Purging, Prioritizing, and Parsimony: AKA Thrifty Thursday

 Hello dear friends!  Hope you are well and safe.  I used to feel I needed to address each and every tragedy that was happening in the world, but it seems so many horrible things are happening to so many people worldwide, that I can't keep up. My news source doesn't even mention a lot of tragedies that would have been headlines for days just a few short years ago. We are living in crazy times my dear friends!  That is why I just hope that you are well and safe.  Even in my own quiet life, I was thinking nothing happened since my last post and then I remembered we had a trip to the emergency room, a court hearing and a tornado watch in those few weeks!  

Well, we had a few days in the upper 70s and lower 80s, followed by two days of snow. I was watching a little robin outside of my kitchen window while washing dishes and he was just standing there staring at the snow on the ground in disgust.  I think I could read his mind.  He looked pretty perturbed. Ha!  But the warm days made the daffodils bloom.

And we harvested the first of the asparagus.

And a few days in the eighties reminded me that I really hate summer.  I know that the warmer weather is necessary for the garden to grow and that is necessary for our lifestyle, but it only took two days for me to long for the quiet days along the fireside. I've noticed that most people that enjoy summer spend most of their days inside their air-conditioned homes or lazing about beaches and golf courses. To me, summer means days of work, often from sunrise to sunset.  And the noise!  Lawn mowers, leaf blowers, motorcycles, and sirens. Most people have seasonal depression in winter. I would have to be different. Ha!

In order to cut down on some of the work, I been purging and prioritizing my garden. I cut down several rose bushes, they are just too fussy.  And Ran dug up my herb garden.  We will still have an herb garden, but it will just be in practical straight lines in a rectangular plot instead of anything fancy. Sometimes practical has to take priority over pretty. Last fall Ran pruned my hydrangeas, and they don't look like they are coming back to life.  Can't say I'd be heartbroken if they didn't.   If they don't, we will replace them with something practical and evergreen. And easy to care for!

In The House

We are still trying to make room in our freezer, so we've been having some rather unusual meals.  Each day, we just grab something out of the freezer and try to figure out a meal from it combined with what needs using-up in the refrigerator.  We've also been going through our pantry and trying to use all the things that have been sitting there too long, or that were purchased to make a specific meal that we have long forgotten about.  One day we will have Mexican food, the next Asian and the following German. It's a good thing we have cast-iron stomachs!

We did have a wonderful meal for Easter, however.  I bought a leg of lamb for a price I haven't seen in years.  The rest of the meal was typical "Jane" thrifty, however, with the remainder of our root-cellared  potatoes and winter squash roasted and we had banana cake made from bananas that needed using up for dessert.   I had forgotten all about this recipe.  It was the one recipe that people most requested, way back in the olden days before the internet, when people used to swap recipes instead of googling them:

1890 Banana Cake

1/2 C. butter

1 1/4 C. sugar

2 eggs

1/2 C. sour cream

1 tsp. lemon juice

1 tsp. vanilla 

1 C. mashed bananas

1 1/2 C. flour

1/2 tsp. salt (omit if using salted butter)

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 C. chopped nuts

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add eggs, sour cream, lemon juice, vanilla and bananas; beat mixture well.

Add flour, salt and baking soda; combine well.  Stir in nuts.

Pour into a lightly greased 9 X 13 pan.  Bake at 350 degrees for 45-50 minutes, or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.   Especially good if frosted with a cream cheese frosting.

It's very important to use very ripe, brown bananas when baking with this cake.  And sometimes, if I have it, I will use a 1/2 tsp of banana extract.  As with all my cake recipes, this makes a very moist "country" cake.

While cleaning out the freezer, I found quite a few bags of cranberries, so I canned six jars of relish and eight jars of cranberry catsup.  We love our homemade grape catsup, so I thought I'd give cranberry a try.  It's a winner.  Weren't cranberries inexpensive this year?  I also had bags and bags of pecans in the freezer, so I canned pecan pie filling.  I love having pie fillings on hand, it makes for a quick and easy dessert.  Just toss the filing into a lightly greased pan and make a quick crumble like the topping in this apple crisp and bake it up while dinner is being served.  Although, I must confess that more than likely I just use the recipe on the side of the Jiffy yellow cake mix for a quick dessert.

Fruit Magic

1 pkg. Jiffy yellow cake mix

1 can pie filling (21 oz.)

1/2 C. chopped nuts (optional)

1/4 cup margarine or butter, softened

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Select your favorite pie filling and spread into an ungreased 8" square pan. Combine cake mix and nuts. Cut in butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over top of pie filling. Bake 45-50 minutes.  (I think I bake mine less, about a half hour, just until the top is lightly browned and the filling is hot and bubbling.)

