Pickled Red Onions

So we were sitting there watching Food Network and Throwdown comes on.  Caught a glimpse of a pickled onion recipe and had to try it, it was the Oaxaca Dog episode.  Though I had to make it can-able.  So I tweeked Mr. Flay's recipe a bit.

The original:

• 3/4 cup fresh lime juice
• 3/4 cup distilled white vinegar
• 3 tablespoons super fine sugar
• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 serrano chile, slit down center
• 2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh oregano leaves
• 1 large red onion, peeled, halved, cut into 1/8-inch-thick slices

Combine lime juice, vinegar, sugar, salt and chile in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Cook the mixture until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and let cool for 5 minutes.

Put the onion slices in a small bowl. Pour the warm vinegar mixture over and toss to coat. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours and up to 48 hours, stirring the mixture a few times.

My version:

• 1 cup lime juice
• white vinegar to cover onions by about an inch
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons pickling salt
• 2 tablespoons dried oregano leaves
• 3 pounds red onion, peeled, halved, cut into 1/8-inch-thick slices (we used the last of ours straight out of the garden after they had been cleaned up and dried a few days)

Toss it all together in a large plastic bowl, cover and let sit overnight.
Next day, bring to a boil, ladle into jars and process for 15 minutes.  Any liquid left that did not fill a jar would be great for pickled eggs!  This gave us 3 pints and 3/4 pint of extra soaking liquid.

Taking a stab at gardinere

We lived in Chicago for 5.5 years.  One of the condiments hubby liked was the gardinere served on top of the roast beef sandwiches.  I haven't wanted to even try this due to the amount of oil in most recipes that would prevent water bath and possibly even pressure canning so I passed.
That is until this year.  I decided to do this my way, which is ignoring all the directions and making it up as I go.  This is what I ended up with:

Want to know what I did?  Yeah, well so do I!
Here's the general gist:
Veggies.  All different types, diced and placed in a bowl with salt to draw out water.  What veggies did I use?
Hmmmm...... cauliflower, yellow squash, onion, celery, green bell peppers, jalapenos and carrots
After letting the veggies marinate for a few hours, I didn't count, I was working on everything else I was canning, I drained and rinsed them well before tossing them in a stock pot where I covered them by an inch of white vinegar.
To this, while the mix was heating up to a boil, I added celery seed, dried whole chilies, red pepper flakes, mustard powder and dill powder (yeah, having to wait on those to arrive in whole form) and about a cup of sugar.
Once this hit a boil I ladled into jars and started processing, the pints and half pints for 10 minutes and the quarts for 15.

I'll add olive oil to these as needed once the are opened.  For now though they get to sit and marinate for a few weeks.

Plum butter crazy

I was lucky enough to be given 2 of those plastic shopping bags nearly full of plums, most of which were on the border of over-ripe.  What to do with so many?  2 words.  Plum.  Butter.
I don't have a recipe for this, it's one of those things you kinda learn by watching reading and experimenting but here's an idea of what you do.
Grab the largest stock pot you own, well in my case I had to, but it still didn't hold all the plums at first.
Turn on burner to medium add a tiny bit of water to keep fruit from burning at first and start piling in the plums, whole or pitted, I decided to do them whole and fish out the pits later.  Cook until they begin to break down stirring occasionally and add more if you have them.
Once all are added, reduce heat to medium low, possibly even low, and just cook until the plums have reduced by half.  At this point I fished out the pits with my fry spider then pulsed a few times with my stick blender to break up any large skins.
Keep cooking this down until it starts to sheet off a spoon, this is where I add sugar to taste, usually only 1/4 the total mass of total fruit.  If I have about 8 cups of fruit mush I'll only add about 2 cups sugar, but this is our taste, we don't like things too sweet.  Cook until it gels on a cold plate, you can find directions for this in most canning books and sites, ladle into jars and water bath can at 15 minutes for quarts.

Whole fruit, not a lot of sugar.  Great for sandwiches, toast, or anything you want to spread a little fruit on.

Once our peaches start ripening we'll do the same with them.

More bread and butter pickles

With more of our very own cucumbers we decided we'd like to try bread and butter pickles, the same recipe I used for the zucchini.  Not as big a batch this time only 5 quarts and 2 pints.

