A Blue Blouse for a Kilt

Years ago, my sister brought Genevieve a little red kilt from Scotland.  Now it's Phoebe's turn to wear the little kilt. Since most of Phoebe's clothes are hand-me-downs from a very clever group of mamas, she didn't really have a top to go with it.

I bought this blue fabric at JoAnn's because the blue scrap I had in my stash just wasn't big enough and I really wanted that strong, bright blue for my strong, bright girl. Phoebe and I poured out the buttons and put our heads together; I love the combination of ladybugs and little vintage flowers!  Then I found this scrap of woven ribbon in my ribbon drawer and scratched my head good and long over where to use it.  I put it on the mandarin collar and divided it evenly down the sides of the placket (it doesn't actually reach the hem), making little black machine-embroidered welts to finish the tops and bottoms.

The blouse is from this pattern, and I do actually still have the flowered blouse that I made Genevieve. It's hanging in Phoebe's closet and we'll see if I can get her to wear it.

The blue blouse turned out so cute, and Phoebe wears it, so that's a win, too!

My Favorite Hair Product is Water

Ok, that title is kind of click-baitish, I know, but I'm here to update you on my curly-girl methods and it's true: water is my favorite product! I started trying the curly-girl method about 2 years ago. I finally feel like I have a handle on what my hair can do and what I'm willing to do for it.

I love the DevaCurl shampoo and conditioner the best - I've tried several different brands by now. My hair is thick but fine, so it can easily get weighed down by the heavy moisture in lots of curl-recommended products. I never skip shampoo, and I do put my hair up after a shower in a regular towel for a few minutes so it's not dripping - I don't rub or pat my hair with the towel, so it doesn't make it frizzy. 

Then I put on some DevaCurl Wavemaker and gel and clip up the roots to help hold up the weight of the wet hair so it doesn't dry flat. I use about 5-7 clips, mostly on the top of my head; one key clip pinches a cowlick in the back so it doesn't show so much.  I give it as many hours as I can to dry, remove the clips, and scrunch a little to break up the crunchy gel.  When this bottle of gel is done, I'm going to try something else that doesn't give me the 80s rocker look.  Not my look.

So at bedtime, here's when I use my favorite hair product: I spray my hair thoroughly with water and go to bed with a wet head. Overnight, my curly waves bounce back into soft, generous curls.  In the morning, I ruffle my hand through the curly waves and that's it! I used to try spraying my hair with water in the morning, but it never did much except dripped on my neck.

Bedhead! Still in my jammies so I can show you

I don't know exactly why sleeping with a wet head makes such wonderful hair, but at my fall haircut, the stylist said that's what she does (locals, let me know if you want an amazing DevaCurl stylist who is totally cool with low-maintenance girls like me and a desire to be environmentally friendly).

 I only wash my hair every three days, so I get two days off from everything hair-related except for some squirts of water at bedtime.  See? Water is absolutely my favorite hair product.

Magic Elderberry Elixir

My friend and neighbor Jess told me elderberry was great. Rebecca told me it was great and sent it with her kids to college. I finally thought I would try, too.

I used Wellness Mama's very simple recipe; I bought dried elderberries at a local grocery store, $4 for the amount needed for this recipe (locals, email me and I'll hook you up). The other ingredients are raw honey, water, cloves, cinnamon, and gingerroot, making this much less expensive than commercial versions. 

I figured it would be like taking vitamin C or putting extra garlic in the chicken soup when we had colds - just another tool to possibly shorten the length of the cold.  But no! I am convinced that taking elderberry syrup has literally killed several colds in our family already this fall! No one has taken to bed with a cold. No one has gone through more than a few hankies before we upped the dosage of elderberry and pow, the cold has entirely disappeared. 

For general maintenance, we take a half teaspoon or a teaspoon a day. We either take it straight or mix it with a little water.  When we feel cold-like sypmtoms, we take that dosage several times a day. We all like the taste of the syrup except Ben, who falls on the floor in dramatic horror every time I force him to take some. Whatever, Ben. You haven't missed out on any fun because of elderberry syrup, so your protests are in vain. 

