MAKING SAUERKRAUT

Regina wrote to me and asked how to make sauerkraut.  Since it is a bit complicated, I thought I'd write a post on it.  Now, I know most of you won't be interested in how to make it, but if you scroll down to the end of the post, I share a recipe for a delicious Alsatian-style pork roast that uses sauerkraut.  Perfect for Octoberfest!

Step 1:  Wash and scald a large crock or a large food safe plastic bucket.  Wash your cabbages and cut out the cores.  Remove the thick outer leaves.

Step 2:  Shred and salt the cabbage 5 pounds at a time.  You do not need to go to all the expense of buying a special kraut cutter.  Just use a very sharp knife and cut in very thin strips.  Use 3 1/2 tablespoons of canning salt per 5 pounds of cabbage.  Make certain the salt is evenly distributed or the cabbage may turn pink.  (This is caused by certain kinds of yeast.)  We use a large Ziploc  bag to mix the salt and cabbage together. 

Step 3:  Repeat the shredding and salting until the crock is filled to within  5 inches from the top.  Tamp the cabbage down firmly to extract the juice.  If there is not enough juice to cover the cabbage make a brine of 1 quart of water and 1 1/2  teaspoons of salt.  The brine should cover the cabbage.

Step 4:  Fit a clean scalded plate or lid that fits just inside the crock.  Weigh it down with a sterilized  quart jar that is filled with water.  The cabbage must be completely submerged in the brine.  Cover the crock with a clean towel and place in a dark place.The  best temperatures for fermenting is 70 degrees.  Warmer temperatures may cause the kraut to spoil.  Cold temperatures take longer.

Step 5:  In a few days you will see  bubbles starting to appear.  That means the cabbage is fermenting.  Check the kraut daily and remove the film as it appears.  Remove the lid and remove any film or mold on it.  Wash and scald it and place it back on the cabbage.

Step 6:  When the bubbling stops (usually in 2-4 weeks depending upon the temperature) tap the side of the crock.  If no bubbles appear, it means the fermenting has ended.

Step 7:  Now you can eat your sauerkraut or you can can it.  To can it, heat the sauerkraut but do not boil.  Pack into hot sterilized jars leaving 1/2 headspace.  Remove the air bubbles.  Process in a boiling water bath for  15 minutes for pints or 20 minutes for quarts.

Now you have the sauerkraut, here's a wonderful meal that's perfect for an October day:

Alsatian Pork Roast

In a large Dutch oven, brown 2 large onions, roughly chopped in a couple tablespoons of oil.  Sprinkle a pork loin roast with a spice mixture of 1 tsp. salt and  1 tsp. pepper, 2 tsp. sage, 1 tsp. rosemary,  1 tsp. thyme and 1 tsp. dry mustard.  Brown the roast in the oil.  Pour a pint of sauerkraut over top of the roast.  (If using store bought, use a good quality kraut, not the cheap stuff that you can buy in a can.) Combine 2 tbsp. each of  ketchup and brown sugar.  Stir into the sauerkraut.  Add clean whole potatoes (or cut up if the potatoes are large) as many as needed for your family and an equal amount of coarsely chopped carrots.  Cover the Dutch oven and simmer on top of the stove until the internal temperature of the roast  reaches 170 degrees.  About 30-35 minutes per pound.  The meat should be falling apart.   Check from time to time to make sure all the liquid hasn't boiled out and that the roast isn't sticking to the bottom of the pot.  Add a bit of water if needed.

 Place the roast on a pretty platter and arrange the potatoes and carrots around it.  Serve the sauerkraut on the side.With the leftovers, you can chop up the roast and and add it to the sauerkraut,  adding  some Italian or Polish sausages to it stretches the leftovers for a few extra days.  Are you ready for October now?

RECESSION PROOF YOUR LIFE

Hello dear friends!  Happy October!   This is my second attempt at writing this post, I was fairly far along  in writing it, when my finger slipped and hit a button and the entire thing disappeared!  Did anyone else's blog list disappear this week?  Oh  my computer woes!  Anywhoo, we're having a beautiful Autumn day today.  It's what I call a Benediction day, you can feel God's face shining down on you and giving you peace. 

And peace is what I need, as I read about what is going on in the world economic-wise.  As of October 1st, the Chinese Yuan is now a reserve currency.  (If you are unaware of the significance of this, you can read my post about the meaning of the petro or reserve currency  which explains it pretty easily.)  Deutsche Bank is teetering.   Just before the elections in November, the Federal Reserve will vote on and probably raise the interest rate and many of you recall that the stock market dropped like a stone the last time they tried to raise it forcing them to rescind the action.  And oh yes, we've been riding the biggest bubble of all, the stock market bubble, for far too long, which will make the tech and housing bubbles look like child's play in comparison.  All of which makes for a rather gloomy forecast for the near future. Just saying, that it doesn't hurt to have some bags of beans and rice stocked in the pantry and some cash hid under the mattress.  You'll have to decide for yourself what to do, but I do know that no one was ever hurt from having some extra food stashed away.  You can always eat if nothing happens.

Recently a comment left by Sharon, reminded me that I have lived through a major recession before.  It's funny how time has dimmed the memories of those worries and fears. In the late 70s and early 80s when Ran and I were just starting out, unemployment was high, inflation was even higher and if  we were going through an oil embargo, that significantly raised the cost of living.  If you were fortunate to have a job, it was likely that your wages were frozen and even if you did get a 3% raise it didn't keep up with inflation.  So basically each year you were getting poorer, unless you had lots of money in the bank, then you could earn 13% interest on your savings account, unfortunately we and many people didn't have any savings.  I remember friends that were lucky enough to have both spouses working, spent their money like it was water, because next year the same money would  buy 20% less. It was a fearful and hedonistic time back then, depending upon which side of the ledger your fortunes fell.

Yet through all the gloom, it was one of the happiest times of my life.  So much of what I learned about thrift stems from that period.  I have to laugh now at some of the measures I took to put food on the table back then.  I remember making a soup with one pork chop.  I boiled the meat to make the broth, added the vegetables, then took the meat out and reused it to make another batch.  Now that is extreme tightwaddery!  And I won't mention the many, many meals of potato pancakes. When times are really hard, there are only three main concerns for your money; food, shelter and transportation to work.  And I dare say, many times food was given up in favor of gasoline and rent.

So what's to be done about hard times?   First give up everything but the essentials.  You know, you really don't need a fancy schmancy phone.  I still manage to communicate with others with my cheap little pay-as-you-go phone and MagicJack.  You can still create happy memories for the children without spending money on vacations and elaborate  parties.  You don't need cable TV.  I live without it, and still manage to know what's going on in the world. When you get down to just the basics, figure out how to cut down on them.  Right now, I'd be scouring the thrift stores and estate sales looking for good woolen blankets, so I could cut my heating bill this winter.  I'd stock up on beans, rice, potatoes and flour.  I'd be searching the internet for recipes for meals made from inexpensive ingredients.  Oh!   And by the way, when you find those recipes, copy them.  Who knows if you'll be able to afford the internet in the future.  Back in the day, I made a simple notebook of recipes from the pantry, culled from sources such as the Grit and Cappers (back when they were good magazines), old church cookbooks, and family  and friends.  I still turn to that booklet when the budget is tight.  Many of the recipes that I write in my Recipes From the Pantry posts are pulled from those pages. Use the internet while you have it, to learn how to do things for yourself, such as; haircutting,  sewing, food storage, foraging etc.  YouTube is a gold mine, there are so many tutorials on it.

