montjoye

I make lots of these but this one was amazing. Trying to remember what I did:

roux sauce:
500ml chicken stock (home made of course)
100ml white wine
100ml cream
~1T butter
1/4c flour
1t mustard powder
S+P
and after thickened: 1/2c grated cheddar and 1 dessertspoon grain mustard

1 pasta bowl of spirelli, boil until half cooked
add half a chopped green capsicum, several sliced sticks of celery
boil further 2min
drain

plus 3 medium mushrooms and one med zucchini, about 1/3c shredded ham. Also 1T chopped fresh parsley and about 1T caraway thyme. all chopped.

mix all the above, put in a buttered casserole dish, add a light cover of grated cheese. Bake in mod oven 45min or until brown.

I went searching for the post from last time I made strawberry jam, but there wasn't one. So this time there will be. Strawbs were 3 punnets for $4.

I pretty much followed Pam the Jam's recipe. Except it would seem that English jam sugar is lots weaker than Jamsetta. I used about a quarter of a 50g packet of Jamsetta, plus  I boiled the peels and cores of three pears (from the pear compote I had just prepped) in about 100ml of water and strained off the liquid through a cloth. Otherwise this is 1kg of strawbs, 900g sugar, 100ml lemon juice and Pam's method. Good colour eh?


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I've written this up for a class I run occasionally on demystifying the art of testing for fibre types by burning. Keeping it simple, just dealing with the basics.


( rest under here )

Whoa, that was sudden. I'm in mourning for a peach tree.

A little less than four years ago, as spring was about to sproig in 2012, I fell over an eager looking dwarf peach tree at my favourite garden shop. It looked about to burst into blossom, but still bare rooted. I took pity on it and adopted it without any plans of where it would fit in my garden. I got it home and plonked it into the middle of my herb garden. When it bloomed, the flowers were so lush that they inspired his name* from then on "Luciano", for Pavarotti of course. He grew well over the next few years, with a huge growth spurt across last spring and summer. I got a sudden terror that he either had or would, get his roots into the sewer pipe, which he was planted right on top of. I failed to think of that when I planted him.

So I came up with a plan to transplant him. The only place I could think of to put him meant that other plants needed to be evicted or moved. I've just done all that, including finding a bluestone boulder that was too big to move. A bit more than a day's work produced the hole to move him to. When I tried to dig him up, I felt there was no chance of getting enough of the roots moved to allow him to survive. So, very quickly I decided to cut him down. So sad! but I thought it would be better than either leaving him or having him die after moving. Sorry Luciano. I'm glad you lived long enough to have one good fruiting season. 3kg yield last summer.

I've kept an attractive bare branch, so he gets to live on as a new twig tree.







The luscious flowers






Now there was still a great gaping hole ready for a substantial plant. So I ran off and bought a new dwarf peach tree. This one even comes pre named. The variety is "O'Henry". So he is of course dubbed "Henry O'Henry". He ticks all the boxes: Yellow fleshed, full flavoured, free stone, red colour on the skin, minimal fuzz, mid season ripening. Welcome Henry, I hope you like it here. I've given him a whole bag of manure and half a bucket of compost for his roots to find .




*of course(?) all my fruit trees have names :-)

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reposting here for better findability.

I think it’s time. I’m going to have a bit of a holiday from the SCA. I have not been having a good time at standard SCA events with fighting+court+feast+lots of people(all of whom I’m supposed to know and interact with) or any combination of the above really. All of those things distress me in various ways. I’ve been feeling this way for quite some years but forcing myself to go to events because I think I ought, feeling like a fish out of water and not having a good time. So I’m going to try having a break before I burn out the remainder of my enthusiasm. I still love making things, knowing other people who make things, wonderfully crazy people, dressing up etc, but it’s hard to be involved in those things without large helpings of the rest.

I will still attend Polit university. A&S is cool, I’m booked, and anyway, I’m teaching. I will still make things, some of them might even be medjeeval. I think I will otherwise plan to stay away until Canty Faire (flights already booked). If I have a good time there I will likely come to festival. The very large events actually work better for me, I’m more able to find a safe corner and mostly avoid the things I’m not coping with. After that we will see.

Of course I might miss it and attend anyway, but I’d rather come when I’m not expected than feel I’m expected to go. We will see.

Having taken note of Mr Darcy's last moult, and he started again yesterday, I'm inclined to keep a record for a little while. Very minor science :-)

April ~20th. Fairly major moult. >10 large feathers, no tail feathers
June 1st. One wing feather so far plus a bunch of medium ones (bigger than just down)
that gap is only about 5wks, I thought it was a couple of months between moults.
July 10th. Again about 5wks. lots of down, a few flight feathers and one tail feather.

While staying with my folks recently, Mum and I made a batch of beef croquettes. This starts with simply boiling stewing beef in water. That smelled so good that I had a sudden thought that maybe the problem with my beef stews is the vegetable bulk? So I'm trying a more beef centric stew version to test that. Of course I couldn't resist making it more complex than just beef in water, but there is very little volume in there other than beef and enough liquid. Anyway while I remember what I put in the pot:

750g stewing steak, cubed and with the chunkiest fat evicted
brown this in olive oil in 3 batches
deglaze with a glass of red wine
add: 3 smallish flat mushrooms chopped
~1T tomato juice/passata
1 cube frozen parsley
~1/2t dried thyme
shake of hing powder
~8 turns black pepper
grated nutmeg (maybe 1/8t?)
enough water to barely cover

bring to the boil, drop to a simmer for 2-3hrs, lid on. Must check for seasoning later, the only salt in the above is in the parsley (and tomato goop I suppose). I mean to thicken it a little at the end and treat as pie filling.

