Happy Easter!

While perusing the internet some weeks ago I stumbled on this way of dyeing eggs. As I searched more, it became clear that I was one of the few people on the planet that hadn't heard of this or tried it yet. But I wasn't going to let that stop me!



First I blew out some eggs, which I've never done before. It is not that easy, especially if you make the tiniest holes in the ends of the eggs because you don't want to have big huge holes.

Anyway, I won't give all the details here because if you just search for dyeing eggs with ties you should find a bunch of people with advice. Martha Stewart apparently started it - or at least got the idea out there.

So you take a piece of silk, which can be from a man's tie or any other bit of silk, and you cut it to fit your egg. Wrap around the egg. Wet it first because this makes it much easier. (I tied the one up in string as an experiment.) You want every bit of egg to be touched by the silk.



There are many variations on the next step. You want to wrap something around the eggs to keep the silk on. You can use strips of fabric (which I did), or stick them in bits of panty-hose, or other ideas. Look at some different blog posts for ideas. I tied the silk on with threads at either end, but I don't think that was necessary; probably just twisting and folding down, then wrapping the cloth strips around would have done it.




Next is to put them in a pot of water, so the water covers the eggs, and add 1/4 cup of vinegar. Now is when you find out that blown eggs don't sink to the bottom - they float on top. So you'll want to weigh them down so they're in the water. I just stuck our colander on top and made sure the water was covering everything.



Simmer for half an hour. When they're done. Take them out of the water and let them sit till they're cool enough to handle. Then unwrap the fabric and silk and, voila!



They look all fancy and complicated, but they really aren't. I found that several had filled with water so I had to blow them out again. But water is easier to blow out then egg whites!







I was going to do a whole dozen, but I came to my senses (after blowing one or two eggs) and only did six. I have some ideas for doing it better next year. Jeremy says he likes the irregularities and spaces where the dye didn't transfer. But I don't. I want them to be perfect! And they will be. Next year.

Happy Easter, and I hope all your egg-dyeing adventures go well!

Booze

Back in December, Jeremy and I were suddenly awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of breaking glass. It's amazing how quickly you can go from dead-to-the-world asleep to extremely awake when you hear a sound like that.
The only sign that we were sleepy and not fully-functioning was that we incautiously turned on all the lights and crept downstairs to see what was going on. As we came down the stairs I began to hear a strange whining/hissing sound. What could that be?
By the time I'd gotten a step or two into the living room, my brain had woken up enough to know exactly what had happened: one of our bottles of cider sitting out in the living room had blown up. The hissing sound? The bottle next to it just getting ready to pop.
There was glass and cider everywhere. Sleepiness returned long enough for me to decide to open that bottle a little to let the pressure out right there in the living room. Very silly. It was a Mt. Vesuvius gusher - I don't know how so much cider could have been in that bottle.
We got everything cleaned up and put the remaining four bottles in the kitchen. It was such a bummer because we had saved those half dozen bottles out for a Christmas present!

When I came home from work the next day Jeremy told me another bottle had exploded during the morning. Cider and broken glass all over the kitchen. (In fact, we're still finding bits of glass around!)
Some night awhile later I vaguely heard a dull thudding sound in the night; but I didn't think much of it. The next morning we saw a tiny little brown glass bottle on the floor in the kitchen. Now how did that get there? It was such a mystery where it came from I was worrying it trying to figure it out. Then I opened the lower cabinets where we keep our booze (wine, whiskey, etc). Ah. There had been one last cider bottle that had only been half full. It took longer for it to explode, which it did, throwing cider and glass all over the inside of that cupboard and breaking some other bottle as well. The explosion must have been big enough to push the door open, and that little bottle had rolled right out.

Finally, the last bottle of cider had broken!  But believe me, this was only the middle of our adventures with cider.

Back up a couple months to October. We'd been talking for some time about making some booze and wanted to start with hard cider. The original idea was to get apples and press them, making our own juice. But I, wisely if I do say so myself, decided that was ridiculous. We didn't know what we were doing and I'd hate to wreck a whole batch after spending all the time making the juice. So we bought fresh squeezed (or whatever they do to apples) apple juice from a local farmer at the farmers market.

We poured all the juice into one of our lovely inherited carboys. I know we added sugar (white and brown) and yeast, but I can't remember now when or how much (sorry - this isn't a recipe!).



I do remember that we didn't water down the yeast enough so it was more like a paste that we were trying to get into that tiny carboy opening. Of course it ended up slathered all around the edges. So I took our tiny rubber spatula and went around the opening to scrape up as much of the yeast as possible so we could get it into the cider.

