Busy as the bees…

This has turned out to be a very busy summer, and I feel like the bees I see working about me as I work in my garden and walk about this fair city of mine this month. Already we’ve made our new yearly pilgrimage to the mountains to celebrate another year together; wandered among the fairies and flowers out at Summer’s Past Farm; ventured into the heat and dust and local plants down in Old Town Historical Park; trekked to the very tip-top of Cowles Mountain; tried to get over my fear of Zombies by going to see World War Z (it was really good!); ushered in a new era of teaching with a new classroom for the Learned Boy; took a few whacks at an overgrown-but-beloved family backyard; and begun the now-firmly-entrenched-yearly- tradition of The Summer Reading List.
A list!  Let’s make one, shall we?
Mad Hungry Craving by Lucinda Scala Quinn- Love her no nonsense-I’ve-seen-it-all-because-I-feed-boys “voice”, lots of fried, meat centric, basic food.
Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes by Jeanne Kelly- Unfortunately, I picked this one based on the title and the cover picture and was thoroughly disappointed. Not enough pictures inside, pages filled with negative space, formatted into a huge, unwieldy book. Liked the pizza section though.
The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook by Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman- Love it! Part gardening book, part beautifully inspiring cookbook, it’s a fun, interesting look at practical gardening. Yummy dessert section, too.
River Cottage Everyday; River Cottage Veg; The River Cottage Family Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall- these books make me long to visit England and experience the restaurant for myself. And cook Nettles and Ferns and make yogurt and bread all day long…
The Farm by Ian Knauer- So much beautiful food, essays on farming and a bit of foodie-centric recipes made this a fun book to read. Loved the section on pickling and canning. And Sour Cream Ice Cream…
The Homemade Pantry by Alana Chernila is just plain magic. Make your own everything- crackers, ketchup, soda (!!!) and take back control of your food.
Eat Greens by Barbara Scott-Goodman is  a lovely little book arranged by type of vegetable, giving several recipes for each. Loved the section on cooking with herbs- lots of good sauces, marinades and butters. Excellent ideas for summer cooking, too.
Green Market Baking Book by Laura C. Martin- I want this book for my collection. Alternatives for commercial ingredients, farmers market-based recipes, and tons of reasons to go locally organic. I cannot wait to make the Maple Ice Cream this fall…
And last, but never least: Home From the Sea by Mercedes Lackey. Last years entry in her Elemental Masters series, a very moving tale based on the Selkie mythology. With guest appearances by Robin GoodFellow, mystical Indian Warrior companions, coracles, steam engines and assorted old myths and legends from days gone by…
Whew! I didn’t intend to read all of these at once, but the public and county library systems are on it this year, and they all came in the same week. Glad I ordered them though- lots of new ideas, facts, recipes and story ideas are swirling around this old noggin, jumpstarting some exciting new projects for the summer.
Now, if I could just get those Faeries to help out in the garden this summer instead of just making dresses from all the flower blossoms…

Spring Reading

We use our Public and County Libraries a lot in this bookish little family of mine- so much so that sometimes it can get a bit overwhelming. Ahem. (they let you check out so many! And it’s free! what’s one more? picture me hidden behind the stack of books in my arms…) So lately I’ve given myself a 3-book maximum rule: One for research, one to read, one for fun. It works out pretty good, too- two libraries, once a week or two, 6 books. More if my husband brings something good home. It can overlap though- right now I’ve got 7 books to post on the reading list to the right over there (they are going back this weekend) to be replaced by the 6 I picked up last night (holds that came in midweek are too tempting to leave at the library!). I’ll order books I see in the bookstores, or titles I find recommended in my blog reading online. With so many titles lying around I thought I’d round them up and make a list!

Julie Czerneda’s A Turn of Light- This is so good! Wishing Magic, with invisible Dragons, armored House Toads, traveling Gypsies, and pie…all against a backdrop of Frontier Homesteading and Doorways to the Otherside. Yummy.

Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent- Alternative Victorian fanciful piece with Dragons  of all sorts, a tragic love story, Russian folklore, and even a  bit of amateur sleuthing? It was read in a mere 4 days- worth every second of lost sleep!

Mark Alan Hewitt’s Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms- Lovely pictures and line drawing of the houses, furniture and landscapes of the Arts and Crafts movement, some background info of how it came to be, and an in-depth look at the attempt of one man to create a Utopian community.