Use-What-You-Have Mittens for Phoebe

No surprise, Phoebe's sloth mittens were too small for her this fall when I dumped out the boxes of kid winter stuff and checked.  Sidenote: one of my biggest thrifty tips is thinking ahead to what you will need and then having the time to find it at a time/place/price that is good for you! So as one season is ending or a holiday is getting closer, I am taking a little time to look at my supplies and think.

So, I thought Phoebe and I would have fun picking out new fleece for mittens, but on the morning that we could run to the nearest fabric store (JoAnn's - ugh), she was dragging her feet about running errands.  I delved into my little box of fleece scraps just in case and you know what? I found enough scraps that suited Phoebe and her new winter coat! 

The purple plaid is actually a beautiful, fine merino wool from a scarf my friend gave me after her dog chewed on one end; she was hoping I could use it to make something.  I did, Stephanie!  The teal fleece is just regular polyester fleece left over from something.

From last year's experience, I put elastic in the wrists.  I made casings from red fleece bias binding - scraps from the Christmas stockings.

Phoebe likes the mittens and wears them and that, I tell you, is Something.  She has strong opinions on her clothes, and I navigate carefully to teach her dressing well and also respect her opinion. I am not the parent who lets the kids wear whatever they want.

The pictures of her on the porch in her winter coat show that she paired a red striped shirt and navy striped leggings - I suggested the denim jumper and red socks. Success!

This outfit is a combined effort: she put the short-sleeved dress and leggings together, I made sure she had a navy cardi and pink socks and bypassed the flowered sneakers.  I think the splashy roses look good together! Wonder what other combinations we will cook up together. . .

Salsa Verde Schools Me

The kids had off school due to elections, the sun was shining, and a real freeze was bearing down on us.  Clearly time to put the garden to bed.

When we were done stripping the tomato jungle that afternoon, I had a heaping dishpan full of little green tomatoes as well as a basket of bell peppers and a handful of berries.   

So I recalled a conversation with a market farmer back before life took a turn into crazy with sports; I was listing all the problems I had experienced with canning salsa and declaring that was IT, no more canned salsa, when she said simply that she'd never had a problem with tomatillo salsa, salsa verde.  Then she said she uses Marisa's recipe from Preserving by the Pint, which I already own and love. I use green tomatoes and tomatillos pretty much interchangeably - my research tells me they are cousins, and I know from experience they have a very similar flavor and texture.

Now staring down the heap of green tomatoes in my kitchen, I plunged in.  First I recruited Ben to take my Visa (no cash, wanted the points, knew the standholders and guessed they'd be ok with it) and go back to market for me to get cilantro, garlic, onions, and poblanos. Then on the way to pick up Genevieve from a friend's house, I stopped at the Latino market and got 20 limes for $2. I know that canning recipes specify bottled lime juice for the acid predictability, but I couldn't bear to drive further to a grocery store and buy plastic packaging with my lime juice. Marisa's recipe did not have cilantro in it, and I do love cilantro in salsa verde, so I grabbed a recipe online from Montana Homesteader. 

Photos with  me in them taken by Ben - good job, buddy!

I used a red poblano to make a batch of Marisa's salsa verde. Then I made the rest of the tomatoes into Montana's recipe with green poblanos, running the food processor like a crazy woman and getting Phoebe to pull some stems off tomatoes. 

I sent Ben to the basement for more wide-mouth pints; he came back with a measly one jar.  Certain he just wasn't looking, I sent Genevieve down (all the while pushing buttons and heating up leftover supper and watching the boiling water vat on the stove), and she came up totally empty-handed.  People, I used up all my wide-mouth pints! I thought I was over-supplied with jars! I finished up the canning with half-pints. 

The first canner-load had a jar bust in it, and I thought darkly of the salsa curse, but the rest of the jars sealed beautifully.

And then I snapped back to reality: I had not measured the lime juice, nor had I used bottled lime juice, and I had canned it in a water-bath.  Botulism visions danced in my head! I was so angry at myself for not doing more research, for not measuring the lime juice. I can low-acid foods in my pressure canner to negate botulism!  Why oh why didn't I find a salsa verde recipe that was pressure canned?  I decided I had to freeze my beautiful salsa verde, treat it like fresh, not canned, food.
 

