It's Christmas Cookie Time....



Finished chocolate chili cookies!


And here is the first batch...the first successful batch, that is. At Thanksgiving, Mum gave me a Farmer's Almanac with a good-looking receipe for Chocolate Chili cookies in it. I tried it first with "coating chocolate" the first time. I didn't realize what impact this would have on the consistency of the cookie. Ah yes, it made lovely chocolate chili mess all over the cookie sheets simply because every time it was heated, it melted to a thin scrim of liquid. Michael had to help me scrape the baked stuff off the pan. This time, I used semi-sweet morsels and that made all the difference. No habaneros this time either. I put into the mortar and pestle only dried jalapenos. This was mixed with flour, baking powder, eggs, vanilla, espresso powder, the chocolate mix you see below, along with more semi sweet morsels and walnuts. Good stuff.

The batter!



Me in the walnut bag...




Semi-sweet chocolate chips with Smart
Balance in my newish double-boiler from
Westland Auction.



Bee Stings and Apple Harvests



I usually never write on the chalk board, but project my lecture notes
from pdf documents I post for students on my web site. I gave the
kids an activity one day and took a picture of my questions for my
own sanity (meaning: I didn't have to write them down...how cool is
the smart phone? Awesome, right?)



We've been busy bees lately. Pun not intended, I'm afraid. I've been pretty consumed by lecture prep and have also been grading papers until my eyes cross. With three sections with approximately 25 kids each, with an assignment in each class per week, the grading is an on-going event in the house. Michael's been putting the garden and the bees to bed. Here are some pics of the recent activity, kitchen and otherwise.....

Bun's putting out a dose of fall feeding for the top bar
in the garden. The fall syrup is composed of 2 parts
sugar to one part water--extra rich, to get the ladies
bulked up for the leaness that is winter.

What's this, you ask? Homemade apple butter, baby.
I had apples that we brought back from central PA, and
they were starting to be six kinds of sandy.
So, I sauced them.



What's the sweetner? Well, our own honey,
of course!



Some little boy didn't wear his bee suit when he went
to winterize the hives on the hill, and he got stung above his
eye. The poor thing swelled up so severely, he could not
open the lid. Within 48, however, Michael's eye was back
to normal. Scary stuff, though!

Melting the Wax Caps...

Remember those wax caps? We've got plans for them!

In addition to what you see in the bin above, we harvested
wax caps from the screen through which
the honey strained. The lot of it appears in the
wax-designated saucepan in this image.

Heat and stir....

...and stir...

I'm melting!

I sprayed Pam inside a leftover container, and
the wax is now inside the container, cooling. Shortly, we'll
be able to make candles...more on this soon!

Our First Honey Harvest

Well...technically, it's not our first harvest, since we took a few frames out in high summer, pushed the honey and comb through a sieve, and got three glass jars full of pretty amber liquid. Yet, this is the first significant harvest, one that involved cutting open the wax caps and placing the frames in a spinner. Processing four supers took us just a little over two hours, not counting prep time. Here are some pictures:

Glenn removes the wax caps with a serrated knife.

Michael uses a pronged scraper to open the
capped cells before they go into the spinner.



Glenn checks the frames, turns them around.



Michael cranks the spinner, while Glenn holds it in place.
They took turns at this task. Savannah tried it, too, but her arm
wimped out after one frame. The centrifugal force pulls the
honey out of the uncapped cells and throws it onto the inside walls
of the spinner. It works much like the spin cycle in a washing machine.



The serrated capping knife, wax, and honey...
looking every bit like a scene from CSI.



Straining the wax and other detritus out of the honey
involves a finely meshed screen.

Glenn dispenses honey into glass pints and quarts.
(Savannah has also learned that hard plastic doesn't like the
dishwasher--even the friendlier top rack. It makes me
wonder what that heat is actually doing to my
softer plastic leftover containers. *gulp*)

Our honey is dark, much like molasses. It is darker
even than buckwheat honey we've purchased at market.
In fact, it is so dark that very little light penetrates the liquid.
We know for certain that our bees hit the field thistles and
clover especially hard. However, beyond that,
we're not sure what nectar might comprise this harvest.





