I got a bee sting on the inside of my mouth. It was really shitty. I was eating a dessert outside on the plaza, it was farmers market day, and this on particular wasp kept buzzing around my food, and I kept batting it away. Then as I was chewing on of my bites, I felt a pinching on the inside of my cheek, and I continued to chew, my bite started tasting bitter. With a feeling of dread, I spat my food out onto the street, and sure enough, there was a slightly chewed wasp laying among my dessert. It was insanely miserable, my cheek throbbed for hours, and wasp guts taste really nasty.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Peachy
Ug. I just bought a new cookbook. It's that Room For Dessert one that I keep hearing about. Not that I need any more desserts, mind you. Although, an interesting thing has happened. When I went in to get my mole removed a week ago, the nurse informed me that I've lost 10 lbs since March. That's in spite of a major cooking binge I've been on, packed full of pies, breads, and really fattening things. I'm blaming it on whole grains, and Brandon (I like to blame good things on him). By the way, we're going to start trying in January! I wish it were January...
Speaking of January... I love my little Arcata, but it has it's down points. One of these is that it usually feels like winter here. Like Arcata winter anyways. There is no hot sunny summer here. There are, pretty much all year round, beautiful-sunny-freezing cold days, interspersed with an equal number of beautiful-rainy-misty-foggy-freezing cold days. The only real problem with this is that fruit don't grow. Which isn't even accurate, but the farmers at the farmer's market (which I adore) like to use it as an excuse to make all their damn food cost really a lot. It isn't very economical to live here. Even the Co-op, which I adore, is loosing points rapidly. What I need, is a big damn yard. I think 10 acres would do the trick nicely, but I'd be willing to settle for 2, or 1 if I had to, or even a 1/2. But 10 would be nice. I've come to the conclusion that 3 is the magic number of my future dream orchard. I want 3 varieties of everything, figs, peaches, pears, apples, cherries, plums, every type of berry I can think of, pomegranites, persimmons, quinces, everything else I've forgotten. With tons of herbs, flowers and veggies of course. I also want goats, chickens and rabbits. And a baby.
What bring me to this is my recent experience with peaches. Real peaches are super, and real peaches from the farmer's market are super expensive. Which really sucks, and I need a peach tree to support my peach habit. There's this fellow at the market who has a little tree stand which I love entirely, the tree's- not the fellow, though he's pretty nifty too. I've bought from him a fig tree, 2 kiwi vines, and last weekend an elderberry tree, and probably other stuff that I'm forgetting. Everything is doin swell! See:
My fig, we've been together for 2 years now.
My girl Kiwi.
My elderberry.
Here are a few of my other plant sweeties:
Speaking of January... I love my little Arcata, but it has it's down points. One of these is that it usually feels like winter here. Like Arcata winter anyways. There is no hot sunny summer here. There are, pretty much all year round, beautiful-sunny-freezing cold days, interspersed with an equal number of beautiful-rainy-misty-foggy-freezing cold days. The only real problem with this is that fruit don't grow. Which isn't even accurate, but the farmers at the farmer's market (which I adore) like to use it as an excuse to make all their damn food cost really a lot. It isn't very economical to live here. Even the Co-op, which I adore, is loosing points rapidly. What I need, is a big damn yard. I think 10 acres would do the trick nicely, but I'd be willing to settle for 2, or 1 if I had to, or even a 1/2. But 10 would be nice. I've come to the conclusion that 3 is the magic number of my future dream orchard. I want 3 varieties of everything, figs, peaches, pears, apples, cherries, plums, every type of berry I can think of, pomegranites, persimmons, quinces, everything else I've forgotten. With tons of herbs, flowers and veggies of course. I also want goats, chickens and rabbits. And a baby.
What bring me to this is my recent experience with peaches. Real peaches are super, and real peaches from the farmer's market are super expensive. Which really sucks, and I need a peach tree to support my peach habit. There's this fellow at the market who has a little tree stand which I love entirely, the tree's- not the fellow, though he's pretty nifty too. I've bought from him a fig tree, 2 kiwi vines, and last weekend an elderberry tree, and probably other stuff that I'm forgetting. Everything is doin swell! See:
My fig, we've been together for 2 years now.
My girl Kiwi.
