Halloween Happiness

Joy is...



watching Two Little Girls carve their pumpkins.



Ooey, gooey fun.


Sloppy, messy, slimy giggles.






Wishing everyone a Happy Halloween! Have fun, and be safe!

Rawr!

I'm loving that it's getting dark so early these days. There's no time for gardening after dinner any more. Instead, there's an hour of dark before bed, time spent in the living room with my girls. Last night they ate popcorn and colored, while I read a story out loud and knitted. An evening like that affords its own sense of peace.

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I keep seeing dinosaur hats on Ravelry and in friends' blogs, and decided it was time to go ahead and make one.

Chloe is modeling it, but I made it for a friend of Cora's for his fourth birthday. No pattern used, one wasn't really needed. More details on my Ravelry if you want to make one.

After Chloe saw it she asked, "Do you think there might have been pink and purple dinosaurs, too?" Add a pink and purple dino hat to my list of things to make. :-)

Coring Pears the Easy Way

Every once in awhile, I come across some utterly fabulous tip for making kitchen work easier. My friend Katie passed this one on to me, and I'm forever grateful!

If you've ever tried coring pears, you'll know that it's tedious work. Of course, it's not bad if you're only coring a pear or two, but if you happen to need to remove the cores from forty pounds of pears, it can be slow going.

Unless you've got a melon baller.

Just cut the pear in half and use the melon baller to scoop out the core. It makes for the prettiest pear halves you've ever seen, and it's about a million times faster than trying to use a knife.

Do feel free to share any other ingenious kitchen shortcuts here - I'm all ears! :-)

The End of the Canning Season

Happily, canning season is coming to an end. Aside from possibly one more box of apples, I've finished all I plan to do for the year. And oh man, is it satisfying to be able to say that!



I haven't written much about canning this year, mostly because it's all the same stuff I wrote last year, and the year before that. Nothing's changed much except that I can kick out jars of canned goodness much more quickly with each passing year.



Here's the list of what's in the "pantry" (read: shelves in the basement. Because I have no real pantry.)

Peaches: 16 quarts
Nectarines: 5 quarts
Apricots: 7 quarts
Pears: 10 quarts
Tomatoes: 15 quarts

Strawberry jam: 16 pints
Apricot jam: 3 half-pints
Apple jelly: 5 pints
Peach jam: 8 pints
Cherry preserves: 3 half-pints
Applesauce: 8 pints

Pear chutney: 13 half-pints
Salsa: 19 pints

Bread & butter pickles: 7 pints
Zucchini pickles: 3 pints
Dill pickles: 3 pints

Apple pie filling: 7 quarts
Apple cider: 4 quarts

I just added it up: 152 jars of food. Wow.

Since peach season in August, I've spent about four hours canning each week, usually a couple of hours on free afternoons, after school is finished and the girls are enjoying some free time (or hang-out-in-the-kitchen-with-Mom time.) It's tiring, but not overwhelming.

And I'm done! We'll have enough fruits, sauces, jams, jellies and pickles to last well into summer next year. Feasibly, all I'll have to buy is bananas. We can snack on canned fruits, have them for breakfasts and desserts all through the winter. I've got about 15 pints of dried fruits as well, which make for lovely snacks.



I'm in the mood for a bit of math. Let's see how much all this food costs to put by. Because math is cool, right?

Peaches - 4 boxes @ $10
Nectarines - 1 box @ $5
Tomatoes - 4 boxes @ 5.50
Pears - 2 boxes @ $8
Apples - 2 boxes @8
Strawberries - 8 pints @ $2
Cherries - 2 lbs @ 1.50
Apricots - free from a neighbor's tree

So about $118 in fruit. All the vegetables I grew in the garden. The costs of the other ingredients I'll estimate at about $50, which seems high except that I use organic raw cane sugar for all the fruit and jellies. That also includes the boxes of pectin, and extra vegetables, spices and such for the salsa and chutney. Figure another $30 for lids for all the jars. So about $200, rounded up, for 152 jars of mostly organic food, or approximately $1.30 per jar.

