Purple Sweet Potato Star Bread...

I took this picture before it was baked and then neglected to take one after it was done!

I made two of these yesterday and gave them to our two closest neighbors for Christmas.

Light the World!

Merry Christmas to all of my Gentle Readers.

I appreciate you all so much.

Tiny Tip - Making muffins last longer...

There are only two of us at our home now; just me and my husband.  The empty nest has some advantages, but I miss all of my fledglings.  

One thing that has been an ongoing challenge is learning to cook for just the two of us and not waste food.  "Quick breads" are notoriously enthusiastic about becoming stale and ending up in the compost. I've finally found a solution!

I made a batch of "Fresh Cranberry - Nut Muffins" (recipe follows) and have found a way to keep them nice for several days without refrigeration.  With refrigeration, although it prevented mold much longer than leaving the quick breads at room temperature, the muffins would become stale and dry anyway.

Here is what I do now:

I have something called a "Food Saver"

I also have a set of two different sizes of these adaptors.

There is one for wide mouth canning jars and one for regular mouth canning jars.  All you need then are clean new metal canning lids, such as these. If you are careful in opening the lids, you can use them multiple time when vacuum sealing food in jars.

So, now you're all set.  I used a 2 quart wide mouthed mason (canning) jar to do this.  We each ate a fresh muffin and then when the others were completely cool (12 in the batch so that makes 10 left over) I carefully placed them in the jar, put on the metal cap, applied the adaptor, used the Food Saver to vacuum out the air and voila!  

My muffins are still perfectly good 5 days later just sitting on the kitchen counter.  It's a bit of a hassle, resealing the jar every time I take out some muffins, but I am very happy with the results.

I thought I'd pass this on in case you have one of these gizmos or have the same problem I was having.

Here is a picture of the Food Saver set up to vacuum seal the jar:

Here is a closer look at the jar:

By the way, these muffins were better tasting the second day.

Here is the recipe - feel free to tweak it however you wish.  :)

Cranberry - Nut Muffins (12)

2 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup avocado oil

1/2 cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (that's one and a half cups)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 cups chopped fresh cranberries (that's one and a half cups)

1/2 cup chopped nuts (I used black walnuts, but you can use whatever you wish.)

Preheat oven to 350 F.  Butter a 12 - cup muffin tin.

In a small bowl, combine eggs, oil, honey and vanilla.

In a large bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder and baking soda.

Add liquid ingredients and stir just until the flour mixture is moist.

Gently stir in the chopped cranberries and nuts.

Spoon batter into the 12 muffin cups and bake until when you touch the top of one of them, it bounces back.  Don't over bake or under bake!  I can't tell you exactly how long.  Start with 15 minutes.

Where I live, it is easy to find fresh cranberries in the grocery store this time of year.

Monster radishes!

Two years ago my daughter came and helped me make a hugelkultur in the vegetable garden. You can read about that here:  

http://simplyhomemaking60.blogspot.com/2017/10/hugelkultur.html

This morning I went out to check on some radishes that I had planted in the hugelkultur in March and neglected to pull up.  Here is what I found!

Surprisingly, they are good flavored and not stringy.  In fact, they are very good!  So, I cut them up and have started a ferment.  :)

Then I cleaned and blanched the greens and ended up with 4 nice little packages for the freezer.

The Sweet Potatoes did MUCH better than I expected!

My husband and I dug up the sweet potatoes this afternoon.  With the overall dismal results from this year's garden, I was very surprised at what a good harvest we got - and very grateful! Here they all are in our wheelbarrow.

Look at this one!

I can't help but wonder just how that happened!

When you harvest sweet potatoes, you need to let them "cure" for at least a month.  If you eat them right away, they are rather bland.

After we did all this and got them into the house, I cooked one of the two that I had left from last year and made a sweet potato pie!  We'll have that for lunch tomorrow.  I make my crust with whole wheat pastry flour, NON -hydrogenated lard, salt and milk.  The pie filling is sweetened with just 1/2 cup of honey.  It makes a very nice, wholesome pie.