These look a bit cloudy for a reason.  I am waiting on mustard seed, I ran out in the middle of the season!!  Shame, shame, shame.  But then again I wasn't planning on doing that many pickle recipes that called for it!  So in order to get these preserved before it was too late (my spice order should be here Monday as we don't have Saturday service for large packages) I used powdered mustard seed instead.

Crisis averted and veggies saved for later use.

A time to shrivel

Well I tried my hand at one of my grandmothers pickle recipes and learned a lot.  I've always heard people talk about lime pickles and decided to give her recipe a try.
This is the recipe:
    * 7 1/2 pounds Cucumber
    * 2 cups pickling lime
    * 2 gallons cold water
    * 2 quarts white vinegar
    * 4 1/2 pounds sugar
    * 1 tablespoon pickling Salt
    * 1 tablespoon pickling spice

Dissolve lime in water. Pour over cucumbers and let sit 24 hours.
Drain, rinse let soak in fresh water for an hour and repeat 2 more times for a total of 3 hours.
Mix together vinegar, sugar, salt and spice, bring to boil and let cool.
Pour over cucumbers and let sit overnight
Boil in vinegar mix 35 minutes and then pack into hot sterilized jars

This is what I ended up with:

A bit shriveled no?  Well, I did them whole, didn't slit them or take off the little bit at the blossom end, that was a crucial step not known at the time.  I'll know better next time though!
These are our very own cucumbers from our very own garden.  Many things are coming in now so it's time for stocking the pantry!!  Stay tuned for more kitchen stuffs!

When the garden gives you zucchini... or not....

So our garden isn't cooperating fully this year.  We have had NO squash of any type, none, zip, zilch.  Which is a pity really since I actually love zucchini.  What to do?  Well you go visit a farmer's market on a Saturday and start asking around for a large amount, someone there is bound to have enough for a decent price.  In my case, I landed two very large boxes full of zucchini for $10, at least 2 bushels worth!

What to do with all that zucchini before it goes south?  Well you divide it in half, surf the internet and all your cook books for ideas then decide to make zucchini bread and butter pickles.  Two days worth of prepping and canning later you end up with 8 quarts and 11 pints of pickles (unfortunately one of those pints exploded in the water bath on me so technically only 10 were finished).  The picture is only a small portion of what I canned.

What to do with the other half?  Save some out for fresh eating and slice the rest up for stewed zucchini, spend a couple of hours cooking it all down and toss it in the freezer.

Want the recipes?

Bread and Butter Zucchini Pickles:
http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1636,148176-228207,00.html

As for the stewed zucchini?  Well.... we've never written it down, never measured anything, so here's the best rendition I can figure...
3 to 4 medium to large zucchini, trim ends and slice supper thin.  I do this on a little 70's style plastic mandolin.
1/2 medium onion diced
about a tbsp butter
salt and pepper to taste.
Toss it all in a sauce pan and cook on medium low until basically mushy, usually 30 to 45 minutes.  Eat or dump into freezer containers.

This can be done with yellow squash as well.  Add as much zucchini or squash as your pan can hold if you want.

Buiding a small frame for quilting

As a quilter in a SMALL house inundated with 7 very active and mostly furry cats, I have trouble finding a place to work with the quilting needle.  Especially during the dreaded spring/summer shed.  I decided to do something about it, something light and portable and secure so if the fuzz butts do jump on it, it won't break.  After combing the internet for ideas, I came up with this.

As for what it is, well it's simple.  Schedule 40 1" PVC and a few pipe clamps and furniture corners I found at a green house supply place, littlegreenhouse.com.  I ordered the longer sections of the clamps and cut them myself with the miter saw, saved a little cash that way.  The PVC was bought locally in 10' lengths and cut down to sizes I needed to be comfortable while working.  The two shorter arms can be interchanged with longer lengths of PVC giving me an enlargeable work area when needed.  And above all, I can pick it up, walk it down the hall and into another room if I want.  Or I can pop the top off, hang it and store the rest out of the way if I'm not working on the piece in it for some reason.  Hence the obvious, DON'T GLUE THIS TOGETHER!

