For many years, I would craft new decorations for our Christmas tree. It was a good opportunity to use small projects to try out new techniques and ideas. Our tree is basically a mad chaos of different styles and materials, and I love it!
Life got in the way, and I stopped doing this for many years. I was able to do a few last year, and I’m hoping to be able to continue this yearly tradition.
With so many cats in the house, though, we’re going to have a much smaller tree, set high off the ground! We’re still trying to figure out how to manage that, but the cats have inspired ideas for this year’s decorations.
Cats are supposed to not like citrus, so I will be using dried orange slices as the foundation of the decorations.
Last night, I sliced two naval oranges and laid them out on a rack in a baking pan. I set our oven to “warm” (170F) and left them overnight. I did have the opportunity to turn them a couple of times, since I was up anyway, investigating the crashing and banging that woke me up (I found Layendecker on the fridge, and a decorative jar with seashells on it was on the floor in the dining room; I’ll have to figure out how to remove the broken seashells to replace them. :-( ).
This morning, one of my daughters took a dried slice and showed it to some cats.
I don’t think they’re going to work as cat repellent! :-D
I plan to include cinnamon sticks in the decorations, too – something else that cats are supposed to not like. I don’t think it’ll help, since in the past, we’ve had cats try and steal our cinnamon apple dough decorations, right off the tree!
Well, even if it doesn’t work, we’ll have new decorations for the tree this year! :-D
Nostrildamus and his sibling were sleeping in the cat house. From the red light on the timer, I could see that the heater was on. Now I’m thinking of getting a thermometer to put inside, facing the window. LOL I’m such a suck, when it comes to the cats!
Not only does Nostrildamus (aka Nosey) now allow me to pet him, regularly, he’s picked up Potato Beetle’s habit of going between my feet while I’m trying to walk!
Mystery is giving me attitude!
I’m good with that. She and her mom usually run away!
Though Thanksgiving is officially tomorrow, we had our dinner today. The brined turkey using apple cider vinegar in the brine, apple pieces added into the cavity along with the lemon halves, and more ACV added to the roaster, turned out fantastic. I made a mushroom gravy this time, frying up a mix of sliced white button, crimini and oyster mushrooms in advance, adding them when I made gravy from the drippings, then using an immersion blender to whiz the mushroom pieces. That worked really well.
Also, we still had some of the Poor Man’s Hippocras left, and it most definitely tastes better chilled. :-) It also went well with the pumpkin pie and whipped cream! Which makes sense. They both have a lot of the same spices
Meanwhile, I’ve already packed up some take-out containers will be taking them to my mother for lunch tomorrow. When I called to arrange the time, she was asking me right away, if I had mashed potatoes and gravy! LOL Yes, Mom, I do. Just for you!
We have much to be thankful for and right now, as I look out the window, I am thankful we aren’t having a blizzard right now, like we did last year! :-D
I hope you all had a wonderful day today, even if you had to celebrate it in a different way than usual.
This morning, the basket was assembled, and I found an English translation of the traditional Polish blessings of the contents (my Polish is not good enough anymore!).
Then it was time to lay out our Easter brunch, using the contents of the basket.
I included the beet and onion pieces that were with the pink pickled eggs, just because. :-) The olive oil from the marinated goat cheese was strained of the herbs and spices, to be used with the vinegar as a dip for the bread. The braided loaf makes it easy to tear into chunks.
We had a lovely and delicious meal together!
We were not the only ones to enjoy the basket.
DahBoy decided it would make an excellent bed!
While the turkey was in the oven for our evening meal, I had a chance to have a video chat with some of my family.
Technology is awesome. :-)
Though today was very busy with lots to do for our special times together, I still tried to keep today as a Sunday day of rest. I notice others are taking advantage of the weather and conditions, though. As I sit here typing, I can see the live feed from our security camera. A burn is being done on my brother’s rented out field, across the road. Work never stops for farmers, even on Easter!
I am quite grateful for all those who work to produce our food and the other goods we need! We have much to be thankful for.
