Just Keep Knitting

If you follow this blog, you may have read Listen, posted in March of 2011. That was the beginning of my writing journey: I discovered that by telling the story of what had happened in my life, not just in my journal but posted out in the wide world where other people could read it, I felt better.

A lot better.

Not long afterwards, the outline for an entire book appeared in my head more or less out of the blue: all the chapters, the content, the shape of the tale. I know an important message when I hear one … so, I started writing.

I’ve been dealing with delayed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder since the early months of 2011. The anxiety, sleeplessness, and ongoing chest pains are the legacy of the chaos that took over my life when my first husband’s brain tumour took hold and turned him into a stranger with a familiar face. During and after his illness I had so much on my plate that I just kept on pushing through life: oh, I acknowledged that things were difficult and I did what I could to deal with the pain and loss and grief, but there wasn’t a lot of room in my life for that kind of work. I had a child to raise, bills to pay, a life to rebuild. The old troubles were tucked away in the hopes that time would heal the wounds without any further input from me.

Well, time alone didn’t do it, and in the past several months I have done a lot of work facing the old hurts and finding my way along the difficult road to forgiveness and healing. This book is the result of that work.

It is my hope that the story of my past, combined with the reflections on forgiveness, faith and fibre (knitting is indeed a healing art) will shine a light of hope so that perhaps, someday, there might be just enough light for someone else to find a way out of the dark.

Just Keep Knitting is expected to be available in early 2012—if you’d like to be notified of the official book release, just send us a note through the link on this page (or from here, if you prefer).

Until the books come out … just keep knitting!

Prayers from a Healing Heart

You made me just the way I am, God, and You know me, and You love me anyway. You forgive me when I make mistakes, even when I have a hard time forgiving myself. You stand beside me when I am scared and hurting, even though sometimes I don't realize you are there. When I am afraid, when the old memories come back and I can’t breathe, when I can’t sleep at night because my chest is still aching, please help me to be compassionate towards my own feelings. Help me to sit with the old fear and the old pain, to tell the hurting part of me “I hear you, I know, it was scary back then, but it’s over now, and it is safe.”

~

God, please help me to forgive myself for being human and imperfect and in need - it's so hard. Jesus said "love your neighbour as yourself" and we need to hear that in both directions. If you would extend kindness to your neighbour but refuse the same kindness to yourself, well, you're still not getting it, right? There are a lot of things I’d do for a neighbour that I feel silly doing for myself. When I get like that, please remind me that you expect me to treat all of your creation well ... myself included.

Too much applesauce

I made a lot of applesauce this year.

Lots of it was from the free crabapples we were given, and more was from the cheap apples I found at the store.

I discovered this awesome recipe for Applesauce Pie, and decided to give it a try. It works! It’s great!

It’s also easy. Make a pie crust. In a bowl, mix one cup of sweetened applesauce (I need to add a bit of sugar at pie-making time to most of my canned sauce to make it sweet enough) with one cup of milk and two eggs. Add a dash of salt, some nutmeg and some cinnamon and then pour the mix into the pie shell. Bake at 425 for 10 minutes then at 350 until the centre is firm. I sprinkled cinnamon and sugar over the surface of the finished pie when it was done and served it with whipping cream (because it is Thanksgiving and so of course I had to buy whipping cream for the pies).

I have a lot of fruit sauces – crabapples plain, apples plain, apples and crabapples both with peaches, apples with plums, apples with cherries. I am pretty positive they’ll all work well in this recipe (perhaps with the spices modified), as pie or as tarts for school lunches and snacks for those of us who spend our days at home.

I think the chocolate apple mousse has real possibilities here, too. Mmm, decadent. And if I decided to chocolify one of my existing sauces before making the pie, I’d just need to add some cocoa when I sweeten the sauce before adding to the other ingredients. Hmmmm … I sense some lovely tarts in my future!

What to do with all that jam

I made a lot of jam this year. Jelly, too, and applesauce – both plain and with other fruits mixed in.

There are only so many pieces of toast, waffles, and sandwiches in one’s life … what to do with all this jam and sauce?

