Autumn Cooking and Crafting

I drifted into Autumn in a bit of a daze, but soon got up to speed. On the textile front, I've been busy making another cushion for craft fairs, and an angel panel for a commission. I'm so enjoying working in this medium, I hope enough people like what I make or it's going to get a bit crowded round here!

   The folk birds seem quite popular, and I enjoy finding new ways to incorporate them into my cushions.

   The beautiful variegated threads are a delight to work with. As usual I'm using Perle Cotton no. 5

              Still using the green dyed blanket; I must do some more, I'm running out of this one.

         I don't always make buttons for the back, but I think the simple overlap works well.

        Meet Flora, commissioned by a lovely lady from Holt. She wanted a "non- Christmas angel" .

  I've enjoyed stitching these stylised flowers, first used on my Molly Dancing top hat, and cushions.

                 The request was for a slightly 'shabby chic' colour palette. I hope this fits the bill.
 

I've just done another Fakenham Makers Market. I didn't sell any cushions this time, but I did sell some pin cushions, a needle case and a little Japanese pouch. I also sold A QUILT! Yes, two about-to be Grandparents were deliberating over which one to buy for their expected grandchild, and they chose one of my folky sampler quilts. They were so excited, we had a long chat about how the images on the quilt would be enjoyed by the baby, and they even showed me a photograph of the ultrasound!

Aside from stitching I've been busy in the kitchen. My header photo shows just some of the wonderful fresh produce I picked up from the veg man on what remains of the lamentably reduced Kings Lynn market, and the fruits of our son's apple trees. You can also see a demijohn half-filled with damsons from the market, blackberries from the lane, sugar and……. GIN! I'm shaking it every day at the moment.

I'm entranced by Greek and Turkish dishes at the moment. I made Baba Ghanoush (roast aubergine puree) , roast tomato and pepper dip, and stuffed peppers. I served it with flatbreads and a small salad.

  My Heath-Robinson method of jelly-straining! Jim is putting me a hook up somewhere a bit better.

Apple - Chilli Jelly, made from our Mike's apples, and chillis from our greenhouse. I've never made this before, and it tastes pretty good!

I also made 6lb of apple and damson chutney on Friday. It was an interesting experiment. Certainly not as pungently smelly as I'd expected it to be. But it was a bit of a faff to be honest, and to tell you the truth, we don't eat a lot of chutney! However, it was fun, and I thank Sue of The Quince Tree blog for pointing me in the right direction and firing me up. I don't have a photo of the chutney at the moment, but I'll try and remember when we open the first jar.

Quite a few blogs are talking about jamming and bottling at the moment. It's such a comforting thing to do - if you like being your kitchen, of course. We don't NEED to continue making home preserves, but it's so satisfying looking at the gleaming jars on the shelf, and also knowing exactly what went into them. Our next door neighbour has kindly allowed us to go in and raid his apple and pear trees, so I shall be thinking up some more ideas to make use of the bounty. I hope you are enjoying the turn of the season, wherever you are.

So, the plan is .........

                          A recent and regular visitor to the garden. Just before he hurried away!

Somewhere or other I likened trying to get - and keep - my life more organised, as like someone sitting atop a coach, driving a team of six independently-minded horses! As soon as I get one under control, one or more of the others breaks out and chaos reigns. (No pun on reins intended!)

Consequently stuff mounts up. Clutter proliferates (they don't call this Haemorrhoid House for nothing, there are so many piles about!) Food is wasted and gets thrown - despite freezing and planning ahead when THAT particular horse is in the lead. Sewing projects languish. Ironing mounts a protest from the TWO baskets in the utility room. Meals are scrappy and not very healthy when THAT particular horse isn't in the lead. The freezer is disorganised, which leads to disorganised shopping which in turn leads to unplanned meals and hence wasted food..... and so it continues. Meanwhile I am fed up with myself, wishing I could get stuck into some stitching but feeling I haven't got the time (or the inclination.)

Some of you are tutting to yourselves, never allowing this state of affairs to develop. Others will be nodding and saying"oh yes",  knowing only too well how easy it is to let things slip. I'm not apologising for it. I'm just fed up with it and determined to get things straight...and CONTINUE to keep on top of things.That is the salient point.

So, where have I gone with this so far? Well, lots of reading up and cherry-picking the bits that I felt applied to me and would be useful. Some of the more helpful blogs I will introduce to you as time goes on.

General Organisation:
I cracked and bought a little book (not as pretty as Penelope's, admittedly)to make my lists, menu planning, and so on.

                                         (Do you love those two little coloured pens??)

I've also made use of my MacBook's "Notes" facility to store my menu plans and ingredients lists.

Sorry, poor photo, forgot to take flash off. You can see how it works, the ingredients/shopping list continues as I scroll down. When I write a fresh note, the older one shoots to the left side until I need it again. It may be a 'belt and braces' kind of thing as I have my new note book and pens, those I can take anywhere,and will contain ideas and other spur of the moment thoughts.