I know I should be in bed right now, but I had a few setbacks. Problems with the van being the most obvious one, but also, I had difficulties typing.
My husband got evidence as to why.
Susan decided she absolutely HAD to drape herself across me as I tried to type. She particularly felt the need to roll around, and use my hands as pillows.
For such a tiny cat, she takes up a lot of space. :-D
Meanwhile, I did manage to finish the last things for the basket before I had to head into town.
These are easily the darkest onion skin dyed eggs we’ve ever made! I didn’t leave them in the pot longer than usual, either. This is just from the sheer volume of onion skins they were immersed in. Also, every single one of them are fine. One of the nice things about colouring eggs this way is the high success rate. At most, sometimes an egg will crack in the boiling water.
The tea dyed eggs, however, are typically much more difficult.
Of the dozen I did this way, I lost three eggs completely (they were delicious, though), and I think only one or two peeled without damaging the egg white. Cracking the shells and cooking them again in the dye seems to make it more difficult to peel them. It also leaves them too fragile to use the shaking method of loosening the peel. I did try it, and the egg just split open in the jar.
We’ll just have to made to with slightly torn up eggs this year! :-D
As for the horseradish, usually I just peel a chunk of root and put it in the basket whole. We would then shred it for use during our Easter breakfast made up entirely of basket contents. This time, I decided to grate it, first.
I left it to dry on a paper towel for a while before putting it into a teeny tiny jar.
I almost forgot I had one last thing to prepare before heading to bed. Brining the turkey! We’ve never done a turkey dinner for Easter before, but I had one in the freezer, so we’re using it now. I use a giant stock pot to brine the turkey in. It’s a big bird, and the brine needed almost 3 gallons of water to be able to cover it completely. It makes for a very full stock pot. I have to get one of my daughters to help me carry it to the old kitchen, so it doesn’t slosh all over. This time of year, the old kitchen is about refrigerator cold during the day, and will probably drop a degree or two below freezing overnight, which makes it quite safe to leave the turkey in overnight.
For now, though, I’d better get my butt into bed. There will be lots to do tomorrow! :-) I’m looking forward to it. :-)
I’m happy to say that I was able to deliver a little care package to my mother for her Easter. I called right after dropping off my daughter to see if she needed anything at the grocery store, but she was able to order everything she needed from the grocery store and have it delivered. Which means they were able to accommodate her in regards to her not being able to pay over the phone. I thought that might be the case, as the grocery store near her caters to a lot of seniors in similar situations.
When I got there, she met me at the door, since her building is on lockdown. Technically, I could have visited her and it would have been okay, but the less people from outside come in, the better.
After the drop off, I went to the grocery store near her place and scored big time!
Not only did they have big bags of cat kibble, but they were well stocked in pretty much everything! They even had a big display of large pack toilet paper, though they were selling for over $30. We are fine for that, so I didn’t get any. Their yeast section was completely full, and I was able to get a nice big jar of the traditional (slower acting) yeast. Between this, what we’ve already got left at home (even after baking day, yesterday) and our sourdough starter, we’re set for a good long time. :-)
Finding a candy thermometer was just bonus! I won’t have to make to with a meat thermometer, when I try a new cheese recipe after Easter.
Once home, I got a couple of pots doing with more eggs; one with the tea dying mixture, and the other with onion skins. We’ve been collecting onion skins all year, and there was so much, I couldn’t even use it all. (click here for how we do our three different types of eggs)
Once the eggs were at the stage where they could be left unattended, I got the dining table all pretty.
Which has fascinated the cats.
Cheddar, at least, was polite about his curiosity. He just sat on a chair and rested his chin on the table cloth. I’ve already found Two Face, just sitting on the table, like a bread loaf.
Once the table was cleared of cats… again… I worked on preparing other basket ingredients.
