The Local Fall Fair

 The very hot and dry weather this summer has made for a difficult growing season for my garden, since I'm using both deep raised beds and large planter pots.   It was difficult to keep them properly watered.  Sometimes they needed watering twice a day, but watering in the evenings usually causes mildew and other difficult to control diseases.   The only plants which seemed to thrive in these conditions were the basil, leaf celery and the peppers!   I was at a club meeting and asked for suggestions to use up some of these peppers as I wasn't thrilled with the pickled pepper recipe I used last year.   The gal on the fair committee said to enter them in the fair as they were a bit low on entries this year.   

So I entered the peppers, and a few other things.  The banana peppers which were rapidly turning red rather than yellow, took 1st place and the mystery hot peppers which weren't supposed to be hot, came second.  I was really pleasantly surprised at getting a ribbon for my meagre gardening results this year.

I also dug through the items I'd made over the past year or so and entered a few things in the hand craft division.  I certainly wasn't expecting to see this 1st place ribbon and a rosette for most points when I peeked in to the exhibit hall when I arrived to demo weaving on the first day of the fair.    

I may have entered more things than I realised.   Not everything won a ribbon.   A few things got the nice little thanks for entering sticker.   I entered 2 shawls from historic patterns, in 2 different sections.  The one section judge wrote lovely comments on the back of the entry tag saying it was  warm and congrats on finding and using an old pattern which was still a good pattern. The little stuffed bear also got a comment on how it was creative and child safe since I used safety eyes on it.

Most of these items are things that I just knit up in the evenings because I hate when the tv goes on and I have nothing productive to do with my hands!

a few items are missing due to lack of space

I was doing a demo on the Saturday with the Weavers and Spinners.   The fair was super busy and the two gals who were demonstrating table looms, spent the entire 5 hours teaching kids and adults alike, how to throw a shuttle, change sheds and use the beater bar.   It was totally awesome.  I usually bring my spinning wheel, but didn't this time, because sometimes people spend so much time talking to me about spinning and telling me their memories of relative spinning that they don't check out the weavers quite so much.   Next year, if we're invited back, I'll bring the wheel out to play.  I kind of missed that this year, but I'm happy I simply had a my little inkle loom because the other two demonstrators got so much attention.  It was great.  On Sunday I took my display of Dorset Buttons.  It was much quieter that day, so I had time to catch up with another demonstrator which I don't see very often.

The local fair is interesting because they've done away with a mid-way.  They've geared it to younger kids, with pony rides, games, bouncy things but kept it relatable for most others in the community by keeping the horse shows, the sheep show, the 4-H classes, the handcraft division, crops competition and live music the whole weekend.  I did demos both days and it was a great, albeit tiring weekend!

Eliza Acton's Lemon Tartlets

More trees are changing colour.  The fields of beans are drying out, as are the fields of corn.  Today I saw squash and pie pumpkins in the shops.  We went from crazy hot weather, to its fall for sure.  Last night it dropped to 5°C.  Poor Dion slept draped over whoever he could find to give him some warmth.  It's definitely autumn!  With the cooler weather upon us it gives me ample opportunity to bake!

I made the following recipe for Common Lemon Tartlets  as found in Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families, 1859.

It was a very pretty tart.  Because my chooks have been free ranging all summer, their egg yolks are very dark yellow which helped with the colour.  

A patty pan tin is a small, individual pie tin about 3-4 inches diameter.  They are often in fancy shapes, fluted, hearts, shells, etc.  

Fluted small pie tins with removable bottoms worked really nicely for this.   I'd recommend pre-baking the pastry for a few minutes because the pie crust didn't quite fully bake before the filling was done.  Prick the pastry a lot with a fork for steam to escape and to help the pastry stay flat.  Pie weights, beans or rice might work too.   I made some in tart shells, in a muffin pans.  They weren't as pretty but worked just fine.

350°F is a moderate oven temperature.

This was easy to make.   It's very pretty.     With the eggs and butter, making a rich base, with the sugar and lemon juice, you get sort of lemon flavoured omelette.   The butter softens the lemon flavour.  I wasn't a huge fan of lemon flavoured eggs, although it was pleasant enough.   I'd used the little patty pans for other pies though as it's a fairly impressive presentation.  

Sunshine Cake - 1896

 This cake was definitely sunny.  It's a sponge cake and was only a little fussy to make.  It was well worth the effort and the eggs though.  It was pretty and tasty! It's definitely a party cake or when you need something to impress!   It was from the 1896 edition of the Boston Cooking School Cook Book, by Fannie Farmer.  