I have also ordered 3 A4 wipe off boards and pens to hang on each freezer. Years ago, when we bought our first freezer (the 70's!) I was very organised, and colour coded everything, wrote everything down and crossed off things used.Sadly, that sensible behaviour fell by the wayside and eventually resulted in the disorganised mess that I lived with until this week. As things are put into the freezer they will be listed on the board, and wiped off when used up. Simple, isn't it? And it takes no time at all.

Another aid to organised living is "30 Minutes". I am going to apply this to those jobs which either I hate doing, or which have grown to such proportions that I feel too overwhelmed to deal with them. 30 minutes is not too long to set aside to clear a cupboard, whereas you may baulk at sorting out the entire kitchen/bedroom/bathroom etc cupboards in one go. Sorting one freezer took me about this long. Culling several bookshelves would take another 30 minute block. My sewing room, were I to attempt to clear it in one go, would take a couple of days, probably, and never likely to happen at that rate, but if I tell myself I will clear for just 30 minutes, I am more likely to start. I picked up this idea from Tawny over at The Frugal Hill Way - Simply Living a Richer Life. As a start I cleaned out my cooking oils tray, giving away a bottle I didn't need, washing greasy containers, organising the various oils into a sensible- use method. Not an essential piece of work, but useful, and my tray looks much nicer now!

Some of the blogs I've been checking out are about frugal cooking. Now I am in the fortunate position of not having to worry where the next meal is coming from, and able to decide where, if anywhere, I wish to economise. However, I do think it is thrifty to shop carefully, cook properly, and use up - one way or another - everything you bought. Because of my disorganised freezers, my food shopping was haphazard, we swung between well-planned, and hastily cobbled together meals, and I was throwing away too much spoiled/unused food.

So the menu planning will certainly help with that, as will the freezer routines. I've been making "freezer hash", that is chopping herbs, soup bases, grated cheese, bread crumbs etc and freezing in small pots, for some time now, since I read about it on Sue's wonderful blog"The Quince Tree". I shall be regularly, not just sporadically, batch baking, or cooking double meals, one to eat one to freeze. You know, I've been doing this for years, just not consistently. Here's what went in the freezer this week.

Two medium and one huge lamb pasties, with left over roast lamb and freshly sautéed carrot onion and swede.

Three portions for two of trout and spinach fish pie mix. We had the fourth portion yesterday.
Not into the freezer, but a good example of frugality, I thought, the remains of (sad to say) one shop-bought lemon drizzle and one chocolate brownie cake, bought for a visit from my brother-in-law and niece. I whipped up two 'use urgently' eggs, and milk, poured it over the broken up cake pieces, and cooked gently for an hour while I had the oven on for something else. It did us for pudding for 3 days!

And yes, I did get into my sewing room and get on with a few stitchy things. A few rows of quilting on the cuddle quilt:

And a wool cushion for someone-but-it's-a-secret!

The stitched wording is just for guidelines, this isn't how it ail look when finished. I may need to snip a bit at the front legs as it is meant to be a hare, and it looks suspiciously bunny-like! That is the moon below, BTW, not an exercise ball!

Phew, this is quite a long post, isn't it, again. Well, I wanted to get my plans for home organisation organised! There is still so much I wanted to say, but will leave it for another post. I'd like to thank those of you who write these helpful blogs; I may not be quite the person you write them for, I'm not in debt, trapped in a house full of rotting newspapers and mouldy food, or struggling to pay off a huge mortgage. But the very steps which help people who ARE in these situations can help all of us who just need a hand getting their houses in order, so to speak. I started by regularly reading DataCreator's posts on her blog Frugal in Norfolk. I also enjoy reading about Rhonda, in Down to Earth, she has LOADS of useful information. From their blogs you can find other bloggers in their side-bars.

Now I hope I haven't bored you silly, and that you will come back and read the next post. Catch you then!

Darning, cooking and reading

My favourite cardigan, hand knitted using hand-dyed yarns by a Newcastle lass called Lorrie Marshall. I have three of her pieces and wish I had a dozen more; when I can afford them I buy them at the Knitting and Stitching Show. This one has been worn and worn and worn, and, indeed, has become very worn - into holes. You can't tell in the photographs but the yarn is very fine.

Ooooh, not a good thing to happen at all. Funnily enough when I discovered these holes I happened to read a blog-post about darning, I THINK written by Sue at The Quince Tree. It spurred me into action.
So I thought I'd do a spot of darning, using some hand-dyed (not by me!) yarns,and I think it worked quite well.

And I did one hole and was quite pleased with it, when I spotted some pieces of silk velvet knocking about the sewing room. Aha! Thought I, I'll PATCH the other holes. So I did, and I love the look. In fact, I'm not going to worry if any more holes appear, I shall continue to patch this garment until it is more velvet than yarn. How lovely will that be?

