It's only FALL!!!

We got hit with an unexpected frost the other night.  It was supposed to go down to around 5 degrees but for some reason or another, Mother Nature decided that was too warm.

At 6:45 I got in the car to head to work. My lovely husband had left my window open a crack so the outside and inside of my car windows were covered in a thin layer of ice.  The not-going-away-with-the-defroster ice. I had the pleasure of having to scrape (YES SCRAPE!!) off ice in SEPTEMBER!  Seriously?  What.  The.....oh nevermind.

Needless to say, my tomatoes were done with the idea of growing and after the frost, they looked pretty sad.  When I got home from work I massacared picked the remaining green tomatoes off the plants and thought to myself what on earth am I going to do with these?

Low and behold I did a quick search and found what seemed to be a good recipe for green tomato chutney.  As per "me" I decided to try it but wanted to tweak it a little bit.  Boy am I glad I did!.  This recipe turned out really well and it is a bit weet, but tangy with a bit of spice as well.  Tastes like Christmas!

Green Tomato Chutney

makes 7 cups

12 cups chopped green tomatoes

2 1/2 cups chopped onion

2 cups white vinegar

3 cups brown sugar

4 teaspoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon cloves (use a teaball or spice bag to keep them from overpowering your chutney)

4 cinnamon sticks

6 star anise pieces

1/2 teaspoon red chili flakes (use more for a spicier chutney)

1 cup dried cranberries (or raisins if you don’t like cranberries)

2 teaspoon sea salt (if using regular table salt, use 1 teaspoon)

Combine tomatoes, onion, vinegar and sugar in a large non-reactive pot over medium heat. 

Add the ginger, cloves, cinnamon sticks, star anise and red chili flakes. (I put the cloves and star anise in a tea ball so I didn't have to pick them out individually at the end)

Cook over low heat for approx 1.5 to 2 hours, stirring frequently to prevent scorching.

About half way through cooking, add cranberries.  

Add salt at the very end of cooking (to taste).

When it has reduced by more than half, and become deep golden brownish in colour, turn off heat.

Remove cinnamon sticks and star anise/cloves tea ball. Fill jars, wipe rims, apply lids and screw on rings.

Process in a boiling water canner for 10 minutes.

Eat on turkey sandwiches, or with a bit of goat cheese.  YUMMY!

Updating the 13 year old birdhouse - a la 5 year old.

13 years ago, when Darren and I moved into a quaint little house in Nova Scotia, his mother gave us a beautiful birdhouse for the yard. It has proudly stood outside in our backyard no matter where we lived. It's a beautiful structure and I've never come across another one I've liked nearly a much.

5 years ago it started to show major signs of wear and weather. The finials were being eaten away by rain, the bird perches were mostly gone and the roofs had begun to crack and break.

When we moved here last year the birdhouse went into the shed. I had intended on fixing it up but didn't know where to start and didn't have time.

I have time now.

A week ago I found the finials on eBay for $1.00 each. They arrived yesterday. Em asked what they were so we pulled out the birdhouse and I showed her where it was broken and we had to fix it.

I hadn't intended to fix it up right then and there but she suggested we do it and honestly, one look in her beautiful hazel eyes and I couldn't say no.

Out came the wood glue and we fixed the roof. The one remaining finial was unceremoniously discarded and the dust/bird poop/dead grass and such was cleaned off the rest of the structure.

Paint. Crap. I have no idea where the paint is!!!. Emily helped me search through our crazy mess craft boxes and we found a few suitable (to a 5 year old) paints that were still usable (and pitched the crappy hard-as-a-rock 10 year old paint).

I gave her complete control of the colours. A dangerous suggestion but she carefully held the bottles of paint to the roof, sides and finials and decides that purple / green and ivory would be the best.

Once the wood glue was dry we started painting. She did an amazing job and the end result looks great.

A few coats of outdoor sealer and this house will be back outside for the birds.

Thanks for the help Emily - today was fun.

It's not all about the cleaning

It's also about the food.

Jam, Jelly, Pickles, Peppers, Tomatoes.....

I'm a bit of a f-r-e-a-k.

