Marmalade

Once again I've been making marmalade. I got a case of Seville oranges from Ripe to You
I shared a 16# box with a friend and half of the box made 20 pts. The recipe I used called for a navel orange which I didn't have so I just substituted another Seville. I also realized too late that I had used up the last of the whiskey in the fruit cakes so had to leave that out this year. It tastes wonderful.

Apple Orange Butter

It's COLD here. 16 degrees this morning. Not much we can do but huddle by the fire. So making up a batch of apple-orange butter seemed the thing to do. I found the recipe in a blog I read from England, The Cottage Smallholder. We have a couple of boxes of apples sitting in the bedroom to keep from freezing and I had a couple of organic oranges. She cooked hers in a slow cooker but I just set it on top of the wood range and let it cook slowly for several hours. It's really good.

Salad

This constitutes our first homegrown (mostly) salad of the year. Joel harvested a whole bunch of little leaves from the greens in the hoophouse, mostly various Asian greens and mustards, bulked them up with a bit of leftover grocery store romaine, some toasted hazelnuts from his Mom's tree and Voila...spring salad. I know the pictures is a bit blurry but we've eaten the salad and I can't take another one.

A Start at the New Year

Vacations are all fine and well but I have to admit that I start getting twitchy if I spend too much time not really doing anything. So today I dragged out my boxes of old sheets and started designing new rugs for the new year. For rag rugs I put on warps that will make 7 rugs at a time so I have to find a bunch of sheets that will coordinate with whatever colors I make that warp. So I pile lots of them up on the bed (I developed the habit of using my bed as a workspace in college in a very small room and still do it) and start selecting similar color combinations. The first warp will be stripes of green and dark blue and that leaves a lot of leeway. The above pile is one combination that I think will work well with those colors. I wound that warp today and tomorrow will start on another one of aquas, bright green, lavender and pink. It is exciting to get back to serious work at the loom.

While I was playing with piles of fabric in the bedroom I was running back and forth to the kitchen where my batch of Delia's Dark Chunky Marmalade was simmering on the back of the stove. It came out lovely, dark, rich, tasty. And it set up perfectly.

Such a nice day. Meanwhile it was pouring outside. In spite of which I donned my Wellies and went for a walk. The ditches along the road are full and flowing (the closest thing to a stream we get on this island) and the fields are full of puddles.

Making Marmalade

I love marmalade. Real English marmalade made with bitter Seville oranges. My family once spent all out leftover English coins at Harrad's duty free store at Gatwick on marmalade. Sigh, in these days of heightened security they probably wouldn't let us on the plane with a dozen jars of marmalade.

I've made marmalade from regular sweet oranges and so has my daughter, Jennie, and it was good, but I've always wanted to make it from Seville oranges. So did my friend,Betsy and I could hardly believe it when she found them at a grocery store in Seattle. Pricey little jewels but we both decided to make the splurge. Betsy found a great recipe from Delia in the Uk.

She found the recipe through a neat blog, the Cottage Small Holder, from England, and also a link to the annual marmalade festival in Cumbria, England. It's held in February so we won't make it this year but we can dream about next year.

Anyway I am having a great deal of fun with this marmalade recipe which is one where you simmer the stuff for hours on the back of the stove. I'll let you know tomorrow how it turns out.

Candy Cane Cookies

I've been wrapping presents to take to friends on San Juan island on market day Saturday and baking cookies for gifts. These candy cane cookies are made from sugar cookie dough. One half of the dough is dyed red. You roll out pencil thickness strips of each color and roll them together. I haven't made these in years. They are a lot of fun.

More Snow

Just a few pictures of the farm in the snow. Above a bed of leeks.
Brussels Sprouts.
A Rufous Sided Towhee sheltering in the rosebush at the front door.

And German Honey Bars from my old Joy of Cooking for Christmas. These cookies need to be stored for at least a week to be soft enough to eat. So they are great to make ahead of time. They are a favorite holiday cookie. I don't dare forget to make them.

Growing our own flour

I always get a good feeling from putting a meal on the table that comes mostly from the farm. All this recent talk about eating local is something we've been doing for years. But if we are going to eat mainly off the farm or at least locally the one thing we would definitely miss would be bread. We can grow lots of potatoes, squash, vegetables of all sorts, raise chickens for meat and eggs, raise sheep, etc.. But this year Joel and our neighbors from Nootka Rose Farm are experimenting with growing wheat and other grains. This isn't an area particularly suited for growing wheat, though oats and barley usually do okay. So they are growing a number of grain cultivars to see what might do well here. Trying to find equipment to process grain from less than 1000 acres has also been a challenge. One of the farm's partners is from Japan and found a small foot operated thresher and a hand winnowing fan in Japan and had them shipped here. They arrived last weekend and we got together to try them out. Above is a bundle of wheat being threshed.
There is definitely a learning curve involved, but we did manged to thresh and winnow several pounds of wheat grains

which was then ground into flour. We made pizza last night from that flour. I used pesto from our basil, onions, peppers, and tomatoes from the garden, hamburger from home grown beef and only added non local cheese. What a yummy treat.