It's peach time in South Carolina!
We had a wonderfully productive weekend. Both of us took Friday off and used it as our regular Saturday - relaxing, some yardwork, catching up etc. So when Saturday and Sunday actually came along, we got lots done. Here's a rundown:
1. Went for a hike with Kane at Crowder's Mountain State Park
2. Picked the first tomatoes in the garden. Yes, that is a penny - aren't the maters cute???? :-) These are sweet currant tomatoes that I grew from seed with seeds from Seed Savers Exchange.
3. Picked the first cucumbers. Yum!
4. Sean made a giant teabag from jute and suede cord to make manure tea for the garden. Here he is sewing it together. Sean actually once took first place in craftsman skills at his local 4H by sewing a dress for one of his sisters! :-)
5. Shopped at the local farmstand and got fresh blueberries, rhubarb (not local!), white corn and strawberries.
Blueberry Breakfast Bars
7. Felt very sad at the news of my friend's 6 month old puppy drowning in a freak accident. Little Davey Crockett will be missed. I will miss your snapping kisses and your boundless energy. We love you lots, J. Sometimes, life just doesn't seem fair. Love with all you have.
8. Went to Greensboro to meet my dog training girls for an obedience training session which was great. More on that in my other blog. Here is Bronco and Jackie working on the jumps.
9. Sean weed-whacked the entire garden. Love you, honey!
10. Sean installed a drip-irrigation system in the veggie garden. The tomatoes love you, honey!
11. Celebrated my neighbor Gaye's birthday with a giant bouquet of kitchen garden herbs, coneflowers and black-eyed Susans. Happy double nickel, neighbor!
12. Almost finished cleaning the green bedroom! Yeay - I can see the floor!
13. Canned peaches. (9pm on Sunday night....). I used TennZen's recipe and canning instructions over here. She has excellent recommendations for safe canning practices which can also be found here. She has also written this post on various unsafe methods (which I have in several of my (recently published) cookbooks.
Sean made me a funnel! Nice...
14. Blogged about it.
I hope you all had wonderful either productive or relaxing weekends, or perhaps they were one and the same. Despite the productiveness, my thoughts are with everyone that lost someone this weekend, which seems to be many, both public figures and friends. May everyone eventually find some peace after all this sadness.
It may not have escaped your notice that I grew up outside the boundaries of the US of A. :-)
I was born and raised in Sweden, and came over here when I was 18 years old with my family. Yup, I'm Swedish through and through - here legally though, no worries.
Many Swedes favorite holiday is Midsommar, or Midsummer. It is a celebration of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and traditionally a large maypole is raised, decorated with birch-branches and flower wreaths. People wear traditional folk costumes and there is good food, plenty to drink and lots of good cheer. Midsummer used to be the time when people thought magic was at it's strongest and so it was a good time to perform rituals. One such ritual was for young girls to pick seven different kinds of wildflowers, place them under their pillow before going to sleep and they were then supposed to dream about the future husband. I'm all set in that area, so no sleeping on wildflowers for me anymore. :-)
The Spread.
Here is the recipe for Swedish Gravlax:
For 1 kilo of gravlax (2.2 pounds, for 6-8 people)
I freeze my salmon before marinating it to make sure it is safe, and then I take it out of the freezer so that it is just about defrosted when I add the marinade.
Marinade:
4 tbsp sugar
4 tbsp salt
2 white pepper corns - smashed
lots of chopped dill (1-2 cups)
Leave the skin on the salmon. Cut out or pull out all large bones. Cut the salmon in half on the short end.
Rub the sugar,salt and pepper mix on the meat side, pat it into the fish (don't wipe off) and put 2 pieces meaty side together with the chopped dill in between.
Put the thick side against the thin side of each half.
Put all of this into double plastic bags and put in the fridge for 1-2 days. Turn the bags about once a day.
Once done - scrape away the spice mix and throw away the salt fluids.
Cut in thin, thin strips and eat with gravlaxsas. (see recipe below)
You can freeze gravlax, or you can put it on the grill and quick-grill it for a more finished flavor.
I prefer mine raw!
It will keep in the fridge for 3-4 days!
Gravlax-sauce:
Almost one cup of chopped dill
1 tsp salt + 1 tbsp sugar
1/2 cup sweet swedish mustard (or 1-2 tsp dark french mustard, I've used Grey poupon in the past as well)
1 1/4 cups oil (canola)
Some ground white pepper
Some vinegar (optional)
Place half of the dill in the bottom of a round bowl
Add sugar and salt and rub it into the dill with a wooden spoon
Add mustard - mix well
Add the oil by dripping it into the mustard mix while CONSTANTLY stirring.
If you stop stirring, the sauce will not coagulate - it will separate.
You will end up with a nice thick, shiny sauce.
Add the rest of the dill and pepper to taste (1-2 turns), a splash of balsamic maybe
IF the sauce separates - add a few drops of lemon juice and stir again until it's mixed nicely.
My fabulous wine-glasses!
Did I perhaps say I wasn't going to eat cake until the wedding? Well, I obviously couldn't keep that promise with this guy/gal sitting in front of me....It has layers of strawberry mousse, blueberries, white chocolate mousse and strawberries. How can you go wrong?
Digging up new potatoes. Very fashionable outfit, ey? :-)
The happy farmers (it was a rough day at work for me, that's my excuse for looking horrible!)
Yeay - we have hot peppers (Wenk's yellow hot)! I can't wait to taste them!
We had a fabulous midsummer dinner, before I had to pack and go to Chicago on a businesstrip. It was a good trip but it's even better to be home. And there's still cake left!
This morning, Kane and I went for a walk as usual. There was a slight fog, and it was humid after last nights rain. The air felt "full" and as the sun was coming up, there was a special kind of light. We walked up our long driveway to the street, Kane offleash as usual until we get to the mailbox. He usually bounces on ahead of me, sniffing this and that. All of a sudden he stopped and stared across the street at the neighbors house. A deer leaped across their front-lawn, and we both stopped and looked. It was a beautiful sight.
Even more beautiful was that Kane was loose and he didn't go chasing after the deer. :-) I'm quite sure I would not have enjoyed chasing my dog in the woods throughout the neighborhood at 6 o'clock in the morning.
After our walk, I figured I had seen enough sights that I really should go get my camera and take some shots. I missed the deer, but maybe there was something else....
Hello Gorgeous! I know you are still sleeping, and you will probably open up
while I'm not here, but you are such an amazing color, I had to take a picture.
Another beautiful daylily...
Then I picked some of these for our breakfast cereal. It's the northern highbush variety that produced these berries. They tasted very good! Of course, I shared with Sean.
And there are more berries to come!
That was the glory of my morning. I hope you too have wonderful mornings like this!
Can I just say how sick I am of cake right now? I normally have the biggest kind of sweet tooth (if it's chocolate and it's near me, it's gone), and now I really feel like I could do without seeing, or eating, cake until the wedding. This is, of course, better for my hips. :-)My bestest friend Leslie came down from Detroit to help me make cakes, and also to get started on invitations. Leslie is a high school art teacher in Detroit (all together now: Bless her heart!)and we've been friends for 20 years. When I first moved to the US, my high school French teacher introduced us since Leslie had been an exchange student in Sweden. Twenty years later, through life's ups and downs, here we are. Still friends. I love her. Here she is hanging out with Kane :-)
I knew I wanted something with fresh berries - Sean and I both love blueberries, strawberries, raspberries etc. Sean had also indicated a strong hint for angel food cake which he loves. Since he's actually also in the wedding (ha!), angel food cake was one of the cakes we chose to bake. We also picked a recipe for "white cake" and I found a recipe for yellow cake at Bakerella's site here.Insert HOURS of mixing, whipping, sifting, baking here. This is a quick view of what it all looked like:
The fillings ranged from Wilton icing with fresh strawberries (which made a very sweet mousse), various jams, fresh raspberries, fresh blueberries. We also attempted to make a blueberry mousse and a raspberry mousse, but that didn't work out too well. The mousses never gelled. Hence the pink mousse with the sad face in the picture above.For frostings we made a cream cheese frosting, a white cake frosting, and we also made a recipe for buttercream frosting from a cookbook, and it didn't gel either. It was made with egg yolks, and turned out runny and yellow - not exactly what anyone wants to see on the wedding cake. That's the picture in the bottom middle.
Here's Kane, supervising as usual. He was also handy for whipped cream testing to ensure maximum quality consistency of course. I usually smear a little on top of his nose so that he has to walk around and lick it off...
Then we cut the cake into pie-pieces, added the various fillings...
Here are the finished angel food cake pieces.
The finished moist yellow cake pieces.
We labeled them with numbers and made a voting sheet for everyone....lol. Sean was called in from the Lakeside garden, he was out in the rain planting corn (and wondering who ordered so much corn.... "Errr....you did, honey!"):
Sean planting corn in the rain. I decided to not zoom in more.... :-)
It was time to taste. Each piece here is about a spoonful only. We had 3 different kinds of cake, 7 different fillings and 2 different frostings. Can you multiply all that up? 42 spoonfuls of cake. Each.
It was pathetic. I could only make it to 12 or so. Luckily I had already found my favorite....lol.
Sean and Leslie persevered. Such troopers.
Here's the aftermath. Crumbles and people full of cake:
We finally decided on this:
Bottom: White cake with fresh raspberries
Middle: White cake with chocolate mousse
Top: Angel food cake with blueberries
It will be a 3-tier cake, all covered in cream-cheese frosting and decorated with all kinds of berries: strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and red currant (if I can find them). I found a gorgeous picture here. This is what I'd like for it to look like. Nice. I'm almost starting to feel like having cake again when I see that picture. Almost.
Coming Soon: The invitation-making session.
Happy Memorial Weekend everyone - I hope you'll have a splendid weekend!
Sleeping Dog Bakery is officially closed for cake-baking.....at least for now.
My real job has been quite busy in the past week or so, but luckily my garden is growing without me. As are the weeds. :-) Here's a quick over-greening experience for you all.
The potatoes that I planted with the children are doing great! These first 2 rows are yours, guys!!!
I numbered all 18 of my tomato plants for you, just so that you could tell I really planted eighteen. There's a tray of 5 more sitting in the foreground. And 5 chocolate cherry tomatoes still growing inside. I've given them away to neighbors and co-workers, but there is still more!!!
Here's the mixed area. Notice my lovely square pattern? :-) I'll be adding some cosmos flower seeds, some zinnias and some marigolds to this soon. Just as soon as I get rid of the weeds. Real soon. 
We've already had several servings of the lettuce which tasted FANtastic. I'm so excited. I've also picked (well, cut!) the aragula (foreground) once already and I'm going to blanch it and freeze it. On to the surprises.I love my camera, and I love taking pictures. Some day soon I'll post about some digital photography and some Photoshop I've been messing around with. Here are a few pictures of surprises around my garden. They make me smile.
The gecko hanging out on the gas can for the grill. We see them every time we take the cover off!Kane likes to chase them. :-)
The electric-blue pansy! I added some edge burn to this image. It almost glows!
The Amaryllis. Pretty, isn't she?
Except where she decided to grow. I have Amaryllis bulbs for Christmas every year, because that's what I'm used to from Sweden. Sometimes I save the bulbs, but some that look a little shabby, get tossed...
This girl got tossed into the area under the trees where we throw flower scraps and weeds that don't go in the compost pile. She surely did not let the ugly location stop her from putting on a show. Guess she showed me. :-) I'm sure there's a learning experience in all this somewhere.
What do you think?
This weekend my best friend Leslie, who is also going to be my maid of honor, is coming down from Detroit, MI. We are going to start making the invitations for the wedding, and we're also going to make some trial cakes (and filling, and frosting!!!!) to see what we'd like to do for the wedding. Anyone available for taste-testing? lol.
I'm hoping to do as much as possibly by myself, our by ourselves (!). At least I may be able to serve my own tomato-sauce for the wedding reception meal, right?
It's peach time in South Carolina!
2. Picked the first tomatoes in the garden. Yes, that is a penny - aren't the maters cute???? :-) These are sweet currant tomatoes that I grew from seed with seeds from Seed Savers Exchange. 
3. Picked the first cucumbers. Yum! 
4. Sean made a giant teabag from jute and suede cord to make manure tea for the garden. Here he is sewing it together. Sean actually once took first place in craftsman skills at his local 4H by sewing a dress for one of his sisters! :-) 
Blueberry Breakfast Bars
7. Felt very sad at the news of my friend's 6 month old puppy drowning in a freak accident. Little Davey Crockett will be missed. I will miss your snapping kisses and your boundless energy. We love you lots, J. Sometimes, life just doesn't seem fair. Love with all you have. 
8. Went to Greensboro to meet my dog training girls for an obedience training session which was great. More on that in my other blog. Here is Bronco and Jackie working on the jumps. 
Sean made me a funnel! Nice...
