BrambleStitches

Please note this blog's new address: http://www.bramblestitches.com/blog

Wonderful. That pretty much sums up the past couple of months while I’ve been absent from the blog. Erik, my exceptionally hard working and good looking husband, was home for several weeks, so all the festivities of the season seemed extra special. (If you remember, Erik was in Iraq last Christmas.) I could go on and on, but I’ll just leave you with a few little snippets.

There was our Ukranian Christmas Eve supper, which was fantastic. We pulled out all the stops and cooked up a traditional 12-course meal, including holobtsi (cabbage rolls), perogi, borscht, salmon, breads, and a huge assortment of other goodies (most of which I had never made before, which I know violates the rules of hosting a dinner party, but everything turned out delicious).

While we were cooking the aforementioned dinner, our new wood-burning fireplace insert was installed. This was especially welcome, as we had no other heat in the house besides an old, inefficient baseboard heater, and the weather has been unusually cold. Temperatures in Gold Beach rarely drop to freezing, yet we had a couple weeks where night time temperatures dropped into the low 20s, and daytime temps never reached 40. Brrr!

Not including all the holiday cooking, my friend, John, and I have been keeping the kitchen hopping with canning almost every weekend–and sometimes more often–since we started in November. Here are a few jars of delicious spiced applesauce we made, along with a huge batch of honey whole wheat bread. Here’s my new favorite recipe for wheat bread.

And just this week we celebrated Gavin’s 4th birthday with pizza and rootbeer at his favorite pizza joint in town. This kid. He just won’t stop growing. He’s so much fun. He’s developed such a great sense of humor, and he’s always talking (although we can’t always understand him) about something REALLY interesting. (These days that something is almost always centered around Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, his favorite Japanese amime; the box in the picture contains a scale model of his favorite character from said anime, up for nomination as Best Gift of the Century.)

There are a few other notable events from the past couple weeks which I would be remiss to not mention:

My hard working, handsome husband turned 26.

We successfully navigated our way through another BHM deadline (look for the March/April 2010 issue in your mailbox in mid-February).

I passed the half-way mark in my pregnancy with our little Baby Dango, I’m finally over most of the exhaustion of the first trimester, and I’m starting to feel a lot of movement.

It’s going to be a wonderful, busy year here on the Tuttle place. I hope you are all enjoying yourselves as much as we are.

Canning/Preserving, Food, Our house, This dream of mine apple sauce, birthday, bread, canning, Christmas, Gavin, Ukranian, wood heat

These are homemade hamburger buns just cut out and on their second rise. They were so good. Recipe here. It is a bread machine recipe, but I did it by hand.

The hamburger buns were also good for evening entertainment. I turned out the kitchen lights and turned on the oven light and everyone gathered round to watch them bake.

This dream of mine

We’re getting ready for the holidays at work. My dad strung lights on the eave of our building in Gold Beach, and I set up our tree in the front lobby.

* * *

I will be posting mostly photos for the next few weeks. Please enjoy a little peak into our lives this season.

This dream of mine

Thursday we headed up to my folks house outside of town. Lenie prepared this spectacular feast for us. Everything was so delicious. We stayed the night and enjoyed some downtime.

Friday we headed back down the hill and out of town the other way to party down with Erik’s family. Erik was disappointed to miss the festivities, but I passed my cellphone around and everybody talked his ear off until well past his bedtime (on the east coast).

This morning we discovered this huge turkey hen hanging out in our yard. My dad estimated that she must have weighed 20 pounds. She escaped Thanksgiving dinner, but I think she’d make a fine Christmas feast.

This dream of mine

Up for adoption: Two useless cats who couldn’t catch one slow mouse.

This dream of mine

This weekend my friend, John Silveira, came over, and together we canned 33 pints of soup. And we had so much fun that we decided to try to can something every weekend all winter long.

Saturday we made kale soup.

The recipe is here. We made a triple batch. Pressure can pints for 75 minutes at 10 pounds pressure (if you are below 1000 feet sea level).

Sunday we made chicken soup with rice, lentils, yellow peas, and pearl barley. It is the best chicken soup I’ve ever had.

The recipe:

Chicken soup with split peas and lentils

7 cups chicken stock

2 cups vegetable stock

4 chicken thighs, boneless and skinless, cubed

1 large onion, diced

1 large carrot, peeled and sliced thin

2 stalks celery, sliced thin

½ cup red lentils

¼ cup pearl barley

1 cup split yellow peas

¼ cup parsley, chopped

1½ tsp Italian seasoning

1 bay leaf

salt, to taste

fresh ground black pepper, to taste

¼ tsp. cayenne pepper

¼ cup short grain white rice

8 medium size white mushrooms, quartered

8 or more cloves of garlic, minced

Combine all but the last three ingredients in a large pot.  Bring to a boil then lower the heat to a simmer and let it cook for about an hour, stirring regularly to keep it from catching on the bottom of the pot.  If it gets too thick, add some water or more stock.  When the peas and lentils are cooked, add the white rice, mushrooms, and garlic and let cook another 25 minutes.  Remove the bay leaf and serve.

When preparing soups to can, you need to adjust how much time you cook the soup before you can it. Canning takes over an hour at hotter-than-boiling temperature, so things like pasta and rice can get over cooked. What we did with the above recipe was put the peas and lentils in and cooked until they were just tender, then threw the rice, mushrooms, and garlic in and canned it without cooking for the additional 25 minutes.

Pressure can for 75 minutes at 10 pounds pressure (if you live below 1000 feet sea level).

Canning/Preserving

Back in June my brother, Jacob, helped me rip the carpet out of the house, pry up the hundreds of thousands of staples, tacks, and nails, and thoroughly scrub 50-year-old asbestos tile. In August I drove to Lumber Liquidators in Eugene and picked up 1/2 of my order of flooring. Mike, the super talented builder/craftsman/and now licensed contractor (congrats, Mike!), picked up the other half.

In September, when my husband was here for a visit, he and Mike started nailing it down.

And now it looks like this throughout the whole house. This is tiger strand bamboo.

I’m in love. (And look, I even washed the floor before I took this picture. Shiny!)

Here’s a link to the wood flooring I got.

This dream of mine

It’s November. November, people! Wasn’t it just November not too long ago? I’m telling you, Father Time is rolling the seasons out way too fast for me. And the colds. I mean really. Is all this coughing and carrying on really necessary? Last year it felt like we were sick all winter long. I hope we’re not in for a repeat of that.

My mom gave me a tin of Badger brand chest rub this year, and I love it so much that I hardly ever break out the Vick’s any more. It smells delightful and not at all medicine-y, but it works just as well. I try to always reach for this and hot tea before I break out the “real” medicine.

This dream of mine Gavin, Olga, sick