Burn, baby, Burn!

I successfully built a fire in the wood stove this morning! It may sound like nothing much, but this is kind of a big deal for me.

I grew up in 1980's suburbia, in a "development". Baseboard heaters and pink-panther insulation kept us warm enough. Fires in the fireplace were heat-inefficient, and therefore were built only when the power went out, and once in a blue moon on a snowy evening. So while I appreciated a good fire in the hearth, I never really thought of them as needful, much less something that might require skill to make happen. Learning how to build a proper fire was simply not on my radar.

Then I married Bill, who doesn't build cozy fires, but face-melting infernos that will send you outside in a blizzard to escape their "warmth". If I wanted to wake up each morning, a raisin on wringing-wet sheets, I'd have Bill build the fire. Surprisingly, I'm actually not a fan of that, so I undertook to learn the craft myself. With much coaching from the hubby, but perhaps slightly more restraint in the shoving-in-as-much-wood-as-will-fit-in-this-thing arena, I struggled to get things going. My goal was to come down somewhere in between the strictly decorative presto-log fire of my youth and Bill's dehydrating blaze. And I feel like I may finally have the hang of it.

This morning's fire has been going for 4 hours now and the furnace hasn't clicked on once. Woot-woot!

Let's hope that I can keep this mojo going, because the bill from having the oil tank filled last week (270 gallons!) nearly gave me a stroke. So it's either the wood stove and lumpy homemade knits keeping us warm this winter or mama's going to need to sell a kidney to pay the oil man.

Attack of the UFO's

U.F.O. - n. 1. Knitting Knerd shorthand for "Unfinished Object".

I faced down my UFO pile this week, and it wasn't nearly as painful as I had expected it to be. Here's where I started-


One scarf, 5 dishcloths, and 2 pair of mittens.

I actually managed to tuck and weave most of these in about 20 (gorgeous, lovely, uninterrupted) minutes of sittin' and knittin' on my front porch. Knitting on the porch, drinking my coffee and watching the chickens is my new favorite morning activity. Besides napping, of course.

The 2nd blue mitten is in the home stretch, and one of the gray baby mittens will have to be remade, as it fell to assault by moths during it's long, lonely wait to be finished. But the others are done! That wasn't so bad. Now I'm free to go nuts at the yarn store again, right?

You win some, You lose some

That statement is particularly true of home brewing and wine making. Our homegrown cider seems to be fermenting well.


Note it's promising "krausen" as Billy, the beer snob would doubtless have me point out. ;)

Let's just hope that it keeps on keeping on and doesn't go funky. We unfortunately lost an entire 5-gallon batch of cider last year to some sort of mystery contaminant and had to compost the whole thing. Talk about heartbreak! I feel pretty confident that we will not face that same problem with this batch though, since we not only washed and dried our apples well, but also used a steam juicer rather than a fruit press to juice them, effectively pasteurizing the juice and hopefully, hopefully killing all the bad guys before adding our little yeasty friends.

So, we have 2 1/2 gallons of apple cider, 3 gallons of dandelion wine, 24 bottles of grape wine, 1 gallon of rose hip wine and 1/2 gallon of apricot schnapps to the good. Alas, we lost the blackberry wine this week.

It, like the others, had been somewhat neglected during our move. Somewhere along the way, something funky snuck in and messed it up. My first clue was a bit of white mold in the airlock. Though most of the home brewing websites that I googled said that a little mold in the airlock was no big deal, I'm not really one to gamble with food poisoning and/or going blind. So of course, I had Billy smell it. Our eventual conclusion was that it had probably turned to vinegar, which would have been fine if I could have been sure that it was safe to use. I wasn't, so it too ended up on the compost pile.

Drink up, little wormies!

I will can this weekend...

...I will can this weekend. I will!

Because I know a certain soldier, far away from home, who has specifically requested some blueberry jam, I will get my act together and make the jams that I have been putting off making. And then I'll drag my lazy butt to the post office and send those jars on an exotic journey. Hold me to it, people. Otherwise someone on the other side of the planet is going to be eating some dry mess hall toast, and that's just not cool.

Wine Time is Nigh

In spite of utter neglect on our part, our wines seem to have been doing just fine during their extended aging. The dandelion is good, very good according to Bill, who has both a sensitive palate and an iron stomach, and is therefore usually the first one to try anything home brewed.

At almost 5 months old, the dandelion was only just sampled and racked to age for another few months before being bottled. Oh the anticipation!

The grape wine (variety unknown) finally reached it's first birthday, and was therefore bottled and laid aside to age further.



Annnd in goes the cork!



The grape is one of my favorites so far, but Bill finds it kind of hum-drum. It is a dark rosé color and reminds me of a lower-shelf white merlot. It's nothing to write home about, but most grape wines aren't until they're at least 2 years old, according to what I've read. I can wait... I think.



Or not. Cheers!

Appliciousness

My apples are ripe! My apples are ripe! At least as far as I can tell, they are.

Besides hardness, how does one determine the ripeness of an apple? I figure that since they are essentially leaping off of one of my trees, that at least that tree must be ready to go. And so I picked a few today, 5 pounds worth, which didn't even make a dent in that side of that tree. I'm excited for this harvest. This quantity of apples is a wonderful gift for many reasons. They will become applesauce, fruit leather, snacks for the bunnies, and more. But I have to admit that the one apple incarnation that stands head and shoulders above the rest is Bill's hard cider. Some have described Bill's cider as strong. Some have gone so far as to call it hallucinogenic. It packs a punch.

So as soon as we acquire either a steam juicer or a fruit press, we'll have ourselves a little harvest-fest and crank through some apples. And a few months after that - hopefully by Christmas - we'll be knocking back some Boggy Hollow cider. :)

Pay it Forward ~ Granola Giveaway #2!

Last month I was the very grateful recipient of a package of lovely assorted British Columbian goodies, courtesy of Megan at Tomato Tots's Pay it Forward giveaway. Here are the tasty treats that I recieved-



Not surprisingly, the Whistler Organic chocolate was the first to go, followed very shortly by the lemon marshmallows. We, uh... have a bit of a sweet tooth over here. ;) We're down to the granola and the peach syrup now. Everything has been so good!

And so, it's my turn to pay it forward! My prize package's exact contents are still yet to be determined, but one thing is for sure, with a new house and back-to-school having just laid waste to our bank account, most of the goodies in this basket will be homemade. I have a lightweight scarf that I'm finishing, and a whole cupboard full of this summer's jams and jellies with more to come. So, if jelly and scarves appeal to you, simply leave a comment on this post to let me know that you'd like to be entered to win and, BAM, you're in the running. Good luck to all and thanks again for reading!

Michelle