August 30, 2012

Eat Make Grow: Blog Hop #5

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 Marigold.

Your Hosts
Marigold from Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky!
Foy from Garden. Cook. Write. Repeat.
Miranda from Pocket Pause
We’re not big fans of rules so there are just two of them:
No big corporation or business advertising or promotional posts. Let’s not dilute Eat Make Grow with junky posts. We don’t mind helping out the little home grown businesses of independent bloggers or handmade merchants (Etsy, etc.).
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:


This week’s most popular post came from Heather of The Not So Super Mama. This Mama is more super than she thinks, because she was Foy‘s choice last week for her perfect iced coffee post! This week, lots of you guys clicked on her post for Homemade Vitamin Water:

Heather says:

I first made these flavored waters when I did a detox diet with my husband where no caffeine was allowed.  It was not a pretty site around here for the first few days.  I might have even scared myself.  I hadn’t realized how addicted to caffeine I had become!

I did a similar real-food-only detox diet last spring: no caffeine, no sugar, no salt. Oy! It was tough. I drank a ton of water with a squeeze of lemon and unsweetened cranberry juice (blech!). I wish I had thought to add different varieties of fruit to my water! Heather offers a lot of yummy flavor suggestions. Hop on over to her post to see what they are!

And my choice for this week’s Host’s Pick comes from our very own Miranda of Pocket Pause! I agonized over whether or not it was totally kosher to share my co-host’s link, but in the end I think this project is too fun and too sweet NOT to share.

Miranda recently hand made the invitations for her sister’s baby shower. She says:

I wanted there to be a way for each invited person to send a special message to both my sister and her son that would last beyond the mailbox and guest list…What if I compiled a stack of banners with a personal blessing/sentiment from all of the invited guests and strung them on a long cord to hang at the shower and ultimately in the nursery?

I thought that this was such a cool idea and could be incorporated into any number of special events. Imagine doing this in place of a wedding guest book, or to celebrate a special anniversary. Hop over to Pocket Pause to see how she included the blessing banners in her invitations. She promises to show us more this week!

Is one of these featured posts yours? Grab our “Featured  Blogger” button to post on your blog and show off how cool you are. You can also  visit our Pinterest Eat Make Grow Featured Bloggers pin board to see some of our past favorites. 

Show us what you’ve done this week!



1 Comment

Filed under Eat Make Grow - Blog Hop

Tagged as , , , , ,

August 28, 2012

Plum Jammin’

What else would i rather be doing on a Monday afternoon than jamming plums for 3 plus hours? Lots of things, actually but i know i’ll be thanking my exhausted self while i dine on Summer fresh jam this Winter. I’ve now jammed 3 different batches of 2 kinds of plums, all foraged from over the fence right here in my apartment complex. Can’t beat free fruit, even if you have to spend $10 or so on more jars, jar lids and some honey. All but the last few plums we picked were NOT free stone, which made the cutting and seeding portion of jamming a looooong and arduous process. The plums were super sour and majorly juicy, making them great candidates for not too sweet jam, perfect for slathering with melted butter on honey wheat toast. Yum.

Plum Jam #1 – makes about 10 half pints

  • 5 pounds teeny purple plums, not freestone (weighed after the pits were removed)
  • 3 cups sugar
  • splash lemon juice
  • 1.25 packages low sugar pectin
  1. Add lemon to fruit and puree with an immersion blender (or in a food processor in batches)
  2. Cook while adding pectin and 1 cup sugar
  3. Bring to a boil
  4. Add rest of the sugar
  5. Bring to a boil again and boil for at least one minute
  6. Remove from heat and process 10 minutes  (recipe adapted from the Ball Blue Book)

Plum Jam #2 – makes about 8 half pints

  • 8 cups pureed sour golden plums, not freestone, pits removed
  • 1 cup honey
  • 4 teaspoons each calcium water and Pomona Pectin (the calcium water comes in the Pomona package)
  • 1 sad, green habanero pepper: use an orange ripened habanero if you can get it!
  1. Mix calcium water with pureed fruit in a large pot/pan
  2. Mix pectin with honey in a separate container
  3. Bring to a boil and add sweetener/pectin mixture, stirring really well for 2 minutes until dissolved
  4. Bring to a boil again
  5. Remove from heat and process 10 minutes

Plum Jam #3 – makes about 4 half pints

  • 4 cups pureed golden plums, not freestone, pits removed
  • 3/4 – 1 cup sugar
  • Several dashes pumpkin pie spice (or cardamom/cloves/cinnamon/ginger) about 1/5 teaspoon
  1. Same process as plum jam #2

All the jars pinged nicely, so i think i’m set. We’ve been eating from the first recipe and are really enjoying it. I also made a batch of spicy plum sauce from the recipe in the Ball Blue Book that turned out nicely, but not very spicy. I’d add a lot more pepper if i did that again – it makes a great bbq sauce, though, especially with rabbit.

