I Love Polka Dots and I Hate Winter

Oooh, get a load of those bright grunge polka dots.

Quilted with a "modern" pantograph, oddly enough called Mid Century.  The backing was pieced, using preprinted Stack 'n Whack fabric and more of the grunge polka dots.

THE STORY OF I HATE WINTER

Last week I showed you a pic of my kitchen door covered in ice.  This is the same door, THIS week.  Fresh ice. This was Tuesday morning.

Here's the back yard Tuesday night.

Here's the front yard Wednesday morning.  Now we've got snow on TOP of the ice.  Guild meeting tonight is cancelled.  This makes three in a row - one for each guild I belong to.

Next, it warmed up overnight and melted much of the snow. Then it froze again.
Thursday morning.  Yeah.  Happy Valentines to you too Mother Nature.  Geez.  Poor Sadie is risking life and limb every time she needs to go for a pee.

Thurday morning front yard.  Can you see my driveway over there?  That is a massive sheet of ice.

It is Sunday morning now and the driveway is still a sheet of ice.  There's a crust of ice on top of the snow, so even going over the LAWN to get to the road is slipperier'n hell.

DH and I did manage to get out and run a couple of errands.  I hit the sale rack in the produce section and bought a bag of half price apples.  I cut up the whole bag for Apple Betty and used a 9 x 13 pan.  Yes - sugar is the only thing keeping me sane these days.  At least I leave the skin on the apples.

My Red Hat group got into a discussion once about buying produce off the sale rack (I think this was during the $7.00 cauliflower period), and whether we did or didn't.  Until then I'd never even thought about looking there, but if I'm baking or canning or cooking veggies for soup...why not?

This is as close as I can get to a giggle.

Beach Day! and, of course, Zucchini Report

I presume you've been following me long enough that you know all about the Beach Girls.  My longarm compatriots.  People are often surprised that we're friends, and not backstabbing competitors stealing each other's bobbins.  Meh.  Life's too short for that shit.

This past week was our annual Beach Day which generally lasts for three days.  We rarely make it to the beach...but this year it happened!

Diane took us on a mystery outing that lasted all day.  We started at the consignment store in Exeter and ended the day at the Lion's Pavilion in Grand Bend.  There was a very fun band featured and their set was "the British Invasion" (or maybe that's the name of their band?, but I don't think so).  Anyhow, the 2 1/2 hours they played was such fun, starting with the Beatles and ending with the Beatles, and over a decade's worth of music in between.  I felt sorry for the folks sitting around us because we're not really aware of how extraordinarily badly we sing.  And we sang a lot.  With unbridled verve.

In our down time we celebrated a birthday and solved the problems of the world.  😀 As Deb and I were on our way home we stopped at the Restore in Exeter, where I was able to save myself fifteen bucks on clear bags that I use for customer quilts AND I got four c.d.'s at $2 apiece for the drive home.

I won't see these gals again until September at the next SOLO meeting.  Anticipation....

ZUCCHINI REPORT

Picked this week:  18
Picked YTD:       59
Gave away:  lots.  I took a bunch to Beach Day but neglected to count them.  I also made four loaves of Zucchini Bread and forced those on the girls too.

Zig-Zag Log Cabin & Redneck Mulch (with Zucchini Report #1)

This quilt has all the appearance of a Rail Fence, but it's actually made from Log Cabin blocks.

Quilted with a simple leaf design in a gorgeous turquoise thread.  Yum.

THE GARDEN
I have a love/love relationship with my summer garden.  I have a love/hate relationship with weeding. 
I kind of like weeding in the spring when I've been cooped up in the house all winter.  I love the smell of dirt, and the different fragrances from vegetation.  By now though, two and a half months in, I am pretty darned sick of weeding, and my elbow is killing me.  Why do they call it Tennis Elbow when in my case it clearly has nothing to do with a lah-di-dah leisure activity?
That will explain my dependence on what I like to call Redneck Mulch.  It's just several layers of newspaper, topped with grass clippings.  A few weeds are pretty determined and will poke out through the joins, where they might actually get a bit of light.  But they pull out sooo easily.  AND they are very sparse.  Where I do still need to pay some attention is right around the stem of whatever veggie is growing, since there is a substantially larger opening there.  The weeds take advantage of that.  (Ignore the Timmies cups.  Those were the 'pots' I used for the tomato seedlings, and the variety is written on the side of the cup.)