The Reluctant Farmer and I were camping last week, enjoying the last fishing trip of the year. Sitting around the campfire, we decided to pull out the Pie Iron and make some post-supper snacks: biscuit dough wrapped around some leftover pie filling (store-bought stuff, used to decorate a birthday cake awhile back) and the chocolate apple mousse made lovely delicious baked treats. I thought hmm … is there a way to do this in the oven?

Sure enough, there is.

Make biscuit dough the way you usually do (when camping, I cheated and used Bisquick, but at home I just toss a cup or so of flour into a bowl, add a splash each of baking soda, baking powder and salt, maybe some sugar, then cut in about a quarter cup of lard and add enough of the kefir that I keep fermenting in the fridge to make it into dough – of course any form of soured milk would work in place of the kefir, but hey, this is one of the reasons I keep the stuff). Roll out on a floured board and cut circles with a big cup – I used a beer mug, but a large drinking glass would work. One of those itty bitty juice cups like you find in a hotel room will be too small.

Place one dough circle on the silicone mat you’ve laid onto a cookie sheet, and in the centre of the dough place a dollop of jam, chocolate apple mousse, apple sauce, mixed fruit sauce, pie filling, or whatever sweet yummy fairly thick substance you have at hand. Cover with another dough circle and smush the edges together with a fork dipped in flour so that you have a sealed round dough pocket. You can sprinkle something interesting on the top (cinnamon and sugar if that’ll go with your filling, plain icing sugar, coloured sugar crystals) or just bake at 350 until the biscuit part looks golden and baked (probably around 15 minutes).

Voila – you have created round sweet lovely treats that can safely go into a school lunch (no peanut butter, easy to fit into a little Tupperware in the lunch bag) or be devoured by the nearest teenager for a snack (yep, The Boy loves these things).

And since I put up new shelves tonight and transferred jam from boxes to shelves … I think I will be making a lot of these. The boys who live here said that was no problem.

More productivity in the kitchen

Today was spent in the kitchen again.

I had more apples, and planned to make them into sauce … until I spied a recipe for Chocolate Apple Mousse in the new Preserving book that my friend gave to me the other day.

Chocolate? Fruit? Canned? Together? Oh, yeah, we’re totally gonna try this out!

The process is easy and the result is fabulous.

Just make applesauce (I slice the apples – cores, peels and all – into a crock pot, then run them through the food mill once they have softened) with some lemon zest and lemon juice added to the cooking apples. Mill the resulting fruit finely into a canning pot in which you’ve combined cocoa, sugar, a pinch of salt and a dash of vanilla. Stir, cook over a low boil for 15 minutes, and can in jelly jars the usual way.

The book suggests using the sauce on gingerbread, in crepes, or as a sauce on other kinds of desserts. I put some in a milkshake tonight that turned out quite respectably, so I think this stuff has a lot of possibilities.

In fact, I liked it so much that when I pulled the peaches out of the fridge for processing (might as well deal with them while the canner is already hot), I made another batch … just with peaches instead of apples.

Easy, delicious, decadent, and made with seasonal ingredients. Well, sugar and cocoa aren’t really seasonal, but you get the idea.

I also grated up a bunch of the carrots I had picked up at the greenhouse and put those in the dehydrator. That will ensure that we always have carrots for winter soups and so on … I have a few in the garden still, but we didn’t get as many this year as I had hoped. Next year, they are going in early under the cold frame!

Supper was curried soup – more carrots, sliced and put into the crock pot with red lentils and yellow peas, a dash of the dried garden greens we use in just about everything (dehydrated carrot and beet tops run through the blender to make an all-purpose seasoning mix), some curry, cumin and garam masala. Let it simmer in the crock pot for a couple of hours while doing the last batch of chocolate sauce, then ran it through the food mill (which got quite a workout today) into a serving dish with a pinch of salt stirred in for flavour. Made a quick batch of sourdough biscuits with the kefir I always have going in the fridge, set out some pickles from last fall, and voila – dinner.

I am, once again, nearly out of canning jars – I have used up just about everything I have, even though I bought more as they’re on sale this time of year. I’ll keep an eye out for more produce on sale and possibly put up a few more jars of something, but we’re probably about done with canning for the year. Dehydrating will continue though – it’s more energy efficient and the resulting items don’t take as much storage space as jars of canned stuff, plus it’s a good way to preserve leftover bits and pieces. I’m pondering some meal plans that will let me use dehydrated veggies in the slow cooker or pot-on-the-woodstove – it’s always nice to know that you can make a whole meal out of just the things in the pantry.

