SOMETHING NEW

When I had the flu in December the Dr. prescribed Amoxicillin for what he thought was sinusitis.  I took it for 10 days, and it didn't make any difference to what I was suffering.  That convinced me it was a virus not a bacterium that made me ill.  But if you've been on antibiotics you need to repair your intestinal floral, so I did some research on how to go about that.  One highly recommended fix was to eat and drink fermented foods and drinks.  Oh, they didn't mention wine.  Too bad!

I bought some sauerkraut, but when I got it home I saw that it was labeled "pasteurized" and thought, Well, that's not going to do any good!  I consulted Marcy who knows a lot about what to eat and she recommended a sauerkraut sold by Trader Joe's, a house brand.  I bought a bottle and thought it was good, even though I'm not a fan of sauerkraut.

There are no Trader Joe's around here, but I have a new cookbook which has a recipe for home made sauerkraut.

The recipe calls for about 2 lbs. of cabbage, so I went to the grocery store to buy some.  Their cabbages were enormous!  I bought the smallest.  It was 5 and 3/4 lbs.  So we've had lots of cabbage lately.  I made a big pot of minestrone soup and loaded it with cabbage.  We had Ichiban Salad.  Today we had boiled cabbage combined with brown Basmati rice and mild Salsa, with just a wee bit of Sweet Italian sausage.  It was very good!  And then I cut up about 2 lbs (I was guessing) of cabbage

added the salt and caraway seeds, 

and let it stand for a while.  Then I massaged it until it wilted--those were the directions!

I know that cabbage is traditionally made in a crock.  I don't have a crock but I have a crock pot and thought that would do.

The next directions said to put it in an airtight container and cover it with some of the reserved outer leaves.  I did that.

Next step: cover it with a towel and secure that with a rubber band.  O.K.

And finally, place it out of direct sunlight and keep it at room temperature for 24 hours, occasionally pressing it down with the back of a spoon.  I put it in the downstairs bathroom, which has no window and is usually one of the warmest places in the house when the furnace runs--which has been most of the time lately.

After that I just need to let it ferment for 3 to 10 days and then store in the fridge.  Well, let's see what happens!  I'm a great fan of making food from scratch.  We like to have a summer garden for fresh produce and preserving.  As I said in the post about making our own pizza: that way we know we have REAL FOOD!

PIZZA FOR SUPPER

On February 2 Elaine Adair posted a blog entry on Inedible Pizza.  (elaineadairpieces.blogspot.ca)  She had bought a frozen pizza, prepared it, took one bite and declared it inedible.  Hubby said the same.  I commented that it is not that hard to make your own homemade pizza--tastes wonderful and is real food!  A few other commentators mentioned that also.  That set me to thinking about making pizza some night for supper and today it happened.

I made the dough for the crust in the breadmaker, rolled it out and put it on a round of parchment paper on a pizza pan while waiting for the pizza stone to heat up in the oven.  Toppings include mild chunky salsa, bits of Sweet Italian sausage, red pepper, onion bits, chopped mushrooms, pineapple and, of course, mozzarella cheese--lots of it!  The crust was pretty big and puffy.  So big and puffy that I cut off a strip and made some cute little curls.  It was so loaded up with toppings that I couldn't move it from this pizza pan to the hot pizza stone and had to put it in the oven just this way.

  The pizza came out of the oven looking gorgeous.  It had been in for 20 minutes at 425º and then under the broiler for just a few minutes.

 

We ate it while watching the 6 p.m. news, with the 7 day weather forecast.  It's warming up!  The weather, that is.

We each had 2 1/2 slices and feel pretty stuffed.  Here's what left, already put into the freezer for a snack some time in the future.

 

Really wasn't all that much work.  The Dear One declared it THE BEST PIZZA I'VE EVER EATEN!  Well, that was worth the effort!

A BIG JOB FINISHED

All the fabric from the closet has been sorted and binned or given away.  It was completed on Monday afternoon.  Here's the newly organized closet, worlds away from what it was last week:

Organization and neatness always gladden my heart!  Now I can see at a glance what is available.  

