Some Baking Going On!!

Over the last few years since I went (mostly) gluten free to help combat my R.A. symptoms, I've spent very little time baking. Obviously if I can't eat the goodies then the draw to baking them is somewhat diminished. The past couple weeks has been a happy change for my poor family who has had to do with store-bought bread and other goodies:) It started a couple weeks ago when I decided to can some hot-pepper jelly. We had lots and lots of extra serrano peppers from the garden and I didn't want them all to go to waste so hot-pepper jelly it had to become!! Recipe found at Food.com.

*Note about recipe: The amount of pectin called for seems like too much. My jelly turned out very thick with no wiggle to it. I think I'll use a bit less next time and see how it works, but the flavor was excellent!!

 

We like to eat it with cream cheese and crackers, or just on some bread. I also have a recipe from one of my hubbies (many, many) grilling cookbooks that is wonderful!! It calls for melting the hot-pepper jelly with some white wine and basil and letting it boil until it thickens a bit. Then grilling pork chops and pouring the sauce over the pork chops when serving. YUM!! Sweet, spicy, and perfect:)

Well, since I was already in the kitchen I decided to make some bread as well. It's been several years since I've made homemade bread and I decided to look for a new recipe. I found it at All Recipes    and it turned out really good.

 

This past week a family from our 4-H group gifted us with some apples from their orchard (they have around 100 apple trees!!) and a bunch of garlic too!!! What to do with all those apples? Cinnamon Apple Bread!!! I did taste a little bit of this one and it is really good. It didn't hold together for me very well and I'm wondering if I should have swirled the cinnamon topping in a bit better, but it was delicious:)  Recipe found at The Happier Homemaker.

And then I made some regular bread again as well. Same recipe as above, but I used 1 cup less white flour and 1 cup more whole wheat flour. We haven't cut into these yet, but they look great!!

 

 

So, any baking going on at your house?

 

 



Summer Bounty

This is the first summer in a few years that we are actually doing fairly well with our garden. Last year we didn't even try to grow one due to over-time at dh's work and family health issues that required some time and attention from hubby as well. But even the few years before that, when we were trying to grow our own produce, we just weren't seeing much results from it. Mostly it has to do with the fact that our soil has too much clay in it, but our ground water is very salty as well. You wouldn't expect that in Kansas, but there are actually underground salt deposits here and it messes with our water supply. In years that we get enough rain, this isn't too much of a problem. First, we don't have to water the garden as much if it is raining and second, getting lots of rain dilutes the salt enough not to cause problems. However, we have been in drought conditions for several years now and that means the salt level is pretty high. Salt water REALLY doesn't help plants to grow:)  So this year we decided to construct a couple raised beds to grow our garden in.

Pepper plants

With limited funds, because the wood and soil are kind of expensive, we decided to start with two 8x4 ft beds, see how they do and then add a couple more next year. I have to say that it has really been a success!! Having nice fertile soil that is light and fluffy instead of like rock has been great, and nature blessed us with some much needed rain at just the right time as well. We planted 4 tomato plants, 2 cherry tomatoes, 2 jalapenos, 4 bell peppers, 3-4 cucumbers and 2 serrano pepper plants, and most are still alive!! :) We did make a mistake and waited too long before deciding on caging the tomato plants and so we didn't end up

Cucumbers

caging them at all. This would be fine except that the tomato plants overtook that bed which also had the jalapeños in it, and now I can't find them:) And the weather was really nice and cool at the beginning of the summer, which cucumbers must not like because all but one of those plants died. However, we've still gotten about a dozen cucumbers from the one plant, so that has been really good. The only real negative that we've found from our experiment is that with only 4 regular tomato plants, we have an awkward amount of tomatoes. There are too many for our family to eat (only dh and I like them), but not nearly enough for canning. So some of them are going bad. And we have cherry tomatoes coming out our ears!! We keep looking for recipes that we can use them in and dh has them in his daily salads.

This weekend's pickins'



Look close for the horn worm!!