Even someone that doesn't know how to bake can handle that recipe! It's a good "starter" recipe for children. Did I ever tell you the story of my first attempt at baking?  I was five-years old.  I had a gotten a cute little recipe booklet from the grocery store for free.  It was a tie-in for the Wizard of Oz, which yearly airing around Easter time, was a big event for us kiddies back in the early 60s. Anyway, I informed my mother that I was going to bake some cookies and back then children were pretty much ignored and unsupervised, my mother just said something like "That's nice".  So off to the kitchen I went!  At five, I could read but I hadn't gotten to fractions in school, so when the recipe called for 3-4ths cups of brown sugar, I figured it meant 3 to 4 cups of brown sugar! Well, you can imagine how the cookies turned out!  They ended up more like peanut brittle and were quite a chore to scrape off the cookie sheets.  But they weren't wasted, my sister's boyfriend ate them all.  After the first batch, my mother finally came into the kitchen and discovered what I was up to and sent me out to play while she tossed the batter. You'd think that first foray into baking would have discouraged me, but after learning fractions (ha!) I became quite the little baker, winning many a blue-ribbon at various fairs.  By the time I was ten, my father preferred my baking to my mother's (not the accomplishment that one might think) and I became the chief baker in the family.

Crafts

Whenever someone asks me what I've been up to, I always answer, "cleaning out the freezer or cleaning out the attic" You'd think that one day it would come to an end!  I keep all my crafting items in the attic and my fabric stash is immense.  My problem is that I love fabric, particularity the pretty reproduction fabrics put out by quilting companies. I can't bear to waste a scrap.  So, I began this scrap quilt last winter.

I was thinking of making a quilt for our bed, which is a two-hundred-year-old rope bed and an odd size, but quickly into the project I decided that it was too busy for my taste.  So, I tucked it away and forgot about it. It was a shame, since I only had about five more squares to finish it into a nice lap-sized quilt.  Guilt got the better of me and I had to take it out and finish it.  I am glad to have it behind me, so I can get on to something more enjoyable.   While I was quilting and quilting (did I mention I hate quilting?) Ran kept me company by whittling these two adorable spoons: 

The larger spoon is a coffee measure, the tiger maple came from our firewood pile. And the little spoon is a little scuttle for salt. He used a dye I made from rose galls to stain the tiger maple piece.  I also used the rose galls to dye some cross stitch fabric for this picture on the left:

The little picture to the right is made from a scrap of fabric that was used in some strapping for an antique chair that I had saved.  We never waste anything! I used the oil some fancy olives were packed in to roast our asparagus in this week.  And to sauté some onions and peppers.  Rose gall dye, olive oil from a jar of olives, old upholstery used as cross stitch fabric, may seem like carrying thrift to extremes and some might think it is downright miserly, but to me, it is a fun adventure.  

So that is it for this Thrifty Thursday.  Stay safe and stay thrifty!

Hugs

Jane

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

 

Colorful

Hello dear friends!  Hope you all are doing well.  We're still spending a good portion of our days watering, trying to keep our garden alive.  My! It's been hot!  But the today we finally had a break from the heat and are having the Picture-perfect summer day.  So many flowers are blooming right now.

This is a garden on the south side of our home.  It's a true cottage garden, in that every plant is either something that someone has given us, or a volunteer plant growing elsewhere in the yard.  It's been thrown together with no forethought on what "goes" but just planted by sticking whatever we found,  wherever there was an empty space.  And you no what?  It's one of the prettiest gardens  that ever existed.  (Sometimes I wish I were a better photographer so I could capture the true beauty of this place, but it is what it is, and if people desire an "artful" blog, I'm afraid they will have to go elsewhere.)  Oh!  And the birds do their part also. Many of the flowers have been reseeded courtesy of the birds. I'm a firm believer in not coddling  plants and letting them live where they want to, no hybrid roses for me!

Here's an area of the yard we will be working on this fall:

This is the back quarter of our property where our apple trees grow.  We plan to plant "something" to make this area completely secluded and have a little sitting area. Even on the hottest days, this shady area is cool.  We've already earmarked some ferns and hostas to go back here.  Any ideas?   I'd love your input. This year we decided not to mow the grass back here and there's all sorts of wildflowers  and herbs growing;   Fleabane, Self-heal, Queen Anne's Lace, Wild Lettuce, Mullein  and Red Clover to name a few.  It's so enjoyable to learn of all the herbs and their many uses. You are never too old to learn something new!