Sweet potatoes don't like being cold.  I just store them in baskets in my kitchen, and they last for a long long time.  

Forgive me, I had written "hydrogenated lard" yesterday.  I've corrected that now!  Yikes!!!

A very nice surprise!

As I've mentioned, this gardening year has been a disaster because of the extremely wet spring.  I was thrilled, though, this morning when I went out there and found that the kale is recovering from disastrous insect damage.  I'm very grateful!  Now we'll have kale all winter to enjoy.

And here's one of the pier at Juno Beach.

I took a short vacation...

I was able to visit our son and his family in Florida the last few days.  He and I went out to Juno Beach two mornings ago to watch the sunrise.  Here is a picture I took out there.

Couldn't help myself...

I also made a new dress for the 1 year old granddaughter's birthday.  :) I had the fabric and supplies on hand.  This fabric is cotton/polyester and very smooth and soft at the same time being a little crisp.  Perfect.  I bought it, a few years ago, from www.gehmanscountryfabrics.com

A friend for the new dollie....

I made the doll for a little granddaughter.  Her brother is having a birthday very close to hers.  I made this bear from some white terry cloth that I dyed with RIT dye.  I'm very happy with it.  Here is a link to the pattern I used.  It is free.  I was pleasantly surprised how nicely this turned out. His eyes and nose are "safety" so they are not a choking hazard, except to maybe the family dog.

http://www.eldrbarry.net/im/meg/simpbear.pdf

A new dollie....

Our youngest granddaughter will be turning 1 year old soon.  I made a doll for her.  Here she is. :)

Salsa re-post!

Just in case you are overrun with tomatoes, I thought I would re-post this:

13 years ago, August 9, 2000 I invented my own salsa recipe for canning.  I've tweaked it various ways through the years.  I call it ~

Millennial Salsa

That jar may look enormous, but actually it is only a pint jar.

Here is a picture of all of the ingredients after I mixed them together.

That is a two-gallon soup pot, and that amount filled 13 pint jars.  13 years, 13 pints jars.  I was quite surprised when I looked at the date on the recipe card and saw I had written it exactly 13 years ago.  Boring to the rest of the world, but it made me feel happy.  Here is the recipe, as I made it this year.

Millennial Salsa

About 1/3 bushel tomatoes - I had a mixture of large tomatoes and some paste - type tomatoes.

4 jalapeno peppers

4 onions

1 Tablespoon sea salt

2 cups vinegar ( I use white, distilled )

4 small cans tomato paste

4 large garlic cloves or two teaspoons garlic powder 

Wash, blanch, peel, and core the tomatoes.  Cut them into pieces and use your thumb to take out the seedy/juicy part of each one.  When they are all prepared, chop them briefly in a food processor.  Alternately, you can do it with a knife. Prepare enough to fill your pan a little over half full.

Cut the stem end off of the jalapeno peppers  and dice them finely in the food processor (including the seeds.)

Peel the onions, cut in chunks and chop them up in the processor also.

Put all the ingredients together in a heavy bottomed and stir thoroughly.  Stirring often to prevent scorching, heat to boiling.  Turn off heat.  Ladle into jars.  Clean rims.  Apply hot caps and rings.  Process in boiling water or in a steam canner for 45 minutes.

This is a "medium heat" salsa.  Do NOT eliminate the tomato paste.  Two things will happen.  One is, the salsa will be too runny.  The other thing is, it won't have enough acid to make this salsa safe to can with boiling water.

A Very Rainy Year... 2019

In case you are wondering why I've not been sharing any garden pictures this year, I thought I would mention that we have had so much rain that our garden is ruined, for the most part.  I am getting little bits of things... kale, a few carrots, and am still hoping the sweet potatoes and Irish potatoes will give us something, but other than that, we've pretty well given up.

On a happier note, and for your viewing pleasure, here is a picture of our 4-year-old grandson at the airport.  :)

And now I can make a case for always canning and/or freezing more than you need, if you have the storage space.  I cleaned and reorganized the canning shelves yesterday, and can see that in fact, I really don't need to can anything this year.  I did do some baked beans and some store-bought cabbage recently. I have plenty of everything else.  I'm amazed and grateful.