This has been successful enough for us to decide to do another 2 beds next year. Our plan is to have 2 beds of tomatoes and to add some okra and maybe some herbs to it. The only thing I'd still like to grow would be green beans. I like the bush variety, apposed to the pole beans, and the bush beans take up a bit more room. Since I'd also like to can green beans, I'm thinking I'd need another 2 beds just for them. Maybe the year after next I'll be able to do those:)   

Progress

I think I've decided that, like gardening, I am horrible at blogging:) I have gotten some things out of my garden this year, which is an improvement over last year, but it is still very over grown with weeds (which is why you won't get a picture of the garden, hehehe). Here is a picture of the tomatoes and some volunteer sunflowers I picked yesterday. It is great that the sunflowers take care of themselves (and re-seed themselves) because I think I've proven time and time again that I cannot keep flowers alive!!!
I arranged the sunflowers with some 'wild flowers' I found during my morning walk. I think they turned out nice:) In the back ground of the picture is our dog 'Gracie'. She is a bit spoiled and lazy:)

I also have a new pic of our 'boys'. WOW have they gotten big (at least for Jersey bulls) and mean (normal for Jersey bulls). We are just about ready to send them off to be 'processed'. I thought that would be hard on me as when they were little I bottle fed them and petted them. However, the older and bigger and more aggressive they become, the more ready I am to have them gone, hrmm, in the freezer:)

I hope to have some progress pictures on stitching and maybe a small wall quilt to show off next time. I'm trying to get a few things made and ready to start up an Etsy shop. We'll see how much time I have though:)

New discoveries:)

I have, for a while now, wondered what kind of weeds we have growing around the place. I know that a lot of 'weeds' end up being useful herbs and wanted to see if we had anything useful growing around here. However, I really didn't know where to start to find out what these plants were, so this spring I've gone around and started tasting anything that looked like it might be edible (don't worry, I do know what the poison ivy, oak and such look like:). I know dandelion leaves are edible, so I started there. They are pretty bitter, but I think they should be cooked. I've tried a few others as well, but still don't know what they are.

Today my dd brought me a 'weed' and asked what I thought it was. The cats were eating it, and that is why she noticed it. So I smelled it and it smells like mint. I looked for a while on the Internet and found that it is either cat mint or catnip. Some sites say it's the same thing and some say they are a bit different. Both are from the mint family and perfectly safe for humans. Now to dig some of it up to put it in the garden so it is officially an herb and not a weed:)
I also saw the birds that I look for each spring. They don't stick around here long, but are really pretty and as we have very few trees, we don't get a lot of the pretty, colorful birds around here. Mostly we get prairie birds which sing beautifully, but don't have much color to them. I also looked these up and found them to be Yellow headed blackbirds. Not an original name:) And they are LOUD!!!

Here is our last discovery. I found this little one's momma while she was giving birth. She dropped her baby and walked away. I tried to get the momma to take some interest, but she had already let the first born die and didn't want to be anywhere near this one. I knew we couldn't keep it alive, but the other cats were a little too interested in the baby (which when wet and brand new looked much too like a dead mouse or rat), so I brought it in. Yes, the poor thing died, but we gave it love and care for as long as we could:( The poor little thing was so ugly that it was cute:)

That is all for now. I have several more pics of 'weeds' that I want to research to see if they are anything useful, I'll post what I find:)

Garden fun:)

I kept hoping to get a bit more done before posting, but I relized that there is still much to do before I'm going to be ready to plant, so I thought I would give an update for what we are doing. I've been wanting to play around with raised beds for a few years now, however it cost more to plant a raised bed than just directly in the ground, so we've never done it. This year we came up with the idea of using cinder blocks, so they will last and not draw termites being that this one is so close to the house. I am planning on putting my lettuce, carrots and herbs in this one. I'll be able to cover it on the cooler nights easier than if it were in our big garden bed too:)


Here is most of the cinder blocks with one of our cats finding the plastic wrapping quite entertaining:)


And here is our start on it, with more cats checking to see if it is level and straight (and if any mice are hiding in the holes:).

And here it is finished. It did take a lot longer to put together than I expected. I had not thought of the time it would take to level and square it. Actually, had it been up to me, I wouldn't have bothered, but those kind of things drive dh crazy:) So it is very level and square to the house, nice and perfect (until I go and plant in it that is).