My elderberry.Here are a few of my other plant sweeties:
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Friday, September 08, 2006
Money
I am a bad girl. And my credit card companies really like me. Last night I bought a book about preserving, which I am happily going to give a test drive (test-cook?) tomorrow after I buy more yummy fruit at the farmer's market. Then today I bought 1/2 lb of dried rose hips to make wine out of (not too cheap) and at the herb store I found hair pins I just had to have... and at the cash register I found a fertility rock that wanted to help get me pregnant... Then I walked by this really fantastic store on the plaza that has some amazing jewelry.... found myself going in... found myself falling in love with an insane pair of earings... I am trying with little success to convince myself not to go back and buy them tomorrow. Sometimes I feel like I'm tuning into such a girl. I hope Brandon doesn't read this.
Janine- As far as apple juice goes, don't do it. I tried it, and got sick of it, and wasted a bunch of money. You can find those bottles for free. I get tons of them at the recycling center in Arcata. If you can find any sort of place that recycles glass, they'll be happy to unload on you (or to sell the bottles for something like 5 cents each) or go around on recycling day and peek into people's boxes.
Janine- As far as apple juice goes, don't do it. I tried it, and got sick of it, and wasted a bunch of money. You can find those bottles for free. I get tons of them at the recycling center in Arcata. If you can find any sort of place that recycles glass, they'll be happy to unload on you (or to sell the bottles for something like 5 cents each) or go around on recycling day and peek into people's boxes.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
2nd 1/2 Week of School.
School's been going for 2 1/2 weeks now, and I think I'm finally getting sick. When I was young, I used to kinda like getting sick, because I could stay home from school. Now it just sucks. No one makes me chicken soup and brings me ginger-ale and movies, and I have to go to school anyways.
It's been hard enough going to school this semester as it is. I've already missed a life-drawing class, two geology lectures and 1 lab, and a painting class. The painting class is the surprising one, because it's the one I really really like. I got to class yesterday, looked around, and left. I went shopping instead. I wonder who I am turning into sometimes. It was actually really satisfying, I bought a beautiful red sweater that's wonderfully soft and sexy, for 75 cents. And I got some other great stuff too, and cheaply, but not so cheaply. Then I came home and went through all my clothes and gave myself a huge allergy attack from the dust. So maybe I'm not sick, just still allergic. But I did dream about spiders last night, and that generally only happens when I'm sick.
It's been hard enough going to school this semester as it is. I've already missed a life-drawing class, two geology lectures and 1 lab, and a painting class. The painting class is the surprising one, because it's the one I really really like. I got to class yesterday, looked around, and left. I went shopping instead. I wonder who I am turning into sometimes. It was actually really satisfying, I bought a beautiful red sweater that's wonderfully soft and sexy, for 75 cents. And I got some other great stuff too, and cheaply, but not so cheaply. Then I came home and went through all my clothes and gave myself a huge allergy attack from the dust. So maybe I'm not sick, just still allergic. But I did dream about spiders last night, and that generally only happens when I'm sick.
Monday, September 04, 2006
Easy Wine
(easy mead actually)
I'm feeling particularly wifey today. Which means wine, canning and dessert. By the way, I got drunk on my own mead last night, which was an odd experience. I think that since I made it myself, I was somehow not expecting the alcohol to be real. Which is silly of course, the alcohol was quite real. It was a very nice sort of tipsy though, I would recommend it to anyone. Unfortunately, Between my husband, myself and the other fellow who we got drunk on my mead, we now have none left. So I'm making two more batches. and it's really easy, a lot less involved than the wine. So I'm going to explain how to do it. Anyone can do it. It's really easy, I promise.
The great thing about making mead this way is you don't have to age it for years like you do with other wines. Just give it a few months and it's good. The first batch I made was strawberry mead, fermented with wild yeast, and it was damn yummy. The ones I am doing today are a blackberry melomel and a blackberry-jalapeno capsicumel, both with commercial wine yeast. Melomel means mead with fruit and capsicumel is mead with chile peppers. I expect these to be damn yummy too.
A few things to know about mead: Honey doesnt have all the nutrients it takes to efficently sustain yeast. You can make mead with just honey, but it's more difficult. With fruit juice, the yeast has more of the various things it needs to eat, and it's tasty too. There were two other things, but I forgot them. They'll probably come to me later.
BASIC RECIPE
1 part honey
4 parts water
fruit (optional)
This recipe relies on wild yeasts to ferment the must (which is lingo for "the fruit juice and sugar which will eventually be wine mead cider or beer"), so you don't really want to sterilize anything. Clean is good, sterile isn't.