I hope that if you grow food, your weather has been better!

Tiny tip - sprinkling spices

This morning I put a whole chicken in the oven to roast.  I wanted to sprinkle some "Poultry Seasoning" on it along with the salt and pepper (I rub it with extra-virgin olive oil first).  It's always a problem, unless you have every single spice and ground herb in it's own shaker...  I finally came up with a solution.  You see, I buy most of my seasonings in bulk, and a few I grow myself.

Here is what I came up with... Behold the magical tea ball!  ;)

This is used for making herbal tea, one cup at a time.  Do you have one?  It is very nice.  Well, if you open it up, it looks like this:

I scooped up a small amount of the spice and then I used it to gently sift the spice onto my chicken.  I put the excess back in the jar easily.  No waste.  No struggling to get it spread around. Voila!

EPP pin cushion...

So, I took that English Paper Piecing patch and

made myself a pin cushion!  I kind of had

to hold my mouth just right to figure out how

to put it together, but it finally worked. 

I stuffed it with wool fleece. 

My first attempt at English Paper Piecing.

This was really fun.  I might get addicted.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!

Me and my Siamese cat, Ralph.  :)

I made a memorial quilt....

A dear young friend lost her one month old baby boy to Sudden Unexplained Death several months ago.  My sweet sister-in-law cut out 5 inch squares of various cute prints from her fabric stash for me and told me how to make this quilt. I tied it with pearl cotton.  I am giving this to my friend.  It was a labor of love.

Do you remember that baby boy that was born on Easter 4 years ago?

Well, here he is at the airport recently.  He is our grandson.  He and his mom and my husband and I all took a trip together. He was so good.  Bless his little heart.

Roasted dandelion root "coffee."

I am not a coffee drinker.  I'm not even a tea drinker.  Still, though, a nice warm comforting beverage is something I enjoy.  I dry mint and stinging nettles for herbal tea. A couple of days ago, I watched this wonderful YouTube video about making "Dandelion Coffee."  I did exactly what he said to do and it worked perfectly! It makes a very nice warm drink.  By the way, never drink HOT drinks.  That can lead to cancer of the esophagus.  

Here is the link to the video I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiGlA2tlh2c&t=470s

I didn't have very many dandelions here at our home, so I went to the original Garden Fairy's home and she helped me.  In fact, she did almost all of the digging and getting the soil off of the roots.  As you can see, I brought them home and covered them with water and let them soak for a few hours to help get the soil off.  The Fairy has clay soil, so that was not easy.  

After soaking and rinsing, I cut the roots right off of the plants.  And then I scrubbed them carefully under running water.  Here they are.

I am not going to give you a complete tutorial here.  Please refer to the link above.  Here is what they looked like after I chopped them up in my food processor.

There are roughly 4 cups of chopped roots in that bowl.

Here you can see how I spread them on a baking pan.  This is a "half sheet" pan and worked out very well for my 4 cups of chopped roots.

When they had been dehydrated in the oven, and then roasted, here is the product that I ended up with.

I'm very pleased with this. It tastes very nice to me.  I am hoping to make some more soon. 

Violet Jelly!

Here in Indiana, USA, it is wild violet season. I went out and picked 2 cups of violet blossoms and put them in this bowl to let any possible hitchhikers escape, for about half an hour.  I didn't actually see anyone, but one never knows.... 

I wanted to make violet jelly.  So, I put the blossoms in a quart jar and poured 2 cups of boiling water over them and let it sit for about 24 hours.  Then, I strained out the infusion. Be sure to press down on the blossoms to get all the liquid out, as much of the color may be clinging to the blossoms.

Next, I you add 2 Tablespoons of lemon juice and the infusion turns this pretty color:

Pour 2 cups of this liquid into a stainless pan that is at least a gallon in size and add 1 box of powdered pectin.  Whisk that together well, and then, stirring, bring it to a full boil.