IN THE KITCHEN

This recipe is something new I learned  last year.  For years I've looked at this recipe in one of Mary Mason Campbell's recipe books and ignored it because it seemed too "ordinary".  But last year I had such a glut of summer squashes that I was willing to try anything to use some up. Hence, this recipe, which has become a staple summer meal for us:

 Casserole of Summer Squash

2 tbs. olive oil
2 lbs. summer squash washed and cut into cubes (I use a mixture of summer squash, zucchini and eggplant)
1 white onion, chopped
3 large tomatoes, chopped
2 tsp. pepper
1 tbsp. salt (scant)
2 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. dry mustard
1 tbsp. oregano
1 C. breadcrumbs
1 C. cheddar cheese
2 tbsp. butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Parboil the squash for 5 minutes, Drain.
Put the oil in a 3quart casserole. Put in vegetables.
Mix together dry ingredients and half the cheese. Spread over top of the vegetables.
Dot with butter.
Cover and bake 50 minutes. Uncover and scatter the remaining cheese over top.  Return to oven until the cheese is melted.

Isn't it colorful?  We substituted some cheese crackers for the breadcrumbs, just because we had some and they needed using up.  Makes it even more colorful.  Happy days when the garden starts producing!

And look! Canning season has begun! One commenter expressed skepticism that I truly canned as much as what I said I did, but this is just the result of one day's canning session, and my true canning season doesn't really begin until the beans and the tomatoes ripen.  Then it's not unusual for me to can 30 jars a day.  Anyway, I know I should let these comments pass, but it does get tiresome some times. 

And speaking of gardens, with all this dry hot weather, now is the time to be drying your herbs in your car. Something I wrote about way  back in 2012.  Good advice never goes out of style.

This was a dandy year for cherries.  Usually the birds have them eaten before they are ready to be picked, but this year there were even  too many  for them!  I ended up with a dozen jars of cherry preserves.  We will treasure those!  And we had enough cucumbers for a dozen jars of relish. We go through a lot of relish. There'll be more on the way, not to mention pickles.  And I got an amazing deal at WalMart.  They must be getting rid of a brand because they had cans and cans of corn and beans on the sale rack. The expiration date on the cans was 2023 so it wasn't because they were expiring.  Anyway, I bought two  six pound cans of corn for $1.50 each (that's 25 cents/lb!). So I recanned the corn into smaller pint jars.  We never have any luck with corn, between the deer and the raccoons, it just isn't worth our while to grow.  And what they don't eat, the crows will finish off.  Oh! speaking of deer, we spotted twin fawns standing in the street in front of our house.  Gosh, they're cute, but such pests! They know they have it made, with a stream and grazing land behind our house, and apple orchards and our garden, plus the fact that there's no hunting in the village, I'd say they are the smartest little deer!

SEWING

During  the "big lockdown" I took up sewing again.  I haven't done any for years, and it was fun to rediscover the craft.  But not being able to avail myself to any stores, I had to "make-do" with what I had.  Using an old linen tablecloth and substituting some woolen goods for the interfacing I fashioned this old-timey vest.  It has a cute peplum in the back.

Sorry about how awful these pictures are.  I am not a model and the one thing I hate most in the world is having my picture taken.  The photographer gets one chance with me and that's what I go with. ANd I wouldn't know where to begin with photoshopping.  It must be tiresome to be a model, or one of those influencers you see on Instagram.  And I hadn't given any thought about how stupid this vest would look with a t-shirt, (I just put it on to take the picture). Or how I had the back all twisted about. Or that maybe the back would look smoother if I hadn't had a big bulky belt on underneath it.  Oh well!  You get the picture.  

Currently I'm knitting a shawl from some yarn that I picked up at the local thrift shop for 50 cents a skein.  It's just a simple shawl, but the variegated yarn intrigued me. It 's not the best yarn, but I'm not a yarn snob and the entire project will cost me $1.  Not like I'm giving it as a gift or anything, just something to do. Truly a mindless project for the times I'm monitoring the pressure canner.  

Well, the world keeps getting crazier, but life is as good as you care to make it.  I hope you all have a glorious week ahead of you. And that's this week at the old Zempel boarding house.

Hugs

Jane

Memorial Day

Happy Memorial Day dear friends!  Can you believe that we have already reached the end of May?  It seems that you wait for spring to arrive and it feels like it will never get here, then one day, ta-da! it's Spring!