What you do is mash up the fruit with your hands, to get it juicy. Berries are great, peaches would be good, pears. As long as you can make it good and juicy it should work just fine. Use as much or as little as you want. I use a few good handfulls per gallon. Add the honey and the water, mix it so the honey is completely dissolved. Cover the container with a dish towel held with a rubber-band. Leave it for a few days; stirring it once or twice a day is a good idea. In between a day and a few days it will start to get foamy. Make sure you stir it twice a day now, and leave it out for a few more days. Then you want to strain all the fruit bits out and tranfer it into whatever you are going to leave it in for the next few months. Top it up with a mixture of 1 part honey and 4 parts water, so that the top of the liquid is about where the neck of the bottle comes in. Cap it with an airlock (you need one of these, they only cost about a dollar and you can get them at a brewing shop or on the internet). Put it somewhere dark to preserve the color, and somewhere with stable temperature. It should fizz for a while. I think mine fizzed actively for a bit less than a month. Leave it alone except for when you taste it, which can only be done (this is important, so pay attention and don't deviate from it) whenever and as often as you want. When it tastes good, have people over and drink it up. The longer you let it go the drier it will become, and flatter. (In my opinion, the better it becomes.)
I start mine in 1 gallon glass jars, filled about 3/4 full. That leaves room for foaming. Then I transfer it into 1 gallon glass jugs, like the type you get apple juice in, and top it up. The strawberry mead fermented I think for about 4 months before we drank the last of it.
I'll post some pictures of this as it goes along.
The great thing about making mead this way is you don't have to age it for years like you do with other wines. Just give it a few months and it's good. The first batch I made was strawberry mead, fermented with wild yeast, and it was damn yummy. The ones I am doing today are a blackberry melomel and a blackberry-jalapeno capsicumel, both with commercial wine yeast. Melomel means mead with fruit and capsicumel is mead with chile peppers. I expect these to be damn yummy too.
A few things to know about mead: Honey doesnt have all the nutrients it takes to efficently sustain yeast. You can make mead with just honey, but it's more difficult. With fruit juice, the yeast has more of the various things it needs to eat, and it's tasty too. There were two other things, but I forgot them. They'll probably come to me later.
BASIC RECIPE
1 part honey
4 parts water
fruit (optional)
This recipe relies on wild yeasts to ferment the must (which is lingo for "the fruit juice and sugar which will eventually be wine mead cider or beer"), so you don't really want to sterilize anything. Clean is good, sterile isn't.
What you do is mash up the fruit with your hands, to get it juicy. Berries are great, peaches would be good, pears. As long as you can make it good and juicy it should work just fine. Use as much or as little as you want. I use a few good handfulls per gallon. Add the honey and the water, mix it so the honey is completely dissolved. Cover the container with a dish towel held with a rubber-band. Leave it for a few days; stirring it once or twice a day is a good idea. In between a day and a few days it will start to get foamy. Make sure you stir it twice a day now, and leave it out for a few more days. Then you want to strain all the fruit bits out and tranfer it into whatever you are going to leave it in for the next few months. Top it up with a mixture of 1 part honey and 4 parts water, so that the top of the liquid is about where the neck of the bottle comes in. Cap it with an airlock (you need one of these, they only cost about a dollar and you can get them at a brewing shop or on the internet). Put it somewhere dark to preserve the color, and somewhere with stable temperature. It should fizz for a while. I think mine fizzed actively for a bit less than a month. Leave it alone except for when you taste it, which can only be done (this is important, so pay attention and don't deviate from it) whenever and as often as you want. When it tastes good, have people over and drink it up. The longer you let it go the drier it will become, and flatter. (In my opinion, the better it becomes.)
I start mine in 1 gallon glass jars, filled about 3/4 full. That leaves room for foaming. Then I transfer it into 1 gallon glass jugs, like the type you get apple juice in, and top it up. The strawberry mead fermented I think for about 4 months before we drank the last of it.
I'll post some pictures of this as it goes along.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
Grandma's Orchid
This flower has been blooming for months, and is hoswing no sign of letting up. I think I'll paint it. I think I'll name it too. I'd like to have name tags for my flowers. I worked in a sandwich shop once where the owner had named all her plants.Barb- Wherever you are, I still love you.
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