Canning is an art....and given I can't draw stick people, it's an art form that surprisingly suits 'me'.  Unfortunately, other than the token strawberry jam, it seems many people don't really can their food like the old days.  Canning and preserving food is a ritual and is so serene to me.  Spending hours in front of a hot stove on a hot summer day gives me an inner peace that nothing else can (pardon the pun).

I didn't always 'can' food but I've been cooking and baking as long as I can remember.  My grandmother and I would spend hours in her tiny kitchen making jam, spagetti sauce, baking christmas cookies, rolling rum balls and perfecting her cheesecake.  The jam ended up in jars in the freezer (yeah, my grandfather pulled out a jar of jam from 1993 the other day.  He says it was perfect.  There is no way I would even try it.)  It's hard to explain my grandfather when it comes to food - pretty much he will eat anything....no matter how old, how freezer burnt or how unidentifiable it may be.  I love him more than anything....... but that's just weird.  His rules??? Don't ask him to eat peanut butter on anything other than toast.  Bananas will only be bought at $0.29/lb even if he has to drive across the city to get them.  Habitant Pea Soup is fantastic and Kraft dinner will never go bad.  I love that man.

This year I had BIG plans.  My new home has a huge yard and given we live a town over from the closest grocery store I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to beg convince my husband to build me the vegetable garden beds I always wanted.  I wanted 4, he wanted 1, we settled in 3....with the proviso that there was room for a 4th if we need it.

The 4th will be made this fall.

The garden beds were made last fall and filled with compost/earth and they sat until spring.  I spent a fair amount of time during the winter looking up varieties of seeds and deciding what I would put where in each garden.  In february I ordered the seeds and in March they were started indoors.  Rows upon rows of little seedings began to pop up.  It was beautiful.

Then the seedlings died.

Not so beautiful.

Seriously??  Where did I go wrong??

I have no idea - so when the earth was warm enough to work and the danger of frost had passed I made a trip to the local nursery (local meaning 35 minutes away) and picked up some tomatoes, peppers and whatever other starter veggie plants I could find.  After carefully plotting and planting my veggies, I planted the remaining seeds from the packages in rows, marked everything and waited.

My garden turned out beautifully.  The tomatoes were 6 bloody feet tall and although the strawberries didn't produce more than 5 berries all year long, they took over the entire garden.  The onions were sweet, the cucumbers and zucchinis were bountiful.  The ground cherries are amazing and the beets were an epic failure because they were overtaken by the ground cherries.  The carrots were ok but too close together to grow much, the leeks never showed up, the potatoes are not ready yet and the herbs were friggin amazing!!!! I learned many lessons over the course of the first season of these gardens and I know what I will and will not plant next year.  The 4th bed will be built later this month and next year I will have more space and will re-arrange things to maximize efficiency and solve some issues.  I'm already starting to put the gardens to bed for the year and have begun the pick out the new varieties of seeds for next year....I'm looking for more heirloom and organic items for next year as I'm confident now as to what works best in our garden.

Back to canning.

June is the first real opportunity to get down and dirty into canning.  STRAWBERRIES!!!!  Around here, mid-June to mid-July is strawberry season.  The first day the fields were open, we took the kids out and picked 2 4litre baskets of berries.  I wanted more, the kids were tired, the kids won, we left.

I have tried freezer jam, cooked jam with sugar, cooked jam without sugar, cooked jam with no pectin and this is what works best for me.

I usually do one batch of "no pectin" Strawberry jam - it really is amazing....but the kids love the thicker one I make which has the pectin in it.

One note here.....sometimes the fruit in the jam floats.  It's not a big deal.  It doesn't change the taste of it, it just may not look as pretty.  I. Don't. Care. anymore.

Strawberry Jam

Ingredients

·      6 cups strawberries (hulled, washed and crushed)

·      4.5 cups of sugar

    1 package fruit pectin

Directions

1.     Pour strawberries into a large dutch oven.

2.     Bring to a boil.

3.     Add the pectin and bring back to a boil.  Boil hard for 1 minute, stirring constantly.

4.     Remove from heat.  Stir for 5 minutes to prevent fruit from floating and skim off foam as needed.

5.     Pour into pre-sterilized jars.

6.     Process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. 
      Remove from water, let sit undisturbed for 24 hours. 