Tomorrow is Memorial Day here in the States and I want to take this opportunity to thank all who are serving or have served.  On Memorial Day, my thoughts always go to my father, who served in World War II.  He never talked of his time in the war except to jokingly recall of the incident when his ship was torpedoed and he volunteered to don diving equipment and go down in the deep ocean waters to weld a make-do repair back on.  He always joked that he was the only one too stupid (his words, not mine) to know any better.  It wasn't until after he died that I discovered all the heroic things he did in the war.  Lately, I've been pondering what he would think of all the goings-on that have been happening lately.  I have a feeling I'd be bailing him out of jail a lot. Ha!  Makes me sort of glad that he's not here to see what a mess we've made of of the freedoms he fought so valiantly to defend.  But mostly, I think of all the things I'd like to share with him.  I know he'd love our little cottage and would be thrilled to be able to go fishing with Ran.  Whenever he visited I was always sure to bake him something special.  He could eat half  of one of my pies in one sitting!  I learned to bake at an early age and one of my duties was to bake goodies for his lunch pail. So in his honor, I made a strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie

1 C. sugar

1/4 C. flour

3/4 tsp. nutmeg

3 eggs, beaten

2 C. strawberries, sliced

2. C. rhubarb, diced

1 9" pie shell 

Streusel:

1/2 C. flour

1/4 C. sugar

1/3 C. butter, softened

Combine first four ingredients.  Fold in the strawberries and rhubarb. Put into the pie shell.

Combine the streusel ingredients until crumbly.  Sprinkle over top.

Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes then turn down the oven to 350 degrees and bake an additional 40 minutes. 

This year everyone decided that the like rhubarb, so I'm making sure to can some up.  

How to Can Rhubarb

Wash stalks and cut into 1/2" pieces. removing any strings or tough pieces (young springtime stalks are the best) In a large pot add 1/2 C sugar for every quart of rhubarb.  Let stand covered, until juice appears. Heat gently to boiling.  Immediately pack into hot jars. leaving a 1/2 inch headspace.  Remove air bubbles.  Wipe rims and adjust lids. Process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes for pints or quarts

We are also beginning to harvest the first of our asparagus.  Here's a quick recipe for a simple  little casserole:

Asparagus Casserole

1 1.2 lb. fresh asparagus, boiled until tender

1/4 C. butter

1C. cracker crumbs (we like our homemade ones made from cauliflower flour)

1/2 C. toasted almonds (optional but good)

1 can cream of mushroom soup (or 1C, of the white sauce, I write frequently about)

4 rashers bacon, fried and crumbled

Combine butter and cracker crumbs.  Pat half into a 8 inch buttered pan. Combine almonds, asparagus, and the soup. Pour over the cracker crust.  Sprinkle the remaining crumbs on top, then sprinkle the bacon over that.  Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes or until hot and bubbly.

Gardening

Memorial Day weekend is when we plant our garden.  It's slow going this year because the back  plots are very wet.  We are hoping and praying that the potatoes that we planted earlier in the season are not rotting in the ground. Such is the trials of a gardener!  That's why it's important to reserve some of your canned goods for the next season, you just never know when a crop will fail.  It looks like our poor peach tree didn't survive the winter.  It was such a dependable little tree, it certainly lived up to its name "Reliance",  it's going to be sad to cut it down.  I'm glad I  canned so many peach preserves last year!  

While Ran is busy putting in the vegetable garden, I've been busy getting the flowerbeds weeded.  Sometimes I regret the folly of planting so many flowers.  If I had to do it all over again, I think I'd just plant huge banks of tiger lilies, but oh well! I have the flowers now, so weeding will just be part of my life until, I'm too old to do it. On the other hand, one of the most enjoyable garden tasks is planning  the urns plantings.  This year I found some unusual plants called "toothache plant".  Some might think that are rather ugly ducklings but they reminded me of the flowers in crewel embroidery.

And you can see from this picture, I love my crewel embroidery!

Sorry about the dark picture, it's just a foggy, pussy-willow-gray kind of a day today.

Finding Time

After a very long winter,  it seems that springtime arrives and so do so many chores.  It's easy for all those little things that need to be done fall by the wayside. I've found that if you make a list and just make an effort to cross three of them off each day, things don't pile up.  For me one of the "chores" this week was to defrost and can all the bacon that was in the freezer.  Canning bacon is one of those "guerilla " methods of canning that isn't "Ball Blue Book approved", but something I've been doing for years, so I won't explain how to do it.  When I pulled all the bacon out, I told Ran that now we had room for all the fish he will catch, "so get out there and catch some".  It was less than an hour later that our neighbor, Ed, dropped off several pounds of frozen cod that came from his sister's restaurant. She has been closed down because of you-know-what and needed to get rid of stuff before it goes bad.  The Lord works in mysterious ways! He also gave us several dozen eggs.  What a blessing to have nice neighbors!

