Almost caught up

I think I have finally settled into being back home. Every room has been vacuumed at least once, we managed some yard work over the weekend and the cat has stopped hiding under the bed for fear we would toss her into the car for another trip.

Turkey.....

Usually when we travel I have a little notebook to record the order of the day so I can match facts to photos. hohohoho. We were moving every minute of the day, evening and sometimes overnight. All I can say is that this was our first mosque. The women and children sit behind this screen, the men in front. Men can come through to the back and after prayers, women can go up to the front. I think the big dividing line is really children. The kiddies can fool around all they want in this back area and no one worries about it. When they are ready to join in, they do, and if they don't, they don't. Isn't the light sublime?

In front are our two guides. In the floral dress is Isel, in the red is Sumeyra. These women are terrific. They fielded endless questions, complaints, moved all of us through complicated travel itineraries, helped with endless diet and water concerns, toilet panics and did it all with grace and kindness. I can't speak highly enough about them.

This long bench has been sat upon for so many years that you can see the slope that has gradually occurred. I love the continuity of the same stone in so many places, the bench, the wall, the ground.

Luckily for me, one of the places we were supposed to go to was closed and I suggested the botanical garden near where we were staying. In the world of botanical gardens, this wasn't the best one. I thought perhaps it would be more reflective the ancient plants from which so many Western plants have derived. For instance the tulip comes out of Turkey and is a small red plant. Nope. I also thought there might be a section on grains for the same reason. Nope. I guess I need to send something to their suggestion box.

But there were a couple of great views.

The view from our gazebo is the main reason we stayed away from the city so long. That yellowish bit in the background is a salt marsh. The far distance is the flood plane for the Medway river. The only noise was birds, crickets, winds through the leaves, and that terrible squirrel who tortured Cleo Belle every time she settled down for a rest.

You can see most of our modern conveniences. Red cooler for a fridge, Blue containers for water, new green and white plastic table cloth for a counter, green Coleman stove and the best of all, the brand new green rocking chair. It was sweet to sit and rock and read or knit.


How's our local food project going, you ask? We managed to keep up with it all. Broccolli, tomatoes, corn, red peppers, peas, green beans and today, cauliflower are all processed and ready for winter. Steve made strawberry jam and a small batch of peach jam that is being stolen right and left by visitors.

Of all the veg that we preserve, these are my favourite. What a lot of yum they add to winter dishes.

Finally, here is a rather poor photo of what I am currently working on. It is part of Karen Ruane's ongoing online classes for stitching. The two pillowcases have been cut and turned to make the beginnings of a table cloth for a small round table in my studio. The patches are from the kids toddler clothes, the yellow from a shirt so worn by Steve at that time that it is very frail. That's how poor we were, we wore our clothes to shreds before replacing things. Better photos to come. Have a good week.

Finally, beloved September!

I just love September, always have. It's back to school time for Steve and the kids, even though they are way past the usual going to school age.Yesterday was the first day of lectures, so Steve did his nearly famous introductory class to Sustainability 1000, Phoebe picked up her keys for the office that Teaching Assistants use at King's College and Lucas headed back to his study carol to get back to work on his thesis. It was also Lucas' birthday, we had a nice birthday breakfast for him.

Here's the newest member of the family, Snow. He's Lucas' cat and does he add a lot of excitement to the place! Mostly nice. We don't have carpets, so he's finding the lack of traction difficult.

I am not back into the rhythm yet. Too many outstanding issues from the summer, but the gap is closing. Just by writing this blog entry, I am nearly back to my desired schedule. I have been working on my online embroidery course all August. Mostly it's about making samples that can be worked into my future textile pieces.  The one above is a machine made fake organza ribbon that I have embroidered and later added to a different piece. The ribbon is about 4 inches long.

This is my current favourite, even though it is a beginner effort. I like the peek-a-boo-ness of the textile coming up from behind. I have plans for this lesson.

