It's a big, big hole in the foundation...

12 in deep x 30 in wide footing poured into hole in foundation

Ready to start laying the bricks and stones

 Sometime ago, many years in the past, the previous owners of this house decided to put in an oil furnace and tank and to add some electrical wiring requiring some electric conduit.   The entry space into the house foundation needed to be about 9 inches x 9 inches.  Granted, the foundation is field stone and quite thick but instead of knocking out one or two stones and making the hole easy to fill, they opened an area the size of a window.  To make matters worse, when they were done the work, they didn't actually fill the gaping hole back up and seal it.  Instead, they tossed a bunch of rubble brick and stone in the hole and put some plastic over it.  They left it.  They left a hole in the foundation large enough to let in animals larger than raccoons, skunks, possums, mountain lions and quite possibly even bear cubs.

We found the hole by accident, when my guys decided that the front flower beds weren't salvageable and were digging them completely up.  They found the seemingly massive hole in the foundation, which was loosely packed with crumbling and disintegrating rubble and had the remains of decades old plastic sheeting, shredded and pretending to offer some sort of protection against the elements and fauna of the area.

Yeah!  Almost done!!!!

I didn't get a photo of the actual hole before the repairs were started.  However in order to facilitate the brickwork, 3 bags of cement were needed to pour a footing about a foot deep. The hopes were to provide support for replacement masonry work.  Several bags of mortar were then used to do the brick and stone work to fill up the hole.  The whole job took the better part of a week and there is still a bit more to finish up, although it is work that can be done from the inside.

It continues to astound me when I think of how many short cuts and cheap solutions the previous owners took instead of just doing a job correctly the first time.  It's like every single simple repair or reno has turned into an epic repair job, even just removing wallpaper or changing out an appliance, sigh.

Colours of September

These Fall Asters  are simply beautiful.  Each night they curl up and the next morning, they are fresh and bright.  These aren't the wild fall asters which grow in our area, are a lovely soft purple and are as hardy as anything.  I'd love some of those as well.   I do love the vibrant pink though.  They've bloomed steadily for several weeks now.

 Autumnal colours are starting.  For a couple of weeks now there have been hints of colour in the trees.  Now it's starting to be unavoidable.  You have to go a bit further north to get absolutely fabulous colours in the leaves but all things considered we don't do too badly.  

 Pumpkins from the garden.  They are Vie d'estampie, which is a variety I've not grown before, at least not with any success.  However these 3 will tell if they are as delicious as I've read about.  If so, I'll grow them again.  If not, I'll probably go back to the standard Sugar Pie, which is sweet and delicious. 

I've tried for several years to get Golden Marguerite (dyer's chamomile) established, with no luck.  Last fall, I simply scattered a few seeds about and then in the spring I also started some seeds to plant out.  The scattered seeds germinated and bloomed all in one summer!  While they're supposed to be a short lived perennial, they are quite hardy once established.  They do tend to give a lot of bright colour all summer long.

Labour Day accomplishments

On the Friday of Labour Day weekend, I picked up a bushel of tomatoes, some extra lemons and a couple of dozen jars.   I spent two days canning tomatoes.  I misjudged on the jars though.  I needed to send someone on a jar run as I just didn't have enough with all the jams and pickles I'd made this year.    I had thought 2 dozen would do it, but needed what I figured would be an extra dozen jars.  We picked up an extra 2 dozen just in case and it's a good thing as I needed one jar out of that carton for the tomatoes.   Since the tomato harvest is down this year according to the news reports, I'm glad to have at least some in the pantry.    

On the Monday, I stripped the garden of all the cucumbers and made more pickles, both garlic dills and bread and butter pickles.  We should have enough for most of the winter now.  The dills I did in spears instead of chunks.   The bread and butters have red pepper, lots of onions and some cauliflower in them to make up for the fact that I was just a bit short of cucumbers.   Several older recipes I found called for the addition of cauliflower, so I decided to try it.  We sampled some from the first batch and they were pretty darned good.  Not nearly as sweet as commercial bread and butter pickles and definitely hotter, due to the addition of a nice little shot of chili pepper flakes.  The second batch doesn't have the hot pepper in it.  I figure we can compare and decide which we want next year but it sure was an easy way to get that "heat" fix without having to whip up a whole meal.

When we shipped the meaties, I moved the new layers into a larger, brighter pen in the coop.  This one has nice roosts and layer boxes and would make a nice home for the girls.  However they had other ideas.  One night I found one of them  out of the pen, in with the older girls.  After shooing her back into her pen every morning, there were two out with the old girls.  Of course, 3 nights later, 3 of the 4 were out with the older girls and I was still scratching my head trying to figure out how they were getting out.   They were staying in the pen all day though so I wasn't horribly worried.  Then a day or two later, I went to feed the chooks and collect eggs and two of them were outside.  Sigh.. I opened the door and let them all out that night and merged the two flocks instead of keeping them separate.  I think I've figured out how they got out but it's too late.   The good thing is that they tend to feed themselves and hardly eat any grain at all.  The bad thing is that the girls were still skittish and one of them won't roost in the barn.  She's chosen a lilac bush just outside the barn door.  However, she'll either get eaten by a predator one night or freeze if I can't get her inside before winter sets in.     I'm not sure how to fix this since she's still pretty wild.  The others come up to me, hang out with the rest of the flock and do the normal chicken flock behavior thing, but this one keeps her distance, spends time alone and doesn't seem to mind being caught out at night in stormy weather.