I also use the checking-off-the- list method for cleaning up the pantry.  Each week I take five ingredients that are unusual (why did I buy that?) and are reaching their expiration date and challenge myself to use them up.  It results in some strange meals sometimes, but we also discover a lot of new and fun flavors.  Keeps things interesting. Since I had just purchased a couple dozen eggs before Ed gave us several more, I tried pickling them this week.  The guys love them!  Who knew?

This is also the time of the year that we take our remaining onions and dehydrate them.  We never waste anything and I hate buying onions.  We use this dried onions from May until September, when we harvest our next crop.  I also fill in with chives, Egyptian Walking onions,  and spring's green onions.  We also dried all our  remaining garlic and ground it into garlic powder.  What a smelly undertaking that is!

Well, I guess I've rambled on here long enough.  I hope that you all have a lovely weekend ahead and  again, thank you veterans and those serving presently.  So that's it for another week at the old Zempel boarding house!

Hugs
Jane

Foraging and Weekly Happenings

Hello dear friends!  How are you this lovely Spring day?  We had a few days of warm(er) weather so I've been enjoying some outdoor activities.  It was so nice to go outside without having to put on my big bulky, my name for my down-filled winter coat.  Rejoice in the little things! It was warm enough for the dandelions to pop out.

FORAGING

Dandelions must be the easiest to recognize and most abundant food to forage that ever existed.  When foraging, make sure to pick only in areas you know that haven't been sprayed with herbicides or fertilizers or where pets like to do their business.  This year we tried something different, dandelion fritters:

They were quite good, although a little piddley to make"

Dandelion Fritters

1/2 C, flour
1/2 C. cornmeal
1 tsp. your favorite seasoning (we used Cajun)
1 egg
2 tbsp. milk
the heads of clean dandelions


Combine the dry ingredients in one bowl.  Whip together the egg and milk. dip the heads in the egg mixture then into the flour/cornmeal mixture.  Fry in hot oil until the coating is browned.  Salt and pepper to taste.

We also had dandelion salad with this using some of the dandelion leaves and some of our lettuce that we are growing in our cold frames:

This recipe is just your basic wilted lettuce salad but with dandelion leaves in lieu of lettuce, you can use spinach too.

Wilted Lettuce

a few rashers of bacon
2 tbsp. cider vinegar
2 tsp. sugar
lettuce

Fry the bacon until crisp. Drain off all but a tablespoon of the bacon grease.  Add the vinegar and sugar to the frying pan along with the bacon grease.  Stir until  the sugar is dissolved.  Put the lettuce into the hot frying pan and spoon the grease over the top, until the lettuce begins to wilt,  Sprinkle the bacon over top.  Serve immediately.

This was a doubly foraged meal for us as the vinegar I used was made from some foraged crab  apples.  Spring is a wonderful time to forage.  We went out morel mushroom hunting Sunday afternoon, or as we call it "a nice stroll in the woods". We rarely find any.  And when I think of the grocery bags full that we used to pick as children. Ah! The good old days!

There's also lambs quarters and purslane to be found at this time of the year. And our friend Jason told us his young son made dandelion chips (like kale chips).  Pretty clever!  Caleb is parsimonious person in training. You're never going to hear me complain about free food.  It's like money  in the bank!

WHAT'S  GOING ON

Ran and Jamie swept our chimney.  That saves us about $150 and a lot of frustration, because dealing with independent small business people around here, particularly in anything that is home-related is like banging your head against the wall a lot of  the time.  Anyway,  somehow, the chimney brush came off  midway up the chimney.  Thoughts of how embarrassing it was going to be to call the chimney sweep  to have him retrieve the brush quickly popped into my head.  So I was standing there fretting , when Ran turned to me and said "You standing there worrying isn't helping anything." Ha!  So true!  How many times have I stayed up all night worrying about things, only to have nothing come of the problem?  How many times has what I worried about came to fruition only to discover that I could handle it and it wasn't nearly as bad as I had imagined?  And yes, it is true, worrying never helped anything. So whatever situation you are going through right now, don't worry, instead put on your thinking cap and come up with a solution.

I've had many discussion with family and friends over the past few weeks about what may or may not happen to the economy.  Some experts say we'll be in the next depression soon, others say we'll bounce back. Some say there will be food shortages, some say not.  I don't know and I'm through trying to make any predictions.  But I do know that putting aside some things has never hurt anyone.  Remember when everyone was predicting a major catastrophe for Y2K?  I didn't really believe the hype, but I bought a big bag of pinto beans, just in case.  Nothing ever happened, but we used the beans anyway.  It certainly didn't hurt.  And that's the beauty of prepping, if nothing comes of whatever the headlines of the day are, you still can use the food.  So to that end, when I went grocery shopping this week, I took notice that there was very little meat on stock at Aldis and what they had they were limiting to two packages a person., so I went to a smaller independent grocer and purchased some pork and canned it up.  I also noticed that  our Mennonite butcher's (he raises, butchers, and sell his own meat) parking lot was full.  Usually, we are the only people in his store. Let's just say he doesn't normally do such high volume business. All this to say in my long-winded way, "what would it hurt?" to stock up a little?