I also liked the techniques I learned on this sample. There is cutwork (the big open hole) and stitching on mirrors and adding lace or textiles behind holes
.

I worked it up a bit more and ended up with this as my sample.

I confess that I am a little confused as to what to do with this blog these days. My initial intention was to write about urban sustainability issues and tag on a few bits of studio work when they were relevant. These days, the blog is more about the studio and less about urban issues.

We are still heavy practitioners of  attempting to live simply and sustainably. The folks I interact with on a daily basis give me good feed back on the studio work. There is a pounding silence on other matters. Since I don't really know who is reading and for what reasons, I wonder what I should continue to write about?

For the time being, I will chat a bit about our dehydrator. Last summer, we dried about everything we could put our hands on. Not everything was a success. I did not like the apples with the peelings still on, nor did I like the strawberries, but Steve did. The bananas were a dismal failure. Too bad because I really liked the idea of banana chips. The blueberries were the best so we repeated that just last week.

We watched a Blue Jays Game, luckily a slow one, while we stabbed about 8 cups of wild blueberries before putting them in the dehydrator. It gave us 5 x 1cup baggies of dried blueberries, to be used in scones, muffins, and trail mix.

Cleo Belle decided to help, by keeping Steve's legs super warm, while the dehydrator was heating up the kitchen when the temperature was nearly 80. We are going to do the apples and pears again this summer, but this time peel the apples. The dried pears were very nice in trail mix, which was sucked down every time it was tucked into lunches. It was especially popular when the lunches were made for a day of sailing.

This summer's drying experiment is going to be mushrooms. I'm not sure if there is a local producer of mushrooms, we'll scout around the market this Saturday. But even if we can only get Canadian mushrooms, and dry those, it will be better than those from Brazil or Australia this winter. Less oil.

Regrettably, the list of things to do left over from the summer includes some finances, cleaning the camping gear in the basement, sorting out the boxes in the garage and attic from Lucas' move home and finding storage for it all.  Too bad the list doesn't have things like pedicure and lemonaide with friends on it this week.

Harvesting through the freezer

I am very protective of our freezer. We bought this johnny nearly 18 years ago.

It is a front door opening kind of unit, not quite half the height of a fridge. It probably has a quantity like 3 cubic feet or something but I haven't any idea anymore. I paid $50.00 for it from a young couple who were taking their two babies and driving out west to start a new life.

Some years our freezer has stayed unplugged especially when the kids were little and it took all my energy to just deal with right now, let alone next month. During Hurricane Juan, I was in a total state of panic, we had just put in all kinds of frozen blueberries and would lose them if the electricity didn't turn on soon. We shoved in ice packs and ice bags and wrapped it up and 8 days later when the lights came back on, we still had frozen blueberries.

I would not have done that with meat, just in case you think I'm completely bonkers.

As we have been challenging ourselves with the hundred mile diet (more on that in the future) we have been learning to use our freezer most creatively. We don't freeze any meat in that unit, we put in broccoli, cauliflower, blueberries, green and yellow beans, rhubarb, asparagus and in the late winter we stock pile some cider for Steve's drinking in the summer. We also put our soup stock, chilies and spaghetti sauces in there.

This summer we expanded our freezer contents to include corn and we have concluded that last winter's experiment with tomatoes was a great success. This summer we put in a pint of peaches to see if the skin will peel off as easily as the tomato skins do and what the texture and flavour will be like.

Where the freezer really makes it's presence felt daily is upstairs. We have the usual fridge size freezer and in the door, in little wooden pint boxes we have frozen parsley, dill, basil, sage, marjoram, onion greens, roasted red peppers, roasted egg plant and celery.

I written about the celery on an earlier blog. The remainder of the frozen herbs make the winter local food restrictions more than bearable. It makes the root vegetables and the frozen products from downstairs simply delicious. The roasted red peppers are by far the best bang for the effort there is. On the barbeque over the season when they are available, we roast extra peppers, and pop them into snack size baggies. Then whenever we want a nice deep tone to a soup or a dish or even an omlette, out come a few slices of red pepper and bingo.

