friday

I love summer. Especially days like today where there is a clear, cool breeze, and I started the day with a walk in the fresh air with one of my boys. Sigh! I am SO thankful that I have the summers off. I am soaking in every minute.

This salad dressing from Rachel is delicious. Since we've started making our own dressings, there is no way I could ever go back to bottled ones. I don't mean to sound snobby - homemade ones just taste real and aren't so sweet and thick. For awhile, I just ate all of my salads naked. (Adam says that sounds fun.) But homemade dressing is better. Adam makes a ranch dressing that he loves; I'll see if he'll do a guest post and share it with you. And I came up with one to copy a delicious dressing served on a seafood salad at Rudder's Restaurant - once I come up with some measurements, I'll share that one with you, too, if you'd like.

And lastly, I wanted to mention a couple of things that I bought at the Fredericton Farmers' Market back in July. Sanctuary's products are lovely. That deserves more emphasis - they're lovely. My skin is especially loving the chamomile toner. It's in a little spray bottle and is especially refreshing on hot days. The Moroccan Rose soap smells perfect (I haven't opened it yet). I sniff if every time I walk by. All of their products are 100% natural, and come highly recommended by yours truly - they're gentle, natural, and smell wonderful. And I say all of this under no coercion whatsoever - I bought these myself, and just wanted to spread the love.

Happy Friday!

red

These are the beets we grew this year - chioggia. They are gorgeous, but I didn't find them very tasty when I roasted them last night. I don't know if it was something particular to our batch (weather, etc.) or if that's just kind of the way they are. But they're so pretty - I think this picture was worth it.
And this has me beaming. Ten teeny, perfect jars of non-floaty-fruit raspberry jam, with seeds evenly distributed throughout! Just raspberries, sugar, and lemon juice. Even better, there are more raspberries than sugar. And the best? The raspberries are all from our backyard! 

Our raspberry patch requires an hour or two of maintenance a year - just enough to cut down last year's canes at the end of the winter. If we were fussy about it looking orderly, it would require more, and the berries probably wouldn't produce as well, since that always seems to be the way. The canes are thornless, so we can dive right in to pick them, and the berries are very large.

The recipe is from Well Preserved, a canning book I love. What have you made lately?

Happy Wednesday!

odds and ends

Thomas does this adorable thing where if we're sitting on the floor, he backs up until the backs of his legs touch mine or Adam's, and then he sits down on us. It could be on our feet, knees, back, arms - whatever he finds comfortable. He waves at everyone and says 'hi' in this casual singsong, and 'bah-bye' with his chubby little fingers slowly opening and closing.

 I'm going to make some raspberry jam from our backyard raspberries tonight. This makes me really, really, ridiculously happy.

 Speaking of things that make me ridiculously happy, I made more butter last week, and used my new butter mold! Cute, eh?

 I also made yogourt the other day, and did you know that you can use the leftover whey to make ricotta? I'll be doing this soon.

Phillip keeps saying things like "I get the hiccups so much because I have more veins than Mama does." He has been reading some new-to-him old-school Sesame Street books for almost four hours now. Yes, four hours. He's completed the library's Summer Reading Club requirements. As of a few weeks ago. I'll have to go up and pry the books out of his hands, and most likely he'll have a fit when I tell him it's time to go to sleep.

Good night!

july 30

It's a very happy day for a sweet friend of mine (Hi, AC! Oh, you're AS by now!) - it's her wedding day.  And I've been thinking about her all day, so this post's for her. Here, we had crazy rain and wind for most of the day - I hope that the weather in Alberta was perfect for you, A. Since I'm not able to be there, almost all of the way across the country, I wanted to say congratulations, and I hope that everything went as planned and that you had a wonderful day. I'll track your mom down soon for the details. And I can't wait to see pictures. May you have many, many happy years together! *Hug*
Sherrie