Michelle Obama’s American Grown; The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America- I’m enjoying this for all the information and background on kitchen gardens, the White House Gardens in general, and the impact food has on our health and well-being.

Bob Thomson’s The New Victory Garden- Love this one! Broken down by month, with colour pictures and beautiful line drawings, this is a gold mine of gardening information, with a little bit of personal history that keeps it from being a dry text book.

Gladys Taber’s The Book of Stillmeadow- A personal account from the 1930’s of running away to live in the country. Susan Branch quotes her constantly in her books and artwork, so I wanted to see what she has to offer. Lovely anecdotal and lyrical writing, and bits are truly funny- she has a ton more that I might check out too.

Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone- A really big, heavy book (not convenient for reading in bed) with lots of really good ideas, some simple, some rather complex looking. Why do these vegetarian books always work out to be behemoths? Vast encyclopedic monstrosities with every single recipe the author can think of, very few (if any) pictures, and rather a lot more commentary and “instruction” than I want to wade through. I am finding ideas, but it’s taking forever to get through it, and I get bored every other page. Very disappointing really. 

So there you have it- some research, some reading, some fun (some not so fun…but necessary). What can I say?

I love to read.

Some books I like this time of year…

I’ve been to the library a few times in the last two weeks, and thought I’d make a list of the books I brought home…oh my. I might have bitten off more than I care to admit this time around:

1. Martha Stewart Living December 2012

2. Gooseberry Patch Christmas 2012

3. Christmas Gifts From The Kitchen Georgeanne Brennan

4. Christmas With Rosamunde Pilcher

5. Mary Engelbreit’s Tis The Season Holiday Cookbook

6. The Best Of Gooseberry Patch Old Fashioned Christmas Favorites

7. Christmas With Mary Engelbreit Voume 1 Let The Merrymaking Begin

8. Betty Crocker’s New Christmas Cookbook (1993)

9. Southern Plate Christy Jordan

10. Eating Well Comfort Foods Made Healthy Jessie Price

11. The Book Of Burger Rachel Ray

12. Quick Fix Meals Robin Miller

13. Christmas Cookies Lisa Zwirn

14. In The Heat Of The Kitchen Gordon Ramsey

15. Martha Stewart’s Dinner At Home

16. The Homemade Pantry Alana Chernila

17. The Food52 Cookbook Amanda Hesser & Merrill Stubbs

18. Williams Sonoma Casual Entertaining: The Best Of The Lifestyles Series

 

Ahem. I’m going to be fairly…busy…the next week or two it seems.

Christmas is coming, I can almost smell it! Well, actually, ok- I do, because I’ve been trying out some of these recipes and the house smells amazing…

What? Doesn’t everyone check out 18 books from the library just to test recipes for Christmas two months in advance…  while rereading every back-issue of Victoria magazine for Thanksgiving decoration ideas, in between making paper houses and animal cutouts for Yule decorations and Pajama bottoms for Solstice gifts?

Or is that just me…

Hey, you Faeries get out of that glitter- it’s not snow!

Weekend Booking and other things…

Whew! That was a crazy, whirlwind weekend, wasn’t it? Appointments, family visits, heavy rainstorms, no grocery shopping, a garden overhaul, and some last minute-but-really-good! booking:

The King Arthur Whole Grain Baking book- I’ve loved this ever since it was first hinted at, even if they faked me out and printed the regular-flour-cookbook first. Baking with whole-wheat is so tricky without help- stone biscuits and rock pancakes was on the menu at our house when I first tried baking with it! Ah. . . now it’s feather-light whole wheat scones and faerie cakes. (no, not faerie-in-or-is-a-cake! You faeries get outta that flour bin right now!)

Delia Smith’s Christmas- English Tradition Christmas, with time-charts! How much fun is this? I’ll be dreaming over this one for the rest of the year. Apricot Orange Chutney, Mince Pies and Pheasant Terrine! Okay, maybe not the Pheasant…

The Foster’s Market Cookbook- I check this one out from the library every spring and summer to ogle the luscious pictures of farm-fresh veggies, dreaming of opening my own restaurant someday, which oddly looks just like Foster's Market does in this book…

And I scored a hardback edition of The Best of Martha Stewart Living Great Parties! These are all so much fun to browse through for ideas, without having to dig out my collection of old magazines. I love that they have collected all her party layouts and Good Thing’s section from a few seasons of the magazines and bound them into a book- they’ve done this with a lot of the categories from the magazines. I especially like the Christmas ones. Great resource, and lots of fun to just flip through, dreaming of spring parties.

