I made flan a couple of times in October. Crystalized sugar makes nifty designs when you pour cold water on it. Can you see the very tired, nearly dead (and very droopy looking) horse in here?
Catching up with October – 4 of 8
Apples & flat lap grinders…. all else is temporarily on hold.
I bought a flat lap grinder last week and only just today got around to assembling it. It took a while (there are screws that are threaded so that they loosen to the right…. doh!) and I’m going to be honest with you —- after turning it on and off a couple of times and watching the motor spin so fast that the whole machine kind of sidled & practically jumped sideways on my countertop, I’m a little scared of using the thing. But I will. I just need to step out and pick up some distilled water for it before trying anything.
In other news, I don’t think I should be allowed to go to any produce farms with 11 frogs. I thought I learned my lesson with the tomato insanity business earlier this summer, but no.
You see, I now have 49 pounds of apples to process…
😮
I <3 fall
Beets as art?
CSA brought some nifty stuff last week…..
This is a beet that doesn’t stain your hands (or your insides) bright red. And it’s super cool & swirly on the inside, too!!!
Tomato insanity!
Last year it was strawberries that my roommate and I got carried away with… this year it was tree farm produce….
What you see here is 32 lbs of tomatoes, 15 lbs of tomatillos, and almost 5 lbs of hot peppers.
After much work (and notice it’s not even done!!! there are ever more tomatoes & tomatillos to deal with), it’s turned in to 4 quarts, 11 pints, and 16 half-pints of canned stuff. It also became some fresh salsa and some tomato soup. Click on this picture if you want to see what’s what.
AND this year was the first year ever where I exploded a few jars. Sadly, these all would have been pickled peppers if only they had survived (I tasted a few explodees and they were quite tasty) and so there are only 3 jars left of that particular experiment… at least they made a pretty cool “BOOM!” sound when they blew… (^_^)
Earlier this year I canned three different kinds of jam, too:
– blueberry, low-sugar
– blueberry-cherry-rhubarb
– blueberry-blackberry-gooseberry
The blueberries I picked in Michigan, the blackberries in Chuck’s backyard, and the gooseberries in my yard (they’re one of the new bushes in the highly contested borderline). But I don’t have any pictures of *that* process.
An onion as art?
Entertainment while cooking this weekend – I thought this was pretty cool looking:
Blueberries as big as your head!
Or at least as big as a quarter….
I restrained myself and only picked a little more than 11 pounds of blueberries on my trip this weekend…. if I’m being hoenst with you, I would have picked more if only the blueberry place had been open on my way back home on Sunday….. so Sunday I picked a pint of raspberries instead (from the back yard of a car mechanic near K-zoo – he was the cheerfullest dude I saw all day). The raspberries were pretty normal. No picture needed 😉
Sushi!
At the request of my relatives, I brought sushi over to my aunt’s house on Sunday…. but instead of making it at home, I brought all the *tools* to do it at her house. Here’s some that my mom made:
Candied violets!
Last weekend I went to visit Laura. The original plans were to brunch and go biking, but what we did instead was go for a walk with her two dogs, where we found 2 morels along the way (!!!). After that, we decided we wanted to save some of the violets that her dad would be mowing down in the next week, so we picked a kerjillion of them to make candied violets (and pressed some violets, too). Friends, I am not ever planning on doing that again. Laura, the rest of the day was fantastic —- but what a pain to get candied violets to look nice! They are still drying on top of my microwave. Who wants to try some?
And then I played a little with some digital elph technology. Here are two examples of “color swap”…..
Check out these radioactive orange violets:
Run, Laura, Run!
Attempt at “professional” coffee
ha ha….. this is harder to do than it looks!
