Winter is Coming.

The garden has been given up on, as has any hopes for a social life. My job has finally broken me and I'm just not even trying anymore. Sure, I'm still making bread every couple weeks and when the milk starts to turn I make yogurt. Maybe next year we'll rip out the grass and expand the garden, but maybe not. I'm just not even going to think about it right now. Winter is coming and the biggest thing on my mind right now is knitting and preparing for the long, dark, wet of it.

We are finally getting new windows for the house. It's going to be glorious. We're upgrading from single-paned and aluminum framed to triple-paned and insulated vinyl framed. It should lower the heating bills substantially and make sitting on the far side of the living room bearable without an extra layer.

The cooler and shorter days are making knitting seem much more pleasurable too. I had to force myself to knit through the summer. There were so many other things I could be doing and needed to be doing, but now it seems a lot more seasonal. I'm about three-quarters of the way through my current big project. I've got two more projects in the queue with yarn already bought and I just started up a new experimental project last night. I went a little nutty with the online yarn ordering. It was all so cheap!




I'm starting on a "conceptual knitting" project, a Sky Scarf. The idea is you knit one row every day. The color of that row depends on the color of the sky. I have also seen people do mood scarves, with a different color for each mood and even an exercise scarf, tracking their different activities with greens and reds and gray for days they didn't do anything. That's good motivation - try for as little gray as possible!




For my Sky Scarf I have three shades of blue and three shades on gray. I'll be done when the scarf is long enough to suit my fancy. It will probably be done in the late Spring. I think it will be a pretty cool thing and end up mostly gray in the middle, flecked with short spurts of brilliant blue.

Cheese and Bread.

I discovered a new delicious treat - Fresh ricotta on homemade white bread.

I made ricotta. That's right, I finally made cheese. My first cheese!!

Ricotta is traditionally made from whey, the byproduct of cheese making. It literally means "recooked", as you recook the leftovers from your previous cheese and it makes ricotta. Most recipes you find for homemade ricotta, however, are milk based and don't call for whey. The whole reason I wanted to try ricotta was because I end up with a good bit of whey every time I make yogurt and I never know what to do with it. I've seen suggestions to use whey instead of milk in bread recipes or to water plants with it, but I wanted to try and make ricotta the traditional way.

The whey ricotta recipe I had called for 2 gallons of whey to start and results in a yield of about 2 cups ricotta. The leftover whey from my yogurt making and a little extra milk and cream for volume added up about a quart of liquid. In the end I had about 2 tbsp of ricotta. Not the most triumphant entry into the cheese making field, but an entry none the less. I didn't know what to do with 2 tbsp of ricotta until I put two and two together as my weekend bread came out of the oven. It was amazingly delicious. Warm, fluffy, slightly sweet white bread with a cold, soft, tangy cheese spread. Mmmm...

That's one more check off my list of things to learn this year: Make a soft cheese, DONE.

Small Potatoes.

This was the first time I ever tried growing potatoes. They worked, but didn't really grow vertically, which I had intended by making little potato towers. There was just one layer of potatoes on the bottom. And there weren't that many. And they were small.



They sure were tasty though. Next time around I'm sure they will be more fruitful. I think the soil was a little too rich for them. Upon further research potatoes actually like kind of cruddy soil with a lot of sand. So, I won't treat them so well next year. Hopefully it will toughen them up.

Avocado Update.

I'm growing a tree in the kitchen window. The avocado has a root! And, yes, I am growing it in a pickle jar from last year. Those file folder stickers don't come off for anything.

Tomato-Tomato-Tomato.

Tomatoes!!! This is the tomato harvest from last weekend:





There were a lot of tomatoes. I managed to use all of them, but then we harvested again and now we have another box of tomatoes to use. I'm eying this recipe.





I made most of them into fresh from the garden tomato sauce. I was so very, very close to having this entire recipe be home grown. Unfortunetly our onions were a bust this year and we already went through what we had. The onions in this sauce are from, gasp, the store. But the tomatoes, carrot, basil, thyme, oregano and garlic are all from our own yard.





