Homemade quill and blueberry ink

What do you do with too many old frozen blueberries and a serendipitous crow feather on a lazy Sunday night?

Yes.  2011.  And it wasn't alone in there....  

Turn the feather into a writing quill and make blueberry ink, of course.  Duh.

I thought it was inspired; The Husband thought I was a little crazy to be so excited about a dodgy old crow feather I plucked from the muddy ground.  He was also a little skeezed out to be honest, so I washed the feather as soon as we got home.

To hasten the juicing of the berries, I dumped a few frozen beauties into a glass bowl and microwaved them for a minute, then smooshed them.  It only takes a little bit of juice to make ink, so now I have a bunch of lukewarm mushy berries sitting around.  Ah well.

The Hubs has a bunch of these sheathed razor blades from his days as an aviation electrician, so I cut the tip of the feather with that AND DIDN'T EVEN CUT MYSELF.  It's a minor miracle.  Don't forget to cut both at an angle and a tiny vertical cut at the point.

Sneaky me slipped in a little history lesson with The Girl and GirlCousin while they thought they were having fun writing with the quill.  Heh heh heh!   (Cue pompous lecture-voice:   "Well, girls, you see... blah blah blotting paper...  yadda yadda blotting sand....")

Truthfully, I was entertained by the whole process much longer than the were the children.

But The Boy wrote this, not I.  Really!

After a the ink/blueberry juice dries, it turns from reddish-purple to a pretty navy blue.

If your inner nerd is as jazzed about a gross old feather and a few tablespoons of staining fruit juice as is mine, give it a try!   Tots easy.   Annnnd makes me want to go read Jane Austen.  Again.

Garden bounty

Today:

Pop's cup  --er, garden-- overfloweth

The Girl and GirlCousin pick sugar peas

My own Little Sal "guards" the day's vegetables.  By "guard" she clearly means EAT.

The day's haul. (After sharing with friends!)  Bounty, indeed.

The Rogue Pea-Eater

I thought I could pick a few early sugar snap peas from Pop's garden yesterday and add them to a salad or something....    but the dangerous Rogue Pea-Eater got to them first.

"What happened to all the peas?!!"

"I'm just sitting here talking to the peas.  Welllll....  to tell the truth:  I ate them."

I ended up with FIVE.

*sigh*  At least she's a good vegetable-eating thief.

Pop the Farmer, himself.

Oh heyyyy.  Looky here!

It's summery growing goodness!

More Summer!

It was a hard winter.  But this summer is making up for it!

 Pop's garden is bursting at the seams:

Pea plants as tall as The Boy

7-8-2014   

What?  Doesn't everyone have peas in their car console?

The Girl and my parents and I went for a hike on Friday.  It's one of our favorite hikes, back to a little rapids and waterfall.

And now we're overrun with cousins.

It's a great summer.

Mmmmmm

While we've been entertaining visiting family over the past week, Bob and his father and coworkers have feverishly been preparing (and repairing) camps and boats and docks for customers on The Lake.  So....  there hasn't been much work accomplished on the new house.   But, things are great on the eating front.  Aside from the pot-luck 4th o' July picnic that stretched the whole weekend, we've got home-grown food covered pretty well.

We are co-parenting some pigs -- Inky and Pinky -- with some friends.  We're more like the non-custodial parents, though.  We feed them when our friends are away.  Despite the fact that the kids have named them, they aren't pets; they're eatin' pigs.  Yummy, yummy eatin' pigs.

June 28, 2014

Please don't be disturbed by the fact that I said we're parenting something we're going to eat in four months.  It's just my way. 

Additionally, we are overflowing with leafy greens!  My parents went on a two-week trip to the midwest, leaving me in charge of eating everything from the garden.   It's a big job.  I've ...er.... blessed all the family I can find and a few unfortunate friends with buckets of kale, spinach and lettuce and, based on The Husband's reaction at dinner last night, I'd better not make any more spinach dishes for dinner here.  But, the sugar snap peas and beans are coming along nicely and next week we'll be short of lettuce and awash in beans.  

The message here is:  I will be flush with things to whine about all summer!

June 27, 2014

July 4, 2014   

Apparently, I think strawberries need to be photographed in my hand and nowhere else.

My father's strawberry plants were really productive this year!  And I ATE THEM ALL.   Except what Bob and The Girl ate straight off the plants before I could get to 'em.

Here's some non-food pictures from the past week or so, just to prove we don't only think about eating.     

Just mostly.

Yes, it was 80 degrees that day.  Artists are notoriously counter-culture.

Happy Summer!

2014 Garden

Well, my father is at it again:   trying to feed half the county with his overachieving garden.  Here's some pix of the progression to veggie goodness:

The annual BEFORE shot, taken May 11, 2014:

 Then a couple of weeks later, Pop put the grandkids to work turning a raised bed.  

Okay, the truth?  They grabbed rakes and went to town on their own.  In the near-dark. 

Fast-forward (past many MANY hours of toil) to this week:

My mother says, "train up a pea plant in the way that it should go, 

and when it is old it will not depart from it."  I'm sure I've heard that somewhere before...

Pop and The Hubs discuss the leeks.  Clearly one of them has insulted The Hubs.   

"What?!  How DARE you?"

 And - nothing to do with the garden - just because I DO WHAT I WANT:

Bob tries to not look pained when his cheesy wife coerces him into a photo.

Prepare for an explosion of produce in the next month.  It's that time o' year!