I've been processing away all day today.    

I pitted the sour cherries and had about 4 gallons of frozen blackcaps in the freezer.  It is OFFICIALLY time to make Blackcap Jam and Wine!

Here's this years first small batch of Blackcap Jam!

Follow the link above to find my original recipes for these. 

This year I'm doing a variation on the Blackcap wine recipe that includes 2 lbs of pitted sour cherries.  For the fruit, you just add 2 lbs Blackcaps and 2 lbs Sour cherries.  Mash, add dried cranberries (or golden raisins) as suggested let set 24 hours, and carry on from there just as the instructions from the original post tell you!

First, you pit the Sour Cherries!

Put all of your frozen fruit (cherries and blackcaps) into a large pot, add raisins (or dried/sweetened cranberries), and top off with 4 quarts of water.

Cover with a hand towel and set sit 24 hours.  This is actually 2 different batches of wine. One plain Blackcap, and one Sour cherry/blackcap

See the original recipe here!
Have Fun, and Happy Fermenting!!!

Lately Dandelions have been getting some attention because they are among the 1st food sources for honeybees at the beginning of Spring. So, this year I waited a bit until the trees and other flowers started blossoming before I harvested ONLY the wide open flowering tops of dandelions to make Dandelion Wine! I've done this every year for the last 3 years and am in LOVE with both the process of picking and preparing and with the beautiful golden wine that results. My girls love to help pick flowers too!
I blogged about the recipe and process last Spring and am currently at the point in the process where I'm waiting for the must to activate with the yeast. In another day or so I'll bottle it up in a 1 gallon carboy.

Here's our haul

Quinn helped me "Pick and Pluck" this year!

Ani helped me stir the ingredients together for wine!

As the weather heats up, this recipe is fantastic either eaten hot as a light dinner or eaten chilled as a pasta salad.  Either way, it's great to eat out on the porch in the sunshine.

This is a spinoff of my recipe for Pasta Shrimp and Peas that I shared last year around this time.  Both of these recipes have proven to be kid pleasers. 

Last year was a scouting year in the woods by my house.  I kept my eyes open while walking the dog (and the kids) and located an area near the creek that was heavily populated with nettle and ferns.  On the Summer Solstice last year I harvested a whole bunch of nettle and used it to make various things, but the ferns, while beautiful to look at, were well past the edible "fiddlehead" phase for the season. 

I noted where those gorgeous ferns lived, and headed back to their patch last week.

Our dog, Oscar, helped me that day!

 I was rewarded with fresh fiddleheads (harvested sustainably, only 1 or 2 from each fern plant) that I sauteed up with some tamari and olive oil and ate as part of a side salad served alongside some "Ramped-up" blackbean burgers.





So, why do I keep on referring to my blackbean burgers as being "ramped-up"?  Well, it's because on this particular fiddlehead-gathering trip to the woods, I happened to realize that there were colonies of ramps EVERYWHERE.  Super abundant this year (and about 14.99/lb at the local grocery store).  So I gathered some of these beauties as well.





You use ramps just like you would use green onions. 

Lately I've been using dinner salads as a place to finish up all of our leftover side dishes (grain salads etc) along with getting my daily intake of ferments, and foraged goodies.  

Yep, I said FORAGED goodies.  The weather finally broke and the green things are HERE!   It's almost impossible to go outside with my girls lately and NOT pick up a few flowers.  


This absolutely isn't a new topic for me.  Last year I covered the use of foraged wild sweet violets, bittercress flowers, and onion grass in this gorgeous post. 

This time around, I kept it simple and added the flowers to our salad plates along with baby dandelion greens, homemade purple sauerkraut, and a Quinoa salad made with some of this season's first onion grass (which, for all intents and purposes tastes very much like mild chives.  I substituted Onion grass for the green onions called for in the original recipe, and carrots for the daikon radish). There's also a couple dolmades on there.  I cheated and bought those from the Greek bar at the store, BUT here's a recipe for those as well!

And here it is, in all it's HUMONGOUS dinner salad glory.

 

Ingredients for Quinoa Salad

Enjoy!!

We have nut trees in our yard. It appears that a couple generations back the farmer who owned this place really liked black walnuts and chestnuts. All summer long  I've been watching, and waiting, and contemplating how to know exactly when the nuts would be ripe and ready to try.  And  also how I'd get to them before the squirrels did!

Well, last week a front came through with high winds howling in off of the lake.  Of course, the kids wanted to go outside in the wind storm... so out we went. When we got out there we realized that it was practically raining nuts! HEY!  They're ready!



The girls helped me by picking up ALL of the walnuts under this tree!

And I picked up the chestnuts (or, as my girls call them "prickle-nuts) that fell to the ground.

Here's what we ended up with!

We ran inside just as the rain was starting.

