Category Archives: Food

domestic scenes

A bit of sewing, a bit of knitting, a little nature, some kid art (the wood-burned horse above was a gift from Iain), a simple experiment and some apple pie.  Oh, and that funny somewhat cryptic looking letter above?  It’s code doncha know.  The latest craze around our house involved various people writing messages in code to be broken by others.  With letters just randomly appearing where ever the intended recipient is most likely to find it.

I just finished reading Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui: Free Yourself from Physical, Mental, Emotional and Spiritual Clutter Forever by Karen Kingston, as highly recommended by a friend.  A bit of a mouthful that title!  I’m in the midst of a HUGE decluttering kick.  Call it nesting if you like.  It was a nice little motivator to be reading while working through things.  Anyone have any other simplifying/decluttering book recommendations?  There’s still a lot to be done here!  There are so many things in life, that I have absolutely no control over, that are so very painfully complicated.  This I have control over.  I don’t want my home and caring for it to be complicated.  Less is more.

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Books, crafts, Food, Homeschooling, Housewifery, Kids, Life, sewing, snapshots, WIP, Yarn Crafts
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gathering in

Some of these pictures are current and some are many months old, showing the season’s progress.

The garlic came in months ago and hung in our pantry to dry.  I finally brought it down, trimmed it, cleaned up the heads and sorted the bulbs for eating from the ones for planting.  We’re hoping to grow around 80 heads next year ::fingers crossed!::.

It seems like it took forever to finally have enough ripe tomatoes to make our first batch of sauce.  We grew over a hundred pounds of tomatoes this year and almost none of them actually ripened on the vine.

I usually dry herbs throughout the summer season, a little bit here and there.  I didn’t this year.  Many of my usual garden chores were neglected this year.  Now I’m bringing in huge bunches to dry all at once.

The sunflowers have come in slowly, one by one, sometimes in little clumps.  What started as the tiny little bundle of seed heads drying on my dining room wall (pictured above) now extends nearly to the floor.  There will be some seeds for us and some for our bird friends, hopefully with plenty left over to plant in the spring.

Last week was a very long one and clearly blogging wasn’t much of a priority for me.  This weekend we were at home.  The weekend was busy as well, but in an entirely different way.  Something of a reclaiming of the space and our life in it.  I put up 11 pints of green tomato chutney, a batch of apple sauce and 3 trays of roasted tomatoes (all of which were ripened on window sills!).  We’re loving roasted tomatoes lately.  Such a lovely way to preserve not just your tomatoes, but the garlic and fresh herbs from the garden as well.  I’m using fresh herbs all the time now.  All too soon they will be buried under the snow!  We completed a few projects around the house and started others.  Elijah invented an interesting new way of storing our apples.  We gathered in all of the delicate produce still about; the last of the beans, tomatoes, zucchini, basil, baskets and baskets full, as next week is supposed to be a very cold one and none of it would survive.

Yes, we’re settling back in to our normal rhythms.  It feels good to be home.

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Food, Gardens, Herbs, Housewifery, Kids, Life
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simple cookery: Katherine Soup

Sorry for the not so appealing looking photo!  This is an autumn staple in our kitchen, named for an old friend who once prepared it for us.

This soup simmers together all the goodness of the season.  I start with chopping a couple of onions.  I tend to make soup in large batches and two onions is just about right for the amount I make.  We eat it for a meal, have it as leftovers, freeze some for the future.  Sometimes it’s nice to cook the onion slices up in a bit of oil, sometimes I don’t bother.  The next thing to add to your pot is squash and yams.  You want at least 4-5 different kinds of squash/yams.  For best results use ones of different colors, flavors and textures.  I don’t bother to peel the squash with soft skin, but for some varieties this may be necessary.  For the soup above I used what we happened to have from our garden: butternut squash, acorn squash, delicata squash, two kinds of pumpkins, etc.  Our friend Katherine used to add shiitake mushrooms.  I don’t usually, simply because I don’t usually have them on hand.  If you do, add them now.  Just barely cover the whole thing with high quality chicken stock- homemade is best.  Bring it to a simmer.  Cover and cook until the squash is soft.  Turn off the heat and add lots and lots of different greens, the more the merrier.  For the soup above we used: 3 kinds of kale, collards, rainbow chard, Brussels sprout greens, escarole, tatsoi, a bit of spinach and probably a few other things that I’m forgetting, all from our garden again.  This is the perfect use for all of those random greens left at the bottom of your CSA bag at the end of the week!  Stir them all in.  The broth should be hot enough to quickly cook them.  Serve with a dollop of light colored miso added to each bowl (this is our favorite brand).  Enjoy!

