What I've Been Up To...

Loving my morning glories this year...
They're all around the yard because I grew them from seed and stuck them in every which where... This one is called "Grandpa Ott" and is the most striking purple.
This one's called Crimson Rambler. Isn't it lovely?! I also have hoards of "Heavenly Blue" but didn't seem to have a very good shot of them...

This is not a rose! It's my favourite geranium given to me by a wonderful friend's mil, who got it from her grandmother, I believe. I've never seen one like it for sale in a store. Love it.

Look at the size of these cukes! My lovely friend shared her bounty with me so I made fridge bread&butter pickles. These are half gallon jars, to give you perspective on how big the cucumbers are!

Lovely sunshine preserved in glass for the depths of winter... I'm a peach girl. Every year when it's peach season I sing at the top of my lungs the "really love your peaches want to shake your tree" song. Great for the libido...highly recommended ;o)

But out of my OWN garden, tomatoes continue to be the love of my life. This isn't the greatest photo, but this tomato was nearly the size of my baby's HEAD! And yes, this is what miss H needs to be doing in order for me to be putting food by... well, not quite true, I do have the most amazing live-in babysitter!

There is just SO much gratification in saving my own seeds, starting these lovelies in the depths of snow and coldness in my windowsills, transplanting (always a little too early, I'm IMPatient) them out at the first sign of a warm night, and then harvesting the heritage, tastey, beautiful goodness. I LOVE the multitude of colours, tastes and textures I get! And cooking is SO easy, truly, with this as a base. Yum.

Another lovely one. I really did think I had lost my garden in a particularly bad storm we had this summer. SO many of my tomatoes were completely stripped of leaves, the tomatoes that had formed were all pocked by the hail, and the ground was littered with blossoms and tomatoes from the terrible winds. So, perhaps because of that sadness, I am enjoying each and every one of my tomatoes EVEN more than usual this year -- relishing every single one and AMAZED that there are SO many. I've slow-roasted 2 gallons, canned 20 quarts, and we've eaten tomatoes 3 times a day most of the summer... what a blessing tomatoes are!!!

hee! love this photo. canned tomatoes underneath a beefsteak monster. We love making a tomato sandwich with these ones and having ONE slice hang outside the edges of our slice of bread (and we make big loaves!)

And this year, totally inspired by my "let's just do it" friend, I'm saving my tomato skins just like my Grannie always did. My first batch I put on the deck to dry in the hot sun with my Grannie's net thing over it that she always used... and Kenai thought it was the most delicious tray of appies she'd had in a long time! urgh! So these ones stayed indoors in the dehydrator. They dry in minutes!

Yes, tis the season for "putting by"!! It's something I love to do, and although it's so much less relaxing with a one-year-old grabbing onto my leg wailing to be "up", it's still well-worth the effort. She's gotten used to having baths in the kitchen sink while I get everything ready, and then big sister is called to the rescue while I do all the hot-dangerous-stuff... Pantry is filling up rapidly and I tell ya, you just don't dread winter when you have sunshine in jars put by!!

oh! and p.s.

i'm doing really well (if I do say so myself) with accepting what is and filling my life with joy. thanks for all the love on that front!

Supper fixin's

We're eating almost soley from the garden now. We picked and ate the last of the strawberries today as well as the last (likely) of the peas and the strawberry spinach. The first beans are coming on and we're eating our beets, kale, garlic, radishes, celery, kohlrabi, cucumbers and loads of raspberries. The salad greens are fading and getting bitter except for the Drunken Woman lettuce -- must plant more of that again soon. We're eating about 3 cups of basil every day in the form of pesto (YUM!) -- pesto pasta, pesto on toast, pesto by the fork-full, pesto in sandwiches... I did manage to freeze a few blocks of it today for those yummy soups in the winter... I haven't had much luck with sweetpeas since we moved here, so this year I planted loads of seeds in 3 different locations. WELL! We have several enormous bouquets ready to pick every single day! What a blessing a garden is! How do people live without one?!

Summer Meal

Ever since reading "A Handmade Life" (which I could never recommend highly enough) I've had a different attitude towards preparing meals for my family. I was feeling uninspired and sometimes resentful about the task and now I see it as such a priviledge -- something to be cherished and celebrated as I nourish myself, my unborn baby, my children and my hardworking husband. Along with my shift in perspective has come a different attitude from my family, as well. Wee P had gotten into the habit of announcing he wasn't eating whatever it was I'd made before he'd even sat down at the table. Now, as we hold each others hands and say our little blessing together before we eat, there's just a different energy at the table. I prepare the food with a grateful heart (and often with lots of help from my children) and that seems to truly translate into grateful partakers. It's really beautiful. I'd so much rather stir gratitude and love and joy and abundance into my food than resentment!

So, with that in mind, I just had to share a peek at our delicious supper last night...

Fresh caught trout, new potatoes (not from my garden) with lots of fresh dill, asparagus (last of the season?), greens from our garden topped with grilled fresh goat cheese (an idea from another book that I loved, "A Pig in Provence") and homemade bread just out of the oven... and then cinnamon buns for dessert.

Does life get any better?

Lambs Quarter

One thing we always look forward to this time of year is the lambs quarter being just at the right size for harvesting. We eat it straight out of the garden along with a pea leaf or a bit of fresh dill struggling to grow against the picking fingers... Lambs quarter was a staple in my grannie's kitchen, but most people just think of it as a weed now. It's ready before spinach and tastes very similar. It's like any weed at our place, though, we have too much of it. We eat as much as we can of it while it's small and tender, and then try to get as much of it pulled and onto the compost heap, but we seem to have more each year.