But first, I talked to Rebecca, who listened to my woes and recriminations and seemed not all worried about it ("Are you sure it's a low-acid salsa? Green tomatoes are tart!"), but shrugged and said, why don't you pressure can it if you're worried?  The heavens opened and a light of reason shone on my head.  So I carefully broke the seal on all my salsa verde jars and pressure-canned their butts.

Here are my take-away thoughts:
find a salsa verde recipe before next fall  that uses cilantro and the pressure canner and not lots of lime juice to keep botulism fears away. Roast or grill the poblanos for a hit of smoky flavor.

Our Family Trip to Seattle and ONP

Back in June, we went on a family trip that we had been anticipating for a long time.  My husband and I had been saving money for years, funneling money into a savings account whenever we could, sometimes only $50 a month, sometimes nothing for a while. We wanted to take this trip before Genevieve started a job (that could happen very soon, friends! she just turned 14!) and after Phoebe was independent of diapers and naps and strollers and such. This summer was that perfect window.  Let's look at our trip through the thrift lens.

We chose Olympic National Park just west of Seattle because it looked like "Acadia of the west" according to my husband, and last summer, we had a super-successful family trip to Acadia in Maine. Our family does well with a location that allows slowing down and deep playing and gets us out in nature, so we lean towards national and state parks for vacations right now.

The kids adored flying on a big airplane to get to Seattle (my husband and I tried not to dwell on the environmental cost of the flying).  We booked our flights months ahead of time on Spirit Airlines - we only paid for two checked bags.  We did not pick our seats or take carry-ons.  Instead, we each had a personal item - a backpack filled with snacks and entertainment - and I chose all Air BnB houses in Washington that had washing machines so we could take limited clothing and shoes in our two checked bags. We flew out on a Tuesday, and home on a Wednesday, the cheapest days to fly, and the Wednesday happened to be July Fourth, so we got a free, beautiful fireworks show when our plane took off from Seattle at 10pm. It was perhaps not the smartest choice to fly a red-eye flight against the time change from West to East Coast, but we suffered through the first day back with coffee and early bedtimes, and then we were fine.

Because my husband travels a lot for work, he had saved up his rental car points.  We were able to rent a car in Seattle for 10 days for a little over a hundred bucks. Before we rented the car, we got around Seattle by bus and by Uber, which thrilled the kids.

We chose our activities in Seattle and Olympic National Park carefully, considering what really sounded fun and interesting to us. Some of the activities cost a lot of money, but that's what the savings were for!  We went on the Great Wheel of Seattle and on an under-the-streets walking tour; we explored the Klondike Gold Rush Museum (a national park - free!), and watched boats and migrating salmon at the Ballard Locks (also free!). We stayed with dear friends in Seattle, such a treat. We had to take a ferry to continue our drive to ONP and thoroughly enjoyed the wind, the wake, the novelty of the ferry from top to bottom. We loved the Forks Timber Museum and Makah Museum, but eschewed the (expensive) hot springs at Sol Duc for looking like a regular old swimming pool. We hiked and hiked and hiked - stopping to play in the water, pose in the trees, and just generally luxuriate in the crisp air and gorgeous sky and mountain views.

I had done some brainstorming ahead of time for meals that I could easily source from any grocery store that would be nourishing, cheap, and relatively easy to make, especially with the unknown kitchens in the AirBnBs I had booked.

This is what I did:
Breakfast 1: eggs, toast with butter/honey, fried mushrooms or oranges, coffee, milk
Breakfast 2: peanut butter/honey toast, bananas, coffee, milk
(We rotated between these two breakfasts)
Lunches: all eaten on the go from our backpacks around Seattle or ONP: bread, cheese, sardines (sometimes), pickles, granola bars, apples, seltzer
Dinner 1: jarred spaghetti sauce, spaghetti, steamed fresh broccoli
Dinner 2: grilled salmon with lemon, baked potatoes + butter, lettuce + croutons + olive oil & balsamic
Dinner 3: grilled kielbasa, pierogies sauteed with onion, (frozen) peas
Dinner 4: pasta + canned white beans + frozen spinach + garlic, roasted fresh cauliflower
Dinner 5: grocery store fried chicken, mashed fresh potatoes, sauteed fresh (local!) spinach with lemon + butter

We did eat four meals out when it was otherwise not possible to cook (travel days) or there was a really cool local place we wanted to try, and we also had some ice cream snacks and espresso and such along the way.

