Eat Make Grow – Blog Hop #15

Welcome to this week’s Eat Make Grow Blog Hop where you share what you have been eating with your family, growing in your garden or making with all your creative impulses. Eat Make Grow is a collective link party that is shared across three blogs and runs every Thursday-Tuesday. Whichever blog that you choose to link up your post, it will show up on all three sites! Eat Make Grow is a way to share with many people posts about your domestic doings, whether that’s growing veggies, hosting parties, sewing, mixing up cleaning supplies, or trying out a new recipe. We want to learn about it! Every week, we will feature the most popular link, and one chosen by the the host. This week, your host is Me!

Your Hosts:

Miranda from Pocket Pause
Marigold from Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky!
Foy from Garden. Cook. Write. Repeat.

We’re not big fans of rules so there are just two of them:
1. Link up posts telling us how you cooked it, made it or grew it with your own hands. Eat Make Grow is about sharing our projects. Please no advertising, propaganda, corporate giveaways or informative articles. We may remove links if they aren’t on topic.
2. Please link your posts back to one of the hosting blogs. This is a common blog hop courtesy. This link helps build the Eat Make Grow community by sending your readers to all of the other participant’s posts. We will feature two posts each week and we will only consider posts that have a link back. A text link is fine, or you can grab this button and put it anywhere on your blog:

Grab the code from my sidebar!

Well, Halloween is over and so are all the fun blog posts for diy costumes and candies. So sad. Luckily we have THANKSGIVING to look forward to! Bring on the crowd family recipes! I’d like to see this week’s hop full of your favorite turkey day side dishes – i need some inspiration!

Our more popular post last week came from Living in the Green with an update on her garden’s harvest. I always loved bringing in and weighing all the bounty from my garden and am seething with jealousy on her yield – just look at all those ‘maters! She also shared some great tips on how to keep that harvest preserved during storage. Worth a read!

For my pick, i just had to choose this post about building a moveable pig pen. I’m impressed, but skeptical… what happens when it starts raining and that big, sturdy ole thing sinks in the mud? I can’t wait to hear updates and will be adding This Blessed Life to my blogroll! (I’m a sucker for pigs and guinea hens, y’all!)

I can’t wait to read what you’ve been up to this week, everyone! Come on, Get Hopping!:



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Pause on Pocket – Explorer

She doesn’t love it when mommy and daddy are wandering in opposite directions, but she sure loves scrambling around in the yummy smelling forest, foraging for mushrooms and toads.

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Recommended Reading for Knitters – Patterns for Handmade Gifts

It’s that time of the year: it’s dark early and the holidays are just around the corner… especially if you’re planning on making all your holiday gifts. If you’re a knitter, i have the perfect two books for you to help you prepare for the season: Last Minute Knitted Gifts and More Last Minute Knitted Gifts, by Joelle Hoverson.

Both of these books are chock full of great little patterns and are organized by speed of completion. From socks to scarves, bookmarks to sweaters there are patterns for every skill level and time budget. I’ve already busted out a few of my favorites and find the patterns easy to read and the finished products meet my expectations, even with my relatively beginner skills.

If you’re a knitter and are looking for a book or two to pick up that has a lot of options for giftable patterns, i highly recommend both these books. Buy online or pick up at the local library. If you know a knitter, i can guarantee he or she would be stoked to receive either of these books as a gift. Include a bookmark on the page of a project you’d like for Christmas next year 😉

Check out my sidebar for more recommended reading. Want more handmade holiday inspiration? Visit my post at A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa this week for ideas and resources to help you give handmade this year.

What are your favorite knitting pattern books? Please share and leave me a comment with the title!

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Magical Mushrooms

Autumn is the hubs’ new favorite season, and for good reason. Fall rains bring MUSHROOMS! We love foraging together as a family. It’s a bit like a scavenger hunt in nature and i have just as much fun taking photos of the inedibles as we do in harvesting the edibles.

We found one small and rather punky Bolete (Porcini) and what we think is a dyer’s polypore which I plan on dying some yarn with to see if it does in fact stain yellow. The Porcini is destined for some cream of mushroom soup! Remember to NEVER EAT a mushroom you cannot positively identify, and then never eat raw. Mushroom foraging should always be done with an experienced forager or a really good guidebook. We always carry a “hip guide” with us and have several larger books at home for more in depth research. In the Pacific Northwest, David Arora is the man and i highly recommend his books:

Bringing home the mushrooms is great fun, but so is the scrambling around in the moist, lush, magical Oregon wilderness. Foraging is really just an excuse to play around like a couple of children and get our hands dirty. Don’t forget to look up every once in a while, there’s magic in the trees as well.

Wild apples, mushrooms, nuts and more – what do you forage for?

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