A jar of organic jam costs $4. Half-pints of chutney sell at farmer's market for $6. A quart of organic canned fruit is almost $5.

I have no desire to do *that much math. But clearly, I'm saving money. A lot of it.

And this food is local! Well, most of it is, anyway. I've talked to the farmers, I know many of them by name. I can ask them whether they spray their crops, or use chemical fertilizers. There's the proof that eating organic and local really is possible, and doesn't have to be that expensive. Is it a lot of work? Well, yes... but it's enjoyable work. It's work that allows for time spent chatting and singing with my daughters or friends in the kitchen, and enjoying the feeling of accomplishment that comes from knowing I'm feeding my family well. And it rarely actually feels like work.

More and more moms my age are canning every year it seems, and I love hearing about it! Wal-Mart sold out of their canning supplies this year, along with most other stores here in town. I think this whole canning/preserving thing is really taking off (for the second time around.)

A New Bedtime

Bed time is sacred in our house. Only on very rare occasions does it get messed with. My daughters are always in bed at eight o'clock. They are permitted to read or do other quiet activities until they fall asleep, but for this mama, quiet time commences at eight each night. Especially now with no more nap times, I need a couple of hours to myself at the end of the day if I'm to maintain the level of sanity I need to actually raise these children.

So it's a really big deal when I write that I raised The Oldest's bedtime. She's allowed to stay up til nine now.

Somehow, when I wasn't looking, this little girl went and grew up! She's matured, become quite responsible and dependable. She was at her real dad's house for a day this weekend, so I was taking care of her chores too, and I realized how much more it felt like I was doing. She's really, truly helpful! Not "little girl helpful" - stirring the bowl of muffin batter or haphazardly shoving her own clean clothes into drawers - but truly helpful, honestly making a difference when it comes to keeping our home neat and tidy.

She feeds the chickens and the dog, she empties the dishwasher and loads the rinsed dishes, she sorts the recycling, puts away all the laundry except Mommy and Daddy's, makes her bed and (mostly) cleans her room. At any time I can ask her to dust the living room or clean the bathroom and she'll do a great job of it. During this harvest time, when I'm in the kitchen for a couple of hours on most days, she's often in there helping me. She's peeled ten pounds of carrots in one sitting, she peeled, pitted and sliced a whole 20 pound box of peaches for canning, she dices tomatoes for the freezer.

Obviously, it's not that she does all of that every single day, but she does it as needed. And here's the kicker - She does it with a good attitude!

Okay, well, mostly. But ya know, there are times that I want to pout about washing the dishes, too. Usually she's standing next to me cheerfully going about her tasks. It's not infrequent for her to come to me and say, "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

What a blessing this little girl is to me.

And so, I raised her bedtime to nine o'clock. Staying up late is special to a little girl, and this little girl deserves it. Staying up later means you're more responsible, and this sweet girl has become amazingly responsible. It gives her a whole hour of time without her sister, time to play just what she wants without interruption. It gives us time to chat if we want to, or to sit and knit quietly together.

Seeing that my girl is growing up is killing me. I'm not ready for her to move into the "young lady" stage yet, and she's nearing it quickly. But seeing her grow up, and seeing who she is becoming, is utterly heartwarming, too.

Knitting Bits: Yarn Shopping with the Oldest

With the cooler weather we've been having, I've been struggling with my desire to ignore the garden and knit instead. I gave in. The garden is in sad disarray as I sit cheerfully in the shade and knit to my heart's content.

I took Chloe yarn shopping for her winter sweater today. I learned a few years ago, after I spent two weeks knitting an adorable sweater for her, that she is not the type of girl to overlook comfort for the sake of cuteness. It was a bit scratchy, that cute little sweater, and so I had to beg her and bribe her every time I put it on her. She wants a sweater that is loose fitting, with sleeves long enough to cover her hands, a hood, and the softest yarn one could possibly find.