Especially when you live at the end of a long gravel road that sometimes doesn’t get plowed for three days in the winter. :)

The Fruits of our Labour

A friend of mine wanted to try making pickles: some dills and some bread and butter pickles, enough to have some to eat and some to give away. The plan was that she’d pick up the seasoning, vinegar and jars and I’d stop at the greenhouse on the way into town to pick up bags of cucumbers. As I was packing up my canning gear and going through the last minute requirements I remembered something … she has a flat top stove. You can’t use a regular water bath canner on one of those stoves – you can crack the glass. What to do?

We solved two problems at once by purchasing a single burner electric element: it sits on a table outside and not only did we have the kind of burner we needed, but we had the added bonus of all that excess warmth not heating up the kitchen! This was a good thing, as the temperatures here have been very, very warm (for us, I know that the Texans would think we were wimps for thinking that 28 degrees is really hot, but we’re just not adapted to temperatures like these).

Here’s a picture of the pickles we made – we ended up with about 2 and a half dozen jars of pickles as well as several jars of applesauce, some plain and some mixed fruit – apples, plums, apricots and peaches all blended together.

We made the applesauce the easy way: wash the apples and other fruit, slice everything into chunks and put it in the crock pots for a few hours. The crock pots don’t seem to heat the kitchen like stove top cooking does, and they work nicely in the background while you do other things. We sliced cucumbers and made brine while the apples cooked down, and by the time the fruit had turned to mush we were done with pickles and ready to start putting sauce into jars. The handy dandy food mill made quick work of pureeing the sauce and separating out skins and seeds (treats for the chickens), and a bath in the canner means the stuff is now shelf-stable. Yum.

While I was at the greenhouse getting cucumbers, I picked up a flat of lovely tomatoes to cook down into sauce. Those went through the slow cooker and the food mill just like the applesauce – the resulting tomato sauce is very watery as I didn’t bother cooking it down to thicken it. We use a lot of tomatoes in our winter cooking and the extra broth won’t be a problem in most of the dishes, so it’ll be fine the way it is. Fourteen dollars’ worth of tomatoes made 3.25 litres of canned crushed tomatoes – probably more expensive than store bought canned tomatoes but they were not transported a zillion miles and they weren’t harvested by ill-treated migrant workers, and that is worth a buck or two at least. Hopefully next year my own tomatoes will do better – I have a few tiny green ones out there in the garden, but not much hope of a harvest at this point in the year.

Today’s adventure was all about free fruit. Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton matches fruit growers who have fruit they aren’t going to use with volunteer fruit pickers who will harvest and share the produce (a lot of the picked fruit ends up at local charities as well, when that’s possible). I happened to be headed into town anyway, so when a last minute request for an extra picker to help harvest apples and crabapples popped up, I volunteered. When I arrived, the Fruit Captain was already there working on the crabapple tree – the apple trees had only a few apples, and everything was at the point of being almost too ripe. There was, however, a little plum tree in the corner so I tackled that job. The tree was surrounded by rough shale landscaping rocks which made my ladder a bit wobbly and they had a tendency to poke holes in the skins of fruit that hit the ground, but I’d noticed an ambulance parked outside a house up the street and figured that if I fell, at least help was nearby, and the fruit was gonna be used right away anyhow, so a few punctures to the plums wouldn’t be too bad.

I didn’t fall, the plums came off the tree easily, and a good three litres of very juicy plums were the result of my work. The Fruit Captain offered me some of the crabapples, but I’ve really had my fill of those for the year … so I took half of the plums and a few apples and was quite content. I did the rest of my errands and came home to fire up the canning gear.

The plums and apples from today’s pick went into a pot on the stove, as I already had the rest of the tomatoes simmering in the crock pot. A quick boil and the fruit was turned to a mush that went through the food mill and back into the pan with plenty of sugar to boil for a little while longer. The resulting thick syrup was poured into jars and canned in the water bath – I could’ve made jam by adding some pectin, but I think it’ll be a lovely addition to muffins and baking just as it is, and we really do have a lot of jam already. I’m thinking a banana muffin recipe with a jar of sauce instead of the 2 mashed bananas (and a lot less sugar since the sauce is already sweetened). I’m also thinking about granola bars, cookies, and ice cream syrup. Yum.

I was able to use the canner outside, too … and boy oh boy I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out sooner. The little single burner element was on sale at Canadian Tire this week and I’d say it’s paid for itself in comfort already! If you’re tired of sweating over a hot stove, do consider one of these – or use your Coleman stove, or your gas barbecue if it has a side burner, or one of those propane turkey roaster things. I like using an electric burner, since at least some of my power comes from the sun thus it’s at least partially renewable energy – though heating elements use a lot of juice. If I had a woodstove outside like my friend down the road has, then maybe I’d use that for canning  … but in the meantime, this is a workable solution.

Canning is a very energy intensive way of preserving food and I don’t use it for many things – I’ve dehydrated some tomatoes this year as well, and plan to adapt my cooking over the winter to try and use those more often than the canned tomatoes, but it’s a learning curve I’m just beginning and I want to make the transition slowly so as not to starve anyone. I did pick up a bag of peaches today as they were on sale, and I’ll make more jam and syrup from those –  and that means more canning. But some of the peaches will probably go in the dehydrator for snacks and dried fruit bits to put in cookies and pies over the winter. I saw a bag of mixed peppers on sale today too so those are destined for the dehydrator in the next few days – I probably have almost enough peppers dried to see me through the winter now. Maybe not quite enough green … I use a lot of those.

The way I see it, each thing you can do for yourself is one way you can save spending money at the the store. Yeah, I didn’t grow the peaches or the plums or the apples or the peppers … but I can buy them now while they are in season and cheap (or get some of it for free just by volunteering to do the work of picking the fruit), and process the seasonal foods to preserve that goodness for the cold days of winter when the local greenhouses aren’t growing peppers or peaches, when I have to pay for them to be shipped halfway across the world if I want them out of season.

What I’m doing here isn’t self-sufficiency by any stretch of the imagination .. but it is at least a step closer towards local eating, and I’m happy to be doing that.

Adaptation

The season is beginning to turn towards fall: the evenings are cooler, the hay is being baled in the fields, and the geese occasionally appear overhead, contemplating the journey south.

The garden didn’t do as well as I had hoped, but the efforts to eliminate the quackgrass have been more successful than I dared to believe. Oh, there’s still lots of the stuff around the edges, but the central planted garden beds are reasonably weed-free.  I now know why people like to plant in rows instead of the intensive square foot method: when you have a large garden and a lot of weeds to deal with, the rows mean you can just walk through the garden, hoe in hand, and scritch up anything that is growing where you didn’t plant anything. Of course, this works better if the dog doesn’t get into the garden and dig a cool spot in the dirt before your seeds get started – thanks to Mackenzie, I have a few plants growing in odd places as the seeds got tossed several feet to one side when he dug up his napping place in the spring. Still, my long-handled half-moon hoe has seen good use since the initial clearing with my mattock. I think next year, I’ll try the same approach: dig up the stubborn roots with the mattock, rake everything smooth, plant in rows, keep the space between the rows cleared with the hoe, and slice out anything too close to the plants with the hori-hori knife.

Next year, I’ll also be planting earlier. In fact, I hope to experiment with some fall seeding under cover: if I clear out some space in one of the beds this fall and put the row cover in place, I should be able to put out some cold-hardly seeds after the winter chill sets in. When spring comes, they’ll ‘sprout when ready’. I had some plants that survived the winter with no cover or anything – some feverfew, onions, and a few other herbs, so if they made it on their own, they might do well with a bit of help.

I’ll also get a bed ready for early spring planting: if Kevin Kossowan can do this in his city back yard, I think it’s worth a try out here too!

In the meantime, I’ll keep checking the corn (we have a few cobs growing out there), the squash (I see some spaghetti squash and what I think are pumpkins … I didn’t mark which thing I planted where and all the squash plants look alike to me), and the tomatoes (there’s a few tiny little tomatoes on the vines, I have no idea if anything will get big enough to use before the frosts come but we can hope).

In fact, I should probably go out there now, wander the rows with the hoe in my hand, and see what I can see.