Brussel Sprouts

The brussel sprouts have been growing all year and we finally ate them. We trudged through the snow in the backyard to pull up one frozen plant. We had them with a delicious meal of local roast lamb, potatoes, parsnips, giant squash, and garden carrots. All the brussel sprouts were still very very small we weren't sure how they would taste but they tasted great!

Bagels

Kevin and I made Bagels from the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day Book yesterday. They turned out really well. They taste a lot more bagel-y the next morning. They weren't hard but had a lot of steps. After making the dough and shaping them there was...

The boiling stage:

Out of the water:

Sprinkle with sesame seeds:

And after baking they were ready to eat!

Christmas Cake Time

Well I put marzipan and royal icing on the cakes and we had our first slices last night. I think it tastes extra good this year.

Mache from the snow covered cold frame

There's a very inspiring picture in Eliot Coleman's Four Season Harvest of picking lettuce from a snow covered cold frame. Yesterday I got to do the same. I had a salad with some mache from the garden.

Tag and Texture Quilt

I made a little blanket for the baby to play with. I'd read about blankets with tags of ribbon sticking off the edges so I wanted to do that. But I made it with squares of all different textured materials so maybe the baby will like that too. I even got to include Kevin's first knitting square since he let me teach him to knit a couple of months ago (he did not take to it). And he also did a bit of the embroidery on it. It didn't turn out very square at all but I'm still proud of it as my first quilting experiment.

Final Carrot Harvest

December 2nd and I finally dug up all the carrots. We still haven't had a proper snow but I know it could come any day now making it less enjoyable to pop out before dinner to pick carrots. Luckily today was a really nice day and I stayed warm in just a sweater.
It turned out to be a very good carrot harvest. We've been eating them regularly since July (for almost 5 months already!) and we still had loads left over. It took me most of the afternoon to dig them up then brush off the excess dirt and snip off the stems.


Some of the carrots turned out to be huge. I weighed all the huge ones and several were around the 15 oz mark with the biggest being almost a pound at 15.6 oz. However, that's nothing compared to the world's largest carrot which was 18.985 pounds grown by John Evans in Alaska.

Christmas Decorations

We just finished putting up our Christmas decorations. We drank some nice hot apple cider while we did it and listened to Christmas music.



My brand new nativity set:

Decoration made from some of our artist friend's cards from over the years:

Newborn Gowns

I found this free pattern online and fell so in love with it I had to make 3 in two days. The one on the right I made from a thrift store T-shirt that I bought specially and the other two are Kevin's old ones that had holes. The yellow one especially will be cute to see baby in because Kevin used to wear that shirt all the time.
This is where I got the pattern:
http://thismamamakesstuff.blogspot.com/2008/08/tutorial-t-shirt-to-newborn-gown.html

Homemade Lemonade

We had some lemon juice lying around after a project for a Christmas present and decided to make lemonade. We added sugar and fizzy water to the juice and it tastes perfect.

Apple Fritters

Last night Kevin and I made apple fritters just like the ones you get from the St. Jacob's Market. They were very good and we ate them all last night. We followed this guy's recipe
http://www.duhlicious.com/2009/05/apple-fritters.html

More DIY - Vanity

We've always wanted to replace the upstairs plain old wall mounted sink with a proper vanity. And we did it today. From our previous plumbing adventures in this house we were expecting it not to go perfectly but we had loads of unexpected extra work come up.
We had to replace the drain like we expected but the part attaching to the wall crumbled away a bit and was all gunky anyway so we had to use a rubber thing we found in the basement to attach it to the drain.
And a bit of unpainted wall shows now. We don't have the matching paint in the basement but Kevin managed to mix up two other paints that we had to make a paint that matches well enough.
And we had to cut away the baseboard.
And we had to return the faucet that we originally bought because it splashed a bit too much and the pop up drain cover didn't work.
But it's all done now.

Mache from the cold frame

Haven't been eating salads recently so we finally got around to trying some of our mache. The stuff I picked had gotten quite big. I mixed it with some grocery store romaine and seeds and some garden carrot. It tasted just like lettuce.

Saloon Doors

We've been talking about them for years it seems, sometimes seriously, sometimes not. But we finally did it. The saloon doors are up and working perfectly. It is not as easy as walking through a doorway without saloon doors but with our new nicely finished basement I didn't like having an open doorway. And these still allow ventilation which is especially good with our dehumidifier being in that room.

I used regular 2X4s, some leftover 2x10 for the top, and bought some small plywood boards that fit on my bike basket for the panels. And I got to use my table saw, router, and biscuit joiner. Kevin did all the wood finishing which is what makes them look so nice.

Chili in a Bread Bowl

Kevin had the idea to make some bread bowls to go with our chili on Sunday night. It was pretty fun.

Christmas Soap Making

Kevin has been helping me make some soaps for Christmas gifts. First we made some peppermint soap. We used peppermint oil to give it a strong peppermint smell and I opened up a mint medley tea bag to give it some specs of dried mint leaves too which I think look really cool especially since they came out kind of different colours after the soap making.


I also wanted to use the dried marigold flowers that I had saved from our garden this summer. I matched it with some lavender essential oil. Marigold and calendula I think are the only two flower petals that don't turn black in the soapmaking process so it was nice we happened to have loads of marigolds.


I hung them up in the study closet to dry months ago. Then we pulled out all the dry petals (along with the seeds).


And I think the soap turned out really nicely. I already bought some nice ribbon from the thrift store to tie it up with.

Saving Seeds

Kevin and I pulled apart some marigold flowers that I had been drying for a while to use the petals in our Christmas Gift soaps and of course at the same time the seeds came out. It hadn't occurred to me at all that that would happen but it was really easy to get the seeds, they just came out with the petals. So I have put the seeds in a jar to save for spring so we can have loads of marigolds next year.


While I was discovering seed saving I decided to finally try to extract the seeds from some bolted romaine lettuce plants that I had been saving in the study closet for months. With these I put the plant heads in a paper bag and shook to get the seeds to separate. This worked but lots of fluff and leaves came out too and I can't even imagine taking the time to separate them. So I've just put the whole mix in a jar. I can at least scatter the whole lot somewhere and see if lettuce comes up if I don't pick out the individual seeds.

Dolls

I went to a doll making workshop (http://littlecityfarm.blogspot.com/2009/11/workshop-making-waldorf-inspired-dolls.html) on the weekend and made this Waldorf style doll. I am saving doing the hair till I know whether I want it to be a boy doll or a girl doll, that's why right now it's wearing that hat that I knit for the baby.



And these are three dolls I made a couple of weeks ago but only just gave faces to. This is my new family: me, Kev, and baby.

Shelves!

Kevin and I started working on these shelves about a week ago but we have been talking about them for months. We are so happy with them. They are totally level and not wobbly at all. And we think they look quite nice. We bought the big laminated boards for the shelves, that was the main expense. All the rest of the pieces are just made from standard 2x4s that I put through the table saw and the router.

We made the shelves in this little enclave that we created when we boxed in a duct that was put in when we got a new furnace. That was our project that we did at the beginning of September.