www.tineke.net

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.

I’m so happy about these beans.

These are the first dozen green beans from our garden. I don’t know why, but you just don’t get green beans in the shops here, and I hadn’t realised how much I missed them until I saw these little beauties curling out of the flowers on the bean plants.

Following the instructions I’ve seen that you should pick your beans pretty hard in order to get them producing more, I pounced today and picked out the biggest 12 I could find. I ate one raw while I was cooking, and threw the rest in our dinner for a short while, so they were still a little bit crunchy. Adults and toddler alike agreed that they were very good.

These were from seeds sent to me by my Mum in NZ. They’ve grown very happily here so far and there are signs of many many more beans to come. Hurrah!

This weekend I made my first ever batch of jam. Late last summer I picked about 3 kilos of blackberries from our garden, and froze them all, intending to spend some wet wintery day making jam.

Now it’s summer again, and our blackberry bushes are heaving with little green berries. So, in anticipation of a really bumper crop later in the summer, I figured I should use up some of those frozen berries now.

And here they are, six happy little jars of jam. There was another half a jar too, which is in the fridge for using right away. In the absence of scones and clotted cream, I mixed a couple of spoons into some of my home made yoghurt, for immediate nom.

For a while, I’ve been considering colouring my hair with henna instead of using chemical dyes.  This has partly been driven by the fact that I hate the thought of all the icky chemicals I’ve been smearing on my head for years, and partly because I’m consistently disappointed with their lack of grey coverage.

So, finally, this week I took the plunge.   I used 200g of henna and about 50g of indigo, to darken it up a bit and make it a bit more brunette than just red.

Here are some before photos – I had a cocktail of colours including old dye jobs, old highlights, and my natural blend of mouse brown and badger grey.

And here are the after photos.    These were taken the day after, and since then the colour has darkened up a bit.

I was concerned that I’d still have a really strong tide mark where the old blonde was growing out – but although it’s still there, it’s slightly less obvious. I was also a bit scared of coming out fire-engine red, but since the henna sits on top of your existing hair colour, that is unlikely unless your hair is very fair to begin with. Plus, the addition of indigo was a good way to tone it down.

Most of all I’m impressed with the grey coverage. I have tried endless dyes that claim “100% grey coverage” and each and every time I have still been able to see greys immediately after I used the damn stuff. It’s been a few days now, and several shampoos later I still can’t see the greys peeking through – I can tell that some hairs are lighter than the others, but they’re a pleasant coppery red rather than grey. Plus my hair feels like it’s in better condition than before. It’s a double win!