Lastly, I wanted to note here that I have officially started the Couch to 5K exercise program today. It went great! The stretching guide is the best part- it helped fix the first calf muscles cramp I’ve had in years (!!!), and got my heart rate down to where I didn’t need a nap after I got back from my run. (eep! I just went for a run! Who is this girl?) Go me! Actually, I will get going just as soon as I can peel myself off the floor- I haven’t done anything like this in about 5 years! Wish me luck…

Right here, right now-

I am reading: Joelle Hoverson’s more Last Minute Knitted Gifts (it’s all knitting, all the time around here again- funny how the urge to knit is seasonal, isn’t it?) Also Jane Austen’s Emma, since I haven’t read it since college, and this time I read the introduction- which is helping to figure out the irony of it all.

Scored two new – old books this weekend: a lovely old Children’s Classics edition of Little Women, complete with coloured illustrations on the end pages, and line drawings I haven’t seen before all throughout  the interior. Bliss! And Gardening Essentials by Barbara Pleasant. It’s chock full of gardening information, with beautiful colour pictures of gardens, plant lists, tips, project ideas and step-by-step instructions for things like stone walls, and brick walkways. I dream in crushed gravel nowadays. . .

Planning the week’s meals: a spinach Gratin, maybe chicken crepes with mushroom sauce, definitely pork chops and sauteed cabbage, and something with fennel, my new favorite this spring. Or it could just get eaten up raw- I served it sliced paper thin and sprinkled with lots of lemon juice this weekend, and loved it!

Starting a new sewing project this week, and thinking of creating a sew-along for it.

And lastly, it’s time to fertilize my plant babies again, so it’s off to the garden I go!

Does anyone else feel like it’s the middle of summer suddenly? The weather here is so strange this year. . .

My Cleaning List

Um. . . my house is dirty.And I need to clean it. So I started making lists again- did I mention I love lists? And recipes. I love recipes, too. So now I have these:

Did you know you can make your own cleaning supplies? It is very easy to do. I’ve been making and using them for years, but ran out last fall and hadn’t taken the time to make up a new batch. I mainly use baking soda and vinegar, with just a few extra special things when I need a little more oomph in my potions. I use Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap for my sprayables and the solid bars in my laundry soap, and I  also use essential oils for their cleansing properties, and the way they make the house smell yummy. This month it is all Lavender, all the time- except for the laundry soap, which is rose scented. I also am testing a dishwashing machine “soap”, which so far is working just great, but I ‘m only three days into the trial, so we’ll see how I shakes out. 

Whenever I start a new project, be it sewing, cooking , or simples making, I always do lots of research before I even start to gather my materials. My research starts with a Google search, then lots of reading: blogs, wiki’s,company websites, forums and also the comments sections of blogs- that’s where you find the most important information, the testers’ results! I compare and contrast reports, tips, recipes, and comments on other blogger’s sites, then start checking books out from the library. My favorite resources are Annie Berthold-Bond’s Better Basics for the Home: Simple Solutions for Less Toxic Living and  Organic Body Care Recipes: 175 Homemade Herbal Formulas for Glowing Skin & a Vibrant Self by Stephanie L. Tourles. My favorite websites for homemade recipes are SouleMama and angry chicken, and a new on I recently found, asonomagarden. I do a lot of testing and tweaking to make things that work for me and my family, and on the whole we are very pleased with the things we use.

The benefits to using homemade cleaning products (can I call them products if they weren’t made in a  lab? Hmm… supplies? Potions? Concoctions?) are threefold. They cost less to make- the initial outlay for a box of baking soda, washing soda, borax and a bottle of vinegar is less than the price of most laundry detergents I have found, but the Dr. Bronners soaps will cost you a bit. The cool thing is the liquid is a super concentrate, and will last me an entire year because most of my recipes only call for a teaspoon per potion! They also make it easier to breathe- they are healthier to use, won’t cause flaking or burns if they come into contact with your skin (unless you’re allergic to one of the ingredients! so be careful with them until you determine if you are folks) and the scents are soothing to the nerves and senses. No more holding my breathe until I can get out of the room after I’ve sprayed something! And lastly I have a great sense of peace of mind about using these cleaning supplies because I know exactly what’s in them. I clean more often because I like to use them, they work great, and I love the satisfaction of making something useful from basically nothing more exotic than baking soda and vinegar!