We order our firewood this past week.  Our local supplier is a very nice  man and always quickly fills our order and is very generous.  We order 10 cords but he always brings between 13-15 cords.  And never charges extra! As a matter of fact, he gave us a discount because we are loyal customers.  Makes a person happy to support a small businessman like that.  If only they all could be so dependable!   So Ran and Jamie spent the week splitting and stacking wood.  Ran splits wood, with an axe ( no log splitter for him), like he was thirty years old.  All this fresh garden produce must be doing his body good, because he'll turn 63 in a couple of weeks.  My thirty-something year old son, says Ran can run circles around him. Just goes to show you, that yes, good organic produce and plenty of it, plus regular exercise keeps you young.  We never think about our age, occasionally we will overhear someone state theirs and we'll look at each other and say, "That old person over there, is younger than us!" Ha!  We never realized that we had gotten old, been too busy I guess.  So anyway, we are ready for winter, although spring has barely arrived.  Up here we only have two seasons, winter and getting ready for winter.  Tonight it is supposed to snow. Ugh! But I guess it just makes the warm days sweeter. And I hope that you have a sweet days ahead of you!

Hugs
Jane

An Old-Fashioned Sweet Briar Journal

Hello dear friends!  Happy last Sunday in April!  Today I thought I'd show you some of the things that we've been doing around here for the last couple of months and some garden talk, kitchen talk and all those things that this blog is known for. So here it goes!

GARDENING

Friday it finally warmed up enough for me to get out and do some weeding.  Ran has been tilling and planting for the past month.  Since we weren't able to buy seeds locally when we needed to get them started, we relied on what we could find, what we purchased last year and what we saved.  In the end, it probably saved us quite a bit of money because many plants that we normally buy, such as; broccoli, cauliflower, celery and leeks we started from seed. Those free sample packets the seed companies sent us with our orders really came in handy!  We used last years potatoes for seed, which is fine.  The only thing we weren't able to buy was onion sets because the vegetable market we buy them from is closed.  Ran is very particular about his onions and always hand-picks them from the bin.  It must be a good strategy because last year's  crop has lasted us until just last week.  Those were some nice onions!  Anyway, we did manage to find some onion sets in the garden decor area of a dollar store.  They've been planted and are sending out little green shoots, so hopefully they will be nice wintering onions.  BTW, I'd like to acknowledge Rhonda of If You Do Stuff, Stuff Gets Done for her very kind  offer to send me whatever I needed for my garden and also for all her support and encouragement  over the last couple weeks.  Getting to "meet"  people like Rhonda is one of the main reasons I blog, so if you haven't visited her blog yet, wander over there and say "hi"!   On another note, our governor has now allowed garden centers to reopen!  She crumbled under all the pressure, so there is an example of protesting, accomplishing something. She also opened up bike repair shops and golf courses (although you must walk the course and not ride a golf cart (?!), and I won't say anything more political here but leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The plot I was weeding is a good example of  the old proverb "a job worth doing, is worth doing well".  This plot was just put together in a slap-dash method to get some plants in the ground before the frost.  That was years ago and since then, I must have clocked hundred of hours weeding out all the purslane and binderweed and still pulling grass clumps from it to this day.  On the other hand,  the first plot I painstakingly hand dug, took the time to shake all the grass from the clumps, turned by a spade and hand tilled every square inch of, rarely needs to have much attention.  Just a quick hoeing.  So that is why I always tell novice gardeners to start small and do it it right the first time.  Your back will thank you in end!

Is it possible to love a plant?

This herb plant has been with me since I started herb gardening almost forty years ago.  Slips of it have been carried as I moved three times.  It has sired many plants that were the start of many friends' and acquaintance's gardens. It has been a loyal friend to me and I almost love it like a pet.  Last year, after a particularly brutal  winter, I thought I had lost it and was just sick about it, but I cut it almost back to the ground and gave it extra attention and it has come back bigger and better than ever.  I'm not one of those mother earth, new-agey  sort of people, but I do love this sage plant!  After all, we've weathered almost a half century together and that is more than I can say for a lot of people!