Annika picked a big basket of it last night and I put some in the salad, some in the stir fry and used some in my omelette this morning. Our hens are laying really well just now too, so we're flush with eggs, and a dutch family has just started selling their homemade gouda cheese that they make from their beloved grass-fed cows that they milk every morning. I had a tomato and some mushrooms from a local greenhouse that I chopped up and fried up with some chives and bits of thyme straight from the garden. Lastly I poured a bit of my salmon oil on it (not so local, but delicious for my developing baby's brain just now). SO YUM I ate half before Annika suggested taking a photo! Best omelette ever!

A Perfect End to a Perfect Day

One of my favourite memories growing up is having tea, fresh bread and homemade butter for supper on the days when mum made bread (every week). My own kids don't get the homemade butter, but they do get homemade mayonnaise, fresh local gouda cheese, freshly made raspberry jam (from frozen berries) and fresh-picked asparagus. And of course, cinnamon buns for dessert. What's not to love?!

I can't get enough of lilacs this time of year... This photo's for you, Marti!

Morning Treasures

Every morning we get to have the most beautiful egg hunt! Aren't these lovely? The green ones come from our Ameracauna hens, as do the pink ones. The large dark brown ones come from our old Red Sussex hens, and these tiny dark ones we have no idea where they're coming from. Two in one day and these are the first we're seeing of them. Now it's a mystery to sort out whose eggs they are. They're the size and weight of a quail egg! But not the right colour. Any ideas out there?

Gladness and Sadness in July

We were SO excited to see a yellow-bellied flycatcher nesting under the eave of our barn, we did a little song and dance in a circle under the nest every day. The day the baby (seemed to be just one!?) hatched, we were giddy with joy. Imagine how we were by the day the little bird took its first flight, us 3 crouched against the barn holding our breath... What we didn't know was that someone more sinister was also watching and holding her breath..... Yup. Our cat. OH! How we wailed when we caught her with our sweet little baby in her mouth... We had a funeral and wept tears of anger and sadness, the little mother flycatcher singing her mournful song in the tree directly above us. We each said a little prayer and it thrilled my heart to hear the sweet gratitude of my children for the Great Mother and the comfort and joy she gives my wee ones. They were both blessing this little bird on its next journey and assuring its mother that it would soon rejoin her...

We thoroughly enjoyed our strawberry and raspberry harvests this year. Our freezer is heavy with both. I wanted to make a combination of black currant/rasp/strawberry saft, so we went picking bc's with friends and made up 3 lovely jars for winter sipping. Delicious!

My beautiful friend from highschool found the love of her life and we got to attend her wedding. She's had a rough time since our carefree days of indulgence living in Pakistan with servants and drivers and all... She's overcome SO much, she inspires me just to think of her. Her brother ended his own life, her first marriage ended in disappointment, her mother has suffered a multitude of strokes, and Jill was the victim of a brutal break-and-enter and very nearly lost her life. She's scarred, physically and emotionally, but the beauty of her spirit shines so brightly through her eyes my heart squeezes every time I think of her. I couldn't help thinking, as I watched Annika enraptured watching this beautiful ceremony that things could have been very very different. When I was Annika's age I sat weeping through a funeral of a friend of my mother's who hadn't been so lucky in escaping her attacker. Thank you, Great Mother, for protecting my dear friend. Thank you for her spirit, her courage, her strength and her beauty that inspires us all.

Here's what our house smells like today...

We couldn't keep up with the carrots from our garden last Fall, so I froze a bunch roughly chopped in 2 pound bags for THIS wonderful recipe.

Carrot Lemongrass Soup (with coriander, ginger and coconut) from ReBar cookbook

serves 6 to 8 hungry folk!

8 cups soup stock (I use whatever I have, this time I'm using 6 cups of veggie stock I made using up the veggies in my fridge that were past prime, so mostly cruciferous variety, plus 2 cups chicken stock from my freezer)
6 kaffir lime leaves (I use dry as I can't find them to buy here and my aunt brings me dried ones from Australia!)
2 Tbsp veg oil
1 yellow onion, diced
1 Tbsp coarse salt
3 lemongrass stalks (I couldn't find fresh so used dried)
5 garlic cloves, minced
3 Tbsp minced ginger
1/2 tsp Thai red curry paste
1 Tbsp coriander seeds, ground
2 lbs carrots, roughly chopped
1 can (398 mL) coconut milk
2 tsp sambal oelek
1 tsp minced lemon zest
juice of 1 lemon

Heat stock, add lime leaves.
Heat oil over medium heat, cook onion and 1 tsp salt until translucent. Add garlic, ginger, lemongrass, curry paste and coriander; saute and stir for 5 min. Stir in chopped carrots and remaining 2 tsp of salt. Saute for several minutes, then pour in hot stock. Bring to a boil and simmer until carrots are soft (about 15 min.)
Remove the lime leaves and puree the soup. Whisk in coconut milk and sambal oelek and simmer gently for 15 minutes. Just before serving add lemon zest, juice and season to taste with more salt or more sambal. Add spoonful of yogurt (and cilantro if you don't HATE cilantro like I do!!!) to each bowl and ENJOY!

Annika says this soup helps her see in the dark. I don't doubt it! YUM!