And then the unthinkable happened. As I was scraping inside the neck, the rubber part popped off and dropped off the stick part and sunk right to the bottom! Oh. My. Word. I had this moment of wide-eyed incredulity before the immensity of this disaster crashed over me. We had been working so hard to keep everything sterile and clean so there weren't any contaminates that would mess with the fermenting and turning all this into hard cider. Well, I'm sure you've all seen the nasty insides of spatulas when the top comes off. Sick. And that was now floating in our cider!

So I berated my incredible stupidity for a few moments, and then we decided on our next course of action. We had to transfer all that cider to the other carboy so we could get that blasted spatula out.



Then cross our fingers that everything wasn't wrecked. So we did that. The next part is to put some vodka in the the little lid thingy (that's the technical name I believe).



You set that on top and wait for it to get bubbling. I believe this little stopper serves to let air out but nothing else in. And if it should suck the stopper in a bit, it just adds some vodka to the cider. Mmm, tasty.

Now I'm a bit fuzzy because I thought this process was supposed to take some time - weeks at least. Maybe it was supposed to be in a certain temperature and light environment. But at some point the bubbles would slow to a halt and that's when it would be done. And that happened for us in less than 10 days. I'm not sure what happened (maybe it was that magical stuff in the spatula) but our cider was ready to go.

Actually, first we back-sweetened it (which means putting some nice sweet apple juice into it so it's not so bitter) and added some yeast inhibitor stuff to stop the yeast from doing it's thing. Then, making as much of a mess as we could, I stood on a chair and held this tube thing while Jeremy filled each bottle. This is a special tube thing that has a stopper on the end so it only fills the bottle while you're pressing the end down into the glass. Or something like that. It's pretty cool.



Then we used our handy new tool and new caps from Northern Brewer to cap the cider.



We used recycled bottles as you can see. This fun experiment netted us 35 bottles!



And it was TASTY! Went down really smooth and then I felt drunk as a skunk after I'd had barely half a bottle. (I am a light-weight of course.)



Jeremy was so excited about our cider he was giving it away left and right to everyone we knew; and before we knew it was all gone!

We got started on our second batch a week later, in early November. This time we did it in a bucket and kept it at the appropriate temperature and light.



This batch stayed in the basement for a month before it seemed ready for the next step. I don't quite get it, but the next step was transferring it to the carboy so we could store it in the back hall and trip over it for three and a half months.







Now, it turns out the bucket is bigger than the carboy so we had extra cider. It was fine at that point (it would just get tastier with this second sit), so Jeremy put the cider into six and a half bottles. (You know where this is going.) I don't believe we backsweetened or put the inhibitor in, so a couple weeks later, after the yeast kept working and bubbling in those tiny spaces, there finally just wasn't room anymore, and CRASH! In the middle of the night. (Why do I feel like saying, "And now you know....the rest...of the story.")

Anyway, this last week Jeremy finally bottled all that cider and there is a lot. We had one ourselves, gave one to a friend who gave us lots of advice, and took one to a party. We're trying to save them a bit now - especially since there aren't any local apples around to make another batch.

This summer Jeremy wants to try making a beer.

And we're dying to get a recipe for Sumac Wine and try making that. We had some a friend made and it was some of the best wine we've ever had.

Yay for booze!

I had no idea...

...that sage was a perennial. I had to look it up in the new herb book we Jeremy got for his birthday. And there it was in black and white: sage is a perennial. Even so, I never would have believed that to be true for Minnesota.

But today I was doing some work in the yard and I looked over to where the two dead, dried-up, abandoned, dead sage plants were... and they were getting green.





I think it must have been our warm and short winter; I can't think of how else a plant like this could have survived. Now I wish I'd left the rosemary and parsley outside too. They probably would have survived - nothing survives living inside our house.

So long Slowpoke

Slowpoke was a chicken, a very slow chicken. If you haven't learned yet, named chickens in our flocks often aren't long for this world. They're only named because they stand out with some problem or another.

Last fall when we received our chicks, we noticed one that was really slow. It slept more than the others, was hard to rouse, didn't seem to eat or drink much. This rooster only made it a few days and then died. Just after he died, I noticed another chicken that was behaving the same way: very slow and lethargic. But this one... lingered, so we christened her Slowpoke. We thought of better names later, but the original name stuck, so we were stuck with it.

Once the chicks went outside, Slowpoke spent most of her time at the feed eating and eating.  She never grew to be more than half the size of her flock-mates. And she never seemed to do the regular chicken-y things - like scratching around in the dirt, looking for things to nibble on. She never at anything other than the grain we keep out for the chickens - no lettuce, no greens, no bugs, nothing else. I guess she just didn't recognize those things as food.