Tomatoes:  This year I planted 8 Romas, 4 PF Hybrid, 4 Big Beef, and 3 Sweet 100.  I will pick my first Sw. 100 in a few days, I think - one is partly red.

Every year, some of the potatoes that we missed when we were digging in the fall manage to overwinter and sprout.  I transplanted the first 5 volunteers into the proper potato patch (say that three times, fast. 😀) but the rest I've just left to grow where they sprouted.  There's at least 10 plants now.

Today I noticed there are peppers on the pepper plants.  Yay!  The beans didn't amount to a hill of beans (groan) so I had to replant them.  It'll be another month at least before I get any beans.  The stuff with white flowers that you're seeing in most of these pics is Cilantro.  Another volunteer which is just as invasive as dill.  Although I love cilantro, so it's ok.  I leave some to go to seed, then whiz the seeds in the (clean) coffee grinder for Coriander spice.

We planted three different varieties of potatoes - an early, a mid season, and a late.  So far DH has dug enough from the 'earlies' for boiled potatoes with butter (OMG, sooo good), AND a potato salad.

The asparagus is resting now until next spring, just building energy so it can feed me again.  In the photo it looks kind of white - that's from our well water.  Disgusting stuff, but there's been no rain to speak of for quite some time.  The county has a burn ban posted, and the Grand River Watershed has requested a 10% reduction in water use.

And now, what you've all been waiting for...
THE ZUCCHINI REPORT

Picked this week:  16
Picked YTD:          16
Gave away:            10
DH was horrified the day I showed him my basket with SEVEN zucchinis.  He must have a horseshoe up his butt though - a customer that day was happy to take all seven off my hands.
In other humourous Zucchini News, the newsletter editor for one of my guilds asked me if I had any zucchini recipes I could share for the newsletter.  Hahahahahaha.... I have a million recipes.
And in MORE humourous Zucchini News, my nephew (the foodie) posted on his Instagram page a clip of him making stuffed zucchini blossoms.  I had to resort to that a few years ago when I had so much zucchini I thought DH was going to leave home.  And in today's newspaper there is a recipe featuring stuffed zucchini blossoms.  I guess that's going to the the summer's hot food item.

A Modern Quilt, the Garden, Social Media

Oh, I love (!) modern quilts.  Especially when they have random bits of 'word' fabric in them, like this one does.

And I love quilting them with swirls & pebbles.  This makes a wonderful contrast against the straight lines & graphic design of the top.

THE GARDEN

I try to be a thrifty person when it's not too much of an inconvenience.  I dug up a coleus plant last fall and left it in a pot on the windowsill all winter, then took cuttings of it in the spring.  I got seven FREE plants.  No special hints - these root in one or two days in a glass of water, then just pot them up.

I did the same thing with a geranium.  Seven freebies.  Yay!  😀 Hint passed down to me from Mom: take your cuttings and let the cut stems dry out for several hours, then stick them in water.  They are not as likely to rot in the water if the wound has healed.  When there are nice roots, pot them up in a good potting mix and put them in a plastic bag to keep in humidity for a couple of days while they settle in to their new pots.  Open the bag before they get mouldy.

Prepare yourself...I will be starting the annual ZUCCHINI REPORT in my next post.  I've picked nine (?) so far this week.  I gave some away yesterday, then tonight I made a nice little stir fry with onions, garlic, zucchini, and diced tomatoes, topped off with crumbled feta cheese.  Yum!  And 'cause I know you're wondering:  no, DH did not eat any of it.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Do you get all depressed when you sit around by yourself on a Friday night, listening to DH snore from the bedroom, while you're cruising Facebook?  I do, sometimes, thinking that everybody in the world is having a much more fun and eventful life than I am.  So I pulled down the kitchen calendar and looked at what I've been doing since the beginning of June.