HOMEMAKING

You know the old saying "make do our do without"?  Well, my home is the ultimate "make-do".  Several times we've seriously considered selling it because it is just too small.  But as always, we realize that the problem isn't that the house is too small, it's that we have too much stuff!  One of the problems has been that it is a very old house and storage is a major problem.  Everyone that has read this blog for any amount of time, knows that I can about five-hundred to six-hundred jars of food a year.  When we first moved here, I made a back bedroom into a walk-in pantry, but one winter  a storm knocked out our electricity for five very long and very cold days.  It was then that I decided that a woodstove was a must.  Sadly the only place to put it that didn't have the chimney going up through the middle of a room or in front of a window or doorway was the corner of my lovely pantry.  And heat and canned goods don't play well together so that was the end of my dream pantry.  We tried putting long shelves on the upstairs landing.  But this is a very old house, built long before indoor plumbing, central heating or building codes, and I worried about all that weight on the joists and expected the whole thing to coming crashing through the ceiling any day.  In the fall when the shelves were at full capacity, I think I could hear the poor joists groaning.  So we finally came up with our final  and I think best solution.  Our living room is square and the doorway into it is about one foot from the wall. I could never figure out how to arrange furniture because the natural pathway is right along that wall so any furniture placed along there was always getting bumped into or moved. That is when we came up with idea to make a huge cupboard along that entire wall  built to the ceiling.  It would only take a foot of floor space and that wall was pretty useless anyway.  If it was made of nice paneling and painted, we could still hang artwork on the doors.  So Ran and Jamie built me the mother-of-all- mother cupboards this winter.

It can easily hold all my canning jars.  And because we live in a cold climate, we love that it makes the living room  even cozier.  Plus I don't have to worry about my poor joists because the downstairs one are actual tree trunks spaced about twelve inches apart notched into a sill that is made back in the days of virgin forests.  In other words, you could probably sit two elephants on the floor over there and the floor wouldn't sag a bit. As some of you might remember this was the wall that held all of Ran's guitars.  They have now been moved to where the old canning cupboard on the landing was.

We are forever moving things around to make this home work.  It was a cheap little house and it will probably never have any real value except to us, but of all the homes I've lived in, this is the one that has made me the happiest.  It really is an artistic expression of us; all  of the furniture is either made by Ran or things we picked up second hand and remade,  the artwork on the walls is our own or something that has a personal meaning to us, the things that make it a home are things that have memories. For instance, I think of my knitting as artwork, so up on the landing, I use an old orchard ladder to display some of my handknit shawls.

And I like to have skeins of yarn, old embroidery hoops, my little doll sized quilts hanging here and there.  Just so people know that a craftsperson and a musician live here.

CRAFTS

We've been basically shut in since November, almost all our neighbors and friends went south for the winter and is was so blustery we didn't travel much, so I had plenty of time to knit.  Over the past several months I've knitted, three shawls, two pairs of mittens, a hat, a Estonian style scarf, a Miss Marple scarf, a pillow, two pairs of socks, and the back and left side of a vest for Ran (this year's Christmas present) and various littles.  Here's a picture of the edging of one of the shawls:

I love the fern-like edge.  This was a quick knit and the pattern comes from Knitpicks, I believe the book was titled Under 100.  The project I'm currently working on is Spring Bloom Mitts and the free pattern can be found here.

One thing that I realized during all this shut-in time is that I need to be prepared with more sewing supplies.  When or if my local Ben Franklin reopens, I intend on laying-in a good supply of things such as sewing machine needles, snaps and fasteners, various sizes of elastic, etc.   Last week I had a bit of  a frustrating day when I wanted to sew something, broke my sewing machine needle, didn't have another one. And that was after I had to unwind a bobbin by hand because I didn't have a spare one.  So then I decided to  hand sew one of the snood-type headcoverings that I like, but couldn't find any elastic. A very long time ago I read a book about a women that had lived in either the Ukraine of Albania, I can't remember which, during WWII and afterward the Soviet occupation.  She said that the one thing she did was sew clothes for children because, hard times or not, children do outgrow their clothes.  And I had also heard many stories growing up about the Depression and how people had so few clothes, so I have been collecting nice pieces of fabric whenever I find them at garage sales and thrift stores, for "just in case".  But I never thought about zippers, snaps, bobbins, etc.  So I'll be on a mission, once the stores reopen!

