Last year was very different!!!

Last year here was just cruelly cold, and snowy. Our steel bear sculpture is only 1/4 inch thick and look at all the snow that caught on it last year!

This year, Winter has been plenty cold - but much drier and easier to manage so far.

BELOW: The house interior in late December 2008. The wall tape and texture crew was just finishing - and I had NO IDEA how much work lie ahead in finishing the house...

BELOW: I was about to become a very, very good painter of walls.

BELOW: Here are all the boxes of "mud" and texture to be applied to the walls. This is the kitchen, where the stove is now. Those are my boots, covered with snow. I would compulsively change into sneakers when I came inside. Not to mess up the plywood!

When the tape and texture crew left, they were the last professionals we would see around here for a loooooong time. In fact, we didn't use any professionals after that! It was me and Larry, that's it. At this time last year we were entering into a phase of very, very hard work in the house. We started in earnest in December 2008, and didn't get to move in until May of 2009.

It has been a wonderful journey!!! I have to say that I learned a lot, and have never had such satisfaction from hard work. Very hard work. Current pics coming soon. Very different!!!

Happy holidays everyone!!!!

The Northwest light in Winter IS different

The angle of the sun up here in WA is so low at this time of year! When the low light angle gets underneath of clouds, the light pingpongs around and reflects up and down, especially off the water. I just love it. Above is Dabob Bay, with the tip of the East Quilcene peninsula jutting out at right, forming Quilcene Bay beyond. A fog bank is streaming up along the water from the south right into Quilcene Bay as it often does, and then on to Chimacum Valley beyond to the north. The color of the water was a just unbelievable lapiz-blue that day.

ABOVE: The silvery Hood Canal. The clouds are trapping that pearly, milky low winter light.

ABOVE: Another shot across Dabob Bay, with the glorious Olympic Mountains peeking through the shredding fog. The town of Brinnon is just out of view to the left of this shot along the water. That small peninsula in the picture above is "Tabook Point".
ABOVE: Another scene on the Hood Canal, same day. The land form with the reflection is part of the same Toandos peninsula that I'm standing on, where it curves around and pinches off the Hood Canal a bit. Needless to say, the tide really rips through there!

ABOVE: A member of the Olympic Range called "The Brothers" showing off fresh snow at dawn in the pink light.

Fermented cabbage becomes Sauerkraut!

Here's the next phase of the sauerkraut project! Here's a link to part one in case you didn't see how it started. In the picture below, the cabbage has been fermenting in the big crock for about 6 weeks and has really settled down. For those of you wondering, the cabbage at this point has no aroma at all.

Next we transferred the sauerkraut to big cookpots, and heated it up with a little added water, just to help it relax from the tight block it made as it fermented in the crock. At that point the smell of the heated sauerkraut was delicious, just a warm earthy tangy aroma that filled the workshop, and was wonderful.

Then when the cabbage warmed up, we filled canning jars with it, sealed the jars and gave then a 20-minute boiling waterbath to seal the jars.

Ta-daa!!! Here are the sealed jars, ready to wait on the shelf until we are ready to enjoy the tangy goodness. Nothing at all was added to the sauerkraut except for salt during the fermentation process. This stuff isn't for everybody I suppose, but I really love it and crave it. What a wonderful thing to have preserved!!

For the full rundown on sauerkraut, please check out the info on Wikipedia.
An excerpt:

A study at King's College, London run by nutritionist Lejla Kazinic Kreho found that "pickled cabbage", or sauerkraut, was as effective as the popular drug Viagra at increasing sexual function...

Sauerkraut juice is also credited with high medical qualities; its consumption is recommended for flu prevention, as a gastroregulator for a variety of gastrointestinal conditions, from diarrhea to constipation, ulcers, bronchitis and various other digestive and respiratory diseases and disorders, anemia, but its most popular use in the regions where it's produced has always been as a major remedy against hangover, since it not only drives away the headache, but it also neutralises the effects of alcoholic intoxication on the stomach and intestinal mucosa and cleans the liver.

Captain James Cook always took a store of sauerkraut on his sea voyages, since experience had taught him that it was an effective preventative of scurvy.

Wow!

Pickled Beets

I love pickled beets but had never made them before we did this. So I was excited! It all starts with the real thing, of course, fresh from the garden! We dug up three rows of beets, each about 15' long. Needless to say, we had a wagonload of beets!

BELOW: After separating the tops, hosing down the dirty beets and then giving them a quick scrub, we popped them into big pots of boiling water. There they cooked until tender. After cooking and a cooldown, the skins slipped right off without even using a peeler or a knife.

BELOW: The cooked, peeled, and quartered beets go into canning jars.

BELOW: Then the jarred beets are topped with hot brine, consisting of sugar, vinegar, whole Allspice and cinnamon sticks. The smell at this point was fantastic. The day outside was cold and stormy, but by this point the workshop was very warm and cozy. Fun!!!!

BELOW: OK, here's the point of it all. Nectar-sweet and tangy with delicious vegetable flavor, these pickled beets are just amazingly good. I give lots of credit to the great soil over at Carol's garden, that made such gorgeous beets possible!!

I don't think I'll ever really enjoy pickled beets from the store like I used to. Here is some interesting info about beets on Wikipedia.

An excerpt:

The beet has a long history of cultivation stretching back to the second millennium BC. The plant was probably domesticated somewhere along the Mediterranean, whence it was later spread to Babylonia by the 8th century BC and as far east as China by 850 AD.

Making Plum Leather

This particular idea for what to do with our several frozen gallon bags of delicious Italian plums came from Carol's wonderful Aunt Shirley. We were searching for ideas of what to do with the delicious, fat, sweet pear-shaped plums that did not involve making them into (tiresome) jelly. "Why not make plum leather?" She suggested. Great idea, Aunt Shirley -- thank you!! (Puzzled? Plum leather is what many people think of as "fruit roll".)

BELOW: Here are the fat little plums cooking down in the top of Carol's wonderful steam juicer. If you are not familiar with this wonderful device, here is a link to more information on Buy.com (No, it's not a commissioned link.)

We canned up the crystal-clear purple plum juice that collected in the bottom of the juicer, for use later. Our focus on that day was on the meltingly soft and sweet plum meat.

BELOW: Enter the Victorio food mill!!! This wonderful old-fashioned device takes the whole cooked fruit that you feed into the top, and shunts all the tough skins, seeds, pits and what-have-you out one way, and the creamy milled fruit flesh comes out the other way. It's awesome. More info about this machine on Buy.com.

By the way, the recipe we used for this was inspired by the one in the Ball Blue Book - except that we cut the sugar WAY, WAY back. The Ball recipe called for SEVEN CUPS of sugar to FIVE cups of fruit pulp - OBSCENE!! That is just an insane amount of sugar... we had six cups of plum pulp and we used just one-half cup of sugar. It was delicious when we tasted it - more sugar would just have adulterated the taste of the real fruit. So there.

BELOW: The fibrous plum "tailings" separated by the Victorio mill get put through the mill once again, to release all the yumminess they hold. After that, the tailings go right out to the chickens. Boy do they love that!

BELOW: Next step in creating plum leather is the Excaliber Food Dehydrator!! The smooth plum puree is spread onto special nonstick sheets which are the put into the dehydrator for 8 hours - and there you have it.

The dried pools of plum leather peel right off, and are rolled up in wax paper, where they are shelf-stable for weeks to months - but they don't last long around here! The essential flavor of the natural plums shines through in every bite of the leather - it's just fantastic. Wonderful snack.