Hot Air Balloon Excitement

 This morning had a tad bit of excitement.   We heard a strange  rumbling  noise and a huge shadow in the sky, flying  low and close to the house.   From the window you could see it was a very low flying hot air balloon.  I've seen hot air balloons take off up the road, but I've rarely seen them flying overhead.  One of the few times they were visible, the balloon flew right over us.  They were low enough that they ran the burner, with a definite loud whoosh and rumble.  The poor chickens  who were out, freaked and ran to the trees to hide.   

This balloon was loosing altitude quickly and was very obviously coming in for a landing.  I'm guessing it was unexpected as the field they were landing in, is still full of standing corn.

Then there was more noise and this second balloon was floating by.  It was a bit higher than the first balloon, at least in the distance.  It's difficult to tell how high they actually are from down on the ground though.   As it was approaching our house, it seemed to be dropping in altitude.  The burner made an awful racket, however, you could still hear their conversation!  That was unexpected.

 

 

 

The balloon ran it's burner just before it came to the big maple tree in our yard.  It was pretty spectacular to watch.  I really was hoping they knew what they were doing, and that they were higher up than it appeared from my vantage point.

 

This is what the hot air balloon looked like as it passed by the maple tree on the other side of the yard. As it floated by, I hoped that it wouldn't  have to land on the farm next door, as they have horses.  That would be a bigger panic issue than a few chickens and likely cause more damage than crushing a bit of field corn.

I didn't walk up the road to see what happened next.  I did watch to see if they gained altitude.   It didn't seem like it. The first balloon was packed with people.  The second one seemed to have only a couple of people on board.   I hope they had smooth landings and didn't cause too much damage though, to themselves or the fields.  

 

Marble Cake from 1898

 

Cake! Yum.  I found a copy of The Galt Cookbook, published in 1898 by Margaret Taylor and Frances McNaught from the Department of Agriculture, Ottawa. It is a Canadian cookery book. Many if not all of the recipes are from what was the Galt area of Ontario, now Cambridge, and surrounding communities.

I found this simple recipe for marble cake, using actual chocolate. Most earlier recipes for marble cake that I've found use some other colourant, like cochineal for the secondary colours, not necessarily other flavours.  I'd been checking books as I went through them, to find a marble cake which used chocolate or another flavour, rather than colours.   Finding chocolate marbled cake was definitely a bonus.

I mixed the try ingredients in one bowl, and the wet in another.  I used a pretty standard method for making the batter.  I added the flour, cream of tarter, soda, salt in one bowl and stirred it with a wisk to mix it well.   I creamed the butter and sugar, added the egg and beat it until light coloured.   I then added the milk and vanilla.   I added the dry ingredients in several portions, mixing well between additions.

I separated out approximately half of the batter into another bowl.  I found a box of bakers chocolate, did a quick search to find the size of chocolate blocks in 1898, and ended up using two, although in hindsight, it was unnecessary.   It would have been tasty and fine with a single modern block of baking chocolate.   I stirred the melted chocolate into one half of the batter.  

I had buttered and floured two 8 inch cake tins.  I only used one.   I think that my batter was a little thick and it blobbed rather than delicately spooned into the tin.  In the end, I realized that not only would I not be able to spread this gloppy goop into two pans, but they would be very thin layers if I did
so.  I scraped the batter into the pan, best I could, first using a spoon, then a spoon and spatula and finally, just the spatula.   I had to run a knife through to try to get the two batters to settle, and then I dropped the pan lightly on the counter several times to try to eliminate any possible remaining air bubbles.

It took about 30 minutes to bake in a 350 F oven 

The finished cake is a lovely cake.   While I was worried it would be dense, it has a lovely texture.  It has a soft crumb and a flavour which shows off the butter, vanilla and chocolate perfectly.   It didn't need an icing to help it along.   It is perfect as is, although for a birthday, I'd definitely ice it

I am putting this recipe into my repeat file because it is worthy of being baked again.

Next time I would sift the flour first.  I think that would help keep the cups of flour be less compacted, helping with the too thick batter.  Or I'd add another 1/4 c of milk.