But most importantly, strengthen your faith.  To quote Abraham Lincoln, "I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me, seemed insufficient for the day."  The best lesson I learned from that time period was, as a Christian, I was to live in this world and not be of it.  I'm sure the other major faiths have a similar outlook.   That is why I can be content and joyful, in adversity.  Things such as a big house, fashion, the latest gadget, a new car, etc. are only ephemeral things,  my treasure is not in this life.  This is going to sound very strange, but from a very young age, I felt that when it comes to thriftiness, God has whispered in my ear and told me to pay attention.  That is why, since my first memories, I have been studying how people lived through hard times.  When older family members spoke of the Great Depression, I listened.  I read novels such as The Grapes of Wrath and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn like textbooks, studying how the characters survived.  I've read and still prefer to read biographies and autobiographies of people that suffered through wars and famines.  And pioneer tales also.  Anything to squeeze one more bit of knowledge out of the pages.  And I can tell you the two main concerns were always food and shelter.  So if the economy takes a tumble that would be my main focus.  Just always remember others have lived through times of trouble and you are just as strong as they are, you'll get through them also.

SO

Even in the hardest of times, there is joy.  Hard times can either bring people closer or pull them apart.  One of the ways to draw family closer is by creating your own traditions. We have a few Autumn traditions here, one is that we get out our Fall decorated mugs.  They are just cheap mugs that we bought at the dollar store, but every year we look forward to the first cool day, to bring out the Fall mugs.   The other tradition is that we hold our own Oktoberfest on the first Sunday in October.  I always serve Alsatian pork roast made form our homemade sauerkraut and dress the table in our finest.  Pork is always cheap this time of year.  I bought a lovely sirloin roast from Aldi's for $1.99 a pound.  Never having bought meat from them before, I was impressed.  It was one of the most tender roasts I've ever had.

The carrots, onions, herbs and potatoes  all come from our garden, so it is also a true harvest  and thrifty meal.

GARDENING

As a side dish we had one of our Australian Butter squashes.  This is a new variety to us this year and we'll definitely be growing them next year.  They are a squash-haters squash,  very mildly flavored.  Except for leeks and some flowers, our vegetable garden is now put to bed for the winter.  While out cleaning and tilling, Ran discovered  a cluster of grapes that I had missed when I was harvesting them for juice.  It was just enough to make three little grape tarts, which we had for dessert.  I wrote the recipe in a reply to Vickie, but thought you might like to have it also:

Concord Grape Pie

Unbaked pie shell
4 1/2 C. Concord grapes
1 C. sugar
1/4 C. flour
2 tsp. lemon juice
1/4 tsp. salt
streusal (recipe follows)

Wash grapes and remove skins by pinching at end opposite stem. Reserve skins

Place pulp in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Cook a few minutes until pulp is soft. Push pulp through a strainer to remove the seeds.

Combine the pulp and skins. Stir in the flour, sugar, salt and lemon juice. Pour into the crust. Top with streusel and bake at 425 degrees for 35-40 minutes or until the fruit begins to bubble.

Streusel:

combine 1/2 C. oatmeal,, 1/2 C. brown sugar, 1/4 C. flour, 1/2 tsp cinnamon. Cut in 1/4 C. butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over the pie.

THRIFTY THINGS WE DID THIS WEEK

Made vegetarian chili from the last of the tomatoes and peppers before we pulled them.  This made a huge pot, enough for three days of meals.  And it cost us nothing as everything came from the garden.

Ran cut Jamie's hair.

Our friend Mary brought us a bunch of fruit.  Has anyone heard of cotton candy grapes?  They were wonderfully sweet.

A thrift store in the area had a sale on all their clothing for 99 cents.  I found several skirts and a few tops to put away for next Summer, which I really needed.  My Summer clothes are deplorable.

Bought a 10 pound head of cabbage for $1.49.  The price was the same no matter what size of head you picked, so I picked the biggest.  Will make sauerkraut from it this week.

Made up some spaghetti sauce from the last culled tomatoes.  Froze it as there wasn't enough to bother canning.

Saved the seeds from the Australian Butter Squash.

Started knitting a hat from my never ending yarn stash.  I'm hoping it will be enough, otherwise I'm going to have to get creative!

Made grape tarts from the last of  the Concords.

Ran made some spoons from the free black walnut wood our neighbor gave us.

So that's it for another week at the old Zempel boarding house!   I hope that you all have a wonderful golden Fall week!

Hugs
Jane
 

INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW

OK, not minds, plural, but one mind wanted to know about my scrapbooks, so I'm glad to oblige.  As a blogger, I'm quite uncertain what direction to take my blog.  When I look at the statistics, the most popular posts are a jumble.  One is a simple how-to, but the next is one of those rambling jobbies, where very little information is shared.  I know it would be easier if my entries were just straight forward little how-tos for those looking for the information and I do have those. But I know a lot of you already know these things and are just friends visiting, so there's those for you dears.  Guess I'll just amble along writing what I feel at the moment and not analyze it too much.  Maybe Hope and Thrift won't be the most popular blog out there, but who cares?  Didn't start this thing to become the next Pioneer Woman anyway.  So when someone writes and requests some information like how to can water, or how to make sauerkraut, I'm  all but too happy to share.  So today it's scrapbooks.

As I've mentioned about a gazillion  times, I live in a tiny house, so I don't have room to store all those pretty magazines.  So instead I snip out all the information that I want to keep and paste them into cheap little photograph books or even notebooks.  I divide the clippings into several categories; decorating ideas, handicrafts idea (including sewing and fashion), winter, spring/summer, and autumn.

Above is the decorating one.  It include pictures for little vignettes, interesting room arrangements, and sweet little quotes about home.  One of the things that I've noticed is that by having all those clippings in one spot, I was able to get a real sense of the  style I like in decor.  Which in turn saves me a lot of time, because  now when I see a pretty design that I'd like to replicate, I know that  while it's pretty, it's just not my style, so I needn't waste my money on it.

Here's the winter book:

Lots of  toasty recipes and gift-giving ideas in this one.  Plus lots of pictures of snowy scenery and poetry.

The autumn notebook is my favorite.  So many beautiful images of trees and cozy rooms.  And the poets wrote some of their best  thoughts about this season.  Guess everyone is enchanted by it.

spring/summer notebook

In this one there's lot of garden design ideas,  planting information and recipes that use all the fresh produce that we grow and is available during those seasons.

These scrapbooks are like having a compendium  of all your favorite pages from the best magazines.  It's a nice little hobby for a quiet winter's day, when ennui sets in.  Plus they take up very little space.  And people enjoy them.  Whenever I leave them out around visitors, they inevitably will sit downand start perusing them.

My favorite magazines are the old Victorias, Mary Englebreits and those rare Mare Emmerling issues.  I'm fortunate that our local thrift store has a good selection of these old magazines.  Magazines are so expensive now days!  I get just as much satisfaction from the old ones.  And it's fun to see how the tastes have changed over the years.  Some of those old Country Living and Country Homes magazines!  Oh my!  Seems that the way we used to decorate was to hang everything on the walls.  There wasn't an empty wall space.  But now it seems the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.  The rooms look so sparse that they'd make a Shaker shudder!   Oh!  Another surprising source of good cheap reading  material is your local antique store.  You can purchase back issues of those great old magazine there for a dollar or two.  A lot cheaper than the five or six a brand new magazine cost today.