PVC furniture corners are great, very sturdy and easy to place and forget.  There are a ton of places you can buy them online but I chose to get them from the same place as the clamps, one shipping charge instead of 2.

It takes a bit to manhandle the clamps on the first few times you try but once they are on, they don't move.  Even after a 20 pound cat decides to jump up on the frame and use it for a new padded hammock.  You can use as few or as many of the clamps as needed, they are removable and re-positionable. 

And it looks as if you are getting a sneak peek at the embroidered cat quilt which is now in the frame.  Providing I get time to work on it this weekend, it should be completed next week.  We'll just have to see how the next few days want to behave.

Here Kitty Kitty

So I have a little side project going for a wall hanging.  I was looking for something different and came across this set of cats in needlecrafter.com's free pattern's directory.  I had to have them but as per my usual thing I ignored the thread color directions and used what I wanted .

I got them done pretty fast actually, only took me a week for all four but it has taken me nearly 2 weeks to figure out what I wanted to do with them.  I finally figured it out.  Last night actually!  I will be using these fabrics in a scrappy version of a Garden Maze pattern.

The empty muslin sections will probably have cat related quilting but I haven't decided yet.  May even put in some embroidery, have no idea.  We'll see which muse starts talking when I get to that point.

Jacobean Attic Windows is out of the frame!

 

So the majority of the hand stitching has been completed.  We finished the frame portion of the work about a half hour before the end of our workday today and had enough time for a quick picture.  If you click on the picture above you should be directed to a very large version of this if you would like to see the stitching pattern closer.  

Now comes the fun part.....  I get to go back over it and fix anything we missed or accidentally messed up.  Then I get to trim it up and add the binding.  That I have to think on, still haven't decided what to bind it with, maybe more of the black pattern, maybe, maybe not.  And considering the large number of shedding animals in my house right now (7 cats 6 dogs) I will have to confine all work on this to my bedroom where no critters other than hatchings are allowed so it's going to take even longer.

But the hardest part is done.

Now onto the next project..... embroidered cats.....  Stay tuned for pictures, I have a decent camera now ;)

Voca Quilt Show 2010

So I hope I've figured this out right and added the link to my site where I'm hosting the quilt show pictures!

Voca Quilt Show

All in all it was fairly good. The rain stopped for a while and the roads that had been closed due to low water crossings being flooded were eventually reopened. I arrived at 7:30 am to get pictures of all the quilts without interruption, hoping to get them without the flash on the camera but that didn't work out so well, there was just not enough light coming through the windows because of the clouds! Oh well.... it is what it is.

We ordered out for a hamburger lunch and took turns sneaking into the kitchen to eat. Many brought hand work to keep their fingers busy during the slow times.

Once we reached the end of the show and the ballots were counted, I managed to win a 2nd place ribbon in the wall hangings group with this entry:

It may have taken 10+ hours to put this show up but it only took 2 hours to tear it down.

Now that I have some free time.... I need to get back to playing with the needles. Well, as soon as I clean up the house and reclaim my sewing room from the cats that is. Could be a couple weeks yet.

Soup and a show

So first, let me explain.....
I was hungry. Really hungry. I've been helping set up a quit show that will be going on tomorrow and it's been raining, really raining and well, I needed some comfort food.
So dinner tonight was matzo ball soup, homemade from scratch by me:



Now about that show......
The Voca Quilt Club, of which I am a member, is hosting a quilt show to benefit the Bluebonnet CASA group on April 17, 2010 from 10-4. It's an advocacy service for children.
We are displaying quilts from the community in a people's choice judging.
My roll in all this? I'm the youngest of the group, I have the muscle, youth, stamina and know how to build the displays so they didn't have to figure out how or who to do it. I offered and I'm officially done. I built most of the things at home and we've had several work days up here to finish.
We started setting up on Wednesday and this is how far we got:



A better look at the bases that will be holding up these quilts:
Thursday we started hanging quilts, I say we though in reality a group of other ladies handled the actual hanging of the quilts with ladders and such. I'm not so big a fan of ladders. I on the other hand did a lot of heavy lifting of tables, stands, placing antique quilts on the stage for display and such.
After we got done, this is just a small shot from the front of the room, I'll add more tomorrow from the show itself:


Today, Bobbi (another of us 'youngsters') built a shelf for the back room to hold all those displays when we aren't using them. I'll have a shot of that later. Just too exhausted to even think about finishing this entry!