In this freezer we pop any meats that we have bought at the market. They are usually used up within two weeks of purchase except for the pepperoni and barbequed sausages. Those get used up more slowly but keep their flavour nicely. This is where we store any doubling up of recipes that we have made, there is usually a reason to double a recipe, such as taking something to a potluck, so those don't reside in the freezer for long. Steve also stores extra loaves of bread. He and Phoebe have an exchange program worked out. He bakes her sour dough bread, she bakes him scones. When ever Phoebe has time to make some scones, she trades him.

Apparently the energy efficiency of freezers hasn't changed much in the past 20 years, if the seal on the doors is good, then it is about as efficient as research allows. I figure that we save a ton of money by owning one of these. The electricity burn is compensated for by the reduced consumption of shipped in food stuffs over the winter and spring. Our winter eating is very, very good. It helps that Steve likes to cook because if it was left to me, the menus would be pretty ordinary. Even so, the quality of anything I toss onto the table (if I haven't burnt it because I was reading a book) is much higher than anything I ever tossed in years gone by.

Visual Harvest

(photo by Ron Thompson, google images)
"Good morning!" said the yellow shafted flicker, just before he flew away.
"Thanks for showing up." I said, and wrote down his date of appearance in the bird book.
Phwow, that's a nice start to anyone's day!

For more visual entertainment, I recommend Bloomingwriter at

http://bloomingwriter.blogspot.com/

Jody deLong is a Nova Scotian garden writer, reporter and blogger. Right now there is a lovely autumn harvest photo-essay on her blog with delightful images. Jodi's blog is one of only a few I like to visit from time to time.


Another kind of harvest took place in our local cemetery Sunday past. Every year Steve and I collect chestnuts. It started many years ago when I picked up a few chestnuts and put one in a pocket of each winter coat. Everyone could put their hand in a pocket and pull out a chestnut to rub and fondle and I found the movement helped to keep my hand warm. Then things accelerated into picking up enough chestnuts for cats to play with and then to a bowl full of chestnuts. Now Steve and I head out when the conkers start hitting the ground and there are a few favourite trees that usually produce good crops.
We only pick up a small handful from each tree, that way I feel the squirrels stand a chance of winter survival.

In with the new, out with the old, to the compost.

Harvesting through dehydration

Sometime in August Steve researched and purchased a dehydrator. We had been talking about this as a way to preserve some foods that weren't so easy to can or took up lots of freezer space.

cabelas.com
is the link to the company we purchased from. Look under dehydrators, the links are complicated to duplicate here.

What was really motivating us was blueberries.
While we had been in Lunenburg in May, the salads all had these lovely dried blueberries in them, making an otherwise dull salad inspiring. We shopped around at our local stores and the best we could find was a 250g bag for nearly $8.00. This seemed painful. Over the summer we recalled that we had bought dried apples and pears a few times from the market at $3.00 a baggie but the vendors seemed to have stopped coming.

Blueberry season arrived and it was too good a chance to miss this experiment. The unit and shipping cost us slightly over $100. We bought the 750 watt unit, because the consumer reports suggested that there wasn't much difference in energy consumption but a large difference in out put of dried food.

The last week in August, we followed instructions and boiled our blueberries for a quick minute or two, and then dried them. It was mush. Do not boil your blueberries. The waxy outer coating needs to be pierced in some manner to allow the insides to dry more thoroughly. We refrigerated that experiment and added them to pancakes. The following weekend, we bought two pints of blueberries and with a darning needle in one hand and a seemingly endless supply of blueberries in the other, we gave each blueberry two pierces and then laid them on the trays to dry.