Garden Update

Hello dear friends!  I hope  this post finds you well.  As we come to the end of July, I like to sit and back and take stock of how my garden is fairing.  I won't write that it's a strange year weatherwise, looking back, I've noticed that I write that every year. Ha!  But we did have any unusually cold start to Spring and it seems quite a long period of drought and heat.  But as with life, you have to take the bad with the good.

It was not a good year for some of our early Spring crops, such as broccoli and cauliflower.  The plants got big  but they never really formed a nice large head.  We got enough little offshoots of the broccoli for a few meals and a couple containers for the freezer, but not as much as we were hoping for.  The cauliflower was a complete lost. And we only got a few meals of asparagus, it was looking kind of sad, so we picked sparingly  to let the plants strengthen.. We are going to plant more slips this Fall and really give the plot a good dose of compost.    However, we probably got more peas then we ever have  before.  But I think we can chalk that up to not having little grandsons around to pick and eat them fresh from the garden. I'd rather have had the grandsons than the peas.  Maybe next year.  Our cabbage was beautiful.  Looked just like a Beatrix Potter illustration and we have more for making sauerkraut in the Fall.

We've been gathering raspberries these past few weeks. Again, with the heat and drought they are not in their usual abundance, but since they have such a long harvest time, I'm confident that we'll have enough to makes up several quarts of juice.  I've already made jelly.  We just pick them and freeze them until we have enough.  The blackberries, on the other hand, are going like gangbusters. I cannot understand why one berry does well and the other doesn't, just one of those garden "unexplainables".  Cherries were phenomenal!  Even the birds couldn't keep up with them.  Rarely do they leave us enough to do something with, but this year I was able to can eight jars of cherry preserves.  We will treasure them come Winter.  And I'm so excited that my beloved Rhode Island Greening apple tree is finally going to produce enough apples to make a pie!   I've been coaxing and pampering it for almost a decade and it's finally come through.  And the Wolf River is loaded.  All the neighbors will be receiving a bushel this year.

We are just beginning to pick our green beans.  The deer and rabbit ate them down to the nubs several times, so we are grateful for any we get.  Fortunately we had some many last year that I still have plenty of jars in the pantry.  Always can extra, you never know when you're going to have a bad year. We've  had our first tomato.  Over the years we've been selecting the fastest ripening and prettiest tomato to save the seeds from.  I think mid-July is the earliest yet.  Thanks to Ran's persistent and consistent water none have blossom end rot.  That is good news, I have lots of plans for those tomatoes.  Happy day, when we can make a tomato sandwich. And the peppers are loving this weather.  It seems peppers always do well.

On one of the cooler days, Ran and Jamie dug the first row of our red potatoes.  The vines are drying up and dying back because it is so dry, but it looks like we  will have plenty, around forty pounds from one row and we have several rows to dig.  We had high hope for the  keeper onions, they started out so well, still got a nice crop, but they weren't as large as they initially looked.  But still nothing to complain about.  We've yet to dig the sweet onions, but so far they look picture perfect.

Our back plot is dedicated to pumpkins, zucchinis, cucumbers and all things viney.  Look for many pumpkin recipes this Fall. Ha!  There's also a lovely vine growing in the compost bin and another by some elderberry bushes I planted.  I've had enough of cucumbers, thank you.  I feel that I've canned enough pickles and relish to supply the county.  I told Ran he can let the vine grow to give some to Anna, our neighbor, but as far as I'm concerned I'll be glad to not set my eye on another one for a while.  And zucchinis, well, they are doing what zucchinis do.  If you feel you have a brown thumb, just plant yourself a zucchini.  A neighbor up the street sets out a table with free vegetables by her driveway, and no one is even interested in take them anymore.

Well, I hope that my garden update will be an encouragement to you novice gardeners.  Even with almost one-hundred years of gardening experience between the two of us (boy does that ever make me feel old), we still have failures.  You just have to keep plugging away at it because that day you taste the first tomato from the garden or have a meal of the fresh potatoes and dill from the garden, makes all that lugging hoses and being bent over a hoe, so worth it. So, how does your garden grow?

HARVEST HOME

 Hello dear friends!  Today our family is celebrating our version of the old Harvest Home festival.  I guess it has its roots in some pagan theosophy, but for us it is just a celebration of getting the final things harvested and gratitude for the good Lord seeing us through another gardening year.  This has been a rough year; I will not lie.  The drought had added many hours of extra labor, things had to be planted several times before they came up, and the yields were sometimes spotty, but in the end our perseverance and diligence were rewarded.  Many a time I wanted to throw in the towel, particularly the last few weeks, as we all came down with a bad case of the flu, and the most labor-intensive crops needed our attention.  I must confess I had several pity parties. Ha!  You learn a lot about life when you garden.  So today in celebration of picking the last apple from the tree (they finished up early this year), harvesting the last hazelnut from the bush and digging the last carrot, we are enjoying a meal of Alsatian Pork Roast and an apple pie made from our own heirloom apples.  We had planned on having a bonfire last night during the harvest moon, but the weather did not cooperate, so that is something we can look forward to later, when it gets to sweater weather.  And when we are more rested!  Getting old and it's hard for us to stay awake until it gets dark. Ha!

This is a little sitting area in our kitchen dooryard.  The village cut down a maple tree in front of our neighbor's house and Ran brought home a log, planed it down and made a bench from it.  The Joe Pye weed is a mystery.  I planted them there about six years ago and they never came up until this year.  I also had planted some mystery lilies (Jung's mystery lily) around back and had forgotten all about them, this year they decided to make a showing!  Maybe because this year with the drought other things died and they had room.  For all the years I've been gardening, there will always remain mysteries. I will tell you one thing, though, between the Joe Pye weed and the Russian sage, the honeybees were busy all summer.  I wish I could have figured out where their hive was, it must have been massive with all the nectar they gathered.

BACK TO THE OLD WAYS

Besides thinking of old ways of Harvest Home celebrations, I have been giving a lot of thought to the "old ways" and how people survived before the industrial revolution. I correspond with a few friends that reside in Europe, and it is getting quite dire there.  A winter without fuel is becoming a reality for many across the pond and hyperinflation has already arrived.  They cannot afford to use electricity to dehydrate or can their produce, so how does a gardener preserve their crops?  We need look no further than to pioneer days.  First people grew different things than the perishable crops such as tomatoes, peppers and such that we do now days.  They grew a lot more root crops, such as potatoes, rutabagas and turnips, things that could be put into baskets and burlap bags and stored in a cool dry place.  You can store carrots by placing dry ones in a barrel or even a box with holes punched in it and layering them with sand or sawdust. Again, keeping them in a cool dry place.  Or if your area is mild enough you can layer them directly in the ground with straw.  Or place an old cooler in the ground and cover it with straw. Growing up, many people made sauerkraut and just kept a crock in the back room. We had plenty of hot, dry, windy days this summer, perfect for laying out fruits and vegetables on screens (made from old window screens) and letting them dry that way.  There're old leather britches, which is just green beans strung on string and hung in a dark dry area of the house to dry naturally.  Apples can be dried similarly.   Did you know that you only need to run your freezer for one to two hours a day to keep things frozen in your freezer?   And make sure it is full, even if it means freezing some jugs of water.  The bigger the mass of frozen goods, the longer it is going to stay frozen. BTW, this is why I always advocated canning, rather than freezing your produce and meats. You really don't need to have a lot of equipment plugged in all day long, as even when it is not in use, it is still using electricity, especially all the "smart" appliances. One year, when we were having a difficult time, we even experimented with just plugging in our hot water heater every other day just long enough to heat the water.  On the unplugged days the water was tepid, but not intolerable.  Here's a post I wrote over a decade ago, about how to stay warm and cozy during the cold months.  I know from whence I speak, having lived through several episodes when we were without electricity for over a week in the middle of winter.  (We lost our electricity over 20 times last year, one of the pitfalls of living in a very windy climate.) Even now, we set our thermostat at 60 during the winter, our upstairs of our very old house is unheated, one morning we woke up and it was 42 degrees upstairs.  We slept well, but it was quite an eye-awakening experience climbing out of bed in the morning. Ha!  A long time ago some squatters were living in an old, abandoned church at the end of our street.  We didn't know what they were up to, but we always wondered why every noon, when the sun was at its highest point, they were sitting out in their truck.  Well, you know how warm your car gets when it is sitting in the sun?  They would go out there and take a nap and use the natural heat to stay warm.  They would spread all their blankets out to let them get heated by the sun too.  Actually, it was a pretty clever idea.  I've used the heat of the car to dry herbs and proof bread.  If you have a really sunny window, arrange your furniture to capture the sun's rays.  People used to do these things instinctively, but now days we've become so accustomed to just cranking up the heat when we are cold, we have lost all common sense. So, you see, there's lots of ways to cope, you might even find some of them enjoyable.  