• 3 lunch dates
• 4 dinner dates
• 2 movie dates
• 1 family overnight company & daytrip
• 1 family afternoon & dinner date
• 1 family breakfast date
• 2 theatre dates
• 1 concert date
• 2 guild meetings w/ pot luck supper

It would appear that I do, in fact, have a social life which includes family, friends, and lovely acquaintances.  So no more Miss Crybaby-Snotty-Nose!

Letters on a Quilt, Company Overflow, Zucchini Report

This definitely rates as one of the more interesting quilts I've worked on this year.

Very simple, design-wise.  But paper piecing the letters and the leaf block would not be my favorite thing to do.  The piecer did a super job on this, for sure!  It was quilted with a Canada flag panto which has been getting lots (!) of use this year.

Last weekend we entertained DH's family, so I was kind of overrun with inlaws for almost a week.  They started arriving on Friday and we waved goodbye to the last of them on Wednesday.  I managed to feed ten of us for lunch on Saturday and as far as I can tell I didn't poison anyone.  Yay me. 👍  However, it seems to have been too much for our front door.  DH went to open it on Tuesday and the door knob fell off in his hand.  It was only 30-some years old...I guess they don't make stuff to last the way they used to.  ha ha...

In the pic below you'll see seven quarts of onion soup, eight pints of peaches, eight half-pints of  Amaretto-Peach Butter, and a lonely jar of zucchini pickles. (There were originally several jars of pickles but I managed to give a few away, for which DH is eternally grateful.)  When I went to the market last Thursday to get some peaches, the peach guy talked me into buying four six-quart baskets of  'seconds', at a pretty good price.  I hate to lose out on a bargain but lemme tell you - I'm darn tired of peeling peaches!!  Last night I made a peach cobbler, so I'm down to the last eight peaches in the fridge.  They just might rot there.  Pfftt.  "OH NO" says my inner voice.   I spent three hours scrubbing the fridge before the inlaws came - it's not getting dirty any time soon.  And yes, it had been quite a while since the last cleaning.  Gross, to tell you the truth.

The onions out in the garden are WONDERFUL this year.  Big and happy.  There's enough to make another 30 quarts of soup, I figure (although that won't happen!).

ZUCCHINI REPORT (2 weeks worth)

With all the rain we've had this summer I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think the zucchini is thirsty.  I may have to water the garden.

Picked last 2 weeks:  15
Picked YTD:             74

I've got five or six in the fridge right now, so more zucchini loaf might be in my future.  But I've also got about eight starting-to-rot bananas on the counter which should go into banana bread, and the eight peaches in the fridge that need to be dealt with.

I may ignore the whole lot and go read a book.  I'm currently working my way through Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.  I have waited months for it (the E-edition for my tablet) to come in from the library.  I love reading books on my tablet but when they expire they just POOF and are gone.  That is pretty friggin' annoying if you're on the second last chapter.  Interesting side note about this book:  every chapter features a pic of a quilt block.

Bright! Stripey! and Cheap Entertainment/Red Hats/Zucchini Report

If this doesn't keep her warm and cozy this winter I don't know what will.

Oh, I just love these colours!

Great pattern - lots of movement.

I could get myself in all kinds of trouble now.  The new DSW has opened in Ancaster.  I stopped in after our Red Hat Pot Luck/Pool Party, where we got into complex discussions about things like folding & rolling your underwear.  Which I actually DID when I got home.   :-)

I made up for the shoe purchase by getting free entertainment.  Waterdown hosted a brand new festival this past weekend artsfest.ca, so Teresa and I went to see Ashley MacIsaac , the fiddler.  Whew, he put on a GREAT performance.