Yield

·      6 cups

I have kids, therefore I have fingerprints.....

On glass.

On mirrors.

Doorjambs, walls, tables, fridge, counters.

Seriously?  I'm not sure what they get on their fingers that make this tiny little smuge spots on E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.  I have a large mirror in our family room that I swear will never be clean.  Ever.

Of course....I was the braniac who just HAD to have the glass table top kitchen table.  Stupid.

Windex?  I think they make 4 different kinds of Windex, maybe more, and I've tried every one of them.  I still can't get mirrors to that no-streaks-or-haze state.  And it drives me NUTS!

So.  New search.  There appear to be 2 main recipies of homemade glass cleaner out there.  One includes ammonia, one has no ammonia but has cornstarch.  Based on the fact that I had cornstarch in the house and didn't have ammonia I chose that one. (I also hate the smell of ammonia - I do the cleaning around here, I'm not smelling that on everything!!)

Super easy to make.  And it works.  For the first time I had absolutely clean, streak and haze free glass!.

The cost difference is great.  Especially when I noticed that the price tag was still on the bottle of Windex on my counter.  $5.99.  OUCH! I cringed when I saw that.  Obviously NOT a great 'shopping for the lowest price' moment.

For the sake of my ego, sanity, fairness, we will pretend that the bottle of Windex Original that I have actually cost the current price (at Walmart) of $2.93.  And yes, I know that there is a slight difference between the bottle sizes but really, even if you double the cost of the homemade stuff, it's still ridiculously cheaper.

Windex - $2.93/765ml 
Homemade - $0.48/ 750ml

SAVINGS OF $2.45/bottle 

Here is how I did it and what it cost.

Glass Cleaner

Ingredients

·      ½ cup rubbing alcohol

·      ½ cup white vinegar

·      2 TBSP cornstarch

·      2 cups warm water

Directions

1.     combine everything in a spray bottle and shake.

Yield

·      750ml

Cost

·       Vinegar ($1.49/4 litres) = $0.04/ ½ cup

·      Rubbing Alcohol ($2.87/1 litre) = $0.36/ ½ cup

·      Cornstarch ($1.49/454g) = $0.08/2 TBSP (24g)

Notes:

·      Shake it before using.  The cornstarch settles at the bottom of the bottle and may plug the sprayer.  Give it a good shake before cleaning your windows and that problem is gone.

Snotty Body Wash.

I was on a roll.

Laundry Soap, Fabric Softener, Tub and Shower cleaner.

I was confident.  Overconfident.

My mistake.

Last week, I decided that since my current bottle of body wash was only 3 showers away from oblivion, I should try and make some.  WOW.  I was an idiot.

I did my usual 'thing'.  Read blogs until I was seeing spots (yeah, I know what you are thinking - I have WAY to much time on my hands).  Since my current 'job' is a) healing my back b) getting better and c) physio - I'm pretty much a bum.  Nevertheless - I kept reading and reading and finally found what I thought would be a perfect recipe.  Everything I needed I already had on hand and according to the particular website I obtained most of my information from, this would be PERFECT!

I was excited!

I dived into the recipe.  Everything ran smoothly.  It smelled wonderful!!  I let the mixture cool overnight.

In the morning, eager to try out my new soap, I took the lid of the bucket and low and behold....

I had snot.

Kinda gross.  ok.  REALLY gross.  I mixed it with the immersion blender hoping against hope that the snotty texture would go away.

Yeah - no.  It didn't.

Ok (i thought to myself).  There are concessions to be made here.  This IS a homemade product.  This says it's supposed to work (the warning being that it may be a touch slimy and won't foam much).  Ok. I'll try it.

Shower #1.  The snot wouldn't stay on the bath poof.  I made do.  I was clean.  I smelled good.
Shower #2.  Nope, not getting used to this.  Still clean, still nice smelling.  I'll live with it.
Shower #3.  NO FRIGGIN WAY AM I DOING THIS AGAIN!!!!  I simply can't stand this snotty, slimy, no foaming shower body wash stuff.  SCREW IT.