In a bit of a pickle

One day last week, I went out early to feed the chooks and realized things had changed.  The light was different.  It was more subdued and the deep summer early morning brightness was gone.  The breeze had changed and instead of that sultry southern warm wind, it was a cool north westerly coming through.  Later in the day, no matter how hard that sun shone, it didn't have that intensity that it seemed to have just a few days before.  That night, the tree frogs were deafening in their near unison chanting.  A couple of days ago, I headed out early and there was a flock of geese laying over in a field of golden winter wheat stubble.  The small stream had an eerie feel with the steam rising off of it.   Yep, it's feeling a lot like fall, sigh, and I'm so not ready for it.

The plane socks are finally done.  They've been sitting around almost there for a couple of weeks, with the second sock just needing the toe to be grafted.  Yesterday I sat down and bit the bullet, and grafted that silly thing together, tucked in the ends and voila!, another pair of socks for the impending winter.

Despite the weather, the cucumbers have given us a decent yield.  So many in fact that I wasn't able to keep up with them for just lunches, snacks and salads.   What to do with lots of cucumbers?  Make pickles of course!  The first batch was garlic dills.  Garlic dill pickles tend to disappear pretty quickly, especially when the boys come home for a visit.  I decided to try chunks this time instead of slicing up the cucumbers into spears.   These have to sit at least a week before eating.


Then I came across a recipe for sweet bread and butter pickles which looked delicious and simple.  So I made up a batch of those as well.   Luckily these only take 48 hours before one can sneak a taste.

The only thing about making pickles is of course the timing.  I never seem to make them in the beginning of the summer.  Combined with canning tomatoes, they are like an exclamation point to the end of summer preserving activities.  

More from Mrs. Beeton's Guild to Household Management

The last time I was working at the Bake Oven, I couldn't decide what I wanted to bake.  There are always fixings for soda bread on site, so that is a no brainer.  I'd just picked up a 10 kg bag of flour, so I knew I would also make a yeast bread.   I also had several logs of gingerbread cookie dough still in the freezer, so I knew I'd drag those out as well.  Even a half recipe makes a lot of cookies!    I'd been thumbing and flipping through various early 19th century cook books and had decided that I also wanted to make a cake.   Last time worked so well, by prepping everything ahead of time, so I knew it could be done.  I'd narrowed it down to several recipes, of which several were eliminated due to things like needing 10 eggs and I only had 6 since 2 or 3 of the hens are laying anyplace but where I can find the eggs.   I ended up going with Mrs.  Beeton's Guide to Household Management simply because I have a hard copy facsimile of the first edition of the book, which I can use like a regular cook book.

This is what is left of Mrs.  Beeton's Good Plum Cake recipe.  The use of the work plum in Victorian recipes doesn't actually refer to the fruit we know as plums or prunes today.  Instead it referred to sweet bits of fruit, often currants and raisins.   

This recipe uses only 1/2 cup of butter and has no eggs.  It's a very white cake and was super cumbly until the day after baking.  It's flavoured with currants and candied lemon peel.   It was pretty darned delicious although I'm not sure if it was quite as good as the previous Useful Cake that I baked the last time.

I also baked Mrs. Beeton's recipe for Heavy Gingerbread.  This recipe made 2 8 inch cakes.  It makes a very dense cake.  The flavour is quite strong which goes with the textue.  While I enjoyed it on it's own, it would be perfect with a good cup of tea.   Served with some ice cream, whipped cream or maybe even some Creme Anglais, it would be a stunning and elegant dessert.

18th - 19th century Red Currant Jelly

I'd done some reading up on early Currant jelly recipes.   Several different books have almost the exact same recipe and the others are very similar. 

The exact recipe I used came from The Frugal Housewife or Complete Woman Cook.  This edition is dated 1796 out of Philadelphia.  I've also seen an edition dated 1803.

 

It takes a little bit of interpretation to read this volume as it uses two different letters for S, in 3 different places.   If it's an S at the end of a word, it's written as an S as we know it today.  If it is at the beginning or in the middle of a word, then it's written as an f.  This works well, except of course when f at the beginning of a word is actually an f.  Then you have to read it to be certain of the meaning.  Thus stript (stripped) is written ftript., stalks is ftalks, stone is ftone, skim is fkim, fast is faft and fine is fine.  Once you get the the rhythm going, it becomes fairly easy to read.

  Having finally decided on a game plan, I took out the frozen currants and stuck them in a stock pot.   The original recipes call for putting the currants in a stone jar and setting that in a pot of water in order to cook the currants to make the juice which is needed for the jelly process.   However not having a stone jar, crock or even a glass jar which would work for the amount of currants and because they were frozen into 4 separate solid masses I chose to dump them unceremoniously into my stock pot and cook them directly over the heat.   I added 1 cup of water to the pot in order to help keep them from burning as they thawed out.   I put the stove on very low heat and watched carefully.   Because the heat was so low, it took a long time to thaw but I didn't have any issues with burning the currants.