Add, all at once, 4 cups of sugar, bring it back to a boil, stirring, and boil it for one minute.

Pour the jelly into hot, sterilized jars, add sterilized caps and seal.

So quick and easy.

What does it taste like?  Well... sweet violets!  It's not something you would spread all over bread or toast, in general, but a nice dab on a cracker is very pleasant and it makes a lovely gourmet gift! 

.

.

Spring Beauty tubers and Red Henbit - a little spring foraging...

I have known for a number of years that the sweet "Spring Beauty" (Claytonia Virginica) are edible. I have never tried them before today.  They grow abundantly in our yard over near the vegetable garden.  I went out and gathered a few of the tubers.  I also picked some Red Henbit (Lameum Purpureum) and brought it into the house and rinsed them carefully with cold water.

Then, I pulled the leaves from the stems of the Red Henbit, as well as the softer parts of the flowers.

I melted some homemade ghee in a skillet,

 added the plants to the skillet, on a medium heat, and stirring, I sauteed them for about 5 minutes, adding salt and pepper.

This next picture isn't very good, but here they are in a bowl to eat.

It was delicious!  The Red Henbit tastes like spinach, and the Spring Beauty corms are very mild and pleasing.  I will be doing this again.

Yummy.  And nutritious. The little corms are high in potassium and vitamin A and are a good source of calcium and vitamin C. The Henbit contains an interesting array of phytonutrients.

As with all foraging, be careful not to harvest too much and deplete the plants' sustainability.

Dandelion noodles - again - sign of spring!

Yesterday I was outside and had been noticing that the dandelions are coming up in our yard. Some people see dandelions as weeds.  Not me!  For me they are a highly sought after and nutritious vegetable.  Here in Indiana, USA, I can harvest them spring through fall. 

On the way back to the house I picked a nice handful of them and came in and made a 2-egg batch of noodles with them.  This time, I also gathered some fresh chives and garlic leaves from the vegetable garden, boiled them all together for 5 minutes, drained them and then put them in the blender with two eggs and a teaspoon of salt.  Then I made the noodles from that mix.  Above, you can see them cooking.

When they were done, I drained them, added about 3 tablespoons of butter, some salt and pepper and some chicken meat that I had canned.  Oh my... we'll have that for our meal today. 

I have posted about this before, and Here is the link to that post. This time, I used King Arthur unbleached all-purpose flour. I also now own a small pasta roller and enjoy that, although that is certainly not necessary. Mine is like THIS ONE.

Sometimes I re-post things, since I've had this blog for about 10 years and I'm sure most of you Gentle Readers have not seen most of it.

Don't you just love springtime?

Toiletry Recipes

One of my Gentle Readers, Patti, asked for my recipes for the toiletries I showed you in the last blog post.  Here they are. :)

Here is how I make the bath soap:

http://simplyhomemaking60.blogspot.com/2011/11/making-soap-is-much-easier-than-making.html

Here is how I make the healing salve:

http://simplyhomemaking60.blogspot.com/2012/06/healing-salve-revisited.html

Lotion recipe - It is very soft and creamy, but not runny.  I can only tell you how I make it.  I used my Kitchenaid stand mixer with the wire whisk attachment.  Into the bowl of the mixer, place 1/3 cup of virgin coconut oil.  Turn on the mixer and let it whip the oil until it is very smooth, creamy and fluffy.  That takes a while.  In the meantime, into a small microwave safe bowl, place 1 Tablespoon of Shea butter.  I bought mine here. Add to that 1.5 teaspoons of avocado oil and 1.5 teaspoons of extra-virgin olive oil.  Carefully melt it together in the  microwave.  Then, pour it into the whipped coconut oil.  Next, add a few drops of lavender essential oil.  Whip it all together very thoroughly, then put it into a small jar and add a lid.