I wanted a dress to wear for my parents Golden Wedding celebration. I decided to use a length of panel printed silk crepe I've had for a couple of years, but was struggling to find design inspiration to turn it into a frock. Then I remembered this lovely and simple dress I found in Kelvingrove art gallery, Glasgow back in 2008. A child's dress in silk batik. Made by Jessie M. King in 1923. I think it's delightful and I spent quite a while looking at it. I came up with a plan to position the printed panels that I thought would be pleasing.



So I made it up.




I'm rather curvier than a small child, so the effect on me is not that flattering. Another trademark elegant sack? or just ugly? It is very comfy and nicely floaty though. I'm still interested in garments from simple rectangles, triangles, but they are challenging to make look good on a curvy figure. One needs a big enough circumference for the outward curves, shall we say, but then there is too much bagginess around the inward curves :-)



Like most loosely fitted things on a curvy girl, it looks better when I'm moving. Some will find these pics amusing.

    

Now I need to decide if this acceptable? or simply too dowdy and I need to think again?

Posting this in case some find it useful. Also because I'm delighted to have come up with another useful variation.

I will only buy free range chicken, and buying it in pieces is expensive. So every so often, I buy a whole free range chook, from which I get at least a dozen meals, sometimes more.

The legs and wings make two meals. I usually make a ginger/soy/honey marinaded slow cooked thing with noodles and veg. Tonight I did a baked thing with cream/zucchini/mushrooms/rice instead.

The thighs make two meals. My standard is a cacciatore variant

The breasts make about 4 serves. I usually do satay or curry but random pasta sauces are also good.

Then the new thought was- instead of just making stock from the resulting carcass, steam the meaty carcass for half a hour. I put thyme and bay in the steaming water. Let this cool, strip the carcass and one gets about a cup of cooked chicken, useful for sandwiches, pasta, pizza etc. Say another two meals. If you have inexpensive white wine, use that for all or half of the steaming water. Either way, the resulting water is a rich stock.

The steaming water counts as stock, then one can boil the bones(including the any of the other bones you haven't already boiled) for more stock. Say 1-2L stock that will make 4-8 serves of soup.
Edit- more like 1L or less stock from only one chicken carcass. I usually collect the bones in the freezer and make a larger amount, hence my confusion.


Not bad for just one chicken.

I suppose I started sewing at about 4 or 5 years old? Pattern darning on hessian to start with, guided by my Mother and Grandmother. Several of those pieces still exist in my Mother's collection. My Mother sewed most of our clothes when my brother and I were small. Initially, much of the fabric came from her old full skirted 50's and 60's frocks. My Grandmother, dear Nana, wanted to be a tailor, but her family could not afford the apprenticeship fees so she had to go to work in a pickle onion factory instead (one of the saddest stories I know). She did manage to study at nightschool however, and had considerable skill. Nan made lots of Mum's clothes of course. Nan (and Gramps) lived with us from when I was about 10, so I grew up with two fairly accomplished dressmakers. Now I have Nan's last sewing machine, sniff.

So large scale embroidery was my start. Then making dolls clothes, both by hand and later machine. Practicing on sewing machines by making "stamps" and spirals etc with old needles on paper. Also making dolls. Pipecleaner dolls and dressing them, often in different country's traditional dress. I was impatient with school sewing lessons because they didn't do things the way my family had already taught me. by late high school I was starting to make clothes for myself, partly because I had access to fabric, but very little money. I kept making clothes all through Uni days, and in the latter part of that, discovered the SCA. Costume became part of the sewing mix, but without much historical accuracy at the beginning.

So many weekends and holidays were all about the gift of time in which to sew. I remember one set of Easter holidays when I was so excited because I had time to make a coat. That coat got made and worn lots. I was so happy both making it, and having made it. For years, I'd spend weekends sewing in the family dining room while listening to one of two sets of albums- Eurythmics or Steeleye Span. I'm astonished in retrospect that my poor family were so tolerant of this.  Yeh I should get out more, or have got out more, but I'd not be as good a seamstress if I had.

I have kept making clothes for myself ever since. Some of the impetus is that I don't have a figure that matches the shapes that retail clothes are made to fit. I look way better in well fitted custom made clothes. I can't buy trousers that fit for any money, or shirts, or anything much except knits and shoes, and even the knits I fairly often end up altering (actually, I've altered a bunch of shoes too). I also love fabric, really love fabric. Well, I really love high quality fabric, especially when I find it for cheap.

I continued my dressmaking education by reading lots of "Threads" magazines, books, and learning things from my sewing friends. Later I found my costume experience informing my general dressmaking. I haven't used a commercial pattern in years. Commercial patterns don't fit any better than retail clothing. I did however learn a lot about garment construction from the instructions in the commercial patterns I worked with for years.

You know that advice for writers? "just write, lots, keep doing it, write, really". Well for me it was sewing. I could simply not count how many garments I have made, or altered, or remodelled. So many. Mumblety years worth. I'm pleased with what I can do, but I suppose I feel I ought to be able to do more. This was not though my paid career. So it's just a well developed hobby, but if I'm away from needle and thread for too long, I crave it.