The cake is likely pretty accurate though.   I have no idea what the cost was because I had all the ingredients on hand.  Not horribly expensive though as it's a single layer cake without any large amounts of ingredients

Processing Nettles Experiment

Here are the samples of nettles processed three different ways.  The green, thicker fibre was fresh nettles, peeled and scraped with an old butter knife.  By old, I mean , I found an antique butter knife at the thrift store for 50cents and used it, as they have a straight, dull edge.  Modern butter knives, or table knives, have a bit of a taper to them, and often have a bit of a serrated edge at the tip.   That made it much more difficult to scrape the nettles, hence the antique knife use.

The whiter fibre was from the nettles that were dew retted.  I bundled them up and layed them on the ground, flipping them every couple of days.  Depending on what you read, it can take anywhere from two days to a couple of weeks to be fully retted.  I left the bundles for two weeks before I tried to process these.    The fibres didn't easily peel off of the bark, or the centre core, so I thought they may be under retted.  The colour was nice though.  

The darker fibres had been retted for several weeks more.  I'd actually sort of forgotten about them as I was busy with canning.  My sweetie asked me when I was going to use them as he needed the space where they were sitting, to stack wood.  The outer bark had totally disappeared in some places and there were fibres actually showing.   They were quite easy to peel off, however they were breaking at some of the nodes on the stems.  Rather than a creamy colour, they are grey.

I don't have any proper processing equipment, like a flax break or hackles, which would have made this a lot easier and more useful.   I had a mallet, some wool combs and medium carders.

The under retted nettles and I call them under retted because the outer bark was difficult to remove in a lot of places.   I lightly bashed them to break the pieces up, pulled out some by hand and them combed them.   Many pieces still stuck.  I combed the fibres to remove more of the trashy bits and after getting a bit frustrated, just spun them and hoped for the best.  They were fairly long, spun quite nicely, but some of the bits were stuck fairly firmly.  

The over retted nettles were very soft.  The outer bark released quite easily when combed, but there were still some fibres with bits out outer bark stuck to them.  I ended up carding these as the fibres were shorter after combing, maybe 3-6 inches long.   I spun them from the end of the rolag, with a semi-worsted forward draw.

The green fibres should have been spun before they dried out.   I had to twine and ply by hand, which is an acceptable way to make a strong cordage, rather than yarn.  If I had a spray bottle, I think spritzing them with a bit of water, covering them and letting them sit for a couple of hours would have made this much easier.  But the sample I made suggests that this would make a strong rope.  I think it would make a lovely addition to a basket making project.


 

Colours of September

 I dressed the loom with the Kool-aid dyed warp using the Wall of Troy pattern from Margarite Davison's green book.  It's a fairly striking pattern but still an easy pattern to both thread and weave.   I'm done the first scarf and there is another left to weave.   Progress has been interrupted by helping my son-in-law build garage doors, canning, teaching a socially distanced rug hooking class at the park, hydro issues which mean the whole electrical panel needs to be replaced and a scary and irritating trip to the car dealer for a simple service on my cute little car, where they made all the motions of masking and social distancing, except for the part where they actually did it.  

The new hens have settled in nicely.  It only took them a couple of days to fully integrate.   After months of waiting for new birds, the feed store was able to get ready to lay hens delivered two weeks in a row.   Yay, to him finding independent breeders to supply us with hens!

 These ones are laying little pullet eggs.  Pullets are young layers.  They should start off laying tiny eggs like these, and gradually their eggs should increase in size.   Sadly, some of the hybrids we've had start off laying huge eggs and it can't be healthy for them.

I found prune plums in the stores, although not at the market. They were wonderfully ripe and two containers came home with me.   They make a wonderful jam or preserve.  I didn't chop them up, so my jam has chunks of peel and fruit in it.  Normally I chop the plum halves up a bit, and then the skins seem to just dissolve completely.  Still, the jam this year is pretty awesome.  It finished to a deep reddish purple colour, from the skins.  It's so pretty.

