Happy Thanksgiving and then some...

Hello everyone...

First of all I would like to take the time to wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian friends, family and all of you who follow this blog. We have a lot to be thankful for in this country. Cheers.

If you have read any posts from my previous blog then you know that I prefer to clean my home using as few products as possible. Everything we use is a chemical of some sort but I try to keep it simple.

Almost all of my cleaning is done with baking soda and vinegar...most especially the vinegar. I clean everything with it. It works amazingly well. The only thing that is not great about it is the smell. Sometimes it is like I work in a chip shop in here! Kidding...

I have thought of a way to change that though.

I have begun adding orange peels and used up lemon shells to jars of plain white vinegar. After they have steeped for a while the vinegar no longer smells like vinegar...it smells wonderfully of oranges or lemons. 

I am sure this is not a new idea but I have only just begun to do this and let me tell you it works a treat.

That is it for today. It is dull and raining here in eastern Ontario so I think I will grab my vinegar and do a little cleaning. At least the house will smell nice.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a great day. Cheers...

                                            Melanie

cabbage, onion and egg pie...

Hello everyone...

Back for the last post of the day. Feast or famine, no?  :)

I will start by saying sorry for not taking photos to show you this whole process. I harvested an amazing Savoy cabbage on Sunday. It was a thing of beauty. And it topped the scales at 10 pounds 1 ounce. And that was after I had pulled off all the guard leaves.

We had cabbage for dinner Sunday night but I still had most of it left. So Monday night for dinner I made one of my favourite pies.

I originally got this recipe from an English magazine called Vegetarian Christmas. We are not actually vegetarians but we do eat a lot of veg. I have adjusted the recipe just a bit over the years so I will share that with you now.

You are going to need to make pastry for a double crust pie. For myself, I like to make pastry with either pure lard, butter or a combination of both. I do not like to use vegetable shortening but that is just my personal preference. When you make your pie, and I hope you will, use whatever you prefer.

For the ingredients you will need:

- about 1 pound of potatoes, peeled and cut into small dice (I used the Irish Cobbs from the previous post. Yukon Gold would be a good choice)
- a couple large red onions, sliced thinly (I have increased the amount of onions from the original recipe as I like more of them)
- a couple cloves or garlic, finely minced
- about 1 - 1 1/4 pounds of finely shredded savoy cabbage
- ground cumin, about a teaspoon
- salt and pepper to taste
- extra virgin olive oil and butter
- 4 fresh large eggs

Get a large frying pan, add about 1 tablespoon of the oil and 1/2 tablespoon of butter and heat. Add the potatoes and the red onions and saute them on low until the potatoes have taken on some colour and the onions and soft and starting to brown. Remove from the pan and set aside.

Add another tablespoon of oil and 1/2 tablespoon of butter to the pan and heat and then add the cabbage, the garlic and the ground cumin. If you do not like the taste of cumin you could substitute anything that you like such as sage or thyme. Saute the cabbage for a few minutes over medium heat to get it going and then add 1/4 cup of water, stir around, turn it down to low and pop on a lid.
Leave it to gently cook until the cabbage is soft which took me about 10 minutes. Turn it off and allow to cool.

Make your pastry. Use half to line the bottom of a large pie plate (mine was 10") and then add the potato and onion mixture in an even layer. Top with all the lovely cabbage, again in a smooth even layer. 

Now, make 4 little pockets in the cabbage, evenly spaced around the dish. Into each of these, crack one egg as you can see from the photo below. Finally a photo right! Sorry about that.  :(

 
Now top with your remaining pastry and seal the edges. Cut a couple of slits for the steam to escape. Now, you can leave it alone at this point or go the extra mile and decorate the pie as I have done. I cannot bear to see a naked pie.

I have used a couple of cookie cutters to make acorns, oak leaves and maple leaves from the scrap pastry. Pat on a little cold water and stick them on wherever you like.

Now you want to glaze the top of the pie. Beat a small egg and paint on the egg wash getting into all the little nooks and crannies of the pastry.

Bake in a preheated 400F oven for about 25 - 30 minutes. Have a look at it after 25. You want the pastry to be lovely and golden like this photo below.

You can really see those cute little leaves and acorns that I slaved away over. They really add something to the pie, don't you think? After all, we eat with our eyes first!  :)

After you remove it from the oven let it sit for about 5 minutes before you cut into it. You can see the filling and the cooked egg in this photo. It is utterly delicious.

So glad you stopped by today. Do let me know if you try this recipe and what you think of it. Have a great day.

Cheers, Melanie

growing potatoes...

Hello everyone....

Second post of three for today.

Like most people who have a decent size veg patch, I grow potatoes. In the ground. Which requires digging a trench, setting in the seed potatoes and then repeatedly hilling them up as they grow since that is where the spuds form. The more you can hill them up and keep them covered, the more spuds you will get. 

And of course they must stay covered to prevent them going green as then you cannot eat them.

