week at the old home place!   Hope you all have the loveliest week!

Hugs
Jane