Homemade Antipasto with Homemade Crackers

I love to make antipasto to give as gifts each year.  I can make a big batch at this time of year and tuck it away in the cold room and then I always have some on hand to give as gifts...and it makes quite a popular gift.  I made a batch last week because we were given a bunch of peppers.

I put in olives, onions, cauliflower, green beans, mushrooms, grated carrot and zuchinni (what doesn't she put zucchini in you're asking yourself, right?) and lots of other good stuff.

Make a tomato based sauce and cook it all up.

Then pop it into jars, put it in a hot water bath canner and it is sealed and ready to be put away.

The shelves in the coldroom here aren't super sturdy so at this point I am just tucking jars away into kitchen cupboards.  It's quite fun really because whenever I open up a cupboard I get to see all the goodies I've put by. 

Today I made some crackers because I wanted to use up some sunflower seeds and also so we could use them to sample some of the antipasto.  The recipe I like to use is in a cookbook which is packed away somewhere so I tried out a recipe I found online and then just tweaked it a bit so that I could add lots of seeds.

And did eveyone except me already know that Spider plants bloom? E noticed yesterday that our varigated Spider plant had these flowers on it and then when I went to take a photo I noticed one of our regular ones is also in bloom.  I had no idea they bloomed. 

Fun!  Can't wait to see how my Christmas cactus and our Clivia plant do this year with all the sunlight we get in this house.

The Days Are Just Packed

There's just something about this time of year for us...we know that the weather will turn soon and things will naturally slow down so it is as if we want to pack Every Last Drop of Summer Fun into the warm days we have left.  These last three days we -

 Hiked a fantastic hike.

Saw a lot of moose tracks on the hike.  Mama moose prints and baby's prints right beside hers.   This picture is of baby's.

Saw loads and loads of different kinds of mushrooms and will be sure to bring along a mushroom guide next time.

Enjoyed gorgeous views.

Admired just how quickly the landscape can change on an 8km hike from dry, sunny plateaus to wet, shady cooler areas with completely different plants and trees.  Mother Nature is very cool that way.  This is a 55-60km hike and our plan is to hike one section each weekend (if we are in town) this Autumn and then do the whole thing in one go next Spring.  Our family wants to do the West Coast Trail as soon as E is old enough and this will be good practice for the boys on hiking, carrying their own supplies and staying overnight on the trail. (good practice for S and I too, actually)

Watched this fellow heading somewhere in a hurry.

Were very glad we hiked this hike only months after it had been worked on - no bushwacking for us this time.

Stewed a batch of tomatoes for winter use.

Froze some gorgeous garden peppers for winter as well.  (I refuse to buy peppers in the winter time so I love having chopped frozen ones on hand to add to soups and sauces.)

Ate some bannock E decided to make.  Delicious!

Enjoyed dinners made from goodness from the garden (and other people's gardens) knowing that ours is close to frosting made every bite taste even sweeter.

Especially enjoyed what might be our last serving of beans this season, prepared in our favourite way.

There was some biking, some knitting (gifts to get going on) and some more picking and drying of nettle, clover and other wild goodness.

Yesterday we rode on a old train through gorgeous scenery.

And...we enjoyed every bit of all of it!!

Elderberry spiced healing honey

When we moved here in mid-June I spied some Elderberry bushes in bloom.  I wanted to pick them when they were ripe and test out some Elderberry recipes.  We ended up going camping and when I got back they were all dried up on the bush.  I went ahead and picked them anyway and  found some delicious sounding recipes on this great blog.

I really wanted to try the herbal honey paste and decided to put my chocolate fondue burner to good use.  It needed to simmer for 10 hours and I figured this was the perfect (low energy) way to do it.  A tea light candle made a very good low heat source.

The ingredients were just honey, ginger, cloves, cinnamon and elderberries.

It cooked down to a delicious thick herbal healing honey.

The day after it was done we packed up and headed to the beach for the whole day and what should I find as we pull into the parking lot?  Loads and loads of Elderberries in various juicy stages of ripeness. ;-)

Squirreling

It's that time of year again.  The time of year when I start tucking all sorts of goodness away for use in the Winter.  I love the feeling I get from putting things by.  It is getting quite cold up here at nights now (we had to cover our tomatoes at night already and it looks like tomorrow will be frosty up here as well) so I've decided to start gathering all my herbs for freezing and drying.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme...and basil! ;-)

I've dried  parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and chives.  I've got basil, dill and parsley in the freezer.  That's all I have this year for garden herbs and so I've also started on wild herbs I'm finding around here.