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Food, recipes
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Waldorf at Home: Michaelmas Supper

A day late to accommodate a complicated schedule.  A hearty, harvest soup full of veggies from the garden, dragon bread and “fire jam”.  To make fire jam: fill one side of a bowel with red jam (raspberry, strawberry, cherry, etc) and the other side with an yellow or orange jam (apricot, peach, marmalade), use a spoon to swirl them together.  Voila!  Fire Jam.

Does anyone have any resources for really inspiring homeschool spaces?  I’m looking for anything from a well laid out shelf to entire rooms.  I’m not happy with our set up at the moment and a large scale make-over is in order.  I need ideas and I’m not really finding all that much.  Actually I’ve found a good bit for little, little ones, but not so much for big kids.  So if you can think of anything, please share!

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celebrations and festivals, crafts, Food, Holidays, Homeschooling, Waldorf
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Autumnal





one of Boobie’s many, many birthday parties








There are fires many mornings now, to take the chill off and occasionally in the evening as well.  It’s rare the night that the windows can stay open, even a little bit.  Everyone keeps talking about the slow quiet days of autumn, with images of quietly knitting by the fire, long hours spend reading aloud, peaceful walks through the woods.  Somehow that doesn’t seem to be our reality just now.  Some days I try to plan for those things, but it never seems to actually pan out.  Too many other, “important” things to do.  Maybe as we settle further into the season.

All of my window sills are full of green tomatoes.  Not just a few like in the picture above, taken last week, but overflowing.  A large section of our plants succumbed to late blight and had to be pulled to keep the disease from spreading.  We salvaged what we could from them.  The plants on the other side of the garden seem alright for the time being, though they are not long for this world anyhow.  We’ve had several threats of frost already, it’s only a matter of time before a hard killing frost settles on everything.

  High winds bent and broke many of our sunflowers, so we get to enjoy them inside, in a vase, for a bit.

Lots of indoor endeavors underway at the moment.  I might wish for a few less in fact, as I’d like to enjoy this season before it passes into one of bitter cold.  But such is life!

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Food, Gardens, Kids, Life, Yarn Crafts
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32/52



A portrait of my children, once a week, every week.

A bit of a theme this week.

 Iain and Elijah: They wanted to try making jam themselves. I love the look of intense concentration on Iain’s face and also the bit of jam on his cheek!  Elijah says, “I love the sound of jam bubbling away.”

Galen:  His specialty is scrambled eggs, and not so much breaking up the greens found therein.  Can you tell there was a lot going on in my kitchen on this particular day?

Màiri Rose: Helping with the laundry.  She swore she could handle it herself and she did.

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52, Food, Housewifery, Kids, photography, snapshots
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simple cookery: braised greens

This way of cooking greens was taught to me by an old friend, who I believe learned it from her grandmother.  I think she had an actual recipe, which I just kind of took the gist of and went from there.  This is very much a favorite with the kids in my house.  I’ve had people at potlucks beg me for the recipe.  And I’ve laughed at their astonished faces when I explained how very, very quick and simple it truly is.

Start with a large cast iron pan (or the pan of your choice).  Add a spoonful of coconut oil, a bit of salt and a sliced onion.  Cook until the onion starts to brown.  Fill the rest of the pan with any kind of hardy cooking greens.  Toss them with the onions and oil to coat.  Add around 1/2 C of water and a big handful of raisins.  Cover and cook until the greens a wilted and the raisins are slightly pump.  Add more salt and pepper if needed/desired.