And, of course I have free food to go along with the free entertainment...
ZUCCHINI REPORT
Picked this week:  8
Picked YTD: 33

Sail, Save, and Soup

In the dead of winter, quilts like this always make me smile.

I am reminded that there ARE other seasons, besides cold. 

What.  You didn't know cold was a season?  DH has been having a cold for three weeks now.  Doesn't that sound like fun?

What a great job the quilt maker did.  

SOUP
Thursday was Red Hat day.  Lois hosted us at her lovely new home, where we had a SOUPFEST.  These 'in-house' events are so much fun.  We sit around and yak for a couple of hours.
This Pumpkin Soup was my contribution, and after trying it out on DH a week earlier, I knew it would be a hit.

 

SPICY PUMPKIN SOUP WITH COCONUT MILK

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon cumin

1 teaspoon red curry paste

1 14 or 15-oz can pumpkin

1 14-oz can Muir Glen Fire Roasted Diced Tomatoes with Green Chiles (*)

(*) I have been unable to find this product.  Instead, I use regular diced tomatoes PLUS 1 teaspoon of Minced Green Chili (found in Food Basics, brand “India’s Best” in the International aisle)

1 heaping cup roasted corn kernels (either canned or frozen corn, lightly charred in a frying pan)

1/2 cup salsa

1 cup light broth (either vegetable or chicken)

1 14-oz. can coconut milk

Sea salt and fresh ground pepper

1 cup chopped fresh cilantro

1 1/2 teaspoon sugar

Juice from 1 fresh lime

Instructions:
Heat the olive oil in a heavy soup pot over medium-low heat and add the garlic, cumin and curry paste; stir for one minute. Add the pumpkin, fire roasted tomatoes with green chiles, roasted corn, and salsa. Stir to combine. Add the broth. Heat through to a simmer and add the coconut milk. Season with sea salt and ground pepper, cilantro and sugar. Heat through gently and bring to a slow simmer.Taste test and add the fresh lime juice to brighten the flavor. Stir. Add more spice if you need more heat.

Serve with organic blue corn tortilla chips.

My recipe was adapted from the original, found on glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.com

SAVE

As I said earlier, we sat around and yakked for several hours.  Lois finally threw us out before we'd have to be fed dinner, too.  One of the topics under discussion was the price of food.  $8 for a cauliflower.  Whaaatt??  One of the gals picked one up at the local grocers on the SALE TABLE for $ .99.  Yes.  Less than a dollar.  I will make a great little old lady, shuffling along with my walker, because I love sale tables.  But I know people who would not be caught DEAD buying anything from there.  Silly.  Given a choice of going expensive or going frugal, I'll often take frugal, keeping in mind that you get what you pay for.  After all, that is how most of us were raised - wasn't it?  Our parents had to save their pennies wherever they could.  

Because I am still reasonably fit (but let's not put that to the test, ok?) I garden to grow my own organic vegetables, I line dry most of my laundry, I cook from scratch (and that does NOT mean I scratch open a box), I save up several reasons before I get in the car to go in to town, and that car is a Honda Civic.  If something is getting a quick rinse I turn on the COLD tap, not the hot.  I shut the water off while brushing my teeth.  I make my own martinis (ha ha, I had to throw that one in there).  There are lots of ways to save a nickle and over time those nickles add up.

The wee RANT that we got into was over the shrinking farmland in southern Ontario.  Yes we can buy LOCAL cauliflower but it's getting more difficult.  Farmland is being paved over by developers.  It's also being covered with concrete by the greenhouse growers, where our precious vegetables are being grown in chemical solutions.  Yah..., um, ick.  Yes I eat them but I try not to think about it.  Local food facilities, like Bicks Pickles, Heinz, and E.D. Smith are closing.  I'm sorry, but I am NOT eating pickles from China.  Garlic in the stores is pretty much all from China.  No, no, no.  Not eating it.

My gift to you today is actually something I am passing along from the CBC web site.  It's a frugal COOKBOOK with lots of tips.  And a few zucchini recipes.  Which is really easy to grow, by the way.