Homemade toothpaste recipe - I used to make tooth soap and have a post about that.  I prefer not to have fluoride in my toothpaste, and so started making my own.  However, this newer recipe is much easier to deal with and make.  So... place 3 Tablespoons of virgin coconut oil into a microwave safe bowl. Melt it carefully in the microwave oven.  Then, stir in 1 Tablespoon of salt, 1 Tablespoon of baking soda, 3 drops of peppermint essential oil (optional) and 3 drops of liquid stevia (optional) Stir it all together thoroughly and put it in a small container.  I just get my toothbrush wet and scoop up a little of the mixture.  It took a few days to get used to it, but I love it now and it saves lots of money.

Homemade underarm deodorant - Many people are sensitive to baking soda in underarm deodorant.  I have no trouble with this formula, but if your skin starts to become irritated from this, please stop using it.  I had gotten to where no matter what kind of commercial deodorant I tried, if it worked it gave me a rash.  If it didn't give me a rash it didn't work, so when my daughter came up with this recipe, I tried it and it works and does not give me a rash. 

2 heaping Tablespoon beeswax pellets or grated beeswax
1 Tablespoon Shea butter
5 Tablespoons coconut oil
1/4 cup corn starch or arrowroot powder for very sensitive skin
1/4 cup baking soda - rub it through a sieve to remove any lumps
10 - 15 drops tea tree essential oil
10 - 15 drops lavender essential oil

1. Melt the beeswax in a double boiler. (I just put a glass bowl over a pot of simmering water for this.)
2. Add Shea butter and coconut oil and heat until just melted.  Stir occasionally.  I like to use a wooden stick to stir because the beeswax will stick to a spoon and make it hard to clean.
3. Remove from heat and add cornstarch and baking soda or arrowroot powder.  Stir until lumps are gone and the texture is smooth.
4. Add essential oils and stir until well mixed.
5. Pour into small jars, cool and put on a lid.

This batch will last a long time.  You only need a little bit.  I just get a very small amount on my finger and apply it.

My Facial Soap - Please refer to the method linked above with the bath soap, but here are the ingredients for the facial soap:

Avocado Oil - 8 ounces
Coconut Oil - 10 ounces
Olive oil - 11 ounces
Safflower oil - 5 ounces
Shea Butter - 2 ounces
Lye (NaOH) - 4.96 ounces which gives you 7% excess fat
Distilled water - 11 ounces

So, there you go, Patti!

Homemade Toiletries...

I have come to the point where I think I am making all of my own toiletries.  Of course, I still have to buy most of the ingredients, but I think all of this is very safe.  They certainly are nice things and work extremely well.

In the back, left to right, there is skin lotion, toothpaste, deodorant and healing salve.  In the front are bath soap and facial soap.

If anyone is interested in my recipes, please ask. 

Cut flowers... - another Tiny Tip

A dear friend gave me a dozen yellow roses a week ago.  Every other day, I have diligently trimmed the stems and changed the water.  Today they were looking rather "gone by", but I was able to get a little more life out of them.  I took off all the leaves and some of the outer petals, trimmed the stems short and put them in a small vase.  I think it looks very pretty, and I didn't have to throw them away, yet.  :)

Early spring garden 2019

A couple of years ago, my daughter came and helped me establish a "Hugelkultur" bed.  It got up to 70 degrees here today, and I just had to go out into the garden! I worked up the soil there, just a little, and added 12-12-12 fertilizer, pelleted lime and some compost from my compost bin where I throw all the food scraps. Then, I planted garlic seeds, beets, rutabagas, Sugar Ann peas, radishes, Michili cabbage, kale, spinach and lettuce.  I have no idea if any of this will amount to much, but it surely was fun. I had some floating row cover and used all of that to cover most of the bed, because we will be getting rain and I hope that will protect things from just being washed away. In the upper part of the picture, you can see some geodes.  They are surrounding what I hope will be my one surviving rhubarb plant. 

See that?  It's a clear glass bowl that I have used as a cloche over some parsley.  In spite of a very bitterly cold winter, the parsley survived!  I've picked it a few times through the winter season.

Here it is.  Not much, but it makes my gardener's heart happy. :)

And here is the garlic that I planted from cloves last October.  I think every one of them came up!

It is not officially spring, yet, but things are coming up and I'm ready... more than ready!