After all that jamming, i need a nap! How about you? Do you love jamming/canning the Summer harvest, or is it kind of a chore you’d rather let someone else do? I’m on the fence. 😉

PS – We scoped out a bunch of pear trees to glean from this Fall, so leave me a comment with your favorite pear recipe, canned or baked, for me to try!

6 Comments

Filed under Cooking, Foraging, Preserved Food

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

August 27, 2012

Faces from the Fair

Hello from the Polk County fair! We headed up to Rickreal for a county fair just north of us this Summer. The Benton County fair is right down the road from us, but we went there last year and wanted to meet some folks near where we may be moving. My husband and i could barely contain ourselves around the goats, and quite enjoyed seeing all the swine, rabbits and poultry as well. We cannot WAIT to get goats, it’s kind of ridiculous. I mean look at these faces:

Seriously. I can’t take it. I love them SO much. Chickens and pigs are pretty cool, too:

That pig at the bottom is a Durock, one of the breeds we’ve considered raising. Cute. I just love pig noses, don’t you? County fairs are a great place to go to catch up with the locals, see old friends, meet new ones and see what sorts of critters folks in the area prefer to raise. If you’re lucky, you might even catch a sweet ventriloquist act while you’re there!

Do you attend your county fair? Are county fairs even a “thing” in your neck of the woods?

1 Comment

Filed under Local Spotlight, Travels

Tagged as , , , ,

August 24, 2012

Baby Invitations Part 2 – Something Special

Today’s post is part 2 of my mini series on the handmade invitations i made for my sister’s baby shower. On to the meat and potatoes of what made these invitations really special!

If i’m given a task, i like to do it really well and go beyond the basics if i can. Sending out invitations is fun: you get to address them, put pretty stamps on them and then you start receiving RSVPs in the mail. It’s like a little mailbox full of Christmas anticipation every day, even though i don’t know who any of these people are: they’re my sisters’ friends. She would be missing out on that excitement and on all the little notes folks sent back. And what about the “no” RSVPs….  I wanted there to be a way for each invited person to send a special message to both my sister and her son that would last beyond the mailbox and guest list. I had a plan!

I took my inspiration from those multi-colored cloth Tibetan prayer flags and plastic Mexican party flags: long banners of colored strips with patterns or prayers written on them. What if i compiled a stack of banners with a personal blessing/sentiment from all of the invited guests and strung them on a long cord to hang at the shower and ultimately in the nursery? It would be awesome, that’s what. And it was! More on the results next week, this week is all about the process.

First off, i designed the size of the RSVP card and “special instructions” card to fit the size of the finished banner sheet. I then cut (with my handy dandy rotary cutter) strips of cloth about 3 inches wide and then cut those down to about 5 inches tall.

Once cut to uniform sheets, i got out the multi-colored spools of thread and used a zigzag stitch to border 3 sides of all the sheets. This took a while, but was worth it. I ended up with yellow, green, red and blue bordered sheets of cloth.

From there, i folded the top over to cover the area that would be sewn into the banner’s cord and stapled 1 flag to 1 ‘special instructions’ card which specified what i wanted the guest to do with this odd invitation. I placed the special instructions/ flag onto the RSVP envelope, covered with the RSVP card and glue dotted the envelope upside down into the interior of the invitation card. A guest would take out the card from its envelope and open it to find their RSVP goodies ready for them and secured in place. It really was quite cute!

It was SUCH fun receiving the banners in the mail with all sorts of personal sentiments from poems to bible verses…. but more on that next week!

****

This week’s featured Fiber Friends are a little family of Buff Orpington chickens.

Aren’t they just the cutest things? Those chicks are TEENY! Perfect for scurrying around the backyard of any dollhouse. I’m scheming up Easter packages for next Spring with families of chickens, bunnies and maybe ducks inside plastic Easter eggs.

***

Do you enjoy sending out invitations, or is it a pain in the butt?

2 Comments

Filed under DIY, Fiber Fridays, Fiber Friends, Sewing

Tagged as , , , , , ,