At the end of December we happened to notice she had a damaged toe. She must have stepped on something sharp and cut her toe. We bathed it, put on some antibiotic stuff, wrapped it up, and put her out in the coop. Hours later, I'm sure, we found her perched on a stump with the other chickens pecking at her foot! Those darn cannabalistic chickens! So we cleaned her up again, wrapped up her foot, then wrapped it up in duct tape (hah! try pecking through that!), then smeared on some pine tar (which chickens don't like). Our poor little club-foot chicken! We had her in the coop on and off, but we had to help her up to the roost because she couldn't jump up with the club foot.

Finally we just kept her in the house, in a big dog kennel in the living room. I can't remember how long she stayed inside, but it was awhile.



At one point we thought her foot was clearing up and Jeremy wanted to make sure there was no infection so we got some antibiotics for her. You mix these up in water and down the hatch with an eye dropper. With the first dosage, we nearly asphyxiated her. She was gasping, gurgling, sneezing, dripping, hacking. Oh, it was awful. I thought for sure we had killed her. The only question was if we should put her out of her misery, or see if she survived.



But Slowpoke was a surviver, and she pulled through. We read up more on delivering medicines via dropper and did the whole thing over again the next night. And the same thing happened! As I was holding her on my lap and comforting her, I realized we had done this sort of thing before with no problems. The problem wasn't our technique, but our chicken! Nothing goes right with her.

In any case, she survived again and her foot was looking good, so back out to the coop she went. Some time later it seemed that another toe wasn't looking so good. We put some pine tar on it and put her back in the coop. Then a week or two ago I got a close look at her and almost ALL her toes were in bad shape. Geez! In fact, the mean old Rhode Island Reds were pecking at her toes so much they were bleeding. =(

So back inside she came to be cleaned up and convalesce some more. After a few days she seemed okay, at least no raw wounds, so I put her outside again. A short time later, her poor toes had been picked bloody again. So back inside she came.



By now I could tell her toes were in bad shape. She didn't seem to like walking on them. So we had a choice to make. Do we have an inside chicken from now on, stinking up the house or do we put her out of her misery? She couldn't live with the other chickens anymore because she became instant bottom chicken and was attacked. I think she would have been happy being an only chicken, but I wouldn't have felt right giving her to someone else with her foot problems.

So... yesterday afternoon we finally did the deed. It was very sad and we hated to do it, but I have to say we both felt a sense of relief in the end. We knew that any problem that could happen with a chicken, it was going to happen to her. Out in the wild, she would not have made it this far.

She had a relatively good life and got lots of snuggles and pets from us - which she really seemed to love. Not very chicken-y behavior if you ask me!

So long Slowpoke!

Eggs!

There is a big difference between 8 chickens and 20.

Two years ago when our first batch of chickens first started laying eggs - it was a big event. The first chicken to go made a big ruckus all day long before that first egg came out. And then over days and weeks it went something like 1 egg, 0 eggs, 1 egg, 1 egg, 2 eggs!, 1 egg, 2 eggs, 3 eggs, 2 eggs, and so on.  A couple times we got up to 8 eggs in one day which was pretty amazing.

Our current batch of chickens is now 5 1/2 months old. I'd been waiting for them to start egg laying for months it seems. They'd been making that telltale "I'm going to lay an egg" ruckus for several months I'm sure. It was such a familiar sound I started checking next boxes frequently, just knowing there was going to be an egg in there eventually.

Then finally, about two weeks ago - there were four eggs!



And it has been four to eight eggs ever since. Every couple days I think another chicken gets the hang of it and we get more eggs. First it was only brown eggs but now we're getting the white ones too. No green or blue ones yet, but hopefully soon!



So now we have eggs all over the place, dozens in the fridge, dozens on the table. We have got to get going with some egg dishes. Bring on the deviled egg platters!

Sheep!

No, we don't have sheep. Or goats. Or rabbits. (Not yet. =)

Some of you may recall that I started up a blog just for my sewing sometime last year.  Seems like I've been keeping it up just as much as this one lately. But I have been inspired to do better at that (and I'm still trying to catch up with a back log of posts and pics for this blog!).

I mention this because an Etsy team I'm part of, HandmadeMN, is doing a giveaway right now of one of my sheep tea cozies.

Adorable, I know.

I know, I know: too cute for words!

Anyway, the giveaway lasts for two weeks and we're into the second week now. You can enter the contest at the HandmadeMN blog.  All you have to do is leave a comment on the blog post (NOT this blog post that you are reading right now, but the blog post over on HandmadeMN!).  There are lots of ways to enter - one of which is becoming a follower of my sewing blog, another is becoming a fan of my Facebook page. Check out the HandmadeMN post for all the ways you can enter. Get your entries in by noon this coming Sunday!