I have 2 jelly bags which I purchased for this purpose.  I'd looked for cheesecloth but couldn't find any until after I'd already bought these.  Even so, it wasn't really fine or sturdy cheesecloth, which I wasn't sure would work, so I just used the commercial bags.  I put the currants into the bag and then hung them up from the cupboards since I hadn't a bowl narrow nor deep enough to hold the bag.   There are warnings in several recipes, both historical and modern about not squeezing the bag or getting cloudy juice.  However after letting the bags drip on their own, I had only a smallish amount of clear juice in the silver bowl.  In the larger batter bowl, I had a little less, but it was cloudy do to some unintentional mashing of berries with a potato masher.  I untied the jelly bags and squeezed the rest of the juice out into the cloudy juice.    Tossing the currants, still full of juice, was just too wasteful to think of, just because the jelly wouldn't be sparkly clear. 

Cloudy currant juice due to squeezing the jelly bags

I did make two batches of jelly though, one with the clear juice and one with the cloudy juice.  My son snorted and told me that I'd be the only person to be able to tell the difference between the two.


The recipe calls for 1 lb of sugar to each pint of juice.  A pint is 2 cups and I had exactly 2 cups of clear juice, which I put in my stock pot.  I weighed out and added 1 lb of sugar, turned the stove on low and started stirring.  Once the sugar was dissolved, I turned the heat up to medium high and kept stirring.   I just kept stirring and stirring until the liquid was at a good boil.  Then I took a few minutes to grab a bowl full of ice and a small metal measuring cup.  This should have been prepped before I started for testing the set of the jelly, but had forgotten to do so.    The first time I checked by scooping out a teaspoon or so of the jelly mixture and setting the metal cup on the ice to quickly cool, the juice wasn't thick at all.   Fairly quickly, after only about 10 or 15 minutes of boiling, the consistency of the bubbles started to change.   If you've ever made soap, it was like they were at the trace stage, when you could run a spoon through them and leave a trail.  They also became like clear red bubbles rather than pinkish foamy bubbles.   When I next checked, there was definitely jelly happening.   It went pretty quickly from then and just a few minutes later, the jelly was thick.  

The first batch made less than 2 cups of jelly which I packaged in 125 ml (half cup) jars.   I'd started up the water bath canner earlier, so it was full of hot water.  Because my jar rack was too large for these tiny jars, I put a dish cloth in the bottom of the pan and the jars on top, to try to keep them from bumping together.  I processed them for about 12 minutes, dragged them out and luckily the lids all did that lovely vacuum pop to announce that they'd sealed.

I can't actually tell which jars were the cloudy juice and which were the clear.  The open jar has the leftovers of both batches and the only way you can tell the difference of which layer was which is because there is a line where the first batch had cooled before I topped it off with the second.

This jam is incredibly delicious.  It's sweet enough but still with the tartness of the currants.  I hesitate to say that it might even be better than the Apricot jam.   The only thing I would recommend is that if you're going to listen to music while making this, don't presume that one CD will be long enough, because it won't be, not even the second time you try with the next batch.

Garden Delights

 I harvested the garlic yesterday!  It's late this year.  Usually I dig it up in July when the bottom leaves are starting to turn brown.  I dug up two plants about two weeks ago, to see how they were coming along and they weren't mature enough.   Finally, the leaves were dyeing back, so I figured it was time to harvest so they didn't split or rot in the ground.   There are lots of heads, but they are smaller this year and there were a number of heads which are too small to use.  Normally, I save all the largest heads of garlic to use for planting.  This year, however, they are all smaller than I'd prefer so may end up purchasing seed garlic to plant this fall.

The past couple of years my beets have been eaten by bunnies, eaten by birds, just not come up, so I only planted a half a row as an experiment with a totally different type of beet.  It's cylindrical instead of spherical.  Of course this year they're doing great.  This variety is sweet and tender, even though it's kind of ugly.   If I'd planted enough, they'd make spectacular pickled beets.  Good idea for next year if I can remember what variety it is or find the empty packet that I'm sure should be hiding in my seed box.

The cukes are still producing.   I've a 3 litre basket on the counter and more in the garden.  Looks like cucumber salad for dinner tonight.

Tomatoes!   Sungold I think, which is a hybrid, but produces early, sweet and flavourful orange tomatoes.   I've been picking them for over a week, but only a couple here or there and they never made it out of the garden in order to be photographed.  The taste of them, freshly picked, warm from the sun, right in the garden was too much to resist.

My last minute pepper plant that I rescued is doing well too.   I hadn't realized it was a mini-pepper plant, but they are tasty. 

The large, red tomato is probably a BetterBoy variety although I thought I'd planted the  Black Krims in that area.  However a Black Krim would be much darker with fairly pronounced green shoulders and this one is definitely all red.   I do hope that some of the Black Krims fruit this year.   We've had such a cool summer that there may not have been enough heat for the longer season heirloom variety.