Each of the items has symbolic significance, some of which are old traditions for our Polish family, while others are traditions we added ourselves. Along with the bread, which symbolizes Jesus (the “bread of life”), and the eggs, which symbolize the Resurrection and new life, we have:
ham; to represent joy and abundance, marked with a cross made of cloves
sausage; representing the favor and generosity of God
butter; to remind us of the goodwill we should have towards all things. We like to make different flavored butters. This year, I’ve added parsley, garlic granules and paprika. Like the ham, it’s marked with a cross of cloves, and the fish shaped bowl it’s in is a reminder for us to be “fishers of men”.
salt; in one of the tiny jars, it symbolizes prosperity and justice, and is a reminder to be the “salt of the earth”.
cheese; this year, marinated goat cheese, but we’ve used many different kinds of cheese over the years, as a symbol of moderation
vinegar; the other tiny jar has red wine vinegar, as a reminder of the wine vinegar mixed with hyssop that Jesus was given to drink, just before he spoke his last words. This is one of our own, added traditions.
olives and olive oil (in with the marinated goat cheese): this is another of our added traditions, symbolizing wisdom, peace, and hope.
Not pictured is the horseradish, which symbolizes the pain of crucifixion. Traditionally, it can be made into a paste with beet juice, with the sweet juice representing the joy of resurrection. We’ve included the beet juice with our pink pickled eggs.
Other items that would be appropriate to add are a candle, a bottle of wine, and sprigs of greenery.
By the time we’re done, there’s enough food in the basket to feed us for a couple of days! Typically, we eat the blessed food as a brunch on Easter morning.
Gosh, I love making these baskets so much!
Now it’s time to check on the eggs, and prep the horseradish! :-)
Today, while the girls continued to work on the basement (I have yet to go down to see their progress!), I worked on baking our Easter bread.
Then, since I was baking anyway, I made some sourdough soda bread, and another double batch of what has become my usual standby, a basic bread recipe modified by the addition of rolls oats and various seeds. This recipe, plus chia seeds and minus the rye flour. Lately, I’ve also included hemp hearts as well, which adds a really nice flavour and texture. Thanks to my dear friend, I even had yeast to use for the non-sourdough recipes. :-)
In this photo, the braided loaf is for our Easter basket, and I made 4 mini loaves with the other half of the recipe. In the back, left, are the loaves of sourdough soda bread. Which did NOT want to rise today. The house was a bit too chilly today, even though it has been warming up again, outside.
In between batches and rising times, I also made a soup using one of my meals in a jar mixes with sausage. The mix had brown lentils, red lentils, orzo pasta, turmeric cous cous, dehydrated vegetables, dehydrated onions, mushroom ketchup powder, 1 cube of vegetable bouillon and 1 cube of chicken bouillon.
The seedy bread was shaped into mini-loaves that made excellent bread bowls.
This was soooo good to break my Good Friday fast (for health reasons, I do not do a total fast).
While doing my rounds this morning, I checked the ground near the power pole in the old garden, where there is horseradish planted. It was rock hard, but I hoped that things would have warmed enough to dig some up by this evening.
After scraping aside last year’s leaves, I found the horseradish has already been trying to grow.
The ground was certainly starting to thaw out by this time, but the soil here is so full of rocks, it didn’t make that much of a difference. I can’t understand why my mother planted these here. For a plant that is grown for its roots, rocky ground would have been something to avoid. The area has always been much rockier than the rest of the garden; so much so, my parents eventually stopped using it completely. The base of the power pole, however, has rocks and gravel packed around it, so it’s even worse than anywhere else.
I did manage to break off a couple of pieces, then decided to see what I could find in the other spot my mother had planted horseradish; at the base of a spruce tree near our feeding station. I had hoped that, between the wood chip mulch and possibly a bit more sunlight, the ground would be thawed out more.
The horseradish here isn’t as big or prolific, but I could see where it was starting to grow.
I did scrape away the wood chips, but it’s still pretty hard to see.
There isn’t as much growing here, and they’re much smaller, but the ground was indeed a bit softer, so I got a couple of decent chunks out. The ground isn’t rocky here, but of course, there’s plenty of tree roots. Again, I don’t understand why my mother chose this location.