--The quilt on the top shelf is usually on our bed in Arizona.  I took it home this year because I want to do some hand quilting in the borders and large squares.  

--The bins on the middle shelf hold scraps, sorted by colour, fat quarter sized and smaller.  --The three containers below them hold larger pieces of fabric. 

--The open bin beneath those containers holds the fabric I kept for making clothing.  I gave away most of that sort of fabric.  

--To the left (not really visible in the photo) is a good sized box of fabric for long sleeved pullovers, Jim's favourite clothing.  They are easy and quick to make, just an hour from the time they are cut out.  Years ago I worked up a pattern that fits him well, gives a good fit around the torso and good long arms and length for the back.  

--To the left of the bins on the center shelf and partially hidden are all the "in process" projects.  One of the big finds was a complete single bed quilt top--bright, cheerful kids' fabrics in a "Turning Twenty" design.  

I've started working on the unfinished projects.  I finished a partially completed block.  And here's one 21" new block that I finished since Monday:

This is fabric that was bought about 20 years ago!  We lived in a small town in Northern Alberta and the local Co-op was phasing out its fabric department.  This is good 100% cotton, priced to sell at $1 a meter.  There were five of these blocks finished and one partially finished.  This is a completely new one and I'm working on a seventh.  I'm pretty sure I can get two more out of the fabric for a 3 block by 3 block quilt.  It would be 39" x 39" without borders.  I think I have enough for a very small border of the orange and a larger border and binding of the brown.  We'll see how it works out.  I really didn't want to get involved in finishing this, but once I got started the interest in the project returned.  

The kids' bed quilt is on the floor downstairs ready to be "sandwiched."

It's been really, really cold since we got home from Arizona.  The first Tuesday we were back, the 13th of Feb. we had some melting.  The downspout by the back door was blocked by ice further down, so the water had nowhere to go, resulting in this pretty impressive "icicle."

It will be a while before that's all melted because it's in an area that doesn't get sunshine this time of year.

Jim was busy piling the snow up from the driveway by the garage:

It will be a while before this big pile is melted!  That's the bricks of the back patio in the foreground.  The driveway is on the other side of the pile.  It is interesting each year to see when the very last of the snow piles, especially those in shady areas, finally melt!

THE BOOKSHELF

Two books I've read lately, one just published, Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God and one published 50 years ago, Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark.

The Future Home of the Living God is a post-apolyptic novel that reminded me of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, currently a movie.  That was the first Atwood novel I read and it really captured me with her word play.  The Future Home was a surprise to me as it seemed quite a departure from Erdrich's usual novels.  Told in the form of a diary to an unborn child in a dystopian future, it has a very narrow emotional focus which contrasted with her usual more realistic and often funny writing that brings out the quirks of human nature.  I found this novel somewhat of a slog at first, but became more interested in terms of finally meeting this unborn child.  The heroine (?) goes through horrendous experiences, but perseveres for the sake of her child.  I found the ending very anticlimactic, which is perhaps what she intended.  I'd love to have a discussion with her about this book, about how different it is from her usual writing.  I had bought this new hardcover as my reading matter on our trip home from AZ but just finished it a few days ago.

Outer Dark was in the bookshelf downstairs and I picked it up because I was out of books to read and the library was closed for the long weekend.  This is a situation that I try hard to avoid, but there are always some books downstairs that I haven't read, books that one of the kids left there.  I had read this book a long time ago, but not so recent that I couldn't reread it.  It's a short novel about an illiterate and super impoverished brother and sister, Culla and Rinthy Holme, living a long time ago (pre motorized vehicle era) in a miserable rural cabin.  Rinthy gives birth to a son (Culla's) and Culla immediately takes the baby and abandons it in the woods.  A tinker finds the child and takes it.  The rest of the story is about Rinthy's search for the child and Culla's search for her, and the extreme hardships and dangers they both undergo.