No, it doesn't have dirt in it yet. This is the beginning of the things that still needs done before I can plant. You see, dh wanted a flatbed for his truck, and so far it has been far nicer than a regular bed for him, but it doesn't work for hauling dirt and such;) So he needed to get wood to build sides that will go off and on the bed. Then he decided that it would be great to have a sprinkler system for this raised bed, which he is right, but now we need sprinkler heads:) Then we need to go to his parents and get dirt. THEN we need to build an encloser for the chickens and not allow them to be so FREE (do you see the one in the pic trying to find something to eat?). But before we can cage in the chickens I have to clean a large area around the chicken coop so they have a nice place to be.....THEN we will need to get some T-posts (thankfully we have the fencing we need) so we can build the enclosure. I'm getting tired just thinking about it!!! At that point I'll be able to plant:)

But since I couldn't wait, I went ahead and started some seeds inside. They never do well inside, but I had to give it a try again anyway:) I planted these (ground cherries and sunberries) a little over a week ago and nothing has come up yet, but I'll keep waiting for a while. This is the 3rd year I've tried the ground cherries (they should be a little sweeter than a tomato, but in the same family), and if they don't grow this year, I'm giving up on them until I have a green house. The sunberries (just a bit larger than a pea, taste comparable to a blueberry), are new to me this year, we'll see if anything happens.

Hopefully in the next year or two I'll get my green house. We have some of the materials we want to use for it, but haven't had time to work on it. Most things we grow can be started outdoors, so it won't matter much anyway:)

I'll have a stitchy post in a few days:)

This and that:)

I have a bit of this and that to share today:)

First off is some stitching I've been doing. This is my spring bunny and the whole reason I needed a spring colored tuck. I have a red tuck that works for everyother season/holiday, but this one needed one of its own:)


Next is a beginning pic of my garden. Nothing going on here yet, but it does look better than it did a few days ago. My dh plowed this spot up and tilled it for me and now it looks nice and pretty. I don't know if you can see them, but there are a few chickens digging around in there looking for all sorts of yummy bugs for their dinner. If only they'd leave the worms:)



And lastly a pic of our boys. These are Jersey bull calves (how old do they have to be before they are not 'calves' anymore?). They are still very friendly and love to have their horns and ears scratched. We try real hard not to get too attached, so we don't have names for them other than 'dinner'. ;) They are obviously NOT doing their job of eating and getting fat right now, LOL!! Just a couple of lazy boys.

Happy Mail Day!!!

I had a good mail day!!! My garden seeds came today, minus the green bean seeds, they should be here soon. This is what came...

I also had a good mail day on Saturday. I had ordered a cross-stitch chart by Blackbird designs call 'Thank You, Sarah Tobias' and it came too:)

I love 'good mail' days:)

Goal for my garden

I just joined the 'Freedom Harvest Challenge' at freedomgardens.org

I'm really hoping that this helps keep me focused on our goals for in the garden this year. Since we moved to our 10 acres our goal has been to grow/raise/process as much of our food as possible. We are raising chickens (so far only for eggs as we have been too 'chicken' to slaughter any of them ourselves - we let the coyotes to that for us - YIKES), and we have 2 bull cavles that we'll take in for slaughter and processing when they are big enough. I did pretty well in the garden the first year, but last year I did really badly, planting more weed seeds than veggie seeds:(

So this year our plan is to expand our garden by more than twice the origanal size (I'll measure it when we get it all plotted out) and I am also wanting a couple 4x4 raised beds for salad greens and herbs. I figure the raised beds will be easier to cover when it is too cold or too hot. We would like to add some fruit trees/bushes as well, but so far haven't gotten to any of that. I did get my seeds ordered though. We order all of our seed from seedsavers.org because all of their seeds are heirloom and if I ever get around to it I'd also like to start saving seeds from my garden to use from one year to the next. One thing at a time though:)

I ordered....

green beans, broccoli, carrots, ground cherries, cucumber, cantaloupe, okra, peas, zucchini, pumpkin, spinach, watermelon, basil, chives, cilantro, cauliflower, sunberry, and several varieties of lettuce. I will buy potatoes, onion sets, tomato and pepper plants locally. I just can't keep tomato and pepper plants alive when growing from seed and I have a place where I can get heirloom tomato plants locally, but not the peppers. It'll have to do.

Anything else I've missed?
I'll be keeping an update here of my progress in the garden/kitchen.