After much washing, then scrubbing with an old tooth brush to get into the crevices, I now have several chunks to use.
That big piece with three sprouts? I could potentially plant each of those, and have three fresh plants.
I think the two little ones will be enough for my mother. If all goes to plan, I hope to swing by her place tomorrow with a care package for her. I’ll leave these as is, so she can prepare them as she wishes – or plant them in her own little garden plot outside her window. :-)
We only need a bit for our own basket. I have been thinking of planting horseradish in softer ground; perhaps in a raised bed or planter. Something that will allow a straighter root to develop. If I can think of a good spot for that, I might do that with the big piece. My mother always kept a piece of horseradish, with the green parts still attached, in the basket to be blessed with the rest of the food, specifically to share with friends to transplant, or to transplant herself. I’ve tried it myself a few times, but the only one that succeeded (and didn’t get dug up by squirrels) was the one I’d included with our Easter basket the last time we were able to visit with my father, 5 years ago. I took it back with us to plant when we got home, and it actually survived. It got left behind when we moved, of course.
Normally, we would finished putting all our basket contents together tonight, in preparation for taking it to church for the blessing tomorrow morning, but since there is no church blessing, we’ll finish arranging the basket tomorrow and do our own blessing whenever we’re ready. I still want to do onion skin dyed and tea dyed eggs, which will be the last things that require any cooking.
For now, I think I’ll head down into the basement and see how things are looking after all my daughters’ hard work! :-)
One of the bonuses of our move to the farm I grew up on is that we could take part in a childhood tradition; the blessing of our Easter baskets. It was many moves and many years before we were able to find a Polish church that did basket blessings, and be able to take ours in.
That didn’t stop us from doing our traditional baskets. It was one of my favorite traditions, growing up, and even when we stopped going to church for many years (for a variety of reasons), we still did our baskets and simply blessed them ourselves.
Which is what we’ll have to do this year, since none of the churches are holding any sort of services during the lockdown, other than online.
We did start some of our preparations already. For the cheese portion of our basket, we decided to do marinated goat cheese again. I made up two 250ml canning jars for our basket (I’m hoping to get one of them to my mother, along with some fresh horseradish), plus two 500ml ones, just for regular eating.
Tomorrow, I hope to make some fancy bread for the basket. Probably a Braided Egg Bread again, though I haven’t completely decided yet.
Today, I started pink pickled eggs; one of three ways we like to do eggs for our basket. The recipe for pink pickled eggs that I followed before is here. This year we, strangely, had a hard time finding anything other than shredded beets at the grocery store, so I modified the recipe a bit. I found 1 small jar of tiny pickled beets and used the juice from that to colour the liquid, plus sliced some of the beets and included them in with the eggs. With so little beet juice, I figured the addition of the beets themselves would help add colour. The other change I made was to include the fresh herbs I had left over from making the marinated goat cheese; thyme and rosemary.
When preparing eggs for the basket, we always cook way more than we need, so that we can use only the most perfect eggs for the basket.
Which is difficult, when the eggs need to be peeled first. There have been times when we’ve boiled a dozen eggs, and not a single one could be peeled without tearing apart!
So today, I tried a combination of “hacks” to get the job done.
The first is to add baking soda to the cooking water. Yes, it does make a difference.
The next is to cool the cooked eggs down as quickly as possible. Putting the eggs into an ice bath is one way to do it, but our well water gets so cold, we can get away with using tap water.
The final one is something I tried for the first time today, and it worked beautifully!
Shaking them in a jar.
Okay, so it wasn’t quite that simple. :-D
I grabbed a small canning jar, though any jar (with a lid) just a bit bigger than an egg would work. Theoretically, you can use a small glass and cover the top with your fingers, but that would get pretty messy. The first jar I tried was a 500ml (pint) size, and I found it a bit too big and ended up using a 250ml jar instead.
