We're jammin'

We're jammin' 
To think that jammin' was a thing of the past;
We're jammin' 
And I hope this jam is gonna last.

I've had that earworm stuck in my head since Saturday afternoon.

Alan's away in Scotland for a week, so the boys and I took advantage of a weekend at loose ends and traveled to my sister's house down in the Niagara Region to make some strawberry jam.

Matthew, my sister, my mom and I went to a pick your own farm and dragged home about 25 quarts of fresh berries. It's still early for berries this year and they were fairly sparse in the fields, but we picked enough to make 40 jars of jam.

We eat a lot of strawberry jam in our house.

It's a pretty simple process. First, you mash up the berries to the consistency that you like. We like our jam with some chunks of berries, but you can mash it up until there are no chunks left if you prefer a smoother, more jelly-like consistency.

 

Put the berries in a large pot on the stove and add the pectin. Bring the mixture to a boil and then add in a shocking amount of sugar (7 cups for every 4.5 cups of mashed fruit).

You bring that to a hard boil that can't be stirred down and maintain it for one minute. At this point you need to be very careful with the boiling fruit mix. A big bubble burbled up from the bottom of the pot the second batch my sister was stirring and gave her a pretty bad burn on her hand. She had to sit with her hand in a bowl of ice water and fire off directions to us.

Which, as you can imagine, she didn't enjoy one bit.

After one minute at a rolling boil, you remove the pot from the heat and let the jam cool for a few minutes. Then skim off the pink foam from the top

and pour it into mason jars that have been sterilized in the oven. I use a glass measuring cup as it's bigger and easier to handle than a ladle.

As Cal would say, easy peasy lemon squeezy! 

Crack'd!!!

Nope, this isn't a post about the latest in the Rob Ford scandal. It's about the giant thing that fell in our front yard last night.

The street we live on is unusual as it used to be the driveway for a large estate. When the land was sold off in parcels, they maintained the trees that lined the drive and created a large boulevard in front of the houses. Well, the boulevard is large for the part of the city we live in - most of the sidewalks in this area directly adjoin the roadway.

Note the man with the stroller crouched down in front of the branch across the sidewalk - there's been a steady stream of gawkers all morning.

The trees are beautiful, but they're also really old. And they're starting to act their age and are losing large limbs at an alarming rate. It was only a matter of time until the branch that fell last night came down. It had a long crack running along the length of one of the upper branches that overhang the house. A couple of calls to the city over the years didn't result in any action. I never knew whether it was because the arborist decided that the branch was okay, or if wasn't ever inspected.

On a windy day earlier this spring I kind of lost it on Alan when he let Cal play out front on a really windy day. I know he felt that I was being kind of neurotic (as do the boys when I make them run to get off the block as quickly as possible on windy days), but I didn't want some huge branch to squash him like a bug.

Now I feel vindicated. This branch would have done some serious damage had it landed on someone.

I have to admit - I was not so secretly hoping that when it came down it would take out our front porch with it. It's time for a new one, and a little help from the city with the demolition costs would have been welcome.

It was close, but not quite close enough!

Tessa's new beds

I have about eight different sewing projects in the works right now, so I've temporarily taken over the dining room.

When we need to use the table to eat, I move the sewing machine down under the ironing board. It's working out okay for now, but I really need to get the spare room on the third floor all set up with my machines and table space to work on.

A couple of the projects I've been working on are for Cal's room. I've taken one of his old Ikea curtain panels and modified it to be a roman shade lined with heavy blackout fabric. We're hoping that this will encourage both Cal and the dog to sleep a little later in the morning. The blind is all finished and ready to mount in the window. I just need an extra pair of hands to help me juggle the drill and the blind.

The other project I just finished is a new bed for Tessa. She sleeps in the family room during the day and up in Cal's room at night, so she has beds in both rooms. The one that she sleeps on in Cal's room was big and brown and ugly.

The top piece is 36" in diameter, which makes the squished-down bed almost 40" in diameter. It takes up a lot of valuable floor space in Cal's room so I decided to make her a new rectangular bed.