IN THE KITCHEN

You hanging in there?  Ha!  We've been endeavoring to clean out our freezer in anticipation of the new gardening and fishing season.  We had a ham in there bought during the holidays at something like 68 cents a pound, and plenty of bacon because our oldest son raises his own hogs and gives us a cooler full of meat for Christmas.  We used to buy a holiday ham sausage from a Polish butcher at Easter time, but he had gone out of business long ago so we decided to make our own, all we had to buy was a inexpensive pork butt roast ($1.18/ lb.).  As the pork was the most expensive ingredient, this sausage cost us less than a dollar a pound.  And it is so good!  

Ham Sausage

4 lbs. pork

3 lbs. ham

1 lb. bacon

1 tbsp. sage

2 tsp. pepper

1 tsp. cayenne pepper

2  tsp. thyme

4 tbsp. brown sugar

1 tbsp. onion powder

1 tsp. garlic powder

1 tbsp. dry mustard

Combine all the seasoning in a small bowl.  Cut the meat in chunks that fit into your meat grinder.  Toss the seasoning with the meat.  Grind through the meat grinder.  Form into patties and thoroughly cook to temperature for pork.

I brown my sausage and can it, which make it easy for me to get breakfast on the table, but this sausage can be frozen either cooked or uncooked.  (The obvious things a person must write these days!)

If you haven't ever tried making your own sausages, you might want to give it a try.  It's almost always cheaper than those tubes of it you get at  the grocers.  And you control what is goes into it.  No pig snouts, no msg, no artificial colorings or flavors.  You can often find meat grinders at estate sales and thrift stores. It's a pretty fun thing to try out old  heirloom recipes of varieties that you can no longer buy.  So give it a try! Maybe you'll invent the next hot dog!

So that's about it from the old Zempel boarding house.  Hope you have a wonderful week.  Now get out there and be thrifty!

Hugs

Jane

THE $20 EXPERIMENT: DAY 5

Hello dear friends!  Are you getting bored with these daily postings yet?  Only two more days, Yay!  Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, I'm getting a tad bit reckless.  Today I used up almost all of my barbecue sauce, save about a tablespoon. I took the remaining sauce and the rest of my fire-roasted tomatoes and simmered the beans in them.  So from here on out we'll have barbecue flavored beans, whether we want them or not.  I also got a bit more generous with the cheese. I still have about a third of it left.  The phrase for today was use it up! Ran went downstate to help our son with some building projects, so it was just Jamie and me.  So for lunch:

We used up the last of the tortillas and made a burrito with the dreaded rice and beans, some cheese, and I used that gravy I held back from yesterday to give them some flavor.  I really overstuffed them; two for Jamie and one for me.  And I served them on a bed of lettuce that I swapped out the taco shells for.  It was a good filling lunch.

Dinner:

I used up those three little biscuits that I made yesterday from the leftover dough for the pot pie.  We put  a few tablespoons of the barbecued beans over the biscuits and Jamie suggested that if we put some of the beans on the lettuce and sprinkle cheese over it, we would have a kind of taco salad, so that is what we did.

If I were carrying this experiment on to next week, I'd buy some inexpensive salsa.  We don't mind eating the beans, we eat a lot of them anyhow.  I had an orange for breakfast, as always Jamie skipped breakfast and had his coffee, which I didn't include in the challenge.

So Far

We still have the leftover pot pie to eat, we're waiting for Ran to get back to eat it, about 1 3/4 C. of the beans, a couple carrots, a bit of lettuce and kale, one-third of the cheese, five potatoes, one orange, two bananas, and the beans and rice. Oh! and approximately one tablespoon of the barbecue sauce and almost all of the oatmeal.  Again, if I were carrying on for another week, I'd buy a small box of brown sugar so we could enjoy the oatmeal.

I've also discovered that this way of eating is very time efficient.  Make one kind of meat at the beginning of the week and you're through for the next six days.  Ditto for the beans.  The rest of the meals were just a matter of assembling the ingredients and a quick pop in the toaster oven or on the griddle. I t would be perfect for single working people, there wouldn't be any excuses for not having the time to cook, you could do all your prep work in one evening.

What Else?

Here's what approximately ten hours of my time the last two days has gone to:

Canning the leg quarters that I bought on sale for 29 cents a pound. To can them I first roast them, then cut the meat from the bone, toss all the bones and skin into a pot and boil that to make a broth. Then strain the broth, cull the meat from the bones, refrigerate the broth so the fat will rise to the top and harden. Defat it, saving the fat for soapmaking.  Next I heat the meat with the broth that I season with parsley, sage, rosemary thyme, paprika, salt and pepper.  Then pack them into sterilized jars with 1 inch headspace.  Put on the lids and caps and process for 90 minutes at 10 pounds of pressure.  So you can call me lucky, or fortunate, or blessed, which I am all three,  but it is still a lot of work  on my end to fill my pantry!

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.

.

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