Leaving the eggs in their cold water soak, take one egg and put it in the jar, along with enough water to fill the jar about half full or a bit more. It can be helpful to crack the shell a bit before putting it in the jar.
Then, put on the lid and start shaking. Vigorously, but not too violently!
The shaking does a few things. The most obvious is, it cracks the shell quite thoroughly. This is where you have to find a balance on how much water is in the jar when you shake it. Too much, and the water protects the egg from cracking as much. Too little, and the egg can get bashed apart.
The shaking also separates the membrane from the white of the eggs – which would have already been spurred along by the addition of baking soda to the cooking water, and the quick cool down. And finally, it lets water work its way between the membrane and the egg white, making it much easier to remove the shell.
After a thorough shaking, dump the contents back into the water with the rest of the eggs. While holding the cracked egg under water, start peeling away the shell. If it still sticks, do the shake again. :-)
Out of the package of 18 eggs I cooked, I got 8 that were perfect enough for the basket; two for each of us.
This is what happens when an egg is shaken up too vigorously.
Here are the best eggs, ready for the fridge.
They should have at least 3 days to marinade in the pickling liquid, which is just in time for Easter.
Of the remaining eggs, there was one that broke during cooking, which left another 8 eggs suitable for pickling. I did up another container the same way, minus the beet juice. It still has beet slices with the eggs, so it will have just a hint of pink. That one will be for regular eating.
It is going to be a delicious Easter celebration this Sunday! :-)
Of course, things have been busy for the past while, even though we try to keep Christmas and New Year’s very low key. I finally have some time to settle in at the computer, so I’m going to take advantage of that and catch up in things.
I’ll be going backwards in time, for the most part. :-D
A great big Happy New Year to all our wonderful visitors and followers! May 2020 be a year of peace and good health to you and your loved ones.
Out of all the millions of blogs out there, you chose to pop over and visit our little corner of the world, and I just wanted to say how much I appreciate it.
Last year, I did a list of this blog’s top 10 most visited posts. I was all set to do it again, only to find it couldn’t quite work out as I intended. It turns out there are too many “tied” posts. A 2 or 3 way tie is one thing, but a 13 way tie? :-D I also noticed that the top visited posts are almost all from last year. I was going to try skipping those and just do posts that were written in 2019, only to find myself back in that tied-a-dozen-times problem.
So here is the list of the top 5 most visited blog posts in the past year.
Five: New Range Hood – part 1 Thanks to my daughter, we finally replaced the original range hood, which was installed in the early to mid 1970’s. Part 2 is when we finally got the new one wired and working!
Four: Sourdough Cornmeal Pancakes These are still my favorite pancakes. Recipe to make yogurt cheese, as a sour cream substitute, included!
Two: Making Chokecherry Vinegar Here is the recipe for the vinegar used in the Chokecherry Vinegar Drink. This year’s chokecherries were frozen, and we plan to use them in mead making. Depending on how many chokecherries we get next year, I hope to make this vinegar again, just so we can make that drink!
I’m sensing a theme, here! :-D This post is from 2018, but we got quite a nice haul this past summer, even though we gathered from just 2 out of 3 trees.
I hope you enjoy visiting these most popular posts of 2019 here at The Re-Farmer blog. Thank you, again, for choosing to visit our little corner of the blogosphere!
Happy New Year, from The Re-Farmer household to yours!
We are a bit behind on our Christmas decorating this year.
Usually, we start at least by Nov. 27 (the Feast of St. Catherine). However, this Christmas is a first for 3 felines.
So we set up the tree, but left it alone. We didn’t even fluff out the branches. The idea being, the cats can get used to the tree being there, and we can start training them to stay out of it, using a spray bottle.
The problem with that, however, is someone has to be in the room to catch them in the act, and we don’t exactly hang out in the dining room.
It’s going to take pliers to straighten some of these branches out. :-D
We can, however, start decorating the rest of the house. Tomorrow is the first day of Advent, so I at least want to get our Advent wreath and its candles set up.
I just have to figure out which of the bins it got put into. :-)
The Re-Farmer 