GOOD AND CHEAP eat well on $4 a day, by Leeanne Brown.

If you would like to read the CBC article, you can find it here.

2016 UFO Challenge and In The Kitchen (the YOGURT story)

2016 UFO CHALLENGE
Every year, my dear friend Margaret (of the Kawartha Margarets) organizes a UFO Challenge for a few of us.  Normally we send her a numbered list of 6 projects, and every two months she pulls a number out of her...we'll say HAT.  This year there will be no numbers.  And no lists.  This year she will have us PICK A PROJECT every two months.  The nice part about that is by the time November rolls around we are not stuck with something we thought about way back in January.  There is nothing to stop us from making a clandestine list, which I may do, since my memory is good for sh*t.

As for me, for the past two years this baby has been on my list, yet has not seen the light of day.  No more procrastinating!!!  Piece 'O Cake, here I come.

IN THE KITCHEN
Just after Mom died at the end of March my friend Noshi came over and got me started on making my own yogurt.  Ever since then I've been making a batch about once a week.  (on a side note:  most people including DH are afraid of home made yogurt and will not eat it.  Curious, eh?)  Fast forward to Christmas when DH and I went to Calgary for a week.  On Jan. 2nd I started a batch of yogurt using a clump of starter that I had put in the freezer before I left.  It doesn't set.  Huh???  Damn.  Down the drain with that four cups of milk.  I have no more starter of my own yogurt, so I opened the last packet of commercial starter and put another batch on.  It doesn't set either.  WTF???  Down the drain goes THAT four cups of milk.  I headed to Goodness Me for supplies and brought home another box of commercial starter.  OK.  Four more cups of milk and ANOTHER failed batch.  Twelve cups of milk have gone down the drain now, and I'm beginning to wonder if Mom is annoyed with me for not visiting her plot since the summer.  Or, maybe it's too cold in the house?  I decided to live it up and try one more time.  But this time I'm going to leave the batch in my lovely warm workroom where there is a nice toasty fire.  Hah.  Fail.  Four more cups down the drain... I'm up to 16 cups of milk down the drain at this point.  I do the math...every four cups is about $1.33, sooo I'm out of pocket over $21.00 just in milk.  Never mind the hydro to heat it up to 185 degrees and the half hour of time to make each batch.  The other part of my brain is calculating how much it would have cost me over the past nine months if I had been buying Greek yogurt.  This half decides that I am still plenty of $$ ahead of the game.
I will try one. more. time.  But THIS time I will put the oven on 'bread proof' setting, which stays at 100 degrees.  We have a dinner date with friends for Chinese food so the yogurt should be done by the time we get home.
... oh dear... much blue air... still runny after eight hours... and the oven is NOT warm.  (There may be an automatic shutoff on the bread proof setting.  After all, who proofs bread dough for eight hours???)
By now I am pretty pissed off.  Pour a glass of wine (size:  large).  Decide "what the hell" and turn the LIGHT on in the oven and shut the door.
When I got up at 8:30 this morning, magic fairy dust had sprinkled itself all over my milk and turned it into yogurt.

The short part of this long story is that the house was too cold for the yogurt culture to ... culture.  Leaving the light on in the oven totally solved the problem.  See?  You are never too old to find out you don't know what the hell you're doing.

Embroidered Applique and Winter Prep

This is one of those quilts where there is not a whole lot of decorative quilting. 

The bulk of this quilt is just stitch in the ditch.  (hah.  "just")
.

 

You can see the quarter-square blocks were quilted with continuous curve.

This is such a pretty border design.  I pulled the little flower motif out and used it in the blocks, too.  This design has a nice wave to the bottom edge, so I suggested to the quilt maker that she might want to scallop the outer edge. She gave me the hairy eyeball at that idea, but seemed to come around by the time she left.

Pretty, pretty, pretty.