So we spent half an hour scouring the yarn aisles at Hobby Lobby this afternoon. We were after something worsted weight, and purple... unless she changed her mind on the color once we got there. After years of watching me in a yarn store, she's mastered the art of fondling yarn. She walks along, hands out, squeezing skein after skein of purple yarn. If one feels like it may be soft enough, it must endure the next test: she rubs it on the inside of her forearm, and then on her cheek. That's enough to make most of the yarn go right back into the bin. Of all the yarn varieties that Hobby Lobby had to offer, only two passed the cheek-rubbing test. And of those, only one had a shade of purple she thought was suitable.

And so I am now knitting a top-down raglan cardigan out of plum-colored velveteen plush yarn. Top-down allows me to make the sleeves just the right length, and I've altered the pattern to include a hood. No lace, no cables, not even appliqued flowers - "just plain", said my Little Girl who is clearly growing up. I did convince her to let me use mismatched antique buttons down the front, because "just plain" isn't in my vocabulary.

I'm happy to be knitting again. :-)

A Houseguest

We had a house guest visit us in the kitchen this afternoon. We weren't expecting her, and so she took us quite by surprise.



She seemed a bit perturbed that we had moved her food source indoors. She marched across the counter and promptly began exploring. She found the dish soap fascinating.



As much as we enjoyed the impromptu science lesson, and would have gladly had her stay awhile, we thought she'd appreciate being replaced in her cozy home in the basil pot.

Fall Dresses for Little Girls

I'm still on Housework Hiatus.

I finally gave in a bought Little Girls, Big Style by Mary Abreu. I've been eying it for some time now at the local fabric shop. And then I used it to make some dresses for Two Little Girls for fall.

Cora's is the Knotty Apron dress - an attached faux apron and knots instead of buttons on the straps. Love how it makes her look like a little peasant girl.



Chloe's is the Pocket Pinafore dress. I had to alter the pattern up a couple of sizes - the book only goes to a size 6. The straps attach with suspender clips.



I love the book, and highly recommend it. These patterns are super simple - primarily rectangles cut and sewn and gathered. Anyone who can sew a straight line could make these outfits without much difficulty. I will say that the amount of fabric called for was way more than what I needed. I have tons of leftover fabric.

The best thing to do with fabric leftover from little girl dresses?



Make doll clothes, of course!



I used an old McCall's doll clothes pattern, altered a bunch, to make exact replicas of the girls' dresses. Basking in the glory of being a mom to little girls. :o)

Notes on Preserving: Frozen Eggs

Wanna see something gross?

Yum... egg cubes!

I realize how nasty this looks (and sounds) but chickens don't lay nearly as many eggs in the winter, and that's not too far off. So I'm trying to be proactive. I looked at many different articles about freezing eggs and settled on this one from Chickens In The Road. The technique is simple - crack the eggs into a colander, smash the yolks, and let the eggs drain through into a bowl. The resulting mixture is then poured into ice cube trays and frozen. Two cubes is about equal to one egg.

Note: eight year old little girls love cracking eggs. Two dozen eggs kept mine happily busy for half an hour.

I don't plan on cooking up a batch of scrambled eggs with these, but I figure they'll be useful in all the winter baking that we usually do.

I've also heard that you can just stick whole eggs in the freezer and then thaw and use them successfully. Has anyone tried that? What other methods for preserving eggs are there - I'm open to suggestions!

FO - Flowers of Fall

This whole homeschooling-homesteading mom thing is really putting a damper on my love for making things. I vaguely remember having time to knit, once upon a time ago, but it hasn't happened any time lately.

With the cooler fall weather settling in, I finally put my foot down and made some time to do a bit of knitting. I rebelled against the housework, even threw the to-do list in the trash. Then I poured myself a glass of wine (at 3:00 in the afternoon) and camped out in my favorite Adirondack chair beneath the shade of the elm tree in the front yard. It was lovely, and so very needed for my sanity.

And the product of my relaxing afternoon made it all the more satisfying:

Flowers of Fall hat by Brownie Knits



I love giant flowers on Little Girl heads. Makes me wish I was four so I could rock the giant flower look.