I dragged out the blending board.  I played with some colours of commercial corriedale.   They're not quite felted and they look fine, but they were just not quite easy enough to pull off the rolags, so slightly compacted perhaps, from sitting in a drawer for however long it's been.  Still it was fun to do.  

Blogger has been switched over to the new version, which I didn't want to use whenver they first introduced it.  I liked the old Blogger format and it was easy to use.  Now I'm finding a new learning curve and having to figure out new glitches.  It doesn't seem as easy to drop photos where I want them amongst a few other things I need to figure out.   This means that my layouts and formatting may be a little off until I muddle through it all.  I'm sure it will all come together at some point.

Tomahto, Tomayto, Tomato

Over the past few years, our garden tomatoes haven't done well.   We've had droughts, blight, more blight and one year the birds and bugs got to virtually every tomato before I did.   I almost didn't plant tomatoes this year and hubby had said why bother since we rarely get to harvest any.  However, I planted 4 plants.   There was hardly any choice of varieties at the garden centres and at one place, they already looked like they were stressed and diseased. 

 Our local feed store always carries a few starter plants, with very limited varieties since they are a small store.  I was told they purchase from a local grower.  I picked up a pot of 4 paste tomato plants.  They were 90 days until harvesting, so late at ripening.   Then we had the drought and a huge issue with blossom end rot.   I dedicated my watering to the now 3 tomato plants.  I don't know where the 4th one went.  One morning it was just not there! 

some of the tomatoes harvested from this year's garden

The watering got rid of the blossom end rot.  The skies opened up and we've had enough rain to make the garden and weeds grow.  A couple of weeks ago I harvested enough tomatoes to hot water bath can 3 jars.   Thinking that the rest of the green fruit would possibly not ripen, I picked up a box of tomatoes on sale at the grocery store.  Then I harvested what I thought was a few tomatoes in the garden.   It turned out there was over 1/4 bushel of ripe tomatoes to add to my store bought bounty.

I'd purchased 3 boxes of lids last fall when they were on sale.  I hadn't realized that I'd used most of them on jams, relishes and for the little canning jar bottles of milk that end up in the guys lunch bags when they want cereal for breakfast at work. I had popped out the the local hardware store, where I regularly purchase my supplies because they are a Canadian owned store, with great service.  I had two of the employees tell me that so many people decided to take up canning and preserving this year they had no supplies left, and no idea when they'd get more in.   Hubby came to my rescue by sourcing some at another store and picked them up on his way home from a meeting.  They were expensive though at some like $4.19 a package and he brought me home 4 packages!

Tomatoes are a borderline acid food and thus with a little lemon juice added to make them safe, they can be hot water bath processed.   I've never had luck with cold pack method for tomatoes, so I use the hot pack method.  This requires heating up the tomatoes first and boiling them for 5 minutes to heat them through.  The downside is that heat and chopping start to break down the tomato pectins.  This causes the juices to release and that separation of fruit and liquid in the jars.  It's safe, just looks a bit odd in the jar.

Over 2 days, I processed 30 pint jars (500 mls) of chopped tomatoes.   Yay!

1- Scald, peel and chop the tomatoes.  Put them in a large pot and slowly bring to a boil.  Boil for 5 minutes.

2- Using a canning funnel, ladle the tomatoes into clean, heated jars.

3- Follow the modern directions for hot water bath processing.  This meant for me, adding 1 tbsn lemon juice to each 500 ml jar and hot water bath processing for 35 minutes, timed after the canning kettle came back to a boil after adding the jars.

4-  Let cool over night, remove the bands, wipe down the jars to make sure there is no residual bits of tomato and they aren't sticky.  Write the date either on the jars or lids.  Some people use sticky labels, but I find they are really difficult to remove when you want to reuse the jars.   I write the date on the lid so that I know that the lid has already been used.   Tomatoes don't need an identifier as well because they look like tomatoes, unlike miscellaneous purple jams and jellies :)

5- Store with the ring part of the lids removed  because moisture gets under the rings and can rust the lids on the inside, making them difficult to remove.   Also, if a seal isn't perfect, it will pop and you'll find it before you use that jar.   Without that seal, the contents will go mouldy and toxins may develop.  Nobody wants botulism from their pasta sauce!

