In the Good Old Summertime

Second day of summer vacation.  Today I gave Sofya's no-knead bread recipe a try, and it is a rousing success.  I mixed King Arthur's white and white whole wheat flours and got a chewy, soft loaf reminiscent of what I could get at the bakerei when I lived in Germany and Austria.

And it's so, SO easy.  You set it to rise overnight, and if you're particularly greedy ambitious, you can get up a little early, about 5:00 AM, turn the oven on for 30 minutes and go back to bed, get up at 5:30 and throw the bread in the oven for another 30 minutes, and be eating freshly baked bread by say, 6:30.  If you happen to have done what I did on the FIRST day of summer vacation, you can eat it with this.

Small batch jam is my new friend - except that I have a slight obsession with having a jar or two to keep for the cold grey reality of winter.  So even if I'm only making enough jam to fill a jar or two, I find it necessary to get out the water bath canner and do the whole boiling jars routine.  But look, aren't they pretty?  Next on the agenda are pickled things - I'm watching the school garden to see if it produces anything worth pickling.  So far it's like this:

We think the kindergarten may possibly have spent some time re-planting the weeds they pulled.




But I'm hoping to be able to make Deb's sandwich slaw eventually, so I'm keeping an eye on things in the raised beds.  It would be terrific to show the kids a jar of colorful edible stuff in September, the fruits vegetables of their labor.

And now, time for a nap.  And what is so rare as a day in June.

I heart the InterWebz

I am not an artist.

Well, I am, but not a visual one.  Yeah sure I can crack open a Mozart score and sing my way through it without blinking, but draw a flower?  Not so much.

And this is why I heart the Internet.  Basically, if you can read, you can find the directions on how to do anything.  My first graders' April song looked like this:

Until I googled  "how to draw a rose" and "how to draw a butterfly."

Now it looks like THIS!

Okay, so it's not "Water Lilies."

The first grade thinks it's AWESOME.

That's all that matters.

I just had to put this here.

Keeping Up Appearances

Right so...we got engaged, bought a house, and I fell off the planet. Also, my Dad died, so that has not been great, to make a colossal understatement.

I've been soothing the soul by sticking close to home and pottering. 

Mr. Eshet has been very busy with projects around the new house - namely securing the fence border so that the two miscreants are unable to dig under the fence - and we began the venture by pulling up an entire floor's worth of wall-to-wall carpet (all DIY, wow, hello, more-work-than-we-thought-project) and then having the wood floors (professionally, we're crazy not stupid) refinished. And I've been engaging in a lot of online mind-numbing. The good kind. The oooo look at the pretty blogs kind. The laugh my ass off kind. iheartorganizing.com,  smittenkitchen.com,  thefrugalgirl.com,  crappypictures.com,  thebloggess.com; thanks - no fooling - for in part getting me through a very terrible time of my life.

And look what they helped me do:

The recipe for honey whole wheat bread is from 100daysofrealfood, but the success comes courtesy of thefrugalgirl. I kept getting a very heavy loaf - the texture of, say, Mount Rushmore. A kneading tutorial from frugalgirl changed my life...er...loaf.   We shall say nothing of Deb's baked goods galore from La Smitten.

Tomorrow, it is to be hoped, there will be pictures of my school's raised bed garden. Unless it rains. Or the neighborhood cats pee in it. In that case, it may be pictures of otters wearing sweaters or something.


PS:  Have I mentioned that my kids are fabulous?  Can't have a post without mentioning that.  The K's and 1's are loving the circle games I'm teaching them, the 2's just finished a field trip to sing at Carnegie Hall, the 3's are preparing for theirs, the 4's are checking out the History of American Popular Music, and the 5ths are getting their butts kicked by History of Western Music, but most of them love it.  Just sayin'.  They're fabulous.