We also peeled and cored a quart of pears. There are different drying times for each kind of fruit or vegetable but it is possible to put the longer drying foods on the bottom trays and the quicker ones on top. We did a bunch of bananas because store purchased dried bananas have palm oil in the processing and that is bad for us. We are very conflicted about bananas. There are some instructions around this, but essentially as one tray dries, its end product can be taken off and put into storage.


Today we tackled a large bunch of green onions and a celery plant. Each vegetable was washed and toweled off. I chopped the green onions coarsely (they dry up really small and might fall through the tray's holes) and did the same with the celery leaves. The celery stalks are sliced lengthwise and put into small baggies in the freezer. We have found that one good sized celery plant will keep us going for most of a year. We make two batches of turkey or chicken stock, several chilies and spaghetti sauces and use the remainder randomly in different dishes over the year, rissotto, paella, chicken pot pie and so forth. Using fresh local celery, even frozen, is very tasty. It keeps its strong flavour and half as much is needed to get the taste while winter celery requires double the amount.

We have dried 10 baggies of pears and they are sweet and tender from that one quart. They will be wonderful on their own, chopped and added to trail mix or baking or over ice cream. We fantasized about peaches but we never seem to have our act together when peaches arrive. Too much else is going on. That will be a major project next summer, jam, preserves and dried peaches.

One of the more obvious foods to dry would be tomatoes. There is certainly good reasons to do this, the dried tomatoes can be turned into tomato paste, ketchup, sauces and used as ingredients for other dishes. A few years back we discovered that if we wash tomatoes and put 3-4 in a snack size freezer bag, when they come out of the freezer the skins wash off very easily and we have one to four tomatoes to cook with. They still have their summer flavour and are yummy. We currently have enough freezer space to do this and it is a habit so we didn't dry any. I can see doing some next summer so that it would be easy to make our own tomato paste or ketchup.

Here is my version of the economics. Taking our initial discovery of blueberries selling 250g at $8.00, we made 10 baggies that would have cost us $80.00 over the winter. The cost of the blueberries was $9.00 for two pints and the electricity and labour could be costed at $10.00.

The way I figure it $100 +$9.00+$10.00-$80.00=$39.00 currently the cost of the dehydrator.

Continuing in this line of economic rationalizing
onions, celery and pears $11.50+$10.00 labour and electricity = $21.50 + $39.00 (dehydrator) = $60.50 15 baggies of dried goods at $3.00 each = $45.00

$60.50-$45.00 = $15.50

This is all the dehydrator has cost us. Maybe I will buy some tomatoes just to get this equation to zero or even a profit.

Cooking with Forsythia

Inspired by Dye Plants of Ontario, edited by Nancy J. McGuffin, compiled by Burt House Spinners and Weavers Guild, I made a list of all the plants that I could harvest for dying in my Halifax city garden. I can harvest chives, onions, hydrangea, bracken ferns, coltsfoot, dandelion, rue, and privet. A few mornings later I was looking at my forsythia bush and wondered...yup. On page 189, Forsythia, a plant in the olive family was listed.

On a lovely early May morning I collected 20 cups of Forsythia flowers and the tips of new growth branches.

Into a dye pot they went, just covered with water. They cooked at medium high heat to begin, and then the pot was turned to simmer for 20 minutes. Surprisingly, I remembered to use the timer. (flowers give better colour if simmered, not boiled)

I don't have a scale so the balls of wool that had been wound on a ball winder, were measured in a measuring cup. I gather that measuring is important in dying so I complied, in my own way. I had two balls of wool yarn approximately 1 cup size and 2 cup size, and one ball cotton of approximately 2 cups worth. This is an eyeball measurement and has no relation to weights, accurate volumes, mass or density. Eyeballs only. And a good dose of rationalization.

I soaked the wool in warm water with “DownEast” dish soap (a small squirt) and a sploop of Glauber salts. Overnight because I forgot I had a meeting and then people came over to play recorder. The next morning the wool was then rinsed before going into dye pot with warm water.