Yellow Jacket Wasp excitement

I keep trying to write posts of things that I've done over the summer, like some natural dyeing.  However, life keeps intervening with much more interesting and important issues.   A couple of days ago, one of our chooks disappeared when they were out free ranging.   This isn't abnormal as we are in a rural area and there are chicken eating predators: raccoons, foxes, hawks, and coyotes.   We've seen all of them nearby.   When we lose a chook, I always lock up my girls for a few days, so whatever critter ate one, doesn't get another free meal.

However, we have one chook, the grey americauna, who is still skittish and timid.  Most of the other chooks get very friendly in just a few weeks, when they learn that I feed them, but even after almost two years, this grey hen just panics, hides and keeps her distance.  She does tend to go her own way at times,   so when I tried to lock them all in their secure pen in the barn, for their safety, she decided she was going to roost in the open area of the barn.  

Chooks don't see well in the dark, so you can slip in and pick up even the most skittish chook, once they've settled for the night.  We figured we'd just pick her up and pop her into the pen after she settled.  The problem was that we went into the barn too early.   She was on the window sill.  When Al tried to pick her up, she freaked and threw herself forward into the window.  The window didn't break, but it turned out that it wasn't fastened securely.   Just a couple of tiny nails, which turned out to be loose, were holding it in place.   The chook managed to pop the window right out of place. 

She flew out the open window, and as Al picked up the window, to see how to re-attach it, he started to scream and run.   It turned out that all this commotion had disturbed a wasps nest (yellow jackets), which had been built in the barn wall, 30 cm from the door, right under the window.   I got one sting this summer, as I was leaving the barn, and am amazed it was only one.  Al was lucky.  He's fast.  He got into the house and managed to find the fly swatter, get them all quickly, with only 6 or  7 stings.

Before we could get the barn window fixed, we had to do something about the wasps nest.  Al suited himself up with protective gear, and sprayed the nest two nights in a row.  In the dark when the wasps had settled for the night, I went into the barn to make sure the chooks in the pen had food and water.  I couldn't catch the grey girl though, so she was out alone for 2 days and slept in the barn with the open window.   On the third day, we had wicked rain all morning and I couldn't find her, even after the rain cleared.   I thought she'd disappeared in the night, with that open window and all.  However mid afternoon, she reappeared, quite happy to have my company.  

Al and my son fixed the window last night.  It won't come off easily as it's been secured with multiple screws!  Two nights of spraying seemed to have reduced the nest dramatically, so we didn't have wasps attacking..   All this was good because we had some new chooks coming today and we needed to get them into the secure pen.  They need to be confined to their new pen for at least a week, so that they learn where their new home is.
 
This morning I picked up the new ready to lay chooks, called that because someone else raises them until they're about 16 weeks old and ready to start laying.  When I opened the pen door, the grey chook, who'd been without her flock for 3 1/2 days, ran in to the secure pen without issues.   Yay!  Since I only had 3 new girls, I had transported them in a dog crate.  They easily popped out of the crate and into the pen.    They are all safe and sound now.  It made me feel very happy and content to have a secure flock, with few more chooks. 

However, I did see a wasp go back into the nest opening as I was leaving.   I'll have to keep an eye on that!

A Kool Aid dyed experiment

One of my weaving guild members is part of a study group in another town.  She recently lead a socially distanced class on "fun" dyeing.  They used Kool Aid.   You need to use the unsweetened Kool Aid drink powder in the little packets.  It's no longer sold in Canada, unless you luck out and find it at a discount or outlet store.  Last winter I found some packets at a dollar store and stashed a bunch of them for future use. 

At our last Zoom meeting, Barb had shown her results which was a huge pile of skeins that she had dyed with Kool Aid, at 1 packet to 1 ounce of wool yarn.  It was lovely, colourful and inspiring.