Variation: replace the raisins with chopped dried apricots.  Apricots and collard greens in particular are amazing!

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Food, recipes
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cake part II: the recipes

Flourless Chocolate Cake

1 cup chocolate chopped- the better the chocolate, the better the cake

1/2 cup ghee- I use homemade ghee, I think that coconut oil might work as a substitute, but I’ve not tried it.  If you do, please let me know how it works!

3/4 cup sugar

 1/8 tsp salt

 2 tsp vanilla extract

 3 eggs

 1/2 cup cocoa


Heat the ghee and chocolate in a double boiler then transfer to a mixing bowl. Add the sugar, salt , vanilla and mix together. Then add the eggs beating briefly until smooth. Add the cocoa powder mix just to combine. Spoon into a prepared 8″ or 9″ cake pan and bake 25 minutes at 375*.

Remove from oven when a thin crust has formed. Cool in pan for 5 minutes and then turn onto a serving plate. Allow to cool completely before glazing.

 Chocolate Glaze

 1 cup chocolate chopped

 1/2 cup cream from the top of a can of coconut milk

 Heat together in a double boiler until smooth and pour over the cake and spread to the edges. Cool the cake again and enjoy.  The top can be dusted with powdered sugar before serving.


For our Vow Renewal cake we made 6 batches of the cake above divided between 3 nine inch pans and 3 six inch pans.  I think we made 3 batches of the glaze and thickened it with extra chocolate so that it could be spread all over the outside of the cake.  Once cooled it made a hard chocolate shell around the whole thing.

 

For the marzipan flowers I used this Paleo Marzipan recipe colored with India Tree food coloring.

For the caramel filling we used this Nut Butter Caramel recipe only cooked for less time so that it remained spreadable.

Dairy Free Almond “Buttercream” Icing

2 tsp almond extract
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 C soy free earth balance
1/2 C palm oil shortening
4 C powdered sugar
2 T coconut milk
1 T honey

1) Cream shortening/earth balance, vanilla and almond flavoring.

2 ) Add powdered sugar, one cup at a time until it’s all mixed in.

3 ) Add milk and beat at medium speed until light and fluffy (a bit more or less may be needed depending on desired consistency)

4) Beat in honey

5) Can be stored air-tight, in the fridge, for up to a month. Allow to come to room temperature and whip with mixer before using.

More on our fancy cake making experience can be seen here.

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celebrations and festivals, Food, recipes, wedding
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the cake

Considering all of our food and budget restrictions, making our own cake was a no brainer.  Besides, I wanted something that tasted GOOD!  And in my experience most bakers botch low-allergen cakes, giving a bad name to all things gluten and dairy free.  I wasn’t about to spend a small fortune on something I wasn’t even interested in eating.

My sweet sister was so wonderful to help me with this project.  She made everything go so smoothly.

So the cake….oh my goodness…it was kind of the cake to end all cakes.  I wanted something delicate and light.  Something with kind of a fresh, artisan feel to it.  Steve wanted CHOCOLATE and had no interest in anything beyond that.  Since it was one of the few things he had a clear and decided preference in, I conceded and made my flourless chocolate cake, which is his favorite dessert.  In between layers of cake we alternated nut butter caramel and coffee icing.  The whole thing was glazed with two layers of chocolate ganache, followed by almond (mock) butter cream icing and decorated with honey marzipan leaves and flowers.  It was rich beyond rich and made quite the impression.  We all laughed when the photographer sent us the link to our on-line gallery with the password: flourlesscake.  To by honest, my sister and I were a little afraid we might kill someone with it.  Not your typical plain-Jane wedding type cake for sure!