On the cooking front it has been soup.....roasted buttenut squash, mmmm.

I'd like to say I wiped the edges of the jug before taking the photo but have deleted the wrong one! Hah!

And this  someowhat brown, worthy looking sloppy mess on the Rayburn is actually a mixed grain risotto, to which I added some seafood , along with the leeks, garlic, mushrooms and spinach. That was GORGEOUS! The change in the seasonal weather has made us long for rib-stickers and warmth!

On the book front, I have been in a bit of a dry sterile kinda place, and unusually for me, unable to settle to read much. So I was putting some things away upstairs in the spare bedroom when I paused by the book shelf and picked up an Iris Murdoch; I suppose I've got about eight of hers. Anyway I started The Bell and really enjoyed it all over again - must be about twenty years since I first read it! Now I'm half-way through The Unicorn. Murdoch's books, to me, seem quite formulaic, in a very Intellectual Manner. For instance, she sets them always in a very rarified environment, with an isolated group of characters who don't seem to have any existence away from the plot. There is always an air of menace and sexual repression, and High Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism play a large part. Lofty academics are in abundance, and there is usually a stray homosexual with self-doubts to add to the boiling pot. They are books of their time, and would not and could not work today; attitudes have changed so much.(Fortunately, in the main!) I am enjoying the writing, though. I remember buying the first one, An Accidental Man, from a book club when we were first married and penniless. I had never heard of Iris Murdoch, and it was like a door opening for me into the literary world, though I had always been a reader.

Since starting to re-read these, I have been introduced to two new (to me) authors, from Blogland: first The Cornish House by Lisa Fenwick...thanks to Maggie at The Reading Corner,(bookloversplace.blogspot.co.uk) and also Red Bones, by Anne Cleeves which is from her Shetland Trilogy. (Actually I have read the first one, Raven Black, I remember now.) I found this reference on someone elses blog but I'm afraid I've forgotten whose.....leave me a comment if it was you, it was definitely one of my regular favourites!

Oh, and on the Listening front, I have mostly been head in the clouds listening to the new cd by Triette, my melodeon tutor's band which is absolutely wonderful. I now want to learn ALL the tracks on it!  wish there was some way I could enable you to listen on my blog, but you can hear three tracks if you go to www.triette.com and have a listen. I am struggling to learn the last track, Special Reserve, it is so lovely! Have a listen, they are superb!

Well, that's your lot this time, you'll note it was going to be a short post.....(sigh) oh well, I hope you enjoyed it! Catch up again soon..........

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Two blogs in particular have given me a bit of an elbow in the ribs recently. Sue, on The Quince Tree quoted a poem by Grace Noll Crowell, called Such Joy in Simple Things, which pulled me up short as I had been in low-grade grumbly mode. Then I read Penelope's post, on L is for Love, where she was considering 10 Good Things Right Now.

Having a high level of intolerance for....well, all sorts of things, really, I can easily slip into an irritated frame of mind a propos of almost nothing at all. And it is annoying. Both for those around me, and for me, too. So without wishing to get too right-on and positive thinking, shoving my gratitude for life down folks' throats, I'm going to be considering some Reasons To Be Cheerful on a regular basis.

Now I shall be posting this on Saturday, when I've sorted the photos out, but I'm writing it now, on Friday. And obviously, it is a given that my family and friends are always souces of cheerfulness to me!

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

The sun is really shining today, and I'm basking in its warmth.

All around me Great Britons are allowing themselves to feel proud about being British!

The Garden is still looking quite good, lush growth and colour.

 I have been reading some lovely comments on the last blog-post.

I actually got down to organising the neccessary for my Baskets Quilt! Yay!

......and actually made a start!

My new business cards arrived from Moo, and I love 'em...thankyou Cathy (Potter Jotter)

I managed to work out the left hand all by myself chords and basses to the new tune I'm learning on my melodeon! I shall amaze Nick, my tutor on Tuesday! Love it! (It's the RSB by Andy Cutting  - who else? - in case you're interested.)

I bought this mag a couple of weeks ago, only got down to reading it today!

Reached page 15...the Feedback page and there I found..........

.......................my Angel! Yes, there she is, Gloria, in all her ........glory! What a surprise. And look at that total we raised.....fantastic!

I finished a journal page using my new Inktense Pencils...love 'em!

While rummaging for the Basket Quilt fabrics, I came across this.........

It's the Auntie Green's Quilt which I saw in mmmmmm, I think Australian Quilting Magazine ages ago. I got as far as the central appliqued panel and the first border of pinwheels. One day.....one day.....but it was great to look at it again and ponder.

We got into town early this morning and did the shopping before most other people were up and about - bliss!Today just meandered along, in quiet contemplation and harmony between us. Nothing wildly exciting happened, it was just laid back and gentle. And very, very cheerful.