BAKING DAY

Saturday often becomes a day of baking here.  Today was no exception.  Here's the haul:

The Saskatoon muffins are my regular recipe, which I call "Better Blueberry Muffins," originally from a bag of Rogers flour but I added ingredients.  This basic recipe can be adapted to other fruits and also makes a very nice pumpkin/date muffin.

BETTER BLUEBERRY MUFFINS

Place in a large bowl--
1 cup of quick oats
2 cups of white flour
1/2 cup of whole wheat flour
1 TB baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon.
Mix all dry ingredients well.  Add:
1 cup of low fat yogurt
Mix a tsp. of baking soda in with the yogurt.
Add:
 2 eggs,
3 TBS olive oil (light tasting)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 to 2 cups of fresh or frozen blueberries (or Saskatoons)
enough skim milk to make a fairly thick batter.

Spoon into muffin pan lined with parchment muffin cups.  (Parchment muffin cups peel off the muffins very easily.  No comparison to plain paper muffin cups!)
Bake at 350º for 25 to 28 minutes.
Makes 12 fairly large muffins.
Cool.

These muffins freeze and thaw well.  Parchment muffin cups can be reused if removed and shaped again.  If you lay them flat, they're pretty hard to get back into the muffin tin.

The Boston Brown Bread recipe is from the More With Less Cookbook, published by Herald Press in 1976.  This is the first cookbook that I was ever interested in.  I still use certain recipes and this Boston Brown Bread is one of my favourites.  It uses no sugar, no fat and no eggs.  Sweetening comes from molasses.  If you'd like the recipe and can't source it, let me know by email and I'll add it to a post.

The loaves of 50% brown bread are from my own recipe.  I load the ingredients into the breadmaker and run the short dough cycle.  If you use the longer dough cycle the texture of the bread is a little finer.

HOMEMADE BREAD
(Load in order suggested by your bread machine.)
12 oz. lukewarm water
1 egg
3 TBS Canola oil
Combination of whole wheat and white flour to add up to 4 cups.
2 TBS sugar
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup of flax seed, ground in a spare coffee grinder  (Leave some seeds whole.)
(2 TBS wheat gluten -- to help the bread rise.  This can be omitted.)
2 tsp. bread machine yeast

When the dough cycle is complete, divide the dough into two equal parts, form the parts into loaves, grease the loaves and place them in parchment lined glass bread pans.  Let rise for approximately 45 minutes.  Bake in a 350º over for 30 minutes.  Remove from pans and cool on wire racks.  When cool, store in plastic bags.  Freezes well.

I grind my own whole wheat flour from organic Hard Red Spring Wheat, using a Whisper Mill that we bought in 1996 for $400.  Have used it for pretty much all our bread since then.  I find that whole wheat bread (even 100% whole wheat) rises significantly better if the flour has just been freshly ground.

Now cut the "heel" off your fresh bread and spread some butter and home-made raspberry jam for a mouth-satisfying treat--no matter what time of day.  ENJOY!

SHOULDN'T HAVE DONE THAT!

This week I pulled up the rest of the Fava bean plants and made another one of those veggie stews.  While I was at it I pulled up all the soy bean plants that the deer had been grazing on, preventing them from ever bearing any beans.  Next to them was a row of other beans, kind of yellowish and tough.  I pulled them up also and added them to the green stuff laid out on the beds to decay and add to the soil.

Later on I happened to look at my garden notes and realized, THOSE WERE THE BLACK TURTLE BEANS!  OOPS!  I went to the garden and picked all the pods off the discarded plants, took them into the house and shelled them.  Well now, this is kind of sad, isn't it?  Here's the harvest of what are supposed to be Black Turtle beans:

Just a few had turned black, some were beginning to turn, but the majority were very small and green.  They should have been left to mature and dry in the garden.  Maybe next year!  I popped the green Black Turtle beans into the stew pot, and they melded right in with the rest of the veggies.  The stew was delicious!

SEPTEMBERRRR!

Well, here we are on Labor Day, one of the last weekends to go camping for the summer of '16, and the weather is COLD!!!  Got up yesterday to +2º, got up this morning to +4º.  For this morning's walk I wore: a hoodie, and a Goretex shell, a knitted wool toque, and a pair of acrylic gloves.  That was just right for the temperature and the wind!

After the walk I went to the garden and harvested the remaining Broad Beans (aka Fava Beans).  Here's the haul:

I pulled up all the plants and pulled off any broad bean pods.  When I shelled the beans I separated the smaller ones for immediate use.  The larger ones will be processed and put into the freezer.

I also picked whatever tomatoes were ripe, some little WallaWalla onions that were obviously not going to get any bigger, having lost their green tops to deer, and whatever Pattypan squash were big enough to use.  

In the house I prepared them for cooking and combined everything in a large pot.  I added some parsley (fresh), some basil (already dried and crumbled), the tomatoes (cooked and put through the mill to remove the skins).  Also added some chicken and beef concentrate and a mild Italian sausage, cut into very small bits.

So here's dinner today.  We'll add a slice of homemade, whole wheat bread to that, a glass of white wine and have a lovely meal.

This is what's left of my attempt to grow soybeans.  You can see how the deer have consistently sheared off the tops of the plants.  Makes for good, compact plants, but no soy beans.  Oh well, in AZ at Sprouts there are lovely, frozen soy beans, Edamame, that we enjoy at least once a week.

Shall I try again next year?  Also missing from the harvest: any sign of black turtle beans. Never came up, evidently.  Try again next year!

TURNIPS???

Yes, we have lots of turnips ripening in the garden!  Most of the veggies in the garden did very poorly.  Only three beets came up.  The deer ate the tops of all the onions.  They also polished off the soy bean plants.  The lettuce flourished but not the spinach.  But the turnips!  Oh, the turnips came up as thick as could be.  I thinned them a few times, and now there is a row of fat, round turnips all ready to be used.