I followed the recipe pretty closely.   The only thing I deviated with was that I added the sugar  slowly, in several additions once the egg whites were half beaten, since I was using an electric stand mixer.    I sifted the flour with my sieve first, and spoon the flour into my measuring cup.  Then I resifted the 1 cup of flour with the cream of tarter to evenly distribute it.  

Things to know -

This was much easier to make than it seems.   Just remember to be gentle with folding in the flour and check the bottom of the bowl so that all the flour gets folded in evenly.    I would have sifted the flour in, but managed to stick the sieve in the sink, so it was wet.  

An angel food cake pan has a tube in the centre so heat circulates and bakes cake from both the outside and the inside at the same time.  If you don't have one, then I think that maybe a not too complicated bundt pan would work.   Just remember to not grease the pan so that the batter can cling to the sides while rising during baking.   

Remember to cool the cake upside down.   My pan has little legs on it for this but before I had it, I just set it on something to keep it off the ground.   This keeps the cake light and fluffy as it cool settle and get a little heavy otherwise.

Moderate oven is 350 °F.   The suggested time was pretty accurate.   The cake should be nicely risen,  puffy and bounce back when gently touched.   

I will make this again but I'll drizzle it with a simple glaze of icing sugar, a few drops of water and either lemon juice or vanilla.  I think it would just add that little bit extra fanciness.

Garden and spinning update!

 Gosh it's gotten cool here.  I harvested the last cucumber on the plants, and with no more flowers, that was the last for the season.  I ate it for lunch the next day.   There are still tomatoes on the vine, but they are all quite green.   We're supposed to have some warmer weather next week, so I'll leave them and hope they get a bit bigger.  There are tons of Hungarian yellow peppers, although I've no idea if they are hot or not.  There are Jalapeños left to harvest.  There are also a lot of them, however they are quite short.  The mystery pepper plant is all still green, but they are very long and slender, so I'm guessing some sort of hot chill pepper. I'll harvest them sometime soon.  Other than that, there are only herbs left to harvest; parsley, basil and soup celery.  I'm going to plant one bed with garlic this fall.   Seed garlic should be in the feed store in a couple of weeks.   

I got 100 g of lovely, deep pink roving from A.  I spun it into singles and then decided that I was going to spin up more singles to ply it, in a different colour, since this was hand dyed and I couldn't match it.   A gave me another 100g of the same fibres which I spun and dyed into a lovely soft grey.   I plied them together, deciding to make a matching hat and mittens.  I knit the mittens first, and then had to figure out how to make the hat fit the remaining bit of yarn.   Finally, after knitting and ripping out hats 5 times, I knit up a sample on a new toy, an old, but lovely working knitting machine.   I made a hat with just a few metres of yarn to spare!

The sky was quite moody on our last hike.   It looked like rain clouds, but it didn't rain and a surprising amount of sunshine broke through the clouds.  The river had a lot scummy stuff on it, which I've not noticed before.  It was a very hot summer though, so that could have been the reason.   There were a lot of dogs on the trails that day.   I generally don't mind them running off leash, as I've only had 1 incident with an aggressive dog.   However, a few owners have decided that they don't need to clean up after their pups, which sadly made for some areas where you had to watch where you stepped, rather than enjoy the scenery!

The Rudbekia or black eyed Susan's were pretty much past their peak blossoms.   The large field of them was showing a lot of spent flowers and not very many blooms.   On the home stretch of the trail, walking beside the river, I saw these pretty blooms.  They look like they should be Rudbeckia but their petals are short and roundish.  I looked it up though and it seems there is a related flower called the Brown eyed Susan and it looks like this!  Pretty enough and nice that it was blooming when it seemed like only the golden rod and a few Queen Anne's Lace stragglers were left.   

I gave away my LeClerc Fanny counterbalance loom to a friend.  She's been looking for one locally but nothing in easy access has been for sale.   The one that came through the guild went to another member.  Since I'd not used it since I strained my shoulder weaving a couple of years ago, I felt it was time to pass it on.   I got this loom with  requirement to pass on another loom.  I have given away a 36 in Mira jack loom, a tapestry loom, a 5 ft. triangle loom and a 15 inch new Dorothy.  I think I have payed it forward enough.   I gave all of these away without any requirements though, just to enjoy and use them.   When my friend picked up the loom, she dropped off a couple of knitting machines she had in her garage.  One which is a plastic bed and the other that she felt I'd enjoy more, was a metal machine.  I've been playing with it and it's quire enjoyable.  It's fast and has a fairly big learning curve like the sock machine.  Really it's just practice and being willing to take off the tangles and figure out what you did wrong.  I had a few of those.