CREATE

I haven't had much time for crafting lately, but I did find time to cross stitch this cute little bowl fillers:

They are a free pattern from Create and Decorate magazine (I loved that magazine; wish they still published it). Here's the link.  For some reason, I love growing gourds and squashes, each year I pick a different type; last year it was spinner gourds, the year before birdhouse and this year it's luffas.  I think I drive Ran nuts with them, he's suggested I throw some of them out, but I treasure each and every one. Just one of the many ways we are peculiar here at the old Zempel boarding house.  I hope you have lovely week and a golden start to the loveliest Autumn season!

Hugs

Jane

WINDFALL

Hello dear friends!  Can you believe we are already one week into August?  Hope this week has been a cooler one for you.  We finally are having some nice temperatures.  If you close your eyes and face north, you can almost imagine it is autumn.

CANNING

This time of year is a busy one at Sweet Briar Cottage.  This week I canned 13 pints of beans, 20 quarter-pints of jalapenos,  7 half-pints of maple-vanilla-peach jam and 8 quarts of peaches.

There's nothing like jars of peaches in the pantry to say "home".  By the way, I saw a jar of  Amish canned peaches in the store the other day - $6!  I'd have to be pretty desperate for a jar of peaches  to pay that price!  Altogether, my peaches cost about $1.50 a quart, and they are all-organic and  non-gmo.  That's why it's good to learn to can.

We also started a crock of sauerkraut.  The directions for making it are here.  We didn't grow our own cabbage because we can buy a ten pound head for $1.40 at a local vegetable stand.  Two heads are all the cabbage we need and it costs about the same as a packet of seeds.  Takes up less space in the garden also.  Which reminds me, someone asked why I don't raise chickens.  Our village  has an ordinance against it, but it just isn't cost effective for us.  By the time you buy the feed and house a small flock, and they don't lay too much during our harsh winters, those eggs are getting expensive.  It helps that I can buy free-range  ones just outside of the village limits for $2 a dozen.  We use less than a dozen a month.  You always have to weigh the benefits when being thrifty. Of course, chickens do give the place atmosphere, so if they ever change the ordinance, neighbor Tom has offered to split the costs with us.

GARDENING

In the garden, we are harvesting our first tomatoes!   If you have ever tasted an heirloom variety picked fresh from the garden, still warm from the sun, you will understand why the tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable.  So wonderful!   So sweet! Every year I fret over them.  Will they ripen before the first frost?   This has been such a strange year; we are already digging potatoes, but the corn is still puny and I'm not sure  the pumpkins will ripen this year before a heavy frost.  I don't ever remember things growing so tall, either.  The hollyhocks have to be at least ten feet tall, and the sunflowers too.  The lilies come up to my shoulders and we have to beat back the black-eyed Susans.  On the other hand the corn is floundering and the Concord grapes are just hard little green pebbles.  Gardening!   It's always feast or famine, that's why it's so important to preserve what you can; you never know when you'll get more!

SAVING SEEDS

 We save most of the seeds from our garden, as many are rare heirloom varieties.  It helps keep the costs of gardening down.  This week we are collecting the seeds from our tomatoes.  Each year we select the earliest, most perfect, sweetest,  meatiest ones; traits we are trying to breed into them   The textbook way to save tomato seeds is to cut open the tomato, scoop out the seeds, place in a jar of water, stirring a couple times a day, let the pulp ferment at room temperature for a couple day, the seeds drop to the bottom, pour off the pulp, repeat this procedure until the seeds are clean, spread the seeds on a paper towel to dry.  However, I've found it is easier to put the seeds in a fine mesh sieve and wash the pulp off under running cold water, then just plop the seeds onto a porcelain plate to dry, scrape them off the plate when they are dry and store.



Our dear friend, Mary, gave us a bunch of ferns from her garden.

Which we planted on the north side of our shed.  An instant garden!   Georgie likes to pretend he is an ancient canine, living in the wild among them.

Silly dog!  But I do understand, every time I can, sew or light an oil lamp; I feel an ancient pull connecting me to my ancestors.  It gives me peace.  One of the best things you can do for your soul, is to turn off all the technology and reconnect to the earth and the natural rhythms of life.  There's scientific proof that WiFi and electrical lines interfere with a good nights sleep and others that having your bare feet touch the bare earth is beneficial to your health.  Who knows?  Maybe we all need to return to our primeval  roots.

"Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still they say. Watch and listen.  You are the result of the love of thousands."
~ Linda Hogan, Native American Writer~

HOUSEKEEPING

One old-fashioned thing we are doing this week, is cleaning  all our room-sized rugs.  Just like the old washerwomen  of days past, we fill tubs (modern-day storage bins work also) with soapy water, throw in the rugs and stomp on them with our feet, like we are making wine.  In another tub, we rinse them.  Then we lay them over clothes lines, bushes and this make-do (two sawhorses and the garden table) for our very heavy braided wool rug.

A few days in the hot sun, and they are dry.  You'd burn out the motor of your washing machine with these old rugs , they are so heavy, and for what it costs to dry clean them, you might as well throw them out and begin anew.  Make sure you use cold water so the dyes do not bleed.  You have to make hay while the sun shines!  So much to do in summer.

RECIPE FROM THE GARDEN

One thing we don't do during the summer, is to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.  One of our favorite summertime meals is  Panzanella,  or Italian tomato and bread salad.  Most of the ingredients can be found right in the garden, so it's thrifty too.  And it's vegan!


Panzanella

1/2 C. olive oil
two cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 tsp. paprika
1/4 tsp. ground red pepper
1 loaf of a hard crusty bread (like French) cut into cubes
5 tbsp. balsamic vinegar
1/2 tsp. black pepper
4 lbs. ripe tomatoes, cut into 1" cubes
2 C. chopped bell peppers
1 small red onion
1 C. basil leaves, torn into pieces

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Whisk together 3 tbsp. olive oil, 1 clove garlic, salt, paprika, and red pepper.  Toss bread cubes in mixture.
Spread cubes evenly on a cookie sheet. Bake 20-25 minutes, stirring halfway through, or until cubes are crisp.  Let cool.
In a large bowl, whisk together vinegar, remaining 5 tbsp. olive oil, remaining clove of garlic and black pepper.
Add remaining ingredients.  Add bread cubes.  Toss to coat. Serve immediately.

