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Archive for August, 2010

I think Linus and I should get married again, so we can have one of these wedding cakes:

Drool

Yes, it’s a cheese wedding cake.  Yes, I want one for lunch.

My clever husband spent quite a few of our summery evenings whittling by the outdoor fireplace.  As well as making our garden markers, he’s been working on his first ever spoon.

This is made from a piece of hawthorne, which is apparently a very hard wood.  I think it’s come up quite lovely – so much so that I’m hesitatant to want to dirty it by actually using it.

We’ve been lucky enough to discover a patch of chanterelle mushrooms, quite close to home.

So today we foraged up this harvest, to go with some meatballs for dinner.

Here in Sweden, chanterelle harvesting spots are a closely guarded secret, so obviously I can’t tell you where we found them.  But just look at their golden loveliness:

The more eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed some nifty markers in recent pictures of the garden.  We got one of those burny-writing-on-wood-pen-things, and split and whittled a huge stack of hazel sticks to make markers for our plants.  All the markers are in Swedish, but you can probably get the gist of most of them

Well, it’s not quite new, but I haven’t been able to put up any pictures of it because it would ruin the surprise.  But now that Mum has her birthday shawl, I can show it to the rest of you.

Project page here.

Remember all those carrots?

About 9kg of carrot "thinnings"

We peeled, chopped, blanched and froze a couple of kilos last night, and I also decided to try out this recipe for carrot bread.  And it’s a winner!

Carrot bread

Such a winner in fact that I have made more carrot puree and stashed it in the freezer, so I can make some more loaves.  I left out the peanuts, and used dinkel (spelt) flour and it has turned out fluffy and moist.  It’s not super carroty in flavour, and works with both sweet and savoury.   I did mine in a large loaf tin instead of two flat shaped loaves (since we tend to eat a lot of our bread toasted, this shape just works out better).

We went out for a foraging walk in the weekend, around our neighbourhood, and came home with 1.25k of ripe blackberries which I promptly made into another batch of jam.

Wild blackberry jam

We also found a patch of chanterelle mushrooms in one of our nearby bits of forest, which we brought home and fried for our lunch.

I harvested most of our beans, since they are so productive that we can’t keep up with eating them all. So I picked 1.2kg and chopped, blanched and froze them.

1.2kg of green beans

Then we did a big carrot harvest.  We’ve been eating our carrots for a while, but they were getting so bushy that they were smothering the onions they are intercropped with.  So, we did a little “thinning”.

About 9kg of carrot thinnings

Now we have to do something with them all …

And finally on Sunday we were invited to pick black currants at L’s mum’s house.  I didn’t photograph or weigh them, but we guess there was about 4kg of currants.  Some have been made into cordial, some are dehydrating, and some are in the fridge, waiting patiently to be made into jam.

I did some weeding between the remaining veges, and they were looking lovely, so I took a snap.

Happy veges

You can see our parsnips and leeks in the foreground, and possibly make out some kale, celery, one lonely broccoli and one lonely red cabbage in the background.