Will have show pictures in the next few days. Wish us luck!!!

Pickled Silkie Eggs

Pickled silkie eggs.
Oh the horror! The humanity!
The... the... the... yummy goodness!!!!

So what, you ask, is a silkie and why are the eggs different? Basically a silkie is an ancient breed of chicken that has feather issues that make them look fuzzy, in the States they are bantam sized. These are a few of our silkies. See? Fuzzy.Being as they are smaller chickens they produce smaller eggs. In the picture below you shall find eggs, clockwise from top center eggs are laid by Ezzy, Red, Joe, Bertha, Freak, Panic and Mayhem. The one in the center, the little one, was laid by Sweeny, the girl in the front in the picture above.

Now.... about those pickled eggs. Why pickle them? Why not? I have yet to have a silkie decide she needs to set eggs so I save them for a week, just in case. Every Sunday I take all the eggs from the previous week, hard boil them and pickle them. I get 3 eggs a day on average from my 5 silkie girls, giving me around 18 + a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
Let's start this how to with the jar. I will use nearly any glass jar that I can close air tight. In today's case it's a roasted peanut jar. This is one of the larger ones, right at a quart, will be a nice fit for 18 eggs. We shall follow the jar on this journey.

So, while those eggs are boiling, get your apple cider vinegar warmed up. I use 2 cups with 1/2 tsp pickling salt (not iodized salt please), and 1 tsp sugar, in a sauce pan over a medium low burner. I put the spices in the jar itself. 1 Tbsp onion flakes, 1 Tbsp whole pickling spice (that's this week's recipe, I vary what I use/add, no two batches are the same with the exception of the pickling spice).
Once the eggs are boiled and peeled and still warm, pack them in the jar, just don't cram them in and break them. I just drop them in as I unpeel and rinse them, no shells wanted in the jar.
Then you pour the warm vinegar mix over them and jiggle the jar to get out all the little air bubbles. Cap it tight and toss in the fridge for a week or so before eating. Yep the fridge, I'm too chicken to try leaving these out on the counter or canning them. Tastes the same I swear!
Last week's batch, I actually had 30 eggs from the silkies so I made an extra jar. They are tainted with hot sauce and tsien-tsien chillies (jar on the left).
Now that we have a taste for the pickled eggs, and trust me a jar of 18 only lasts a week, all the girls will decide to set the same day and we won't get any silkie eggs for at least a month while they hatch and raise their broods!

Making do

What do you do when it's freezing cold outside at the jobsite and you've already lost 60% of your income? You make do with what you can find instead of buying those new insulated coveralls!
Hubby is working out in the rain and mud, he gets cold easy and several layers of clothing just aren't cutting it so we had to find another option. And we did. We lucked up on a set of lined bib overalls that were at least one size too big, 6 inches too long in the legs and missing a button for one of the straps... but they were FREE!
Last night I set to work with a quick repair to at least get hubby a day or three of warmth while I wait on the zipper issues to magically resolve themselves in my head. You see, the legs are zippered all the way down. I had thought it was just a boot zipper and knew I had replacements so I could take off the extra length and replace the zipper. Nope, full leg zipper, from thigh to ankle and they are about 5 or 6 inches too long.
Anyway, the quick repair. I had to recreate some sort of fastener where the button was ripped out. Knowing this would happen again should I replace the button I decided to make a hook. I pulled out my heavy duty denim patches, which didn't match either, patched the hole left by the button, ironed it on (still fighting with Onyx for the iron I might add) and sewed over it with my machine. Good. Looked tolerable.
Nice and secure but what to make the hook out of? I remembered the large coil of bronze wire I had stashed away but it wasn't as thick as I remembered, only 12 gauge, so I had to think. We have a roll of bailing wire outside, no, decided that was a last resort. Then I remembered that bag of old wire hangers. Bingo! I hunted down the lineman's pliers, the ring pliers, and a few other of my jewelers/wire working type pliers and set to work. Once finished I tacked it on with doubled upholstery thread to get him through today, I will go back and cover with denim later this weekend to protect those threads.
Then I had to address the fact that this thing was meant for a tall person and the back was just too long and the straps were as well making the whole overall puddle around his waist. I made him hold really still while I set to work pinning up the back for a temporary fix until I had enough time to actually go in and take apart the seams and redo the sizing. I took the heavy thing to my machine and had to fight to get 3 layers of denim and lining to fit under the foot! Oh the horror! I broke 2 needles, and the machine fought back, birds nesting in all the wrong places but I got it done. It doesn't look pretty but it's functional for now.