Now, I'd better make some sort of promise about blog posts to come which will hopefully compel me to write said blog posts. I'd like to tell you all about our cider-making adventures last fall; and give you some updates on the mushroom season, which is in full swing. Stay tuned!

mini kitchen remodel

I love the way Jeremy tells this story. "Aimee was trying to put some pans away and she got all upset and angry, throwing pans around. So I thought, I'll be the mature one and get the pans put away. But then I got all upset and angry and started throwing pans around!"

And that was when we finally decided to do something about the kitchen storage issue!
What we had was this:



A tiny little cupboard which had to fit sheet pans, muffin tins, cake tins, spring form, pans, glass pie plates, etc (obviously hard to get to in the first place with brewing equipment and a worm bin blocking the way!) I tried to keep things on the side, but it always ended up like this and it was difficult to get anything in or anything out after awhile.


And while we're at it, we also had this:

I took the tea shelf and microwave out before this shot, but you get the idea. This was another huge part of our storage, pots, bowls, plastic containers, quiche plates, more pie plates, and things hidden in the recesses that we hadn't seen for years.

We have plans for re-doing the whole kitchen someday and we just keep trying to live with what we have in the meantime - though I suspect it will be years and years before anything changes. After that last blow-up, the straw that broke the camel's back, Jeremy admitted that he had thought of buying some sort of cupboard for me for Christmas. (Aw, the sweet things we do for our partners. =)

But he hadn't been able to find anything on Craigslist. So he got me pasta maker instead - which we had to find room for in the kitchen! That very day he jumped back on Craigslist and within a few moments he had found a potential cupboard option. Someone in St. Paul was remodeling and getting rid of a long 7 or 8 foot base cabinet (original to the house!) along with two large upper units. We contacted the guy, we were second on the list, the others backed out, we borrowed a van, and drove straight over to pick up our new cupboards!

Of course the whole thing didn't fit in any perfect way into the kitchen which meant some work. Jeremy had to cut the base cabinet apart because it was too long to fit in any one space.



It's upside down in these pics.


We also had to add a base to raise it more to counter height and add a counter since that had been removed by the previous owner. Our counter top? A piece of plywood painted and sealed. It's more of base piece awaiting real counter top...some day...

Next to the oven we got this:

The extra surface being put to excellent use.

And, glory be, this:

An organized space, with wooden uprights to keep everything on its side and in place. We kept the original cupboard and have just the glass things in there.

In the other corner we got this:

Everything had to be scrubbed down it was all so filthy! You'll notice that half of the heater vent is covered up . This piece was still too long because of that vent that sticks out, so Jeremy just cut out the back corner and slid this piece in over the top of it. So our plastics, pots, souffle dishes, and whatever else lives down there are nice and warm! He cut a vent in the front of the cupboard so the heat can get out.

Here we are all cleaned up and painted (and yes that is the pasta maker there Jane, I set it up and ran some pasta through to clean out the excess grease from packaging - so now it's ready to use!).


Last but not least we had the uprights. They turned out to be way too tall to fit in our kitchen. I think they're about six feet high.

So I decided to use them in the back hall, which had looked like this:

Will we ever be rid of the pile of boxes and random things in the back hall? Probably never.

These upright cupboards were absolutely my favorite. There was a bit too much contact paper of various ages and depths for my taste so I removed most of that. The insides were painted this incredible dark turquoise-like color with sort of a shiny shellac paint. Bead board runs along the back, and then there are these grooved strips of wood running in all corners for adjustable shelving. You stick in these slim 1 inch pieces of wood and put the shelf on top. I think it's so cool.



But also way too dark. So I painted part of it white.

There is actually some beautiful wood underneath, but neither of us wanted to go to all the work to strip the paint off. We told ourselves that these would not be the cupboards we used in our kitchen when we remodel it anyway, so why go to all the work for things that might end up in the basement or garage someday? It's kind of a shame, but really, I'm just happy to have more storage space now!

Looking much better in the back hall now. (The door in the lower right was stripped by the previous owner, trying to see what lay underneath the layers of paint.)


Now I have things organized by shelf: baking things in one area, beans in one area, rice and grains in another, some canned items in another.

It's funny that with our previous shelf it felt like we had no room and everything was about to fall off. Almost everything fit into one of the new uprights so we have room for a lot more out here now.

Some day that space in the hall will be a walk in pantry accessible from the kitchen. I cannot wait for all that glorious storage space! Then we can finally unpack the half-dozen (or dozen?) kitchen boxes still languishing in the basement.

So that was our mini kitchen remodel, which cost less than $100 in the end. I think we more than doubled our drawer space, certainly doubled our counter-top space, and added half again as much cupboard space. And we haven't had any more blow-ups, shouting, cursing, or throwing pans around the kitchen. =)