While the pot is simmering I will tell you about the plants that can be harvested. Assume that the mordant (the chemically bit that helps to hold the colour to the wool as well as influence the colour tint or tone) is alum. I picked up a bottle of alum at the health food store a few years back for these impulsive dying moments. I also have a copper scouring pad and a copper flower pot that I toss in for excitement sometimes, but not today.

Using alum as the mordant for all of the following you will get: Chives, a dye bath of deep gold yellow; Onion (dried skins) a burnt orange; Hydrangea flowers a pink beige; Bracken ferns a green; Coltsfoot (flowers and leaves) deep yellow; Dandelion (flowers and leaves) a celery green; Rue (leaves) a pale lime; Privet leaves a gold yellow. The forsythia should yield a strong yellow green. These plants I have in enough quantity that I can harvest and not destroy the plant. Others that I could use for smaller amounts of yarn and available in my city garden could be: Bee balm, Bergamot, Buttercup, Cedar, German Chamomile, Cucumber, Feverfew, Forget me not, Geranium, Grape, Lavender, Lilac, Linden, Marjoram, Meadowsweet, Mint, Parsley, Pea (the bush), Plantain, Raddish, Rhubarb, Sage, Smoke-tree, Tomato, Willow and Yarrow. That is just in my not so big yard. Think what I could talk my friends into giving me in addition. The Rhubarb (deep acid yellow or if I use copper – deep gold green) intrigues me, so does the Tomato (pale yellow or with copper – bright tan)

The timer went so now.....Wow, a near disaster. I was thinking I need to get rid of the flowers and stems because poking those out of the wool afterwards will be annoying. So I ALMOST poured the dye liquor down the drain in an effort to collect the flowers and stems. Luckily, I uncramped my brain and thought to use one strainer to collect the bits and dump them into the next strainer. Then because I wasn't sure if the plant bits should stay in the pot, I put the strainer back in the simmering pot along with the alum and wool.

Those of you who like to measure things are wondering how much alum I put in. You'll hate me. About a plop. Enough that when you dump it in, the water goes plop. Possibly 3 tablespoons all at once. Here's a chance for the measuring kinds of gals to do an experiment and see how much it takes to make a plop verses a ploop verses a splash. Use a height of about one foot from the surface of the water.

The dye liquor yields a water colour that is similar to daffodils on their last day. “Expiring Daffodil!” What would the paint stores do with a colour like that to market?

I have set the stove to medium high for 2 minutes and then will turn it down to simmer for 25 minutes. Dye Plants of Ontario is really a terrific book. There is a great introduction, explaining how the Burt House Spinning and Weaving guild undertook to dye a huge number of plants over a year. They involved guilds and individuals from all over Ontario and had several artists draw the plants. They established a set of instructions for dying and reporting. The dying for each plant was done with Alum, Chrome (no longer recommended), Tin, Copper and Iron. Skeins dyed with Alum was then further over dyed with Chrome, Tin, Copper and Iron meaning of course that a separate skein was used with each secondary mordant. One tough problem was on how to colour code the results. It isn't clear what criteria they used to keep people from describing colours as Expiring Daffodil, but you see the possible problem (or creative solution). At the back of the book is a good set of general instructions.

I did read these, a couple of times before hand and during. My learning style is “in-attentive” and consequently I often miss out on a few details. Such as bring the water to a slow simmer. My solution to turn the knob to medium high and then turn it down to simmer is not considered the correct way. I thought it was pretty slow compared to turning the burner up to high and then turning it down to simmer, but that is relative and probably should be ignored by those of you who like instructions. I have a friend who shopped for years to find an ice-cream scoop that would scoop the correct amount of muffin mix into her muffin pan. She would slap me if she was in the kitchen with me now. I on the other hand would lick the muffin mix spills up. It is a wonder we are good friends. But in the end, I have dyed yarn that is somewhat like what the book predicted.