Now to figure out the zipper issue, I'm thinking about possibly moving the brass stops on the bottom of the zippers up to where I need them and just hacking off and hemming like I normally do with his pants. Just have to figure out how to undo those brass stops.

Jacobean Attic Windows

So I finally got the borders added to the quilt Tuesday morning and had to fight a rather insistent cat while marking everything for quilting. Onyx was being an absolute royal pain and decided that the table where I was working was where he needed to be. Whether it was sleeping, jumping, attacking thread or fabric or just generally being his normal annoying self, the table was the point of his attention.
After finally getting it marked up, folded and tucked away in a cat proof bag I started worrying over the backing. I finally decided on that blue paisley:

So I sewed it together to make it wide enough and had to again fight with Onyx, though this time it was over the iron. The little devil knocked it off several times while I was attempting smooth out the massive wrinkles in the fabric. After ironing the whole thing 3 times without getting the worst winkles out and having a rather large knot on my heel from the monster's last attempt to kill me I gave up and prayed it would stretch out straight on the frame.
Then I pulled out my last roll of batting, it was high loft. I panicked. This is for a group of hand quilters, I was afraid it would be way too thick. But I unrolled it and fluffed in the dryer anyway. To my shock when I pulled it out it wasn't as high lofted at I envisioned so it got to go with me to quilting.
After much vacuuming, finagling, pinning, repinning, stretching, rolling, pulling and smoothing we got the quilt into the frame today. Here is a side view, I'm having to stand on top of a chair to get this much of the quilt in the shot! Top of the quilt is to the right.

Since this quit will be for my mother in return for buying me the bundle of panels, it has pink it it. I am not a fan of pink, if this quilt were for me, it would be blue or purple instead of pink!

We only work on Wednesdays from 1 to 5 so it will be a couple of months before you get to see the finished project, but for real hand quilting with those tiny stitches, it will be worth the wait!

Oh.... and I guess I ought to introduce Onyx. He was a rescue in September 2008, just a few days after we lost our beloved Topaz. When I picked him up I nearly lost what control I had on my emotions. He looked very similar to Topaz and had an attitude to match. He still has the attitude, in spades!

The Jacobean Quilt, a needle work rescue story

Back over the summer when my parents were visiting we stopped in a thrift store and found a large amount of embroidery panels, 14 of which were finished. The embroidery was excellent and the price, though high, was tolerable. So... my mother bought them, handed them over and told me to finish them. These panels were from the 70's!
They came with the instructions and color chart for a floss that is no longer made but after many, many thrift store adventures I found all but one. So I divided up the panels, half for me -all unworked- so I could ignore the color chart and half for her including the ones that had been started. I finished them, they look almost identical to the original needleworker's stitching, but they were stained unevenly. So I washed, still stained and dingy. Tea dying to the rescue and they were all even colored. I cut them down to 12.5" and started designing a quilt that would suit my mother's taste.
The panel:

After some rifling through my stash and a forced order of fabric, since I didn't have enough of the green leaf print, these are the colors I've picked:But what to do about the block pattern? I drew out many different possibilities but none of them struck me as appropriate for this embroidery.... then I had an idea. Really large attic windows, and I mean really large! But I had to figure out which way looked best:

or

I finally settled on one and started sewing up the blocks. The one I picked:


The black and leaf green fabrics will be borders to this quilt making it a total of around 88" x 88", close to queen size. It will also be hand quilted by the Voca Quilt Club, of which I am a member. It should go in this week (Wednesday 2/10/10, geeze this is cutting it close to the wire) as my turn to put in a quilt is up! Next blog entry will show the whole finished quilt top in the frame and the backing I have yet to decide on. Probably going to be a light blue paisley but I haven't finished searching my stash yet.