Our peppers were a bust this year too. Need to get a cold frame. But, my future mother-in-law's garden had plentiful peppers and we got share in it! These were roasted and either put into salsa or frozen.




I experimentally canned some green chile sauce and some knock-off Ninfa's red sauce. I also made jalapeno salsa from an actual canning recipe.





I didn't bother to really read up about canning salsa. I assumed peppers were high acid food like tomatoes, because, well, they just seem like they should be. I was wrong. They are not. So, I need to un-can the Ninfa's sauce and the green chile sauce and move them over to the freezer. Or just eat them. The jalapeno salsa I made should be good; since it was prepared from a meant-for-canning recipe it's loaded with vinegar. Live and learn. At least I didn't give us botulism or something.

Sewing.

I don't know how to sew. No clue what-so-ever. There are a couple of things I have "mended" over the years that were great triumphs in my mind, but really, there was no skill involved. I just followed a vague intuition of what stitches are supposed to look like.

I started planning on buying a sewing machine about four years ago. My first project when I got that not yet had machine was going to be an apron. My mom bought me an apron that Christmas because, well, she knew this would happen. I never did buy that sewing machine.

Last year, though, Mike found a sewing machine. That was step one down. Just because I finally had a sewing machine didn't mean I knew anything about it. I had never in my life laid a hand on a sewing machine. So, that found machine sat in a case (and is still sitting in a case) on the floor of the back room waiting for me to figure out what I'm doing.

Better late than never, I started taking a sewing class this month. It's a four-week series and I'm two weeks in. I can....kind of sew now! I at least have enough of a clue that I can start using that machine at home and I'm starting to see all the garments I thought were lost to tears or wear that I can fix or re-purpose now. I'm think about things I can make. It's opening up all new doors of possibility. Who knew sewing could be so exciting.

Random projects.

Labor Day has come and gone, which means summer is over, right? It does mean my work hours are going up again, which means less time to do anything. Thankfully, this is coinciding with less garden chores as summer winds down. I have some other pest extermination experiments to do this week and I've got garlic and shallot planting on the calendar starting next weekend. After that though, what we've got is pretty much what we've got. And then it will start raining and I won't have to worry about watering the garden for like nine months.

Anyway, lingering end of summer projects around our house are....herb drying. I cut a bunch of thyme and oregano to store for the winter. We've got five little bushels hanging to dry. It makes nice decoration.





That's a big 'mater! We have eight tomato plants. About 90% of our tomatoes are coming from four of those plants. The other four are tiny, but cute, and are giving us about 3-4 tomatoes per plant. I haven't counted, but I think the big ones must have like a thousand tomatoes each, or something...

Mike made a jalapeno salsa and I made a Hatch green chile salsa. We're competing. I'm not sure who is winning though. They are both pretty good. I guess I should get more chips and "taste-test" a little more thoroughly.




My newest pet project is an avocado tree. Once upon a time, in a land far, far away I sprouted an avocado seed and grew a tree indoors. It made it to about a foot and a half high. My cat, (then kitten) Tim, chewed on it one night and killed it. I haven't had indoor plants since. When I cut open this avocado the other day the seed was already split and sprouted. I took it as a sign.

The Internet tells me to suspend the seed a quarter submerged in water. The root will start growing into the water and a tree will sprout out the top. Once it's a foot tall or so and has some good roots I can transplant it to dirt.




You can see the split where the roots will soon emerge.





Looking back, last year at this time we were hard at work on our patio. We finished it up (the stones at least) just after Labor Day 2010 and right before I started back to work. I can't believe I've been here a year already!

I really love our patio. It looks great and we have eaten outside almost every night this summer. We've got a few potted plants around and grapes starting at the foot of two of the beams. There are a couple large cedar stumps we saved from last year's firewood that now serve as extra seating for the picnic table too.