Fun with pipe-cleaners while we wait for food; the backpacks eased the tedium at other times, not just the flights

We ate every last scrap except a half-jar of peanut butter before we boarded the plane, and the security people threw our peanut butter away because it was classified as a liquid and thus illegal to take on the plane. Peanut butter as a liquid!

My plane buddy after the red-eye flight, 3:30am in our bodies when the plane landed.

Overall, this trip was a huge success. We did not actually use all of our vacation savings, and we have immediately started building it up again.  I was worried that Phoebe was still too little to benefit much from the trip, but oh my goodness, if you ask her, she will still tell you about the Great Wheel over the ocean and about nurse logs in the Hoh Rainforest and when she rode in the canoe with Mommy and Daddy while Genevieve and Ben had a kayak.  She was perfectly behaved and occupied on the 6-hour flights (another worry of mine), and occasionally she and I stayed at the AirBnB in the afternoon so she could catch up on her naps and mama could, whew, do her introverted thing. Now that I've actually sorted through my photos, I'm going to make a photo book to go with the travel journal we kept - using a coupon for a free book, of course!

Patchwork

I don't care for perfectly matching fabrics, nor do I like totally random; I like to see the fabric all speaking the same language, I'm looking for the theme.  Look at my patchwork here:  to me, all these fabrics have something to say in dark, bold colors.

Utensil/straw rolls made for J

 I literally lay fabrics next to each other to see if they speak the same language.  Their message surprises me constantly!  Like a chorus, maybe, where the different parts create harmony as well as dissonance in service of the whole song.

Hotpads made for my friends R & P

 I know some patchworkers use viewing tools and computer programs to match the fabric to their liking:  good for them, not for me.  I prefer fast and loose with a whiff of mystery:  how will it turn out?  Not always to my liking, but always interesting.

What I Did Yesterday

Friends! I was swept under the tide of big kids' activities this fall, and I dropped everything I could to keep my nose above the water.  For me, that meant keeping up with the laundry, good food, and bills/paperwork, and everything else had to wait. I'm eager to get back to you!  

Last week, Phoebe and I picked out a custom blend of apples to make applesauce: Fuji, Grimes Golden, Gold Rush, and Smokehouse. Twenty bucks for two bushels of apples, a good price.  I really should have read my canning notebook more closely, though, because I would have met my applesauce goal with 1 1/2 bushels.  In the spring sometime, I take inventory of the preserved food in freezer and cupboard, and then I set some targets for the year's preserving.  

So I stashed the apples in the basement until I could clear a day to make applesauce.  Phoebe was keen to help, hooray, so I planned for a day when she did not have preschool, but her help couldn't extend much beyond washing jars.  Hot apples in a food mill are too much for a four-year-old.  

I made a grand total of 33 quarts of applesauce yesterday.  Oh, I was tired! I did not do laundry, go food shopping, or editing.  I stood in the kitchen and canned.  But the resulting applesauce, from those four kinds of apples, is so delicious: deeply rich apple flavor with no sugar needed, thanks to the sweet Fujis.  And now my canning goals for the year are all crossed off.  

Putting some tomato-canning photos in here as well!

Here's my list from this year, basically in chronological order: 

7 half-pints strawberry freezer jam

18 pints frozen blueberries

13 pints frozen sour cherries

25 pints frozen corn

17 pints dilly beans

3 quarts frozen green beans

8 pints pickled red beets

9 pints bread & butter pickles

3 half-pints blueberry syrup

5 half-pints pickle relish

10 pints 7-day sweet pickles

5 half-pints duck sauce

2 quarts frozen grape pie filling

3 quarts grape juice

4 half-pints spiced grape butter

21 pints pizza sauce

14 quarts tomato soup

28 quarts whole tomatoes

7 half-pints pimentos

3 half-pints peach jam

33 quarts applesauce

And I'm back on the laundry today, with a grocery shop planned as well. 

Red Sundress, Almost Kitschy

This is a summer work dress: cool and breezy in 100% cotton, printed and dark enough to look decent through splashes and dirt from canning and gardening, and not restrictive at all for lifting and bending and wrangling and the full workout. I love it!