Of course, now I have to actually go use them, and whip this house into shape!

Ogling the garden path-

Happy Wednesday! I thought I would pull out all the books I’ve been reading these past few weeks and make a wishlist for my birthday. Ahem.

New Booklist for 2012- doesn’t everybody have a list like this?

Jessica Houdret’s Practical Herb Garden. This is such a beautiful book, crammed full of plant lists, advice, full colour pictures, instructions for rose potpourri, how to lay out a cook’s garden (gah!  A Potager! stop me now. . . ) and oh, for heavens sake- Lavender sugar!

Cory Schreiber And Julie Richardson’s Rustic Fruit Desserts is a must have- not just for the recipes in the book (which all look fantastic!) but for the ideas that get me ruminating about summer and fall fruit desserts. . .

Mollie Katzen’s The Vegetable Dishes I Can’t Live Without. The title says it all. Although I could mention the Brussels Sprouts with shallots and hazelnuts. . .

Harriet And Carrie Hargrave’s Quilter’s Academy Vol. 1&2. Oh yes I did! And I am cutting the fabric out as we speak. . .

Sunset: An Illustrated Guide To Organic Gardening- did anyone else’s parent’s have various and sundry editions of the Sunset series laying about? I love the line drawings in this book- they make me reminisce so hard about my childhood gardens!

Paul Heiney’s Country Life: A Handbook For Realists And Dreamers- um, I am in deep trouble folks! I want a cow, and a goat, some chickens, and a patch of corn in the worst way right now. Do not read this book if you even look at the chickens at the fair every summer. Just sayin’. Save yourself the heartache. He just makes it all look so easy . . .

Anna Pavord’s  The New Kitchen Garden will blow your mind. It has colour illustrations of every kind of kitchen garden you can imagine. Traditional? Check. Formal espaliered apple trees? Natch. Cottage garden? I am going to go live at the one she has pictures of in this book, as well as an illustration. As a matter of fact, I’m about to go on a world tour of all the gardens she has outlined in this book- be back next year. . .

Winter is the perfect time to check books out from the library, just to drool over the pictures and make lists of all the thousands of seeds and plants I plan to buy in the spring to create the most awesomely perfect garden in the whole and entire universe. Oops- my evil genius/scientist/gardener slipped out for a moment there, sorry ‘bout that. Don’t mind the woman behind the curtain, folks. It will pass- as soon as the sun comes out and I see just how small my balcony gardening space really is. Plenty of room in the kitchen for a few more basil plants though. . .

Lavender Green Magic

Last weekend I grabbed this book off the shelf and started flipping through it for plant ideas when I noticed that I kept reading the darn thing again, so I sat down Saturday evening and gave it some proper attention. It’s Andre Norton’s Lavender Green Magic,  a book that’s been around me in some location my whole life- I remember my mom reading it when I was a veeery little girl, and then I found it on my bookshelf after I got married. Somehow it’s followed me through all the places we have moved to since. Must be those faeries. . .

It’s a lovely book- I assume it’s another young adult fiction, judging by the focus of the story. It’s written from a child’s point of view, but the language level isn’t, as far as I can tell. I’m not an expert in reading or literature by any means- I just know what I like. Anyway, it’s a little different- there’s no monsters, or aliens, or interplanetary travel in this one. But there are gardens, and mazes, junkyards and early American history, and time travel. And there’s a witch in there, too. . .

Lavender Green Magic is also an interesting study on racial discrimination, albeit obliquely, as well as an emotionally sensitive look at the effects of loss on the individual members of a military family, particularly the youngest members of such. As they cope with a bewildering and devastating event, these children teach us that honesty and commitment are just as important as a belief in the unbelievable. And that if you’re going to walk a maze, always make the right-hand turn. . .

Book review- A Tale of Two Castles

I finished reading another book this weekend, Gail Carson Levine’s A Tale of Two Castles, which I really enjoyed because A: It has a dragon in it, and B: it has historical costuming details in it, and C: I am a geek. Ahem.