Summer is winding up!

 The summer is slipping by far too quickly.  The ridiculous heat and humidity we've had so much of this year, is something I'm not sure I'll adapt to easily.   However, there are already signs showing how short our summers are.  I drove down a nearby road the other day and there was a tree with a lone branch already turning colours.   I know this could also be due to lack of moisture, but I'm still not sure I'm ready for the leaves to turn colour.   Hubby also brought in a load of kindling yesterday.  I asked if it wasn't too early for that, but he pointed out that we'll likely have to have our first fire in 4 to 6 weeks.  Plus there are the crickets.  They are an end of summer bug; a noisy, loud, end of summer bug.

Speaking of bugs.   I noticed 3 big caterpillars on my parsley plant.  I looked them up and they were parsley worms, or the caterpillars that turn into Swallowtail Butterflies.   The next day there were only 2 of them, and today there aren't any.  They were very slow and hardly moving and large enough that a friend who has watched some all summer, said they were ready to spin their cocoons.   I looked around a bit but didn't see any cocoons, so I'm hoping they found a safe place and weren't dinner for the chooks, who have been hanging around begging for leftovers and treats!   I also hope if they did spin cocoons that they have time to complete their metamorphosis  before it turns too cold here.

With only 1 tomato plant, which was supposed to be a cherry tomato but has turned out to give large,
yellow albeit delicious fruit, I purchased a couple of baskets of tomatoes.  I quickly peeled them, chopped them up and tossed them into the canner.   I've done 2 batches this way.  It means 2 hours at most at one time for canning, unlike having a bushel and it taking 2 full days to do them up.   I remembered how easy it was that year that my tomatoes ripened slowly and I had a canner load every 3 days or so.   That was really the best way to do it.

I'm passing on my big counter balance loom.   I have a smaller jack loom which has been unused for well over a decade.  I've decided to clean it up and switch them out since the counter balance is just a bit too big to be comfortable these days.   A friend wants it so hopefully two of us will be happy about this.

I put this on the rigid heddle loom last night.   Mary Maxim is having their tent sale and while they tend to have a lot of middle of the road yarns for quality, nice but not exceptional, their prices, especially at the sale are decent.   They didn't have much sock yarn, but this stuff was nice.   The  only thing is that it is DK weight, and sort of in-between reed sizes.   It's interesting because of the way the colour changes are painted.  I thought it might be more serendipitous plaid like but it's not at all.  It's lovely in this part, with the section which is mainly white, but a little different in the next colour change with the darker blue and the little black bits.    This photo was taken at night, so despite the flash, it is dull.   The white is nice and creamy and the blue parts area. really nice shade.  The vertical black spots are great, but the part I'm not sure about is when the black and blue are in the weft, and go horizontally.  I don't have enough of this yarn to cut out the blue and black sections, and have enough yarn for the weft left and it wasn't cheap enough to grab another ball to play with, so I'm going with it.  I won't really know what it's like until it's off the loom and washed.  It could end up being lovely.

Rant and summer colour update

We saved up all our pennies for 5 years because we needed a new car.  The old truck was on the road for 2 or 3 years longer than we would have liked.   We shared my car last year because winter safety and then general safety, was more important than me getting out of the house, which was a bit difficult sometimes, but it's what was needed.   We did without a lot, stopped purchasing unnecessary stuff, used our leftovers, stopped eating out at restaurants, carefully weighed costs vs expectations  for classes etc, and I mended a lot of clothes.   It's not that we did totally without, as we took small vacations etc but were actively saving for the car first, now a new roof and to get 2 mature trees professionally removed because the previous owner planted them in a stupid spot: both of them in different stupid spots!  

 So why do some people find this an issue?   Like I'm supposed to just go and spend whatever I want whenever, when I have a budgeted amount of mad money for the year and refuse to go over my budgeted amount?    I have to pick and choose what I do, and I'm okay with it.   Somehow I don't think anyone else should be ticked off that we chose to find a way to make our budget work well for us!

Rant over and it was due to comments and actions of some acquaintances and friends.  And nope, just because we have our car now, I still can't afford to get that or do that.  By the way the car is nice.  It's not horribly special or exotic but all cars are stupidly expensive right now, so what can you do? 