Not wanting to duplicate her results, I tried something a bit different.  I had picked up a packet of Guar Gum about the same time I purchased the Kool Aid packets.  Guar Gum is a thickener and one of it's many uses is to thicken dye for painting skeins.  It helps prevent the dyes from running together too much, allowing for techniques which might need more distinct lines.   I found it at the bulk food store, in the gluten free section. 

You don't need a lot of it. I used 5 ml in a litre of water.  I buzzed it up in a blender.  Since it was food grade, I didn't worry about extra equipment but used the seldom used smoothie blender in the back of the cupboard.   It was thickish, but from a couple of videos I'd watched, I thought it should have been thicker.   However, I decided to try it as it was, so if it didn't work, I had a definite starting point to work from   I divided the liquid into 7 disposable cups which had been sitting in a box for years.  I added a single packet of Kool Aid powder to 6 of the cups and left the 7th cup uncoloured, to use as an extender if I needed it.

The Kool Aid powder blended in quickly and gave fairly bright colours.   I used my acid dye syringes since I couldn't find my husbands stash of foam brushes which I sometimes use to paint fibre with.  Earlier in the day I'd wound a wool/silk blend warp for 2 scarves. I tied a tight choke tie in the middle, where the fringe from one scarf ended and the other began.  I tied looser figure 8 ties on the rest of the warp, except for the cross.  It was tightly tied too.

 I soaked the warp in warm water with about 1/4 cup of vinegar.  It's not really necessary, but I wanted the dye to take quickly.  As well, it was a lot of warp for a little dye, and I wasn't sure how diluting it with the guar gum would affect the dye to acid ratio.  I felt comfortable with a little extra security.

I used a lot of plastic wrap and ran it in long lengths, to put my warp on.  This protects the work surface to some extent but also protects the yarn when you steam it.   Since I was working on the glass topped patio table, I didn't put down any other protection on the table.  Kool Aid and Guar Gum are food safe, plus the glass table is super easy to clean.   I used syringes and spoons to paint the warp.  The syringes were discards from my husbands workplace and a friend who breeds Alpaca.  They are easily available at the farm supply store though.

Once I had the colour on, I wrapped the plastic wrap tightly around the warp threads.   I tucked one side in, around the warp and then rolled it up.   Amazingly, the guar gum did stop most of the leakage from where the plastic wrap pieces joined.   I dyed one scarf, rolled the plastic around it and then did the second one, as my table wasn't large enough to do both at once. I rolled the whole kit and kaboodle up like a jelly roll.  I popped it into a dye pot, with a steamer rack in the bottom, added a few inches of water and let it steam for about an hour.  I added water a couple of times during the process, to make sure the pot didn't run dry.   It doesn't need an hour, but my pot lid had gone missing, so the one I had to use didn't fit quite tightly enough.  This way I made sure it had enough steam time.

I turned off the stove after the steaming time was up.  I let the warp cool down overnight. If the wool yarn, or roving or fibre cools down too quickly, it will likely cause the fibre to felt up.  Since this was a wool silk blend, it could not only felt the wool, but damage the silk, if I didn't let it cool slowly.

The final colours are fun.  I'd read someplace that the purple Kool Aid was an ugly colour, but I rather like the purplish-grey colour.  The guar gum did prevent any major blending of colours from one colour to another, even if it wasn't quite as thick as I'd thought it should have been.  The warp is now on my loom, waiting for me to start weaving.

So, why did I use a wool/silk warp, luxury fibres for a Kool Aid experiment?  Kool Aid, and food colours in general (Wilton's Paste food colours work well too), act as weak acid dyes.  That is dyes which are easily fixed with vinegar or citric acid.  However, they need a protein or animal fibre to work.   The only pure wool I had was blanket wool.   I didn't have enough of any one white fibre to wind a scarf warp, let alone a warp for two scarves.   I did however have enough white wool/silk blend for the warp and the weft for at least one of the scarves.   Since I know that food colours, when heat processed at the proper temperature and time are stable, I wasn't too worried.