BTW, check the reduced-for quick-sale  shelf of your grocer's bakery for good, cheap bread for this salad.  Since you are toasting it, it doesn't need to be fresh.

Pure bliss!

Most of our meals this week have consisted of freshly dug potatoes, (either roasted or boiled and served with fresh dill and a dab of butter) just picked tomatoes, green beans from the garden and some berries for dessert.  Life is good!

WINDFALL

The recent storm has gifted us with some treasures.  There were lots of branches to be gathered for firewood and smaller ones that I am collecting for a Colonial-style stick fence for our garden,  If a person put some effort into it, I'm sure they could gather enough wood to see them through several weeks of heating the house by woodstove.

Another windfall were these plums.

A branch must have broken off the neighbor's tree during the storm and they didn't bother to pick the fruit off the branch before hauling it to the street.  All in all, there were about three pounds of fruit, free for the picking.  Not a blemish on them!  Should make several jars of plum butter. 


CRAFTING

 

I've been seeing a lot of these knitted ruched scarves on Pinterest lately (don't you just love Pinterest?) and I wanted to knit one up.  I found the pattern  in this knitting book  on loan from the library. I used an inexpensive Lion Brand wool in mustard and the pattern really knitted up quickly.  Hint:  I really dislike casting on large amount of stitches (this pattern was over 300) I count and recount but the numbers always come out different each time.  I found that if I place a marker every 50 stitches, it is easier to count the cast-ons. 
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"To me a lady is not frilly, flouncy, flippant, frivolous, or fluff-brained, but she is gentle, she is gracious, she is godly, and she is giving.  You and I have the gift of femininity ....the more womanly we are, the more manly men will be and the more God is glorified.  Be women, be only women, be real women in obedience to God."
~Elisabeth Elliot~

GO OUTSIDE

My son and daughter-in-law brought the grandbabies for a visit.  That's a picture of son Erik and grandson Felix above, eating ice cream at our favorite parlor, a Victorian general store.  We also spent some time at the beach.  A fun activity for grandparents to play with the grandchildren is buried treasure.  Bring a couple handfuls of change  along.  Encourage the grandkids to look for buried treasure by digging in the sand.  Every once in a while, distract them from the digging and throw some of the change in the hole.  The little ones get quite a kick out of it.  We used to do this with granddaughter Tatianna, but now she is too big to fall for the trick.  Only works for the little ones.  Enjoy them while you can, they grow up so quickly!


THRIFTY THINGS WE DID THIS WEEK

Canned peaches, jam, jalapenos and beans.

Saved tomato, hollyhock, spinach, dill and mustard green seeds.

Collected windfall branches and plums.

Harvested tomatoes, summer squash, peppers, beans and herbs from the garden.

Washed our area rugs rather than dry-cleaning them.

Knitted a scarf from a free pattern.

Got more free compost from the village.

V IS FOR VICTORY GARDEN

Sorry about the long stretches between posts.  I have been busy doing this:














I was thinking that I'm almost through with the canning for the year, then I started listing what I have left; eggplants, pumpkins, potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, apples, pears,one more bushel of tomatoes, some peppers, more blackberries and let's not forget sauerkraut.  Well!   Let's just say I'm two-thirds through the canning season.  Going to need some more shelves!

I do not live on a farm, just a regular sized city lot.  Just goes to show you  what you can do with a little bit of gumption.  The other day I was talking to a relative who was unemployed.  She was making herself sick with worry about how to make ends meet.  The whole time I was wondering  why she didn't put in a garden as she lives on several acres out in the country (even volunteered to help her get it started).  I read a statistic that one in seven Americans receive food stamps.  That means that some of the people I know are using them, but when I tell friends and neighbors to just come and pick whatever they want or need,  they rarely take me up on the offer.  Now, the very same people will gladly accept produce if I pick and clean it and present it to them in a nice plastic bag, but it is too much work for them to do those couple steps themselves.  They'd much rather go to the grocers and buy it that way.  I stopped offering.  If a person cannot bend their back and use a bit of effort to help themselves,  then I surmise that they are not truly needy.

Well, enough of that rant!  Just had to get it out.  We've had cool weather the last couple of days.  One day it was in the nineties and the next  the high temperature was fifty-one!  It was as though nature said, "Labor Day has come, summer is over, let's get on to autumn!".  It would be nice to have an extended fall season.  Usually it gets smooshed between a too long summer and a too soon winter.

It smells wonderful outside.  The Concord grapes are ripening,  Looks like a bumper crop this year!  This is the first year we are getting more than one apple on the trees we planted five years ago.  We planted my favorite "pie" apples;  Rhode Island Greening, Wolf River, and Smokehouse.  Old antique varieties.  Also, just for eating, the delectable Snow or Fameuse apple.  The neighbor also allows us to pick the pears and apples in her orchard. Lori is such a nice neighbor!   While I was writing this,  it reminded me that grape juice is also on my list of things to can.  The work never ends.  But it is a joy.  Next time I post something, I'll have a more informative article.  Just dropped in to say hello, and say I'm still here on Earth.  Just buried under garden produce!

Small Scale Maple Sugaring and Other Thrifty Doings

 Hello dear friends!  Happy Springtime!  Several of you have written and told me that you have had problems with subscribing and commenting on my blog.  I'm sorry about that, unfortunately, I am the least techie person on the planet, bordering on full-on Luddite status, so I cannot fix those problems, but I do appreciate you making an effort to let me know. I truly do appreciate all feedback, even the negative as long as it doesn't get abusive.  Anyway, with that out of the way, here's what springtime looks like in my neck of the woods:

Not the prettiest season.  No forsythias, no daffodils, no green grass, those things won't come until May, just mud and the remainder of the snow. It always looks so bad this time of year.  So that is the reality of living "up North".  But on a happier note, the robins have returned, and the morning was greeted with a cheerful chorus of birdsong.  They are surviving on the wild grapes and crabapples left on the trees until the ground thaws and they can get at their worms. 

Small-scale Maple Sugaring

I just read a news article that this year has been one of the best maple sugaring seasons Michigan has had in a long time.  We are gathering a gallon of sap a day from the one tap on the maple tree in our front yard the past few days. We already boiled down enough to make a quart and a half of syrup. This year was just an experiment to see how we could do this efficiently, but next year we will tap more trees and put more than a single tap in each.  Here's how our tap looks:

We inserted some tubing into the tap and then into a pop bottle, then Ran rigged up some wire to attach the bottle to the tap. Then when the bottle is three-quarters full, we put the sap in an enamel-lined pot and put it atop our woodstove, where it evaporates down to one-tenth of its volume. This way we are not wasting any energy, as the stove is being used to heat the house anyway.  After that, Ran takes the evaporated sap out and finishes the evaporating process on our rocket stove.

