BrambleStitches

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

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

I hope you’re all enjoying your Halloween. Gavin barely fits into the zebra costume I made for Olga two years ago, but since I was too lazy tired to make new ones this year, he’s wearing it anyway. Olga opted for Magical Angelina Ballerina Fairy Girl, thankfully pulled together out of things we had. Next year, there will be something new. I promise.

And this year, after many failures, I actually looked up directions for roasting pumpkin seeds, rather than winging it, and I’m happy to report that they turned out delicious.

This dream of mine

I know I harped on about painting the fence in my last post, but you really can’t appreciate just how long it takes to paint pickets until you’ve done it. I think painting probably took twice as long as everything else combined, including digging and setting new fence posts, hassling the lumber yard, and hanging the gate (although we all agree, we’d rather paint another fence than hang that gate again).

The weather has been a little touch-and-go here, so some days we blew off work to paint. (Of course we always make up for it… )

We used a taught string as a guide for the tops of the pickets (you can barely see it in the photo above to the left of my head) and a 2×4 scrap as a spacer between pickets. I held up a spirit level every few pickets and made adjustments when needed. We’re using special screws that are “dactrotized” and apparently won’t rust or corrode in our marine environment.

We’re not quite finished putting up pickets, but many of my neighbors have already stopped to say how much they like the fence. I love it.

This dream of mine

Way back in July we started working on beefing up the existing fence in front of the house. I wanted an enclosed yard so the kids could play out there. The boundary fence on the north side of the house was also not in the right spot, so we moved it and reclaimed about 500 square feet of our yard.

This has really been my dad’s project, but I’ve helped as much as I can.

In order to get the kind of pickets I wanted, we had to make them. We ordered 1×6 and 1×8 8-foot premium cedar fence boards. We ended up hand picking through them, because a lot of them came in warped, cracked, etc. Also any boards with large knots down the center were put aside. First we cut the boards to get two 3.5-foot-long boards. (The extra cedar we put aside as scrap wood.) We ripped all the 8-inch wide boards in half, and 1/3 of the 6-inch wide boards in half. We ended up with an equal number of 6-inch-wide and 3-inch-wide pickets, and twice as many 4-inch-wide pickets. I wanted to alternate pickets – narrow – medium – wide – medium – narrow – medium – wide – medium – …

To get nice rounded tops on three different sized pickets, I hunted down three suitable templates. For the wide pickets, an empty paint can worked. For the mediums, a large can of tuna, and for the smallest pickets, a can of peaches was right. I traced the template onto the best end of each picket, and Dad cut most of them out.

Then we painted. And painted. And painted–that tedious and never-ending job. Cedar that is going to be painted has to be sealed. It’s something about the sap staining through the paint, or whatnot. Anyway, I didn’t want to worry about it, so we primed all the pickets with oil-based exterior primer. That stuff stinks and takes forever to dry. I finally got the last of it out of my hair this morning, and I haven’t used it in about a month. Also, it transfers to couches quite easily. We used up an entire 5-gallon bucket and had to buy more. These boards just soaked it up.

But once everything was primed, the top coat went on pretty quick. Gavin got to help with this part. He really got into it, although Grandpa made him the scapegoat for most of the grass that ended up painted to the boards. I know he looks very paint-free in that picture, but I assure you it is entirely a trick of the lens. He managed to paint his overalls to his boot at one point. Luckily, he’s about to outgrow those clothes anyway.

Part 2 tomorrow when I get around to it…

This dream of mine

…the newest member of the Tuttle family, currently known as Baby Dango, due to join us in June of 2010.

This dream of mine

All the trim work on the windows is done now, and after living with them for a few weeks, I know these extra wide windowsills were a good choice. The windows have become furniture in the house. I can set down my coffee and lean on the sill to see what’s going on outside,  Gavin has turned his into a racetrack for matchbox cars, and Olga can gallop her ponies around the room.

The windowsills are made from 1×8s, and we used one of my Baba’s pot lids to make the corner radius. If she knew, I’m sure she’d say something like, “See, I told you not to throw that away. Look how useful it turned out to be.”

We’re really enjoying the new windows. They let in so much light that the whole house seems more cheerful. I’ve noticed a definite reduction in drafts, too. And having windows that lock has certainly helped me to feel more at home.

I haven’t finished painting all of the window trim yet, but I’ve put two coats of semi-gloss on the windows in the master bedroom and in Olga’s bedroom. I’ll try to get most of the painting done this week, but I may not have much time since deadline is creeping up on me again.

While Tony was trimming the insides of the windows, Mike was working on the outside, carefully trimming and nailing in little wedges to make the trim look like it was original to the house, without damaging any of the aluminum siding. You really can’t tell now that the windows are recent additions. They look like they’ve always been here.

This dream of mine