This little guy, or his relatives have lived in our woodpile since we moved here.   He's not overly tamed or friendly but he's getting better about not racing off as soon as I try to take a picture of him.   I'm not a huge fan of small rodent creatures living this close to the house, but he's better than some it could be.  I do mean that I'd freak a bit if there was a honking huge rat sitting there, like we used to see sometimes on the farm!  We lived on a road with almost all dairy farms, so there were tons of them when someone tried to eradicate them from a barn.  ICK!

The black eyed Susans were out in full force on our last walk.   The field that had all the poppies in the spring is now filled with these and some clumps of bergamot.   I really wonder if someone tossed a bunch of seed out into that field, or if they are natural.  There are just so many of them.   My only experience with wild flowers in unused field areas, is from a different area, with less farming and more bush, and a colder climate, so maybe all these flowers are normal for this climate zone?

One of our favourite trails has several different trail routes you can take.  It's a mix and match thing, giving lots of choices on how long, what sort of terrain and what you'd like to see on the trail.  One part of the trail runs through this spot, with a single bit of railway track persevered.   It's fun and an odd spot for something like this, but it fits.  Despite there being 2 different working railway tracks on two sides of the conserved area, there is a little bit you can safely walk on and have fun with.

Elecampane.   I planted this because I'd read some natural dyeing information which suggested that you could get black with the roots.   Someone warned me you might never get rid of it once it was planted, but I thought that I was safe.   It has giant leaves on the base, with a few small leaves up the very long stalk and a rather spindly flower.  It's not full, it gets scraggly easily.  I think it will dye a yellow, but I dug up the whole patch to try the roots once to see if it gave black and got nothing but a lovely clear dye bath.   And now, after having dug up my whole plot of the flower, it's growing in other parts of my garden?  Like how does it do that?  Like madder, it's not a horribly lovely plant, but I guess at least it's not prickly like madder is!

Garden update and CSM trouble

 We've had 2 lovely summer days which were cool enough at night for good sleeping, and not hot, humid nor windy during the day.   It's been such a nice change from those crazy warm days.   It's been so hot that some days, it was too warm to fuss with weeding the garden.  While I normally water the garden beds mid afternoon, so the plants have time to dry properly to minimise the risk of powdery mildew, blight or other diseases, there was one evening I actually watered the garden beds because it had been so hot I didn't think the plants would survive the night without water.    We've had a bit of rain in between, so mostly I haven't had to water a lot this summer.   

Due to the blight issues last summer, I only planted a single tomato plant this year.   I'll hunt around at the market or see if there are local farmers selling their extras when I want to put them up.   Not my favourite way, but it gives the garden a break this year.   So the single tomato plant I chose was a sweet 100, a cherry tomato type that I plant for both use in salads and for just eating out of hand when I'm working in the garden.  While all the plants in that tray had little plant stakes declaring that they were all indeed Sweet 100, this one obviously was mislabelled.   These are not cherry tomatoes!  Nor do I have any idea what variety I might have here.  It's fruiting already though, so that's nice.

I planted more pepper plants than I usually do.   There wasn't a lot of variety choice this year, unless I wanted to spend half a day hunting through different garden centres.  The large one at the grocery store had minimal choices and they weren't looking all that happy.   I usually just go to the feed store up the road and get whatever they have unless it's something special that I really want.  So this year I planted Hungarian hot peppers, Jalapeños and one plant without a tag, in a tray with several different varieties.  I planted no sweet peppers because they are easy to find locally during the summer.

I have baby cucumbers too, from some old seed I found in a packet from a year or two ago.   It's some fancy variety I think, but since I couldn't find any cucumber seeds at the shop, I thought that it was worth the trial.  I had 4 seeds and 3 plants grew.    I also did zucchini that way, from seed in a packet that I seemed to have ripped off the variety.   I had 2 seeds and lucky me, I have two plants, one already flowering.     I planted onion sets but they need weeding desperately but I've held off due to the number of mosquitoes in the cooler evenings.

I took apart my CSM (Circular Sock Machine) to clean it.  It took several hours getting the cylinder clean due to yarn fuzz.   Then I put it together wrong and had to put a call into my mentor to send her videos of what it was doing, which she diagnosed over the phone, told me how to fix it.   It took me 5 minutes to fix, since I just put something in the right place, but the wrong location, if that makes sense.   Anyway, everything on this machine, a Legare 400, needs to be set up at 6 o'clock to be in the correct location - crank hand, yarn carrier and making sure the ribber stop is also correctly places.   So I'm going to see how it works by making my daughter hiking socks for her birthday.   She liked the shorties I make for myself for the summer, but wants them just a little bit higher to fit in her hiking boots.