You can get all fancy-schmancy and measure the temperature of the sap to see if it is at the syrup stage, but we just eyeball it.  When it is the right consistency to run off of a spoon slowly and it's that maple-syrupy color, we bottle it.  I will probably "can" the syrup for long-term storage in pint jars.  I use the term "can" but it more like bottling the jars.  Sterilize you jars in a 275-degree oven for ten minutes, .  (Normally I do not recommend sterilizing jars this way, but you want the jars to be dry inside, so that the syrup doesn't mold.)  Heat you syrup to the boiling point, pour the hot syrup into the hot jars, leaving 1/4-inch headspace.  Place a lid that has been simmered and then wiped dry atop each jar and the screw the band on tightly, none of this fingertip tight business here, really jam the rings on.  Place the jars upside down on a soft dishtowel.  This should seal the jars. After the jars have cooled, turn them upright and check to see if the jars have sealed.  Any that haven't should be stored in the refrigerator for up to six months. I'm sure there's many articles on exactly how to do this out on the internet, if you want to do a bit of research, but it really isn't rocket science. Speaking of rockets, these rocket stoves are a wonder.  They take very little energy to get a large pot of water up to the boiling point.  We just use twigs we find in the yard and scrap lumber.  We've used our countless times when we have lost electricity for the umpteenth time every year. This is a purchased one, but again, there's lot of information on the internet on how to make one.  They are definitely a valuable tool to have on hand.

Taking Stock

March is the month that we take stock here at Sweetbriar Cottage.  We go through all our canned goods and see what we need to grow and preserve for the coming year.  More tomatoes for catsup and salsa but we are good on beets and carrots. (I'm still having nightmares about having the flu while canning those bushels and bushels of carrots.) And we definitely need to make more sauerkraut this year.  All the oddball canned goods and those that are reaching their expiration dates are put into a basket to be used for meals this month.  It makes for some interesting meals; I can vouch for that.  And we try to eat down our freezer, in anticipation of the coming fishing season.  My goal is to use only the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and not even use the small upright freezer we have (a goal I have yet to achieve). 

 It is finally warm enough to go up into the attic and straighten things up.  I can truthfully say, I needn't buy another skein of yarn or scrap of fabric for the rest of my life.  I will need to live to be a hundred just to use what I have, and that is after donating bags and boxes of yarn and bolts of fabric to the local thrift store.  I also go through my winter wardrobe and donate all the clothes that I have never worn all season and the ones that do not suit my lifestyle any longer.  There's no point in having pretty clothes that are not practical, I never go anywhere to get dressed up.  They are just taking up space and in a small home space is more valued than hanging onto things for sentimental value.  My thoughts on the whole matter are that it is better to pass on these pretties on to someone who might enjoy them, then it is to have them sitting in drawers going to waste.  Taking stock from time to time is a thrifty thing to do. After seeing all that I have, I can honestly say "enough is enough"!

But yet....

I say all that, but yet, it didn't keep me from taking a jog through the thrift store yesterday when I dropped off some donations. Ha!  I had this beautiful piece of an old overshot coverlet that I wanted to frame, so I was looking for a frame to cut down to fit the piece. And there it was!  For $5, less than what I'd pay just to have the glass cut.  I was going to paint the frame, but I thought the color brought out the golden browns in the fabric.  It took less than a quarter hour, for Ran to have it framed and hung.  

Even the mat worked out (it appears more bluish here than it actually is).  The only other thing I bought was a twiggy wreath for my door.  I toss my wreaths at the end of the seasons.  Usually, they look the worst for wear after a couple of months being battered about by the wind and the thrift stores always have more.  The one I bought cost 75 cents.  Speaking of twiggy wreaths, here's a woolen candle mat I made from some of my big box of wool scraps:

That was a fun one-day project.  And here's a penny rug I finished this month:

I am through with making those woolen tongues for a long while.  In March I decorate in a lamb and lion theme.  I don't decorate for Easter; all those bunnies and chicks are too cutesy for me. And I am not fond of pastels.  Besides, the lion and lamb have a Biblical connotation. Or so I thought.  I had a real Mandela-effect experience when I discovered that the Bible actually says, "The wolf will lie down with the lamb".  I thought it might be some modern interpretation, but I checked my grandmother's Bible that was published in 1911, and yep, it says wolf there too.

March Sales

March is a wonderful time to stock up on some items.  They've had great buys on corned beef.  At Aldi's I bought the cheaper cut for $2.99 a pound.  I would have bought some to can, when you can your meat it tenderizes the cheaper cuts, so don't be afraid to buy them for this purpose, but I still had plenty in my pantry from the previous year, so I didn't.  But I did buy two roasts, one we ate on St. Patrick's Day, and the other I roasted and cut into slice for sandwiches.  I still see corned beef on sale at Walmart.  

I saw lamb for less than $4 a pound at Meijers.  Unheard of price for lamb!  If I weren't being so lazy, I would buy some to can for stew.  Lamb is a rarity in this house.  I used to grind it and make gyro meat which I sliced and froze.  So nice when the cucumbers and dill are ripe for tzatziki sauce.  Oh, oh!  I'm talking myself into a chore!

And of course, ham and eggs are usually on sale this time of year.  I haven't checked the prices, but just a quick glance, I have noticed that the prices on eggs are going down. You can really make a ham stretch.  One of our favorite ways is with this ham and egg pie. Then there's always ways to use it in soups and omelets. Take all the little scraps and grind them up add some onion, mayo, and dill relish and make a sandwich spread.  And when you get down to the soup bone there's always a nice old-fashioned boiled dinner (with lots of cabbage which is on sale this month).  Goodness!  A family could survive an entire month on one bargain Easter ham!

A Question Posed

Recently, someone posed the question is self-sufficiency and preparedness Biblical?   This is usually followed by the verse about the lilies of the field.  I'd say, yes, while we depend on God to provide for us, He also give us knowledge and discernment.  I can point to just as many verses and parables about preparedness. We all read the news about bank closures and interest rate hikes; they should be telling you something about where the economy is heading.  It would be foolhardy to not watch your pennies a little more closely, in my opinion.  My attitude is not to go at preparing for hard times in a fearful manner, by going to grocery store and hoarding up enough food and making your home into a bunker, but it won't hurt to have some extra things put aside.  These days, no one can be truly self-sufficient.  Even centuries back, people were still dependent on others; millers to help grind the grain, neighbors to help shuck the corn, threshing teams at harvest time, not to mention most had large families that pulled together.  I dare say that a lot of those "preppers" I see on YouTube will find that all their well-laid plans are just that, when they have to grow enough feed for all that livestock and harvest it with a scythe because fuel and parts are not available for their tractors. Or if they have to haul buckets of water from a stream for that herd of cows.  They'll be downsizing their gardens when they have to turn over the soil with a shovel and till it by hand.  And what does one do when a drought occurs?  Or a flood wipes out your crops?  Then I dare say, we are not as self-sufficient as we thought, so we needn't be so smug about it.  Self-sufficiency is a goal, but I'd say we still need to have God's blessings to ever achieve any facsimile of it. Yet, I still say it is better to at least try attempt to live as independently as possible, rather than to rely on the good graces of others, or worse yet, the government, to provide for you, realizing that every tomato you pick, every piece of firewood you stack, every drop of water you drink, is a blessing and should be treasured and not wasted. What say you on the subject?

So anyway, that's it for this month's Thrift Thursday at the old Zempel boarding house.  Dear Regina, I hope this helps, and thank you for urging me to write a post!

Hugs

Jane

 

NOVEMBER NOTES

Hello dear friends!  The autumn leaves pass by my window.  Have you ever heard Nat King Cole sing this in French?  Lovely! 

I'm not going to write about how unusual this Autumn has been, let's just say this has been the first year when we hung laundry  outside in November.   In spite of the warm weather the leaves are falling so Ran and Jamie raked and mulched them and put them on the garden beds.  That's an easy way to add compost to your garden.  By Springtime they are all decomposed and ready to be tilled under. 

