Day 21 of the Advent Season

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.

.

So the kids got to do some baking today with their treat from the Advent calender being a chocolate chip cookie mix of dry ingredients, all they had to do was add the wet ingredients, here is the recipe.
.

.

And whaa!! la!! 6 mini cookies each to enjoy with a cold glass of soya milk.

.

Learning about the miracles Jesus did.
.

Here are some close up shots of the ice patterns in an icicle.

Now that the rains have returned and the snow appears to be on its way out, I know the beautiful icicles days are numbered. so here are a couple more shots of the icy beauties.

.
The Trini song today is about the enjoyment of local foods at Christmas in particular the range of homemade wines that is generally available. This is another parang influenced tune.

.

Scrunter - Home Made Wine

Day 2 of the Advent Season

Homemade Notebooks

.

The girls delved into their advent calendar again today and received some little notebooks made by me. We also had another bible story, which produced many a question but I won’t go into that, it really was quite extensive.

.

.

.

.

.

They both have already begun to draw in their notebooks, can you guess which one was produced by which?

.

I’ll take this opportunity to complete my October to November updates:

.

One of the things that was weighing heavily upon me when I took a rest from blogging was my lack of dedicated work space to create items for my blogshop and so I decided to do something about it.

Before moving to a more work friendly area of the house this is where I was trying to work, in a corner of the living room. This just left me feeling cramped and the area made the whole living room look untidy and it felt ‘heavy’, which is not good for the creative mind.

.

I decided to move myself into the loft which was properly insulated early this year and so it does not get cold or hot. There was already a dedicated area for the sewing machine and some of my hubby’s gym equipment so with a little rearranging, I created a little space for myself. I covered a half of sheet of ply board with some lovely old blue linen cloth I had lying around used my storage draws as legs and made myself a work station.

.

Of course it doesn’t look like this all the time, the picture to right is more reminiscent of the area once its in use, which is fine by me. What I find stifling is having to tidy up my things at the end of every day/ work session while I’m in the middle of a project. If I can leave everything they way it is, it means I can come and do a fifteen minutes here/ an hour there whenever I have the time, without having to waste time taking everything out again and when the project is finished I do a big tidy up in readiness for the next.
.
One of the things I have been dabbling in is making my own focal pieces to use in my jewellery designs and in my paper crafts. These focal pieces are made from a cornstarch clay recipe, which air dries, the picture on the right are the pieces after I have hand painted and sealed them. I haven’t had time to turn them into anything as yet but I have a few ideas floating about in my head.
.

One of the things I offer in my blogshop is the opportunity to receive a Free Wish item from me, info can be found on the right hand side of my blogshop. The item above is the first Free Wish I have had to produce, you can read about it here.

I want to share my experience with a vegetable that I grew and ate for the first time, its called Shark Fin Squash. First and foremost the plant is a brute and a bully, it will try to take over your plot by any means necessary. It is though an abundant producer and if I knew then what I knew now I would have gotten a lot more produce from the plant than I did get, not that its not enough. I won’t go into to much detail but if you want more info there is tons out there just google it.

So the squash is a brute outside and a bugger inside, that’s if you can get into the darn thing. I kid you not, a cleaver and a hammer is how I got into the first one and that was hard going I tell you! I loosely followed a recipe for shark fin squash soup (incidentally that’s the only recipe you’ll find for this vegetable) and created a very nice tasting meal but I was so tired after trying to get into it that I couldn’t truly appreciated it. The next thing is the amount of flesh from one squash could easily feed 8 people and although the meal was nice it does not lend itself for eating as leftovers, you just don‘t want any more the next day.
.
Now this squash is more melon like, there is a mild smell and taste of watermelon when it is raw, which I find sweetens the soup slightly. So because of this the second dish I made was to create a sweet and sour vegetable sauce, then I added the flesh of a baked shark fin squash (I pierced the squash a few times all around it then I baked it whole, which made getting into it much easier). I only used half of the squash and we were all satisfied, I gave the other half to a friend whose hubby is from Vietnam and he used it in his chicken soup to good effect.