I've just recently become a fan of Red Clover thanks to Susun Weed's books.

Mullein grows like...well, like a weed around here and so this year I decided to finally try making Mullein flower ear oil.  I picked a basket of the flowers and let them dry for a few hours to get any moisture off.

Then I put them in a jar and covered them in warm oil.  They will sit in the sunshine for awhile so the oil can absorb all the goodness from the flowers.  This is supposed to make a fantastic healing oil for sore ears.

I've been collecting nettle since we moved here and using it for different things.  I am a huge, huge fan of nettle.  Adore it.  When I was down on the property picking some on the weekend the wind picked up quite suddenly.  There was a trembling aspen beside my making a lot of noise and I thought to myself that that would make it hard to hear if a bear was nearby. 

Right at that moment I heard a loud noise and looked up to see a (not too biggish) tree falling.  I wasn't terribly concerned  because I could see that it wouldn't hit me but then it knocked into a much bigger tree and that started to come down...quickly.  I ran to the other side of the nettle patch just in time to see it thump down about 20 -30 feet from where I'd been picking.

The next day E and I went down (when it was not windy!) and he decided he would make a walking stick out of one of the branches for a gift.  He worked on it while I did some knitting and then he decided to make two more. ;-)

I also found a patch of wild mint on this property so we will use this for teas.  Love all the goodness available if you are willing to look.

And, since it was a long weekend and we had decided not to go camping, we had to be sure to make time for fun as well.  We found a new spot to hike.  We love hiking along creeks and I couldn't resist taking a snap of the guys playing a game we like to play called Sink the Boat!!  Kinda like poo sticks except then you use rocks to bomb the sticks you've thrown in. ;-)  You can see here that the biggest "boy" (AKA Dad) quite likes this game and tends to get a little carried away.

Those who were so inclined went mountain biking in mud (and a little snow apparently).  There biking clothes are sitting out in the rain with the hopes that Mother Nature will do some of the work of stain removal. ;-)

Those who were not inclined to bike in mud and snow stayed home and picked herbs, sat in the sun knitting, and took photos of pretty butterflies

The guys have  been squirreling too.  They have been cutting up large amounts of firewood to get us through this Winter.  Unfortunately there are load of dead pine trees around here (killed off by Pine beetle) but it does make it so that free firewood is not hard to come by.  It turns out that E has quite a deep love for chopping wood.  He has been chopping kindling every spare moment  he has.  He seems also to be unusually (for him) organized when it comes to wood.  He has his old wagon stacked up full and nicely and  on the weekend I noticed this box out in the wood shed area.

I opened it up to find it filled with more kindling.  Nice and tidy. 

What a gorgeous time of year.

Wild Foods and Stalking the Shaggy Mane.

E has always been a forager, since the time he could walk he was off...picking things and sampling.  I had to keep a very close eye on him and some things (Foxglove, for example) I decided early on to just completely eliminate from my gardens because I simply could not be sure that he wouldn't sample it.  Here he is when he was a babe, right after his bath, sampling unripe strawberries - something he continued to do up 'til this very Spring.

He eats all manner of things - sorrel leaves in which he rolls up lettuce, currants, handfuls of dill and other herbs; unripe poppy seeds; flower petals; dandelion leaves and much more.  As he grew taller he would sample unripe peaches and, a favourite, tiny unripe apples off of my fruit trees.  So, it didn't really surprise me when early on he showed a fondness for finding and eating wild foods.

He is the first to spot any wild berry bushes when we go hiking.  He loves to learn about different uses for all the different  plants we find growing and we often go out with a identification guide in our hands.  He has been interested in learning more about mushrooms for awhile now so last week when he came in and told me I had to come see a mushroom he had found I went out to see.  I had a look and the name that came to mind was a Shaggy Mane.  We looked it up online and saw that it was, we also learned it was a pretty easy one to identify and that it was edible.  Since he was interested we went to the library and picked up three mushroom identifying books and then came home to learn more.

We sliced it open and double checked in the books that we had the right mushroom.

And we've been finding and eating them almost every night since.  Delicious!  E (and the rest of us) are even more inspired to start finding out more about mushrooms and all wild foods.