I bought enough microfiber to make the dog bed and to cover his new chair. In fact, I seem to have vastly over-calculated how much I would need and have a couple of yards of fabric left. Oh well, I'm sure I'll find some use for it. Perhaps another doggy bed for the cottage - she just sleeps on a blanket we throw down on the floor in Matthew's room up there.

The bed was really simple to make. I cut out one large rectangle that I wrapped around for the top, bottom and two long sides. I cut out two small rectangles for the short sides. I hemmed the two short sides of the big rectangle, and then just sewed it all together, leaving an overlapped opening on the bottom of the bed into which I could stuff the stuffing sack.

I reused the inside of her round bed, but you could easily use this bed cover with any old quilt or blanket. Old blankets that you can pull out would actually make it much easier to wash, and thus much more likely to get washed frequently.

I used an old down duvet for her downstairs bed. It was fraying around the top and bottom edges, so lots of little feathers were escaping. I had it out on the porch ready to toss on the next garbage day, but then decided to put it to use. I folded down the edges and ran a quick seam with my sewing machine, and then folded it up and put it inside the bed cover.

Down filled bed for a dog? Nothing is too good for the Contessa, you know.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

Some people love Christmas, some love Easter. My favourite time of the year by far is strawberry season.

Every summer I imbibe to the point of hives. The problem is that Ontario grown berries are sooo much better than the tasteless imports and the season is just too darn short. That means that I have to gobble down a year's worth of berries in a few short weeks. Which leads to the hives. Benadryl pretty much takes care of them, though.

Today we were out walking in our neighbourhood and happened across some local berries at a little stand set up on the sidewalk. It seems that some Niagara farmers are growing the plants under row covers that keep the heat in and hasten ripening. What a clever way to draw out the length of the season!

We couldn't resist buying a quart. Our favourite way to eat strawberries is in strawberry shortcake. I always use homemade old fashioned shortcake biscuits, not the yellow spongy cake-things that the grocery stores try to pass off as shortcake worthy. There was no time today to bake biscuits, and there was no way that the berries would last in the house overnight, so I settled on whipping up some cream to top them off. 

They weren't as delicious as middle of the season, freshly picked, still warm-from-the-field berries, but they were pretty darn good.

Ontario berry growers have a Facebook page where they're tracking how ripe the berries are. They expect the full season to open on June 10th. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled until then!

New chair for Cal

Cal spends a lot of time in his bedroom drawing, playing his keyboard, and just hanging out. He had one of our old kitchen chairs to use for his desk and keyboard, but it was kind of heavy and didn't fit into the leg hole space in his desk well. He was in the market for a new chair.

I found a chair down on Queen West for $6, and loved the shape and detail of the back of it. It wasn't very attractive when I brought it home - I think that Alan thought that I'd lost my mind. Or perhaps he's just tired of me dragging home random chairs. 

Anyway, I had this really ugly chair hanging around on my front porch for months before I got around to refinishing it. It was painted a flat mauve, with chips showing the puce green it was painted previously. And the seat had all kinds of paint splotches on it.

I'm not sure if they were done on purpose, or if the person who painted it was just too lazy to take the seat off. Which is saying a lot in the laziness department because the seat wasn't even screwed on, it was held on with little hooks that you just pulled free from the chair frame. No screwdriver required.

It took me forever to strip the stupid thing back to bare wood. While the trellis pattern back looks nice, it has a million small crevices to scrape the paint out of. My initial plans were to stain the wood the same dark walnut finish of Cal's bed. I almost threw in the towel several times in favour of spraying it black as it would have been so much easier.

I stuck it out, though, and after a lot of stripping and sanded I ended up here.

Two coats of walnut stain and satin varathane, and I was very happy that I hadn't given up and resorted to paint.

I picked up some bright microfiber to cover the seat as it's nice and easy to clean. Our old living room furniture was covered in microfiber and it's amazing the stuff that wiped off, including food, marker, ink and assorted bodily fluids from babies and small children. It also repelled dog hair.