Now I have re read what I wrote I don’t think I have explained this vege properly but feel free to ask me questions in the comments of this post or by email and I’ll do my best to clarify my experiences with this veg, which by the way I don’t plan on growing again (unless I can sell it to a Chinese restaurateur).
.
During the month of October we also celebrated my eldest 10th birthday. I don’t do big parties every year for my girls, we celebrate the majority of their birthdays at home with the family, sometimes a few members of our extended family come along to make a fuss of the birthday girl, sing happy birthday and to share in the cake and ice cream. When they do get a big party with all the trimmings its on specific birthdays - 1, 5, 10, 13, 16, 18. So with this in mind my eldest was planning her 10th birthday party for the last year, writing and changing and rewriting lists in her diary. Well with my help her special day went beautifully, all invited friends came so counting my girls there were 14 in all. I filled the 3 hours with party games, arts & crafts, makeovers, food and a piñata. It was a huge success and I was knackered for a good 48hrs afterwards.
.

Now I know you all must be wondering what’s the latest with the allotment plot. Well the last time I was there was the first weekend of November and that was for a members meeting. The picture above shows the last lot of work I got done late October, which was the digging over of the main un-worked area. There is a strip of grass path about 4ft wide directly in front the dug area which awaits my elbow grease but time has not been on my side and when I did have the time the weather was foul. The meeting was fruitful though on two fronts and I’ll go into one of them at a later date when things are more concrete but the one I’m happy to share with you now is that I gained a further 5ft of width to my plot, whoopee!! More planting space and with that comes more digging than I thought I had laid ahead of me, ho hum, it’s a case of taking the bitter with the sweet.
.
Ta! Ta! for now.

Where Does The Time Go????

Gosh! I thought that as the days grew shorter and things slowed down on the gardening front, I would find myself with too much time on my hands, with lots of time for blogging and dabbling in crafting activities. How wrong was I??

This last week I haven’t had time to not even smile at the garden, so there is no present updates on that front and to make matters worse Wednesday and Thursday there was a lovely break in the weather with lots of sunshine and mild temps and I couldn’t even get time to fit in a visit to the plot, BUMMER!!! (My hubby was home all week as well so I would have been able to go on my own and leave the bambino home, *^%%^^$& !!!)

So what kept me so busy you are probably wondering? Well I had a commissioned jewellery job to complete for a friend, which if I was not unwell a couple of weeks ago I would have completed a while back, as it is the cold made me lose a week plus some, which meant many a 2 O’clock to 4 O’clock morning bedtimes this past week.


She wanted some dragonfly brooches for her teachers and something for the two male teachers.




I attempted some very snazzy cuff links (for the brave male in your life/ for the lady who wants to jazz up her borrowed/ owned male shirt) and was really pleased with how they turned out. I thought I would have had some leftover for the blogshop after showing her them on Saturday but she took the lot. So after this blog update its back to the loft for more creating.

Since I was stuck in the loft for long hours each day last week I decided to take a few photos to show you all what I have to look out onto when I come up to breath.

See I told you we had some lovely gardening weather this week down my way (seen while sitting).

This is if I stand and look out the window.

And when I stick my head out of the window this is what I see ( I love touching the lumps of moss).

Other things that kept me busy was the kitchen, the weekend before last I was busy turning the green tomatoes I picked previously into chutney, golly there was a lot, I also did a small pot of apple jam. The tomato chutney was made following the Glutney recipe from River Cottage Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This recipe is certainly a fail safe recipe for garden veg gluts and I’m always pleased with the outcome. The apple jam was made simply by equalling the weight of the chopped apples with brown sugar and I added some spices such as cloves, bay leaf, nutmeg, cinnamon, and mace. Stewed it down till it reached setting stage and bottled in sterilised jars. End result was 15 jars of chutney and 4 jars of apple jam.