So, if you haven’t already figured it out, I read children's literature. I guess it all started when I read the whole Dragonriders of Pern saga in the sixth or seventh grade. My mom had been reading them for years, and I hadn’t paid much attention to them until a classmate (okay, fine- a rival classmate. She was better at spelling, sure, but no way was she going to be a better reader than I was) wrote a book report on one of them. I was incensed, and determined to read them too. It wasn’t until after I had grown up and been married for a while that I found out that some of Anne’s books were considered children’s literature. Instead of being mortified that my favorite author didn’t write at the higher level that real author’s did (what’s that? Why no, I didn’t get along with some of my college professors and their snooty little sycophants. Why do you ask?) I was instead delighted that I could continue to read my childhood favorites, and find more books like them that were being written by today’s authors. I still read science fiction, fantasy, biographies, the newspaper, etc. But I like to read for enjoyment as well as research or information, and I love a good children’s book for the sheer joy and wonder they fill me with as I read them. 

A Tale of Two Castles is a book I’ve been hearing and reading a lot of reviews about lately, so I decided to have a look at it. And I’m glad I did! Dragons who live in the city and do odd jobs? Ogre’s who can shapechange into mice and monkeys? Mansioners and cat trainers and kings and princesses? Count me in!

I especially liked the the historical details Levine used for the setting of her book. The clothing sellers from the medieval ages, along with the walled city and letter writers for hire gave the story the feel of an English metropolis from ages past, but the day to day details, speech patterns and the observances of the differences between the city and the hometown of the heroine flavored the story with an Asian air.

The writing gets a little simplistic occasionally, and the story meanders through the middle of the book until it discovers its purpose at the end, but overall the book has a wonderful life of its own, with characters whose lives fill its pages with depth and meaning. Overall, this was a page turner.

skimming the light fantastic. . .

Do you read? Do you have time to read?

I do. And lately, I’ve had even more time on my hands than I have books to read. I’ve been sicker lately than I’ve been in a loong time: I’ve had the flu, a common cold, then sick again from the antibiotics they saw fit to proscribe me when I’d had enough of the coughing/no sleep/throwing up/headaches etc. that have plagued me since Thanksgiving.

But I digress. I have been reading lately. So much time spent just lying in bed, sitting on the couch, struggling to keep my eyes open through one more chapter.

So, what have I been reading?

I read and enjoyed Mercedes Lackey’s new Beauty and the Werewolf- anything that has a fairy godmother, herb women, stillrooms, invisible servants and heroines who would much rather wear plain-and-sturdy-but-pretty-workclothes than frothy dance dresses is a must read for me. Loved it! and the story had some cool plot twists, too.

Seanan Mcguire’s One Salt Sea was completely devoured in a day and a half, it was so good. Her writing style- that familiar tone, dry humour, and clever twists on stereotypical-noir-archetypes-as-mythological-creatures is still just as fresh as her first October Daye novel. Makes me want to head up to San Francisco to find a knowe for myself!

Tanya Huff’s The Wild Ways however- that’s the first fantasy book I’ve given up on in a long time. I really enjoyed The Enchantment Emporium, but not this one- it is built on too much inside information, too many sly references to what, I still can’t say. I liked the characters, the writing is solid, but the storyline is just too full of references that I can’t follow. I’ll return to it later, after I’ve had a chance to do some research into her other books- maybe it’s an offshoot of some other series? hmm. . .

Then there’s the research I've been doing. A little architecture/design school- basically just two books on the Prairie School, but so far I’m not liking what I see about it.One is a very dry book published in the ‘70’s, and the other one is a coffee table book from 2008. But it’s been enough to make me realize that I’m more an Arts & Crafts, William Morris kind of girl at heart. I’ve also been doing lots of research on gardening, in general and also container gardens, patio and balcony gardens, herb gardens- the local librarians are sure there’s a commercial enterprise starting up in the neighborhood somewhere, I’ve ordered so many books! Nothing too special here so far, I just like looking at the pretty pictures and plot schematics . . .

Speaking of Herbs, I’ve been looking at Herbals like Rosemary Gladstone’s Family Herbal, Lesley Tierra’s Kid’s Herb Book, and Raleigh Briggs’ Make Your Place: Affordable & Sustainable Nesting Skills. All of them are lovely to look at and read, lots of good solid information, and are a wonderful choice if your interested in either medicinal use or gardening info.

Yup, it’s been all books, all the time around the ol’ homestead! Let’s see if I can rustle up some sewing projects for next weeks’ post, shall we?