I bought enough fabric to make a coordinating cover for Tessa's bed. She sleeps in Cal's room at night, and the poor thing has the ugliest brown cover on her bed. Plus it's kind of an awkward size and takes up too much space in the room. We have a smaller rectangular one downstairs that she sleeps on, so I'll make her one the same size for up here. The cover of this one unzips, so I can just use the inside of this bed in the new cover.

I'm also in the process of changing Cal's curtains into a roman shade so that his room is very dark. Now that the sun is up so early, Tessa is also up tap dancing along the hardwood floors. The early morning wake-ups are killing us!

Backyard clean-up

Oh the excitement! Today the boys and I arrived home after work to see this at our curb.

Our wonderful contractor had come by this afternoon (unbeknownst to me) with some of his guys to help us out with our little problem. The one that looked like this.

When we started the reno I wasn't convinced that I wanted to replace all of our appliances. I thought that we should see how much the reno was going to cost (since I was sure that we would uncover lots of unseen problems behind the 100+ year old walls) and then make the decision. Along the way we decided that we should just get it all over with at once, and I haven't regretted that decision in the least.

Except for the fact that we've been staring at the pile of crap in the yard. We tried to donate the appliances to Habitat for Humanity but they wanted pictures and purchase dates and manuals, so it was too big of a pain. Then we tried to find a charity that could use them, but that fell flat too. And before we knew it, winter was finally over, the appliances remained, and I was dying to use our patio.

Now I finally can. It took a lot of sweeping (and several blisters) to get the detritus all cleaned up. We didn't weed or sweep the patio at all last summer or fall, so it was in really rough shape. It's all set to go for outdoor dining now, though. Just in time for the hot weather we're expecting over the next couple of days.

We got the BBQs set up right next to the house, where perhaps we'll be more likely to fire one of them up on weeknights. 

The patio really needs to be redone. We laid reclaimed bricks from the foundation of the original back stairs (a tiny uninsulated entry to the basement from the back of the house) when we did the extension about 10 years ago. There appears to be two different kinds of brick - some are very resistant to the freeze-thaw of winter, and some of them crack to pieces. Every spring we have to replace a few. And the weeds that grow up between the bricks drive me batty.

We were planning to replace the patio and build a raised deck at the level of the door this summer, but now we're thinking of waiting until fall or next spring. It will allow us to get use of the backyard this year, without the mess of all that construction. And that sounds pretty appealing to me.

Cookies & Cream Cupcakes

This weekend, like most, was a busy one in our house. We were invited to a BBQ with friends from work on Saturday afternoon, and with Matthew's hockey team on Sunday. I decided to bake cupcakes for both of the parties. Five dozen in all.

Since these parties involved many small boys, and all small boys love Oreos and chocolate (Cal excepted), I decided that some Cookies & Cream cupcakes were in order.

Yes, that is an Oreo cookie baked inside the cupcake. Decadent. 

I used my go-to chocolate cake recipe and popped an Oreo into the bottom of each cupcake liner before filling each cup 2/3 full with batter. 

The Oreo stayed at the bottom of the cupcake, but I think that it might be better to have it in the middle. Next time I'll try filling the cups 1/3 of the way, drop in the Oreo, add more batter to the top, and hope that the cookies stay put while they're baking.

While the cupcakes themselves were delicious, the pièce de résistance was the Cookies & Cream buttercream icing. It was light and fluffy and delectable. Seriously, how can you make buttercream better? All you need to do is add Oreos.

Cookies & Cream Buttercream

1 pound of butter, softened

3 1/2  cups icing sugar

2-3 tablespoons whipping cream

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

12 Oreos, chopped

     1. Whip butter in an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment until pale and creamy. This takes about 5 minutes on medium speed in my KitchenAid.
     2. Add the icing sugar, cream and vanilla. Mix on low speed for a minute until icing sugar is incorporated, and then on medium speed for 5 minutes until light and fluffy. Add in chopped Oreos and mix for about 1 more minute.

Then all that's left to do is ice the cupcakes and top with a mini Oreo.

 Oh, and fight off the hungry beasts children until the five dozen cupcakes are packaged up and hidden away.

Well, since the evidence is smeared on Cal's face I might as well admit that we might have made that five dozen less two.