The applique is the star of the quilt, so I kept the quilting very quiet, adding only where necessary to keep the empty spaces to a reasonable size.

Some of the design space was taken up with straight line quilting around the edge, and echoed at 1/4".

DH and I spent some time in the garden today, starting the pre-winter cleanup.  This is the last of the green beans, getting a 10 minute steam.  I've frozen them in the past, but they are just ... (can I say crappy?) that way.  This year I am going to dehydrate them.  They will take up much less space.  I can put 'em in a glass jar in the pantry and throw them into soups or stews or casseroles.  We shall see - hopefully they will be better this way.

Tonight was the first ROAST BEEF DINNER of the fall season.  Yum.  With mushroom gravy, mashed potatoes, and roasted carrots & onions.  All summer long we eat pretty light meals, mostly chicken or sausage with fresh veggies.  Fall and winter seems to be the time for the B's:  beef, bread, and baked goods.
After supper I made an Apple Betty. (oh, how clever - another 'B'!)  Two of our wonderful neighbours have each brought over a grocery bag of slightly wormy organic apples for me, because they know I like to can and bake, and I will put them to good use.  In the next week or two I will be helping myself to the slightly wormy organic pears from the roadside tree nearby.

If you are looking for a delicious dessert using apples AND pears, try this Autumn Fruit Flan.

OK, now, everyone, sing along with Joni Mitchell: 
Hey farmer, farmer
Put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But LEAVE me the birds and the bees
Please!

Blooming 9-Patch, Adult Entertainment in the Winter, Stash Report

The Blooming 9-Patch which has been on my UFO list for a long, long, time is now pieced AND quilted AND labeled.  I just need to hand sew the binding.

This is the quilt where I ran out of the butterfly fabric and one of my lovely (!) blog readers sent me some in the mail.  I've seen a zillion of these quilts and they are ALL so pretty.

I used up some "fuglies" on the back.

This is such a busy quilt pattern that I just used a pantograph on it.

ADULT ENTERTAINMENT
Um, no.  This is not X-rated.  Not in your wildest dreams.  You will see that this photo includes old guys in baseball caps, cabbage (both red and green), and bagged apples. And there is kale in the box, which is kind of hard to see.

Oh, look.  Another old guy in a baseball cap.  And a lot MORE bagged apples.

What the hell???  More guys, more caps (although two guys are being a little, shall we say DARING by wearing touques), and more apples.

DH and I went to a FARM AUCTION.  We were out with friends for dinner a week ago, and Ann (of Jumps R Us fame) was telling us about the produce they sell at the auction.  She must have thought I was pretty stupid, because I just didn't get the gist of what she was saying.  I kept asking "you mean a produce MARKET?" and she'd say "no, an AUCTION", and I'd say "you mean a produce MARKET?", and she'd say "no, an AUCTION", and I'd say... well, you probably get the idea of how that conversation went.

The Farm AUCTION place in Hagersville sells produce at the Friday auction.  First they auction off all the junk other items, then at 12:00 they auction off the produce. 

For example, the apples were bagged in 1/2 bushel portions.  There might be 20 bags on the skid.  The bidding went up to $4.00 per bag.  The person who bid the $4.00 can take as many or as few of those 20 bags as they want.  Then whatever is left from that 20-bag lot is up for grabs at the $4.00 price.  I grabbed ONE of the bags.

You may notice, however, that there are TWO bags on my kitchen floor.  Well, the next lot of apples sold at $3.25.  So I took another bag at $3.25.  Ann bought the whole box of cabbage (which I think was eight heads) for $2.00.  Then she foisted four of those heads on me.  I only wanted two, dammit!  The huge bag of potatoes was $3.00, and the bag of onions was $3.00.  Total expenditure was $13.25.  There will be a lot of PIES in my future.  And a lot of cabbage SOUP.

STASH REPORT

Used so far:  31.8 m
Used YTD:  31.8 m
Added this report:  000 - zero
Added YTD:  000 - zero!
Net 2015:   - 31.8 m