The next day, I hulled the chestnuts ( WITH GLOVES! as indicated in the photo above).

Here are the hulled chestnuts.  I have them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator right now, but I'm planning on roasting some of them to eat either tonight or tomorrow, and also to use some as part of the stuffing to make stuffed winter squash for a get-together we're having in a couple of weeks. 

A lot of people plant Calendula or Pot Marigold (Calendula officinalis) in their veggie gardens to keep the pests away.  It definitely has a potent, but not unpleasant scent to it and has both astringent and antibacterial properties. These healing properties make it a perfect candidate for drying and using as a healing "gardener's salve" to put on hands that have been digging in the garden without gloves, or have perhaps been a little overzealous in a blackberry patch.

These amazing fruits have gone overlooked year after year and this year I just couldn't take it anymore!  I mean, LOOK at these!

The first summer we were in our house, I realized that our neighborhood is absolutely loaded with wild grape vines. That year I decided to make wild grape jelly for the first time and it was a hit! For the next couple of years, I kept an eye out, but there was never quite as much fruit... until this year.  And so, we have a brand new batch of jelly!

It's the equinox and from here on out the days will be shorter than the nights here in the northern hemisphere.  The weather has turned cooler and the leaves are starting to change color.  Everything that is going to set fruit this season is doing so and herbs and flowers for winter remedies abound.  This is going to be a photo roundup of what we've been doing and seeing around here lately.

Hope you enjoy!

There is a Native American herbal legend that says whatever grows in excess during the growing season is an indication of what kind of a cold/flu/viral season it's going to be.   See lots of  random "volunteer" Coltsfoot?  Expect croup to show up.  See lots of Mullein? Bad upcoming hayfever season... Etcetera.  I see no reason to doubt this theory, it seems as plausible as any.  And this year I see lots and LOTS of Purple Aster and Goldenrod (there's always lots of goldenrod, by the way). New York (Purple) Aster (Symphyotrichum novi-belgii) is known to be a fairly strong nervine and is sometimes prefered over Valerian for sedative and sleep-promoting purposes.  It is also traditionally used to help counteract asthma and other bronchial irritation.  So, traditionally, the abundance of purple aster is telling us to expect a very "bronchial/sleep deprived" cold and flu season.  I believe it!  My asthma has been abnormally terrible the last couple of weeks and there's a story all over the news about some new virus that's causing fairly severe bronchial distress.


Granted, we still have our humidifiers and antibiotics and Doctors and, in my case, albuterol inhalers, but wouldn't it be great to have to use that stuff less?!


I had a great time harvesting 2 gorgeous flowering weeds today and they often grow together:  Purple Aster, and Goldenrod flowering tops.  I made a tincture out of the purple aster and added some elderberries to the mix for extra "cough" help, and I made an infused oil out of the goldenrod which is supposed to work really well when rubbed externally into sore muscles. Can't wait to try the oil when I decide after the Holidays that it's time to shape up a little (this happens every year! HAHA!).

A few weeks back our wild rose bushes were in full bloom.  There were enough flowers to fill many, many quart containers and the smell was divine.  I stopped picking after about 2 quarts of petals had been harvested (my eldest daughter was done getting pricked by the thorns at that point) and brought them inside to make rosewater.  


I had it in my head that I'd be using the 2 quarts of rosewater that I ended up making in tons of different recipes, but then my fascination with strawberries took over and I lost track of time.  A few  weeks later, my rosewater was still sitting in the refridgerator, looking forlorn...  and I decided to use the whole container in one go!

The result was an amazing smelling sweet rose petal wine!

Starting at around the 4th of July, our wild black raspberries were ripening.  The bushes have been yielding a bit more than a quart every-other-day and we've been gorging on them, and filling the freezer with the rest.  I plan on making wine, and jam as I have in the past, and they're also fantastic with
(soy)icecream or used instead/alongside strawberries over shortcake. 


I'll include the wine and jam recipes as I get around to them.

Another garden staple around here has been zucchini!  If you've ever grown this vegetable, or know anyone who does, you know that once they start producing, LOOK OUT because they'll take over your entire kitchen!  There's never a shortage around here despite the fact that I haven't actually grown any for the last few years.  I got a bagful at the farmer's market for .75 each and have been playing happily ever since.

So far I have made zucchini soup, zucchini bread, sliced zucchini on the grill, zucchini in kabobs, and sausage/zucchini pizza on the grill.  The recipes for soup and bread are designed specifically to use up zucchini.  Like, those HUGE ones you can't figure out what else to do with!

                                                   Seasalt to taste

Back in June I picked and pickled a jar of wild grape leaves when I found them newly growing on the vines in the hedgerow by our house.  A couple weeks later, I've decided to turn them into dolmades!  They were fairly easy to put together, and I loved the flavor combination.

Enjoy!