McCarthy's prose is so lush and his characters and events are so dark!  It makes me wonder if there really are such people and such events.  I suppose so, and I wonder how he knows them.  They, the characters and events both, are not something in my world, and for that I am thankful.

A BIG JOB

I kind of stumbled into a big job today.  It began with sorting a few fabrics for another quilt.  I didn't get much sewing done in AZ this year and am eager to do some in the next two months before we get busy in the Garden Centre.  So I was digging through my stash and got kind of carried away.  It turned into a complete clean out of the sewing room closet.  This first picture is looking toward the mostly empty closet.  Some of the mess is ranged around the floor.  The container with the white/black fabric and the red fabric is one sorted bin.  It will have the larger pieces of material, bigger than a fat quarter but not as big as a piece of backing.

The second picture looks in the opposite direction.  These boxes and bins have the scraps of fabric big enough to make blocks.  The fabric is (mostly) sorted by colour, a box of reds, a box of blues, etc.  I did a lot of that sorting, ironing, folding and putting away of this size scrap today.

Then I hauled out all the boxes that were on the floor of the closet.  They contained mostly fabric for sewing clothing.  Some of this was bought more than 20 years ago.  For instance, there's a very nice red/white/blue linen plaid that was intended for a blazer and just never happened.  These two boxes and two containers are filled with those fabrics and will be donated to the local second-hand shop.

Last fall I wrote about the huge donation of fabric that came into the sewing room in our village in AZ.  Joan and I spent a LOT of time sorting through all that.  Remembering how much work that was inspired me to get at it now and not leave it for our kids to do after I'm gone.  Plus, I love having things clean and organized. 

There's more to do yet in terms of sorting through each of the boxes and getting rid of fabrics that won't be used.  But the major part of this BIG JOB is now done!

HOME-HOME AGAIN

After a three day drive we arrived home in AB at 4:45 on Sunday afternoon.  It was terribly cold! -28ºF.  What an adjustment!  We quickly unpacked the car, turned up the heat; the house was warm enough because S. had turned up the heat for us but as cold as we were we wanted MORE HEAT!  The gas fireplace in the living room was not working for some reason.  Later we found out that the gas for all of the area had been abruptly turned off in November when a construction crew for a new subdivision breached a gas line.  Today the gas co. rep. came and relit the pilot light for us.

Today the temps rose to right around freezing.  A BIG IMPROVEMENT!

Today was the regular meeting of the quilt club here in town and it was a treat for me to go and be warmly welcomed back by my quilting friends.  We always have such a good time together--lots of teasing and joking, lots of laughter, plus a nice Valentine's treat for tea time in the afternoon.

I finished the two blocks for the quilt we plan to donate to the Seniors' Outreach for a raffle to help support them with their budget shortfall.  There were a lot of upgrades to the hall where we meet, resulting in a major deficit for that group.  We're trying to help.

Then I also made a block for a quilt I plan to make:

I had a lot of trouble making the block (the top one of the two) and felt like I was having a really "dumb" day!  But in the end if turned out o.k.  I kind of like using more of the different black/white fabrics in this block.  I'll see how many I can make before the material runs out.  I plan a 40" x 52" lap quilt (approx.) to donate.  We'll see how it goes.

This photo should be lightened, but I have such trouble with my iPhoto, that I hardly dare do something like that--it so often produces "black screen."

I bought an iPad last week and am in the process of setting it up.  NOT EASY!  But it would be very handy to be able to travel with just an iPad rather than the laptop.  Wish me luck!

GRAMMILOU'S BOOKSHELF

Recently I've reread a few books that I read a long time ago.  They were good books, worth rereading.

The first was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, a coming of age story about Francie Nolan, granddaughter of Irish immigrants, growing up in the early 1900's in New York.  France and her family are very poor, but find joy in life in simple things and the closeness of a loving family.  Just as good in a second reading as in the first.