The bandanna fabric could be cutesy and kitschy; I sort of itched to pair it with rick rack or calico or even some crocheted lace.  But no: cute is not my look.  But still: I wanted just a little pizzazz somewhere.

  Look closely at the yoke in the front:  I hand-sewed running stitches in black and white perle cotton around some of the circles and squares!  Subtle and happy. 

Also, inside the dress, I made the channel for the drawstring out of striped blue cotton and finished the hem in light blue bias tape.  I really need a little fizz somewhere in my clothes, a little patchwork effect if you will.

I used this dress pattern seven years ago, the second dress I ever made for myself.  This time around, I did not widen the bodice, and I'm really pleased with the fit.  I wish I had made the red dress a touch longer.  Also, I have to say I no longer own that plaid sundress because the fabric turned out to be part polyester as plaids often can be, and I really cannot abide that wrapped-in-plastic feeling in the summer.

Genevieve took these photos of me as I ripped the unholy mess of cucumbers out of my raised beds.  That was extremely satisfying. 

The Summer of the Cucumbers

I have accidentally not blogged since June! Hello! How is your summer going now that it is ending? Mine was really nice and I have no reason for the lack of blogging except perhaps I was buried under a heap of cucumbers?

My family loves kosher dills/fermented cukes/sour pickles so much, and I had a hard time finding good pickling cukes, so I decided to use my raised bed space for cucumbers instead of green beans this year. I have tried cucumbers maybe once or twice before and got basically nothing: the vines wilted or the leaves got powdery or something ate everything.

Well. I planted the whole packet of Parisian Pickling Cucumbers, timing them to be ready once we got home from our big Seattle trip (there's a post!) and figuring that I'd only get a handful anyway if I was lucky.  Well no.  Turns out, this is The Summer When All the Cucumbers Grow.  All my friends who planted cucumbers are overflowing and pickling and laughing in disbelief.

As a cucumber novice, I am not very good at getting the buggers at the little pickling size I wanted. Overnight, they grew six inches into logs!  Which were bitter and seedy and tossed on the compost pile.

I made gallons and gallons of fermented cukes (method below).  I also made two batches of bread and butter pickles from the Mennonite Community Cookbook, as well as 7-Day-Sweets, a childhood favorite that involved pouring boiling water over the cukes several days in a row to make them crisp.  Why does this work?  I don't know, but it does.

I made pickle relish, fridge pickles, and salad after salad.  Because I planted so many plants close together and did not water them regularly, but regularly let some of them get too big, I had to deal with bitter cucumbers.  I tried cutting off the stem end and then rubbing it on the cut end until a bitter white foam came out.  I tried salting sliced cukes and then rinsing them.  My best success was slicing cukes and soaking them in salted ice water for about an hour, then draining and rinsing.

Last week, the cucumber plants finally showed signs of slowing down, so I yanked them out.  I still have over 1 1/2 gallons of fermented dills in the fridge, plus fridge pickles, and a crisper drawer full of cucumbers.  On my to-do list:  "decide what to do with cukes."  I guess we will eat pickles for every meal this winter?

Did you plant cucumbers this year and get a roaring crop? Or is something else bursting from your garden?

Fermented Dill Pickles

In a half gallon glass jar, combine:
1 Tbsp. fine sea salt (not iodized)
1 quart room temperature non-chlorinated water
1 Tbsp. dill seeds
1 tsp. dill weed
1-2 garlic cloves, sliced

Stir and/or set aside until salt is dissolved.

Wash and trim ends from small pickling cucumbers - I usually kept them under 4" and a thumb-size diameter. Drop them into the brine, shaking and pushing to fill up the jar but making sure they can all be submerged. May need to add a little more water and salt.   Keep the pickles submerged under brine by filling a smaller jar with water and capping it and setting it in the jar on top of the pickles.
Set jar in room temperature for 48 hours.  Should see foam and bubbling action.  Scrape off the foam before capping and storing in fridge. Keeps indefinitely in fridge. Sometimes I use a cup or so of the brine in a new jar of fermented dills. If you have fresh dill, use 2 heads or so in place of the dried stuff.