I'm sorry but this post is going to be a rather hodgepodge of thoughts.  We are busy here preparing for the holidays, as most of our guest visit at the end of November and the beginning of December, so we have to prepare now.  By mid-December our guest have come and gone and we are ready to settle down for our "long winter's nap". 

One thing I did this week is make a batch of Lebkuchen, a German Christmas cookie that is a tradition in our home. They must be made now to be enjoyed in December because in order to develop their flavor they are placed in a tin with apple slices for at least four weeks.  I won't include the recipe unless someone writes and tells me they want it.  It is not a thrifty undertaking, with expensive and unusual ingredients, such as citron, almonds, white pepper and cardamon. But they are part of our heritage, as Ran's grandparent's immigrated from Berlin and my family came somewhat earlier to America, but still maintained a lot of the German customs.  My mother was the first generation to speak English as her first language.

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FORAGING

This week we foraged for pinecones.  We use them for crafts and for fire starters. And I just like to place them around the house for holiday decorating.  Did you ever see the bags of them for sale in craft and gift shops?  Who  buys them when pinecones are everywhere free for the picking?  We made some little pinecone gnomes from a few to put on Christmas packages. 

Just glue a wooden bead to the top of one and make some hats and scarves from felt.  Glue a piece of brown felt to a piece of cardboard and cut out some skis for the base.  Glue the cone onto the skis and draw eyes on with a marker.

CRAFTS

Another easy-peasy craft for gifting is these little coffee cake soaps we made:

You simply grate one pound of soap (we used our own homemade but you can use a good quality unscented store bought soap)  with twelve ounces of coffee, grinds and all, over a very low heat until the soap is completely melted.  Pour into  mini bundt pans (the flexible ones) and allow to harden.  Remove from the molds and let them  cure for at least one week before gifting.  Wrap them in  little treat bags as you would for baked goods and make sure to label them as "soap" so no one will take a bite of them!  We added some cinnamon and oil of cloves to ours for extra scent. I think these along with some handknit washcloths makes a cute hostess or teacher's gift.

To go along with the other kitchenalia we have been making, Ran made these pig cutting boards using a vintage one I bought at a garage sale for a pattern.  He used tiger maple.

 And here's a picture of the pipe he carved last week, Toni!

I'm still knitting!  Somedays I feel like Madam Defarge, knitting, knitting, knitting.  This week I knitted this super-easy toddler's jester hat, which is a free pattern,  The mittens pattern is located here
and is free on this blog.

Did you know cookie jars make good models for children's hats?  The yarn I used is FairIsle by Yarn Bee, a yarn that can be found at Hobby Lobby.  As you can see, it's a self-patterning yarn, which takes some of the boredom out of straight stockinette stitch.

CANNING

Isn't it funny?  I just used up the last of our canned ham and said to Ran we needed to be on the lookout for a sale on it, when our bulk food advertised ham for ninety-nine cents a pound.  At that price we canned up eight jars plus had enough for a nice meal (made a great glaze from ginger ale, peach preserves, mustard and a pinch of cloves) .  I also canned up our sauerkraut.

OTHER THRIFTY THINGS WE DID THIS WEEK

Started upholstering this Eastlake settee that we bought for $45 at a garage sale this summer:

A nearby village was having their holiday open house this weekend and one of the stores participating was the Ben Franklin.  They were 20% off on any purchase, so we bought things needed to upholster this settee and  craft items for other projects. 

I took advantage of another store's sale to buy a few decorative items for the holidays at 25% off.

I used a coupon of $5 off and various other coupons at the Family Dollar to buy a lot of household items that were on sale  like toilet paper, dish soap, laundry detergent, etc.

While we were out, we stopped at a thrift store and Ran found a beautiful Pendelton wool shirt for $3 and I found an antique ironstone cup for 35 cents.  At another thrift store I found a pewter platter for $1.99.

We replaced our dead mums in our urns with branches from our corkscrew willow.

I think they'll look pretty in the winter with snow and ice on them.

I harvest some green onions that had self-sowed themselves in the garden.  Tomorrow I'll make some potato soup and use them for a topping.  Yum!

I started knitting a pair of ragg wool socks for a present.  One down another to go!  Knitting plain stockings is a bore!

Ran found some beautiful tigered maple when splitting the firewood, which he set aside for woodworking.

Well, that's it for another week at the old Zempel boarding house!  This week we Americans go to the polls to elect a new leader.  Please pray that God's will shall be done.  I hope that you all have the loveliest week!

Hugs
Jane

Tis the Season

 Hello dear friends!  You know in all those Regency novels they speak of the "season"?  A time when all the garden parties, soirees and balls begin?  Well, we have our "season" here, also, the end of spring until Labor day when all the church rummage sales, garage sales and estate sales begin.  The Grand Finale is the Blue Water garage sale trail that runs along the shoreline of Lake Huron in the Thumb area of Michigan. Ran and I look forward to it every year.  We carry a list of things we hope to find and usually do.  This year our list included garden twine, sandpaper, art supplies, and winter reading material.  Of course we make allowances for a few pretties to make our home more homier.  This year we spent less than what it would cost for the two of us to go out to a nice dinner and that included our gas money.  We pack a lunch because there are no fast food joints along that stretch of road and only a handful of diners (and we don't like to waste our valuable hunting time being waited upon and served.)  Besides we ate our meal along the shoreline and watched a bald eagle fishing in the lake.  How's that for tableside entertainment?   Sales are getting sparser and sparser each passing year, unfortunately.  Perhaps because of the economy people are holding onto their treasures?  Or maybe it is the older generation is getting too old and the younger generation cannot be bothered?  But still, we had a wonderful time and everyone was so friendly and even the weather was agreeable.  

The End of an Era

Sadly, one of my favorite sellers told me this would be her last year.  I've been stopping by her place for the past twenty years.  She used to be and antique dealer in the 1970s and when I first started buying from her the things I found!  Almost all my English pink lusterware has come from her shop and quite a few pieces of pearlware circa 1820s and earlier.  I've picked over the pieces I really admired over the years, but couldn't resist buying a few last pieces of some chinoiserie for old times sake.  I do love a bit of chinoiserie, but only if it comes from England. Ha!  But what I really come to see is her home.  I've informed Ran that if that house ever comes up for sale, I'm selling everything I own and buying it.  It's not the house so much, it's a pleasant enough little white cottage, but the location.  It's at the end of a country lane on a cliff overlooking the lake with a white picket fence with rambling roses.  Oh my!  Be still my beating heart! Anyway, I see in the picture that the front cup has a small chip in it, so I won't be using it for my morning coffee.  Oh well, it's still pretty and she only charged me fifty cents.  I have quite a collection of teacups and Ran brings me coffee every morning in a different one.  One of life's little luxuries.  I would love to have a huge Welsh cupboard to display it all, but our tiny house doesn't have enough wall space for such a thing.  One of the few drawbacks to living in a tiny cottage. 

Another Seasonal Event

Another seasonal event in Port Austin is the annual cleaning out of the summer homes.  Every summer  the summertime residents clean out their homes and, having enjoyed them during the warm months, put them up for sale during the cold months.  So they drag their possessions out to the curb and put a "free" sign on the piles, hoping everything will be gone before the garbage man cometh. Hunting through the piles is one of Jamie's favorite sports.  He's found some pretty good treasures too; like the colonial punched tin chandelier that hangs in our back room, a 100% wool oriental carpet, a Victorian birdcage and some really nice old baskets.  There's always some nice furniture too, but we haven't room for any. I always say that a person could furnish a home quite nicely on what people toss away here.  This year he found this lovely art pottery vase and a picture frame.