DIY Wedding Cake Tips and Tricks:

  • Make a practice cake or three or four!  Do some taste tests, experiment with different decorating styles.
  • Let a least one of your practice cakes sit out for a while to get an idea of how it will hold up while sitting out on display.  You can obviously skip this step if you are not planning on displaying your cake.
  • Take scrupulous notes on exactly what you did and how you did it: Any modifications to any recipes, baking time, number of batches, etc.
  • An extra set of hands is always nice.
  • Be flexible.  Make adjustments if a recipe or decorating method isn’t working for you.  Better to make a simpler cake well then a more complicated one poorly.
  • Your timer is your best friend, don’t forget to use it.
  • Choose a cake that is very sturdy.  The flourless chocolate cake we used is an excellent example.  Pound cake is another good option.
  • Do your math and double check it.  Figure out exactly how much batter you need to make enough layers to feed your guests.  Then figure out exactly how it should be divided into each cake pan.
  • Always grease your pans well.
  • Make as much as possible in advance.  We baked the cakes, made the marzipan decorations, as well as the caramel filling well in advance and froze them.  I froze the flowers and leaves on was paper in a pyrex container.  The caramel was also stored in a pyrex.
  • Take great care with freezing your cake.  Make sure each layer is entirely cooled before doing anything.
  • I wanted to use ziplock bags to cut down on the risk of freezer burn, but was concerned about the cake developing a plastic-y flavor.  We put each layer on it’s own cardboard cake board for support (packs of these can be gotten very inexpensively at most major craft stores), then wrapped them in wax paper, followed by foil and then into the bag.
  • Gallon bags were big enough for the size layers we were working with, check your measurements.  Make sure to get as much air out of the bag as possible.  A nifty little trick; take a drinking straw and place an end in the bag.  Seal the bag all the way up to the straw.  Suck out all the air and quickly seal the rest of the bag as you remove the straw.
  • Use common sense with freezer placement…store them flat, try not to stack anything on top of them, etc.
  • Make sure your cakes are completely thawed before trying to assemble or ice them.  In most climates, overnight on the counter should do the trick.
  • Also consider the benefits of making other parts in advance and decide if it’s worthwhile.  Our mock butter cream icing took around 10 minutes to whip up.  It didn’t seem worth making in advance and risking it separating as it thawed (I’ve read of some people having trouble with this).
  • Make a cake schedule and assign dates for each step.  Write it all on your calendar and don’t forget to include getting the cake out to thaw!
  • Again, cake boards are indispensable.  Each tier should be on one.
  • A thick bead of icing piped around the edge can help to hold in gooey fillings and also help one layer to adhere to the next.
  • Invest in or make a pretty cake stand, it can make a world of difference in presentation.
  • Take the time to measure to make sure your cake is centered on the stand and each layer is centered on the next, unless of course you are going for an asymmetrical look.  Then measure and make sure they are evenly off center!
  • Make sure nothing is going to shift.  We used a bit of painters tape, rolled on itself, under the bottom cake board to keep it from slipping off the cake stand.  You can use drinking straws to secure one layer to the next.  Just push them all the way through to the bottom and trim off the excess at the top.  To attach one tier to the next, you can use a thin sharpened dowel.  Gently hammer it through all of the layers and cake boards down to the lowest layer.
  • For our cake we completely coated everything in two layers of chocolate glaze which, once chilled, completely glued the entire thing together Making any extra measures unnecessary.  Very convenient!
  • Before decorating your cake, slip strips of wax paper under the lowest cake board, all the way around.  When you are done decorating, simply pull them out and you will have a pristine cake stand, rather then one that’s smudged with chocolate and icing.
  • Youtube has many cake decorating tutorials.
  • Craftsy now offers a wide variety of cake decorating classes, from basic to advanced, including a few free mini-classes.
  • Above all; relax and have fun!  Pick a delicious cake.  If it doesn’t turn out beautiful, your guests will enjoy it all the same and you’ll have a fun/funny story to tell.

Up next: the recipes!

All the photos above are by the lovely and talented Dawn Joseph.

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celebrations and festivals, Food, tutorials, wedding
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