Last year I happened to watch a Youtube video from England about growing potatoes in pots. Now, this chap was doing it because of lack of space. I began to think about growing that way because of convenience.

So this year, I purchased several different varieties of seed potatoes. Some I planted the conventional way as described above and I also planted a couple pots of each kind as well. I wanted to compare the results.

I just used pots that I had leftover from when I had purchased plants. Some were a fairly decent size and others were smaller. I put one or two seed potatoes in the smaller pots and up to three in the couple of really large pots. You simply needed to put a couple inches of garden loam in the bottom and snuggle in the potatoes and cover with an inch of soil. Water and leave them to grow. 

And grow they did. The really easy part is that you simply grab a few handfuls of soil and just keep topping up the pots as the plants grow larger. When you reach the top of the pot you stop and just leave them to continue growing. 

I will do an in depth post about this next year but for now I wanted to share what I got this year.

This is the harvest from a single pot which is about 14"or 16" in diameter. These are Irish Cobb potatoes. I dumped out the pot, gathered up the spuds and then weighed them. 

Have a look. 5 pounds and 15 ounces of potatoes from a single pot! And that is one of the smaller pots. I cannot wait to see what I get from the big pots. :)

Thanks for stopping by. Will be back with one more post shortly.

Cheers, Melanie

those crazy hens...

Hello everyone...

I have a couple posts for today but wanted to start with this one, which is short and cute.

At present I have 13 lovely chickens. Some are adults and 6 are the newest ones still growing up to be big girls. The older hens quite naturally are the ones who are laying the eggs at this point.

To facilitate that, we have 4 good size nest boxes for them to use.

Hens are funny little creatures, each with their own unique personality if you take the time to get to know them, which I have. And they have a definite preference on which nest box they like to use.

But sometimes, there is somebody already in there. Rather than use another box they will often wait until the box is available or, as you can see in this photo, if they are friends with the hen who is already in there, they will just climb in with her.

These two ladies are friends so they have no problem sharing a box as they sleep together at night. 

Thanks for stopping by. Another post to follow shortly. 

Cheers, Melanie

spinach salad...

Hello everyone...

I harvested a good big basket of my last sowing of spinach last night. I had grown it under row cover until a couple days ago and it was looking amazing so time to harvest before this bizarre September heat wave caused it to bolt.

We love spinach in many ways but our favourite is a simple spinach salad with a homemade creamy garlic dressing. Lets get started...

Beautiful just picked spinach.

I pick the larger leaves off the stems as we find them too coarse to eat. The smaller leaves go in whole. Dump the lot into the sink and give it a really good rinse.

I use a salad spinner to dry the leaves. I generally spin twice, dumping out the water in between. The leaves will not be completely dry but good enough for what we want. 

Boil up a couple of eggs until just hard boiled. These lovelies are from our hens. In order to be able to peel them cleanly it is easier if they are a few days old. Really fresh eggs do not peel very well at all.

The remaining salad ingredients are sliced button mushrooms, the above noted hard boiled eggs, sliced and some grated cheese. Use a fairly course grater for nice shreds of cheese. 

Now for the dressing. In a blender crack one fresh large egg. Add about 1 tablespoon of granulated sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder, 2 oz of white vinegar or white wine vinegar and 7 oz of canola oil. Sometimes if I want a bit of a different taste I will vary the type of vinegar I use such as one of the herbal vinegars that I make.

Whiz away until it is really well blended. It will be slightly thick and taste utterly delicious. Sweet but with a good hit of garlic.

I generally put the spinach leaves into a very large bowl and add a few tablespoons of the dressing to dress the leaves before I add the remaining ingredients. You want a nice thin coating to the leaves...definitely not sopping in dressing. Add the remaining ingredients, another tablespoon or so of the dressing and gently toss. The one addition I sometimes use is freshly made croutons but did not use them this time.

Now sit down and enjoy. We had this with some simple grilled chicken and fresh potatoes from the garden. The remaining dressing will keep for quite some time in a closed container in the refrigerator. Just shake briskly before you use it again. Although this is our favourite dressing for spinach salad it would certainly work well on any robust leaf salad such as romaine.

Do give it a try and let me know what you think. 

Thanks so much for stopping by. Have a great day.

Cheers...  Melanie

welcome...

14 September, 2017

Welcome to my new blog. If you have followed my previous blog...Candleford Farm Homestead... then I hope you will be happy to follow this one. The content will be somewhat different but certainly some things will be similar. 

My main focus with this blog will be my love of all sorts of gardening, homekeeping and cooking. Gardening will likely take the lions share of the posts because I spend a great deal of my time in my garden. Because we have such a large kitchen garden and we try to feed ourselves for most of the year from the garden, a lot of posts will be about recipes that I have used for our produce. And as far as homekeeping is concerned...well, I enjoy looking after my house and the things in it...without harmful chemicals.

I hope you will find something here to inspire you. Thank you for stopping by.

Cheers... 

     Melanie