Well I know it doesn’t seem that much but the above mentioned stuff along with everyday life and a husband recovering from some minors surgery (not to worry he’s fine, went back out to work today), my last two weeks have left me time poor and shattered, thankfully I made it to bed early Saturday and Sunday night so I’ll be feeling good as new soon.

Oh! by the way check out what I harvested from the greenhouse on the 21st of Nov, how cool is that! This is the result of my ‘Extending The Tomato Harvest Period Experiment’. I’m afraid I didn’t label the posts I mentioned it in before and now I can’t even find them to link back to. So I’ll try to briefly explain what it was/ is about. In latter part of June I took the removed side shoots of the outdoor grown tomatoes and rooted them in water in the greenhouse. As they grew they were potted up into pots at least twice before ending up in their final black bucket pots. I also restricted their growth to a cordon style and to a particular height of no more than roughly 3ft/ at least three trusses of flowers. The whole idea was to see if I could extend my outdoor tomatoes by growing their clones in the greenhouse which should crop a little later and longer because the plants are protected by the elements when the weather change for the worse. So far so good the autumn was uncharacteristically mild so that was definitely to the plants benefit. And as of right now there are ripe tomatoes outside in the greenhouse waiting to be picked. A couple of cuttings even made it inside on to the kitchen window sill but I kept these in much smaller pots which forced them to concentrate on ripening the fruits quicker. So the question remains home picked Christmas tomatoes? I’ll have to wait and see.

I almost forgot to update you on the progress of my South American root veg. the Yukon has had lovely tubers on them since October but I’m yet to harvest any and as of last week the oca has begun to grow tubers, nothing yet noticed on the ulluca though.

Anyhow! Here are some more photo updates on my pass blog hiatus period.

What I Got Up to in The Garden October into November.

Beds were cleared and weeded, the compost bin overflowed quite a few times as a result.

Tender plants were moved from the greenhouse to the conservatory (chili plants, sweet potato, Greek basil, lemon grass and Vietnamese coriander) and from outside into the greenhouse (the South American root veges: Yukon, oca and ulluca). I also moved my succulent hanging basket (which sits as the center piece of my vege garden mini pond) that I started this year into the greenhouse, for although the plants are hardy, there is quite a lot of water retaining crystals at the base of the basket. This would definitely cause water logging over the winter which may cause me to lose some of the plants.

The mini meadow area was strimmed down (I removed the seed heads carefully first) then the area was raked quite roughly to remove some of the faster growing grasses which opened up some bare soil. Then I distributed the seeds from the saved seed heads and the seeds I saved from the field poppies that grew elsewhere in the garden this year evenly over the area (some of the wheat and oat seeds were already germinating with the warm wet environment of mid October). I then netted the are to prevent the birds taking the seeds.

In October month I was still fortunate enough to be harvesting a few summer crops, with some like the runner beans giving of their last right into November.

08/10/09 - A continued bumper harvest of plum tomatoes made me a second batch of chunky tomato sauce.

09/10/09

12/10/09

15/10/09 - The very last of the patty pan squash and sweetcorn (eaten as baby sweetcorn and baby squashes) included in this harvest.

15/10/09 - The last of the container grown potatoes, a main crop variety.

15/10/09 - WHAT THE !!!!!!!! a little aubergine. It never did get much bigger than this, I ate it anyway :)

The borlotti beans shelled and chucked into the freezer because as you can see from the green beans not all got to dry on the plants or in their pods.

23/10/09

03/11/09 - The last harvest of the runnerbeans.

03/11/09 - A combination of outdoor and greenhouse tomatoes.

09/11/09 - Still harvesting outdoor and greenhouse tomatoes, picking enough to keep the two tomato bowls filled.

.

Other developments in the garden has been the self seeding of the 2008 over wintered parsley plants. As you can see the mild weather has encouraged a plethora of parsley seedlings in this years sweet corn bed and where I wanted them in the cracks of the brick footpath boarding the beds.

Well I think this blog post is more than long enough so I’ll end it here and will try to complete my October into November updates over the next couple of days.