I know...it's been so long!



Funneling the peach-habanero jam into 1/2 pints!


 I know, I know...it's been so long since I've posted (sorry for the long lag in news, Bob! And thank you for the gobs receipes you sent! I'll make them very soon and send some in with Michael for sharing purposes).

We've been travelin', which I'll get into on Friday (with photographic illustrations, no less). But even before our trip, we got unusually busy. Wanna read the whole tale? You can read of our new car adventures and my week of insanity here by clicking on the hyperlinked text.

Tonight, though, we're back in the swing of things...making this hot business called peach-habanero jam, using pepers we ourselves grew and peaches we picked up at McDannell's Fruit Farm on the way back home.

In the canner for a 10-minute bath.



Bun wipes the rims, so the lid truly seals.

  We followed this receipe for the jam, and it is every bit as hot as it sounds. And we added neither extra pith nor seeds. 

Keep on scrolling for a rainbow. No, seriously. There's a rainbow below...


Amazing. We saw a double rainbow on our way back to PA from Mount Vernon!
We just got back from Williamsburg, VA on Monday.
I promise to post trip pictures on Friday. Promise.



Pepper jam, tomatoes, butternut squash, and beans!

Pepper Jam, Baby!

We've started to get a small ton of tomatoes!

Ugly Tomatoes!

The first batch of tomato sauce!

I baked our butternut squash in the oven and whirred it
around in the food processor.

So many beans, with so many more to come.



Jasper begged for a bean, but wasn't digging it once he got it.



Kidney beans, black beans, favas, soldier beans,
yard-longs, and black-eyed peas.



We just haven't figured out how to get around this part yet.... 

Prepped for drying....

Watermelon Jelly (Part 2) and Other Stories....

The water bath is heating up and the lids are sterilizing
in a sauce pan. I'm stirring watermelon juice, vinegar,
sugar, grated ginger, and pectin.

First, some storytelling: "The Unnatural History of Brown's Island" was the featured story at Fiction365.com on Saturday. I hesistate to call my Brown's Island story 'new', since I wrote it in January 2010 and have been sitting on it, like it's an egg, ever since. The story itself, although fictional, is based largely on local legend and some fact, since there was indeed a deadly explosion there just before Christmas in 1972.

In other news, food preservation continues! I started watermelon jelly on Monday and finished it on Tuesday afternoon. In fact, I was

washing dishes just as Michael came home from work, and that left our evening free to attack the other things that needed to be taken care of, namely, carrots. Michael got a fannyload of them on Sunday by digging them up with the potato fork. Last night, we washed, trimmed, scraped and re-washed the carrots before raw packing them and getting them into the pressure canner....pictures of the productivity follow, just below: 

Just out of the canner! Watermelon-ginger jelly.



Rainbow carrots, being peeled and chopped.



The smaller carrots got their own jar.

We chopped the larger ones.



Fresh out of the pressure canner!



A long view of Tuesday's productivity...is that a
ghost in the image, or is our jar just steaming?

Watermelon jelly (part 1), brioche, and Jasper at the 'dentist'

Savannah started making watermelon jelly on
Monday afternoon. The watermelon  here is in the
food mill, getting a good wringing!

The resulting juice, but...I'm not able to make jelly
just yet. We have to pick up our little patient Jasper....

Fred's was a little glum. Jasper was getting a tooth
extracted and was at the vet all day. Fred missed him and
hid most of the day beneath the coffee table tablecloth.

Savannah also made brioche, and as you can see above,
 it grew like the blob, touching the window on the
machine lid.

Michael says our brioche looks like it has a beret.

Finally, Jasper came home, slightly drunk from
the anesthesia. Michael re-applied a bandage to
his IV boo-boo.

Woo! They shaved it so close it feels like suede.