Then I reread My Antonia by Willa Cather.  It describes the life of young Jim Burden, orphaned, gone to live with his grandparents and of Antonia, daughter of a neighbouring family, extremely poor immigrants living in a dugout on the prairies.  These best friends spend their childhood together, forming a close bond that endures throughout life. The descriptions of life and nature are brilliant.

Water for Elephants is a much more recent book, well known also from the movie.  Jacob Jankowski, a young man about to graduate from Cornell Veterinary School suddenly loses his parents in a car accident and finds that all their money and assets were consumed by the bank which held the mortgage that financed his education.  Distraught, he cannot write his final exams, leaves the campus and wanders into a travelling circus where he is welcomed, after some ordeals, and becomes the circus vet.  The story is told in flashbacks from his perspective as an old man living unhappily in a care home.  Lots of interesting details about elephants, circus life and dangerous personal relationships.  A "can't put it down" read.

Just now I finished rereading The Road by Cormac McCarthy.  This is not an easy book to read, a post apocalyptic novel of a man and boy travelling painfully through a dead, ashen world, dealing with roaming bands of predatory people, cold, starvation.  Quite horrifying, but illuminated by the self-sacrificing love of the man for his son, with a surprising ending.

For our coming time in the car I bought Louise Erdrich's newest novel, Future Home of the Living God.  She is one of my favourite writers, and I've read most of her books.  I've no idea what this one is about.  And we have along a copy of Walter Isaacson's Leonardo Da Vinci.  That makes me remember our junior high school art teacher, Mrs. Post, who, we all joked, was in love with Leonardo, as she talked about him with such rapture.  I've started reading this and find it very well written.

What interesting books have you read lately?  

THE SHAWL GOT AWAY!

The shawl was finished yesterday about 2 p.m. and was immediately given away.  It went to my friend Marcy who has had some health struggles lately.  When I started knitting it I thought it was for me, but by the time it was halfway finished I knew it was meant for Marcy.  I forgot to get a picture of the finished shawl before I gave it away.  It looked much the same as before, but just longer.  I bought a beautiful, big red button for it and thought it looked just smashing.  I already have the yarn to make another one.  That will make a good project for the long drive back to Alberta.

We have reached our last week here.  The time seemed to go by so quickly.  Partly because I was quite sick for some weeks there in December, and it took a long time to get back to my usual self.  Also, we had quite a few visitors this year.  In fact, my little sewing room was packed up in a corner of the closet since the first week of December, so there was very little sewing accomplished.  I had cut out squares to make a Disappearing Four Patch quilt to donate here but never sewed even one seam for that quilt.  The squares will go home-home again with me, and hopefully I will get that done this summer.  (A friend on mine distinguishes between her home here and her home in Portland, OR by calling the home here "home" and the home in Portland "home-home."  That works!)

What did really work well for me this year was my time on the wonderful pipe organ at church.  I had 6 hours a week on the organ this year, and that was a great joy!  I was privileged to play three pieces in the "Organ Marathon" and then this past Sunday Gloria and I played a piano/organ duet on "Our Father" by J.S. Bach for the morning offertory.  That was a good experience and I had several very nice comments on it.  Practicing regularly makes such a difference!  So that was one of my highlights of this winter, although I was unable to get to the organ for about five weeks due to the flu and the time needed to recuperate.

I also very much enjoyed playing in the Sun Cities Chamber Orchestra again this year.  Our viola section has become a group of friends; we even went out for lunch once day with four of the six of us.  One of our members is getting too old to drive so he was not able to come along, as his ride needed to go straight home.  I also enjoyed playing in the cantata for the Bellevue Heights Baptist Church.

So here we are up to our last week.  I need to clean and pack and make final arrangements for change of address, etc.  We leave on Friday morning for the three day drive (depending on the weather) and on Friday afternoon our renter comes in.  We've never met him, but he's a good tenant and always takes good care of the place.

There probably won't be much news this coming week, as it is just a matter of tying up ends and leaving everything in good order.  If anything remotely interesting happens on the road home I'll post it.  In the meantime, have a good weekend and a productive week!