The flowers come from our "meadow".  Ran tilled up a piece of ground and we throw all of our seedpods from the garden back there and the birds do their part also.  There's also a lot of what some people call weeds (we call them medicinal plants) like chicory, plaintain, mullein, etc. in that plot.  It's really amazing what is right under our noses if we care to look, isn't it?

Speaking of Free Stuff

It's been a boon for summer squashes and zucchinis this year.  In one week we ate a casserole of summer squash, another casserole comprised of zucchinis, Italian sausage, onions, peppers and spaghetti sauce topped with mozzarella cheese, zucchini crab cakes, and I baked a zucchini-caramel poke cake for our weekly dessert.  That's a lot of zucchini for one week!  But we are firm believers in eating and being grateful for what the good Lord provides.  We also gave a way several  pounds to the neighbors and, although I swore I'd never do it, I shredded up a couple quart bagfuls and froze it.  Then we set a few dozen out on the street with a free sign on it, but no one took them. Evidently times might be hard but not that hard.  I was never so glad when the vines stopped setting fruit and we could pull them from the garden.  

The pagan religions have a celebration towards the end of summer when you they start harvest their gardens and pulling out there spent plants and start preparing the soil for its winter rest.  I can certainly relate to this,   the happiest days for a gardener are the first plantings and the last harvest.  It's a nice time to reflect on what you have been provided with and to express gratitude.  

I've been busy canning potatoes this week.  It was a very good year for them.  I'd say we dug more than 150 pounds out of our small plot. (No, I don't can all of them. Only the little peanut-sized ones and those that are pierced by the potato fork.)  So don't let anyone lead you to believe you need acres and acres of land to be self-sustainable.  We also harvested about 30 pounds of onions.  These won't last that long because use a lot of onions and I hate that we are already dipping into the baskets.  Our freezer is packed with broccoli and cauliflowers.  Little by little we are restocking the pantry.  Tomatoes are coming in by dribs and drabs, but we are getting enough to can the things we wanted to; catsup, salsa, and spaghettia sauce.  Temperatures are dipping into the 50s at night, so I'm not sure if we'll get enough to can plain tomatoes, but it doesn't matter, we'll manage with what we already have.  That is why it is so important to preserve more than what you think you'll need. You never know when you'll have a bad year.  Thanks to Ran and Jamie rescuing the peach and pear tree by covering them with a tarp during an exceptionally late hard frost, we are one of the few people in our area  that has peaches.  But the are just starting to ripen.  Usually by now they would have been harvested weeks ago.  

Let's see.  We harvested all of our cabbages because slugs were starting to get to them and I started the process of making sauerkraut.  A stinky proposition if there ever was one.  We'll dig the beets this week.  One of my least favorite canning duties, stains everything.  We are trying to beat the racoons to get a few meals of corn on the cob.  How do you know when the corn is ready to eat?  When the racoons get into it. And I'll make another batch of our favorite tomato-apple catsup this week.

Tomato-Apple Catsup

8# tomatoes

2 green sweet peppers

2 red sweet peppers

4 onions

3 C. apple cider vinegar (5% solution)

3 C. sugar

3 Tbs. canning salt

3 tsp. dry mustard

1/2 tsp. ground red pepper

1/2 tsp. ground allspice

1 1/2 tsp. ground cloves

1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

2 C. applesauce (I use my home canned, but store-bought works too)

Quarter tomatoes. Add peppers and onions.  Emulsify with an immersion blender or use a food processor.

Add the rest of the ingredients except the applesauce.  Cook down to one-half the volume. Add the applesauce Heat   and can in water-bath for 15 minutes.  Leave a 1/2 inch headspace in the jars.

Other Outdoor Activities

Ran has been repairing and repainting the birdhouses. And he's been installing solar lights into various lanterns and antique porch lights we've picked up over the years.

Gives a bit of fairyland atmosphere to the old place. I used to be able to find old porch lights like this everywhere way back in the day.  Made  some money selling them to people renovating old houses.  One of the ways I managed to be a stay-at-home mom and put our children through college.  I rarely find any like this any longer, sadly.

Wardrobe

A few of you dear lovelies asked to see some of my wardrobe.  I'm afraid it's not very exciting this time of the year.  In summer,  I'm just happy to find something that keeps me cool enough to keep my eyes from melting out of their sockets.  Did I mention that I'm not a fan of hot weather?  Oh yeah.  About a billion times.  Anywho, my summer wardrobe consists of something like this:

A 100% cotton skirt (me-made) and a cream or ivory blouse made from the thinnest cotton I can find.  I find that  a very full skirt allows air to flow up, thus keeping me cool.  And although I'm covered from my collarbone to almost my ankles, I'm often the only one not suffering when I'm with others that are wearing more traditional summertime fare. The skirt is homemade from the thrifted fabric and blouse comes from a garage sale for $1, so I don't have too much invested in this outfit. So when it gets stained up, as all my summer clothes do, it is not such a hardship to toss them in the trash at the end of August.

Crafting

While my summer wardrobe is expendible, my cold weather clothes are another story.  I often spend months knitting just one sweater or weeks on a pair of fairl isle gloves for it.  Just finished the ginormous intarsia  knit shawl.

I don't really enjoy knitting intarsia knitting or knitting with circular needles, but I wanted a giant shawl with a fern on it and no one was going to knit one for me.  The pattern is from Tiny Owl Knits. I would have preferred a dark brown background, but I'm trying to knit down my yarn stash.  Fortunately I had a lot of fern green yarn for some odd reason.  But you know what guys?  As soon as I finished it, I found some beautiful baby alpaca yarn and a couple of skeins of linen/silk yarn at the garage sales, so much for knitting down my stash!

Lest you think all I do is knit, I managed to sew a few aprons.

This one was inspired by the aprons Mrs. Hall wears in All Creatures Great and Small.  I made it from a duvet cover that I purchased at a thrift store.  Still have yards of fabric left over.  King-sized sheets give you lots of fabric to play with.  Anyhow, I discovered that this style of apron is more suitable for more straight  up and down figures and doesn't do a curvy figure any favors  Oh well!  It is only an apron.

Then when I was cleaning out the attic I happened upon a generous cut of plaid fabric. So another apron was in order.  This time an Edwardian one with princess seams.  Much better fitting.

I probably should have ironed it.  Anyway, it's a cute red and green plaid.  Years ago I started making little presents for the house for Christmas, like potholders, samplers, napkins, table runners and aprons.  I often find new candles and fancy soaps, tea towels, etc at garage sales and especially at estate sales.  I guess people are given these things and put them away for  a special occasion and never use them.  Anyway, I tuck away all my treasures like this apron and some time in December bring them out to make the holiday special. It really is like Christmas morning because half the time I forget what I've squirreled away.  

Books

Anything else? Oh yes. Books! Thank you all for your book suggestions.  Right now, I'm reading zilch.  Just too tired at the end of the day.  And I think I'm wasting too much time on Pintrest looking up recipes for garden produce.  Amazing site, that Pintrest, but you really can fall down a rabbit hole with it.  

So, if you've stuck with me thus far, I thank you kindly.  If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to do so.  Hope you all have a restful Labor Day.  Can you believe summer is coming to an end?  Hopefully, we'll meet again soon!  Bless you all!

Hugs

Jane