Making marmalade: lots of work, small payoff

That sounds like a description for writing books, too, for most authors except the upper echelon. 

My friend, Robin, makes marmalade all the time and never complains, but that's because she's more hard-working than I am, and I'm whinier than she is.

I must have spent a total of about 2 hours on my feet sanitizing the darn jars, lids, equipment, etc,. and zesting...

cooking up the zest

and sectioning + extracting the insides of the oranges and grapefruits...

the fruits, as spent and shriveled as yours truly

Using the recipe in Robin's "A Simple Jar of Jam" ebook, I cooked up the pulp.

yummy pulp

cooking with fruit and pectin, waiting to add sugar

After all that, I canned 6 measly pints of marmalade.

Granted, it's some of the best marmalade money can't buy, but 2 hours?! Really? If hubby, Son2 and I didn't love marmalade so much, I'd just make  super easy strawberry jams instead.
But, it really was all worth it because look who came to partake of the remains of the fruit? No, not Kazuo Ishiguro...

a Little Wood-satyr (Son1 won't let me use "Wood-Satyr," saying world convention dictates I use "Wood-satyr"...in case anyone else actually cares)

We were really hoping to attract Baltimore Orioles, but this was just as good since we're amateur lepidoptera-philes. :)

What's your favorite jam/jelly to make or to eat?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Just to prove I wasn't totally slacking

I managed to finish up a few projects before the end of December, 2013. Granted, I started some of those projects at least several months ago, but I consider it a victory when I actually finish a project.

The socks and the washcloths are knitted but the hat is crocheted. It has a funky swirl pattern on top, which was what drew me to it in the first place. I owe Robin thanks for helping me get started on the complicated looking pattern.

What projects did you finish up at long last by the end of 2013?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Home-made 2012

This is just a little recap of some of the things I've made over the past year. I don't remember to take photos of everything I create, and some of those things were gifts so I can't ask for them back just to take a picture.

This is a pillow (back-side) I made from a shrunken wool sweater and a pillow form stuffed with dryer lint. Hubby made a face when I told him what the form was made with, but, geez, dude, dryer lint is cleaner than the clothes you have on you! After all, it came from clothes that have been washed and then the lint was thoroughly dried in pretty high heat.

I also made a scarf that is keeping me toasty warm all winter long:

I bought the gorgeous yarn - a combination of mohair and ribbon - from talented Robin. Check out her Etsy site to see her hand-dyed yarn, roving, and hand-woven towels.

I knitted some wash cloths for gifts, but since I didn't get started early enough, only some people got them for Christmas. :} Others will have to wait until next year.

One really cute thing I knitted was for my buddy Tom, who is not only a kind-hearted soul, but also fun and eclectic in tastes:

Guess who?

Some of the best things I made during the year were, of course, food. Here's an apple kuchen:

and a blueberry pie - yummy and nutritious:

A favorite of hubby's is homemade pasta (he whines notes that I don't make it as often as I could).

What was the favorite thing you made this year, for yourself or someone else? Do you also go a little batty if you're not doing something creative or making something by hand?

Happy New Year tomorrow! May your 2013 be as productive as I hope mine will be. :) Thank you for following and reading my blog. I hope you'll continue to drop by and we can learn and laugh through the year together!

p.s. If you're itching for another blog to visit, I'm trying a 365-Day Project and would love to see you there. ;)

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Bacteria, it's what's for dinner

When it comes to my friend Robin, sometimes I feel like "monkey see, monkey do." I usually like to march to the beat of my own drummer (read: I am not a follower), but Robin inspires me a lot with her self-sufficiency and the things she does, and I want to be just like her when I grow up sometimes. ;)

When she started using natural yeast to bake - which saves on buying yeast - it sounded so cool, I wanted to try it too. 

First, I bought the book:

Then I waited patiently for my free dried yeast from the authors to arrive. Luckily, Robin came to the rescue again by giving me one of her happy starts! 

This is what it looked like when I went to feed my pet start for the first time:

  

Despite the book calling for proceeding slowly and with caution, within the week, I wanted to try out a recipe. Nobody said I was patient. I chose the easiest beginner recipe, no knead bread, and mixed it up:

I fed the start again after I used a portion of it for the dough above.

And I stuck the dough into the pans:

It turned out very sour and dense and, well, meh because I'd run out of whole wheat flour:

So I power-fed my starts to make the dough sweeter, and then I attempted "Adam's Bread" with a combination of white AP and WW flour. The loaves came out darker due to the WW flour and therefore, IMO, much prettier:

the yeast was alive with the sound of screaming...okay, no screaming

The only problem was that for whatever bizarre reason, the bread tried to crawl out of its container while in the oven. (The other loaf did too, but you can't see it in the photo.) Creepy.

The bread turned out sweet and, while it had lots of little air holes, was also on the dense side. Not quite the bread we're used to, but it was tasty enough that I was encouraged to keep going and keep experimenting for a while longer.

There are some health claims about natural yeasts. I've not done my own research on it to confirm or deny such claims. I only wanted to use natural yeast for the fact that you can keep a start going (like a sour dough biga) ad infinitum so you don't ever have to buy yeast again for bread-making. Any questions about health claims should be directed to the authors of the book.

Do you think you might try bread-making with natural yeast? I think this is something best suited to those who have patience and attention to detail, neither of which are my strong points, as I've mentioned earlier.

----
Update: no one in our family likes the flavor, the texture, or the denseness of any of the 7 recipes I've tried in the book, so I'm giving up. If any of you would like to try it, though, I'd be happy to mail you my book for free. First person to ask me for it gets it. :)

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams