Sour and delicious…like life

My husband has a friend from his graduate school days who used to say every time he sipped coffee, “Ah, bitter…like life.” (He’s an Eeyore kind of character.)

I wouldn’t say life is bitter; it’s more like sour and also delicious–just like a Cornelian cherry and rhubarb pie. What? You’ve never had one, you say? Well, check mine out…

Cornelian cherry is a dogwood, by the way.

good gravy, I look like I’m performing surgery and taking out polyps or something

mashing up the two ingredients together

Ahhh, pie is everything!

In case you’re wondering why Cornelian cherry-rhubarb, it’s because we didn’t get a big enough Cornelian cherry crop for me to do a whole pie with.

If you love pie like I do, you probably want to be my neighbor; I make very good pies. 😉 Have a lovely weekend!

When life gives you eggs…

Our hens are laying well right now and we have a ton of eggs–I mean a TON!

What do you when life gives you an excessive amount of eggs? Well, a lot of things, but one of them is make fresh pasta!

The gorgeous ball of dough in the bowl.

I used this King Arthur Flour.

Done…rolled out and cut.

The herbs are fresh from the garden and the jar of anchovies are from Vital Choice.

Dinner is served alongside a garden-fresh salad, also just picked from the garden. Homegrown is unbeatable!

This is one of our favorite homemade meals. What’s one of yours?

A little bubbly

Some people celebrate with champagne bubbly, I celebrate with this other kind of bubbly:

Sourdough. Tasty and my body doesn’t react weirdly to it like it does to alcohol.

I made a few things with the discard because I’m an immigrant who inherited my mom’s motto of “never waste food” (she lived through WWII as a kid and never forgot about starving until the day she died), and can’t throw out perfectly good starter.

What am I celebrating? Well, I still can’t tell you because, again, publishing. But let’s toast with sourdough, shall we?

Perfect pandemic feast

With 50 pounds of flour (I wasn’t hoarding; that’s about my normal homesteading amount) and an average of 15 dozen eggs in the fridge (happy hens who have finished molting), what could be better than making some fresh pasta?

Then, too, our greenhouse and the beds in the garden under row covers have been pretty productive all winter.

So it was inevitable that we break open the $20+ jar of anchovies and make a feast!

I hope you have been making good eats with what you have on hand during this shut-in time.

If it’s winter, it must be marmalade season!

Most of you aren’t old enough to remember a movie with Suzanne Plechette called “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.” I don’t remember much about it either since I watched it in my teens, but I love that title and love to riff on it whenever I can.

My mom loved marmalade, but it took me a number of years to love it as much as she did. And now I am hooked. In fact, so is hubby. He claims to love jelly more than jams because he doesn’t like chunky stuff as much. And he claims to love black raspberry jelly. WELL, I have come to the realization that that in a fire and he could only save either the black raspberry jelly or the marmalade, it will always be the marmalade. Every. Single. Time.

And of all the possible permutations of marmalades, we have settled for the full grapefruit version. One day, I may try making a pomelo marmalade but it’s harder to find those around here. #NotTheTropics

zesting…I love big chunks of peel

is this beautiful or what?

the first batch

safely stored in our root cellar…part home-canned stuff, part store-bought stuff

Do you have a favorite jam or jelly? Have you tried making it yourself?

Homemade pasta…an incredibly good thing

One of the things that’s great to make when you have happy, productive chickens (or inherit a lot of eggs instead of money from your eccentric Aunt Bertha) is fresh pasta. I don’t make it often only because I’m lazy. It’s easy to make but takes a long time (or maybe I just work slow?).

Weighing out the flour on my Escali scale (love that thing!).

Rolling out the dough on the Atlas pasta roller…

And, finally, the meal hubby made with the pasta…

It was one of the best meals I’ve had…and hubby cooks many great meals. 🙂