Most recipes for turnips say: peel them, cut them into cubes, boil them, mash them and add some butter.  That gets a little boring.  But this week I came across a recipe for CRISPY TURNIP "FRIES."  You can find it on allrecipes.com.  It involves cutting turnips to french-fry stick size, oiling them and combining them with Parmesan cheese, garlic salt, paprika and onion powder.

I substituted garlic powder for garlic salt, used some celery salt and paprika and skipped the onion powder because there was none in the cupboard.  This was an excellent recipe that gave the turnips a completely different taste.  Delicious!

OBSESSED

Yesterday I gave myself permission to "take a day off"--except for cooking, dishes, etc.  Instead I started a new knitting project.  I had received a free pattern for a cowl and was itching to try it.

From the stash I chose a beautiful variegated blue/green/purple yarn that I had bought a year ago just because it was so lovely.  I cast on 156 sts. using both ends of the ball of yarn.  With a long, long piece of yarn for the "tail" you can cast on a huge amount of stitches and for large amounts that's far easier than trying to guess how long a tail is needed.  I put yarn stitch markers at every 24 stitches to keep track of where in the pattern I was.  The pattern was given as a chart and knitted in the round.

One of the nice things about this pattern is that the number of stitches is reduced by 13 every eight rows so as you knit you progress faster and faster.  What fun!

At the end of the day I had a completed cowl.  But it was very curled up!  Both the beginning and the end tried to meet at the middle.  The rest was a nice, puffy cable-patterned cowl.  Even though I knew better I heated the steam iron and steam-ironed the cowl flat.  The yarn was acrylic and I knew what would happen so I have no one to blame but myself for the flat thing that resulted.

It's just 4 inches long.  The picture with the pattern showed a much larger cowl.  And the pattern explained that the first eight rows of the pattern were repeated.  You can source this pattern at pantsvillepress.com.  The name of the pattern is "Welter".  The free pattern was a special offer to blog readers.  Her blog is called Violently Domestic.

This cowl will be repeated sometime soon, and probably paired with a hat.  I think the pattern could easily be changed to become a hat pattern.  Start with a good sized ribbing, and then figure out how many repeats of the 12-stitch pattern are needed, and go from there.

BACK AGAIN

I'm home again from my trip to the east, and had a terrific time.  Among the visits: four days with my BFF from college days, including two of those days at Lake Michigan with just perfect summer weather; four days with my cousin Joan and her hubby and those days included a cousins' reunion at which I saw four cousins whom I hadn't seen for over 40 years, one of whom was recently remarried after being widowed, and two adult children whom I had never met; and finally a week with #1 daughter who was recuperating from a burst compression fracture of the L1 vertebra that happened the middle of May.  Such a rewarding, worthwhile time!

While travelling I was able to knit a pair of socks for DGS#3, who turned 16 this past week.  They just need to have the threads woven in and to be mailed.

I've often noticed that variegated sock yarn, even from the same dye lot, does not produce identical socks.  That's simply beyond a knitter's control.  The Dear One received his new pair of black socks that I had been saving for the sock knitting class, which is now postponed until next February/March.

The next sock pair, for my brother-in-law Wayne, are well on the way.  From toe up, the first sock is up to the top cuff.  And this morning I caved to the temptation to begin another project: An attractive cowl.  I'll show pictures pretty soon when there is a bit of length to it.

It always seems that the first few days after a holiday are just chock full of "catching up."  This was no exception.  I drove Jim to three different appointments, two for preaching in Rocky Mountain House and one to the oral surgeon in Red Deer to have a molar removed.  That amounted to a total of 10 hours on the road in just 8 days.  Seemed like we were always on the go.

But this week our helper S. and I dealt with apples and corn.  She picked them all and then helped me wash them, cut off the blossom and stem ends and cut them in half.  After that

they went into Dutch ovens and were cooked to a mush, and then put through the French mill, producing a lovely, sugar and additive-free applesauce.

The total: 13 quarts for the freezer and some to eat with Monday's dinner.

I didn't take a picture of the corn, but there are now 20 cobs of corn in the freezer for enjoyment later on.

There are not so many appointments left on the calendar before we leave for Arizona again.  Jim is preaching in Red Deer this coming Sunday.  We need our prescriptions updated and pick up 6 months worth before we leave.  The car needs to go to the mechanic for a complete check up.  There are two meetings of the quilt club, and then we're off!

MORE KNITTING

I did finish the big, double thread mittens.  They turned out well, big, warm and masculine.  I usually write everything down as I knit, especially for socks and mittens, since there has to be a matching sock or mitten.  But I didn't write down how many rows made up the thumb after picking up stitches for it.  It looked like 17 rows, so that's what I knitted.  But when the mitten was finished it was obviously too many.  So I had to take out the weaving ends in and remove a row.  That was so hard to do because of the black yarn. 

However, I had a handy weapon: this magnifying lamp that I've had for decades.  Every now and then it comes in so handy, as in this case.  With the lamp I can see the individual stitches and remove them.  After that it was easy to finish the mitten.

Here's the pair, all set to go.  Someone's hands will be nice and warm this winter!

The next pair of mittens is on the go, but not even the first mitten is finished.  I designed a two colour section, and that slowed me down quite a bit--especially as this is the 5th time I'm knitting that section, trying to keep it loose enough not to shrink the circumference of the mitten.  I'll show them when they are finished.

I will be travelling for the next 2 1/2 weeks, so there will be a prolonged silence on this blog.  I'm going without my laptop, so I'll catch up when I'm back again.  In the meantime, I'm looking forward to visiting friends, relatives and our daughter in Ontario.  See you later.