I swallowed my bruised ego.  I swallowed the $2.00 it cost to make 4 litres of this crap.

I went back to the internet.  I think the actual search I put in good was "body wash that isn't snotty".

I read some more.  I found what the author described as the perfect body wash.  TA DA!!  I could hear angels singing....ok maybe no angels, but I was excited however skeptical after my first disaster.

During my next trip to the store, I picked up some beautiful Dove Shea Butter soap.  I've secretly always been a dove girl but it's so expensive for the body wash so I would usually pick up whatever was decent, smelled nice and was on sale.  My last bottle was a Nivea soap. ( LOVE Nivea products!)

Ok.  Round 2.

Did the 'microwave the soap instead of grating it on a cheese grater' method.  Nope - don't like that - the soap came out as a hot blob of goo and immediately went hard before I got it out of the measuring cup and into the water.  In the 3 minutes it took to microwave the 3 bars of soap, I could have had them grated and in the hot water already boiling.

Hot water - check.  Soap in hot water - check.  Standing by hot stove to stir the soap (ughh) - check.

I'm sure it took 10 minutes to melt the soap but I'm convinced it was only because the soap was a big lump after coming out of the microwave.

After everything was melted, I poured the soap through a strainer to make sure I hadn't missed any lumps of soap (I hadn't).  I sent a text to my hubby saying there was soap on the counter and not to go trying to taste it.  (ok, so my hubby has this annoying habit of getting his fingers into anything I'm baking/cooking/making whatever - to taste it.....figured it looked like icing so he might just try it)

On second thought - next time I'm not letting him know >>evil grin<<

I let it cool overnight.  Not expecting much in the morning, I took a look at the white mess in the bowl and TADA!!  It was awesome!!  A quick stir with the immersion blender and the addition of about 1/2 a cup of water (I thought it was a little thick) and it was SILKY, SMOOTH, FRAGRANT, BEAUTIFUL BODY WASH!!

I poured it into my empty Nivea bottle and used it that day.  It was great.  It felt awesome against my skin, lathered like a 'normal' body wash and left my skin clean and soft.  AMAZING!  Another great 'plus' to this is that it doubles as a hand soap as well.

I was SOLD!

My son tried it tonight....he usually uses the bar of Irish Spring my husband has in the shower - and he always complains that it dries out his skin.   Well, rave reviews from him tonight!  He loved it.

When I made this up, I used the 500ml jars I had.  The thought to that being that when it was used as a hand soap, all I needed to do was take off the jar top and put on the jar top from the hand soap containers I already had.  2 birds with one stone! One batch, two uses...like this...

The cost difference is pretty good.  The store bought stuff I was using was Nivea Water Lily.  I picked it up for $4.49.  The bottle is 16.9oz.  The homemade stuff makes 3 times as much as the store bought.  

Nivea - $4.49/16.9oz - $0.26/oz

Homemade - $3.75/3 bars Dove Shea Butter Soap, 50.7oz - $0.07/oz.

SAVINGS OF $0.19/oz!  I find that I use slightly less of the homemade stuff because it's pretty thick and sudsy.  

Here is how I did it and what it cost.

Body Wash and Hand Soap

Ingredients

·      

3  3 bars of soap

·      6 cups of water

Directions

1.     Put water into a pan on the stove and bring to a boil, then turn down to medium heat.

2.     Grate the soap, add the grated soap to pot of water.

3.     Continue stirring occasionally over medium heat until all the soap is dissolved.

4.     When completely dissolved…transfer to a glass jar or bowl and allow to cool, then pour into a plastic bottle for shower use!

5.     It will thicken as it cools and will continue to thicken for about 24 hours.

6.     If it gets TOO thick…simply add some water until it’s the desired consistency.

Yield

·      1.5 litres (50.7oz)

Cost

·      Dove bars ($1.25 each) x 3 = $3.75

Edited to add:

Yesterday I tried this recipe with Oil of Olay Shea Butter Soap, I added a 1/2 cup extra water to it and it also turned out very nice.  The cost worked out to: $3.25/batch.  It's nice but I like the Dove one better....but then again, I'm a Dove girl.  :)