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: