Pages

Monday, August 31, 2026

August in My Kitchen

70°f/21°C, light clouds and a little shower early on. We need the rain. Had a nice little downpour yesterday as well.

I am going to try to link up with Sherry's Pickings with this post, a review of the past month in my kitchen. Some of you have seen some of these before, but here goes.

Kitchen window with herbs hung to dry.


My little 1930s spice rack. I had the jars for a while, then a few years ago found the perfect rack for them.


A gallon of ast year's cider. I guess we won't be making any this year, as we have no more apples and no pears. So sad!


My Sellers cabinet. Such a useful piece of furniture! Mine does not have the sifter, but i use the left side, where the sifter would have been, to store my cookbooks. It also holds some of our canned foids for easy access, my cookie sheets, toolbag,  other baking pans, and the drawers hold a miscellaneous of cooking tools and gadgets 


I just got this! It's a puntarelle, and is just awesome for cutting potatoes and squash. It's very sharp. I learned about it on a Giovanni Siracusa video.


Kitchen table, after dark.


Photo from the other day of apples from our trees.
We only got a little over half a bushel this year due to frost.


Larry turning the crank on the Victorio, making applesauce. 


Indian corn and pumpkins drying.


Stringing chili peppers on the porch.


Mincemeat tarts and another quiche, this one vegetable-laden: peppers, onions, squash, kale, chard, tomatoes, and basil!


A photo from 45 years ago, at least, in the days before we had electricity: my Dad and 3 of my 4 boys. Notice the lamps on the table, the full canning jars, and the pie on the table. Oh, and the Fenton vase! So long ago...


Flowers from the garden


My trusty Tappan stove, as old as I am and one hard worker.


One of several recipes I made from Giovanni Siracusa's videos this month. This one is zucchini and onions sauteed in olive oil, then a little water added, blend half the mixture, add pasta and more water, salt and pepper, cook til the pasta is done and the mixture is thick and creamy, then stir in parmesan. So good!


One of the quiches I made this month.


Dried tomatoes used up a lot of tomatoes when we were overrun with them.


Elderberry jelly, made using a half cup of white wine in place of some of the  Elderberry juice. 


Grape juice, not as much as most years but so delicious.


Not in my kitchen, but in our booth, a dinette set that took just 2 days to sell. Yay!


Also in the booth, two sweet teapots. It's hard for me to part with teapots!


Chocolate zucchini bread, batch 1. I made several batches and gave away or froze them. Tastes like brownies with a hint of cinnamon. Just incredibly good.


This month's tea set. I make tea every morning, carrying my tray to the porch or the log room.


One dinner this month, featuring that zucchini pasta, cucumbers in a dill sauce, and ham.


Kitchen windowsill


There was much more this month because August is a very busy canning and food preservation month, but I guess I didn't take photos of most of it.


Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Sunday, August 30, 2026

Weekend Report

70°f/21°C, already feels hot. Should reach 90 today. Bah.

In downtown Ripley. 

We are back to hot weather, sadly. I am so grateful for the reprieve of the past week, when we were able to get outside as much as we wanted. After all the rain at the beginning of this month, now none is in view until possibly Thursday.  I am afraid all my planters will dry up and die before then. I will water them heavily before we leave and hope they can hang in there.


A patch of welcome shade along the driveway

The Olde Farmer's Almanac predicts a late frost for us, sometime in late October, and a mild winter. The Almanac was correct last winter, so we will see if they are right again. I prefer a real winter myself, snow instead of rain and mud! We still have hummingbirds hanging around, and I am not sure if these are our usual guys or migrators.

I have been following the news from Nepal, and it is just heartbreaking.  I was sure the videos of the border crossing between Nepal and Tibet were AI, so it was shocking to learn that they were actually real. Those poor people. Recovery will be long and difficult. We have floods here but never anything even close to that magnitude. In comparison, our life seems so safe and so mundane, it makes one feel guilty. 

So while the Nepalese struggle to just survive, here we are doing the usual stuff. The past two days, for example,  were town days, getting our booths in order and taking care of a whole list of other things. My mind kept wandering back to those people, though, and I watched the videos many times, just trying to comprehend, because I could not believe what I was seeing. 

But onward we go, with our national idiot chopping down cherry trees, randomly renaming things, insulting our allies and making empty threats. The older I get, the more I do not understand this world. Once again, Canadian friends, my deepest apologies for this insane man and his disgusting actions.

Here at our house it's little vexations, but nothing irreparable. The man who has been setting up sound for the open mics let me know that he won't be able to be there this time, and since I will not be there either, I had to show my stand-in and Shari, the store owner, how to set it up. Then the van needs an oil change so Larry picked up the stuff for that, and I had to take back almost every piece of clothing I bought the other day. Although I bought everything in the same size, some were too big, some too small. Go figure. 

Larry got his mower back, again, and this time it seems to be running just fine. No additional charge, either,  even though the problem he fixed was unrelated to the last issue. And I got my laptop back at last. According to the repairman, it had 2 viruses and the battery was bad. My son told me, after I took my computer to this guy, that he had a bad experience with him, so my fingers are crossed that he actually fixed it. We shall see. I really doubt the virus claim, since I had virus checkers and it worked fine until it just wouldn't stay on. The repair cost over half what I paid for the thing, very aggravating. 

I didn't take any booth photos this time, but did get a little better shots of the display window.


I focused on greens, amber, and orange colors, to transition into Fall.



The next window will be a Halloween theme. I am already collecting things for that.

Larry, operating the Victorio strainer the other day when we made applesauce. How people managed without this tool I do not know. There are some models with electric motors, and a friend hooked his electric drill to his to turn the drank, but we still do it by hand power, and it goes very quickly.


Great-granddaughter Elliana had her first day of school last week. Just Head Start, but she sas so excited.


She is the funniest, sweetest little thing.

And finally, a few funnies to end this post.


Can any of you relate?







Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.

Thursday, August 27, 2026

Dogs, Gardens, and Memories

63°f/16.6°C, mostly clear. Yesterday aas glorious, never reached 80° but it will get hotter today.


Yesterday was National Dog Day, so here are my two sweet guys. Buddy on the left, is 5, and has eyes that are brown on top, blue on bottom, and after a hectic puppy hood of constantly running off, jumping at least 4 feet over the gate on the porch, and generally frenetic behavior, he has settled down to be the sweetest of boys. Pip, on the right, is a year and a half old and drives Buddy nuts trying to play. I am pretty sure Buddy will be most relieved when Pip finally grows up!
 

My sweet Buddy.


Yesterday I picked and strung my chili peppers after I finished weedeating that part of the garden. It looks so nice out there now. I put netting over plants I want to protect, so I think I can go to Colorado easier in my mind that something might survive until we get back. Worth a shot, anyway.


Ah, here's Pip! Being still for a change.


A table full of Fall. I like to grow Indian corn, nowadays called rainbow corn actually. We only got two pumpkins from our one hill we planted, but that's enough. Larry said there were more, but apparently something helped themselves 


The white corn in the photo above is Hickory King. It sprouted in the garden from a cob we threw out. I had had a basket of this corn saved around three years ago to make hominy. Never made the hominy so while doing Spring cleaning, we tossed that corn in the garden, thinking it was no good. Wrong! So I ended up with this random patch which grew like crazy. Now I have more of it. Should I make hominy this time? Save the seed? Do both?

Here it is in the garden, in completely not the place I would have chosen. Sorry for the blurriness! It's that taller corn and as you can see it had not fully tasteless yet, so ended up a bit taller.


And here is the original patch, in either 2022 or 2023, can't renember which. It was at least 10 feet tall!

Today I will get what apples we harvested, a little over a half bushel, made into sauce. It was a disappointing fruit year, as everything except one apple tree was frosted and bore no fruit.


A few zinnias brighten any day.


Now, some memories from this time of year. Here's Larry and I in 2017 in Ireland. Nine years sure changed ny hair color!


And 2015, atop King John's Castle in Limerick, Ireland. That trip was with my sister Theresa. We did it through Travelzoo, a deal that offered hotels, flights, some meals, and bus and train transport for less than $1000 per person for a week's stay. My entire trip cost less than $1700, and we had a blast.


Inside the castle:


In a nearby pub. I had to ask if poets really met there! Of course not, it's where the old guys met and talked. After a few drinks, the guys told us, they seemed to wax poetic!


On Inis Mor, the smallest of the Aran Islands, off the coast of Ireland in County Galway.


You can see more about these trips to the Aran Islands here and here. Clicking on surrounding posts will take you to more of the places we went on those trips.

Now, to work! Those apples won't can themselves, daggone it.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...