Chocolate Box Cottage, Volume 2
Week 44: November 5, 2022

A batch of blowsy days ushered in winter weather – but still no frost! Homegrown strawberry mint tea is the perfect way to warm up and relax in the afternoons and evenings. It tastes amazingly like fresh strawberries and is pleasant plain or with honey. If you can find this variety, I warmly recommend it – grown in a pot unless you are prepared to hand over your backyard to a mint plantation!

Go ahead, fix yourself a cup of strawberry mint tea, if you have it, or whatever flavor you have on hand, then sit back and read this post.

Blowsy days are perfect for puttering. But before we get to that, let’s take a quick tour of the 2022 Victory Garden at Chocolate Box Cottage.

Garden

Those small tasks in the house and in the garden that have been waiting for an opportune moment – it is now! I move from one task to the next without hurrying and it feels good to take care of them, tie up those loose ends and put things in order.

The garden teepee is fading – it is November after all. The morning glories were attacked by an insect, not frozen, and I still need to determine what it was. The gourds have been harvested, but the vines themselves are still alive, miraculously! And on the fence, a lacy cup-and-saucer vine that got a late start wends its way up the boards.

Green tomatoes are hanging in there. I harvested the sizable tomatoes and left these just to see what will or won’t happen. Cardinal basil is the showiest basil in our garden. It puts on a display of fluffy brilliant purple bracts that rival the zinnias and happen to be great companions for them! I am hoping for seeds to save from these beautiful plants.

Greenhouse

Step inside the greenhouse with me! It may be windy and cold outside, but inside it’s a comfortable 52F (11c) degrees.

The Clementine orange on the left displays a small crop of fruit and behind it is a porch pot with orange mint. To the right are two oversize porch pots overflowing with Josephine Norwegian geraniums. There is an interesting story behind these geraniums that I will share one day.

Here I will introduce you to two more greenhouse residents. A Meyer lemon tree seedling, one of a dozen, that suffered from heat and wind in the summer is putting on a fresh batch of leaves. Learn how to plant lemon seeds to grow citrus trees.

My summer blooming amaryllis with strappy leaves has multiplied to become 3 plants in one pot.

The pawpaw seeds are biding their time, waiting for favorable germination conditions. Growing trees from seeds is very rewarding! All the details are contained in my garden journal. It’s just a school composition notebook, housed in a used Ziploc bag with a pencil. Keeping garden records doesn’t need to be fancy or exhaustive. Any notes taken are better than none.

It’s wood stove weather and it’s smart to harness the heat for cooking, but first: a soak in cool water. Soaking the Italian clay bean pot fills all then pores with water, which in turn allow for gentle, even cooking of food.

I soaked a pound of cannellini beans in water overnight with a good amount of salt. 

In the morning I rinsed the beans and placed them in the bean pot with fresh water. 

I reached into my scrap bag in the freezer for a couple of ends from a couple of onions, and took a bay leaf from my spice drawer. 

I brought the pot to a boil on my kitchen stove, then moved the pot to the wood stove, where it continues to simmer gently. In a few hours, we will have slow-cooked beans to add to Taco Soup, with extra to freeze for a future meal. 

I consider beans a building block to cooking and keep 3-5 kinds cooked and ready to use in my freezer, along with bone broth, and freezer bread dough. 

Having these basics on hand makes it that much easier to put a healthy meal on the table without making a trip to the store. (We don’t live near a store, anyway, but for those of you who do, it’s something to consider!)

Learn to use your wood stove to cook.

Tea at Mom’s

Weekly tea and lunch and Mom’s consisted of Taco Soup and homemade banana bread made from the overripe bananas I abducted from Mom’s fruit bowl last week. Mom’s best friend, Joy, and Miriam joined us, too! Joy brought a wonderful salad with a cilantro lime dressing to complement the soup, plus bevy of delicious toppings. Tea this week was Orange Jasmine, a surprisingly nice pairing with lunch.

Church Christmas Bazaar

There is nothing like the Christmas bazaar to get you into the Christmas spirit early. I have taken Miriam, and Cameo when she was home, to the church Christmas Bazaar every year since she was in a stroller, 20 months old. The girls were so excited they used to hardly be able to sleep the night before! I let them wear their Christmas dresses with tights to the bazaar and we have always made a day of it with Mom/Grandma.

Mom prefers to stay home, finding crowds a bit overwhelming these days and Cameo lives up north, but Miriam and I still enjoy our very special annual tradition.

We have lunch at the pop-up cafe in the church gym and take our time visiting each and every booth – twice! That’s right, we go through the entire bazaar twice. We go home with a big bag of kettle korn and relax with tea and a Christmas movie and chat about Christmas plans.

Samuel’s list

Sam’s list this weekend included an array of small projects:

1. Replace the accelerator pedal in the truck

2. Put away hoses and insulate outdoor faucets

3. Sharpen kitchen knives

4. Add straw to henhouse and bunny quarters

5. Put away lighting/cords used to deter bears (We think they’re gone for good now)

6. Toilet repairs

He also hoped to mow the grass one last time, but the we weather prevented him.

Puttering

MY THREE BAKING FRIENDS: SOURDOUGH STARTERS
I would like to introduce you to my clan of natural baking leaveners! I depend on them to raise bread, make mouthwatering hotcakes, quick piklets for breakfast, and more. So much more.

MERLIN is my most-used, all-purpose sourdough starter. I call him a mutt because he is happy to gobble up whatever flour I am baking with, whether it’s all-purpose, whole wheat, rye, spelt, and even small bits of non-gluten flours like corn and millet. 
***What Merlin makes best: quintessential sourdough boules, hotcakes, crackers, popovers, and crumpets.

SOPHIA is a star in her own right. Sophia is a lievito madre, an Italian sweet starter as opposed to sour. She currently dines on whole wheat flour, but also likes bread flour. 
***What Sophia makes bests: the BEST pizza ever with crust a complex wine-line flavor and the perfect balance of airy bubbles and chewiness, and , and enriched breads like Pan de Coco (coconut bread), chocolate, lemon, etc.

DAKOTA PIONEER EVERLASTING YEAST is the leavener of my German grandmother, Emma, and her mother before her, Katerina. Everlasting Yeast eats a steady diet of all-purpose flour, boiled potato, and a little sugar and salt. 
***What Everlasting Yeast makes best: sandwich loaves baked in a pan and kuchen, a fruit-topped German coffee cake.

I will share my bakes over the autumn and winter months and thought it would be nice to introduce you to the starters first! Do you bake with sourdough or other types of natural leaveners? 

I mixed up numerous batches of Homemade Hot Cocoa Mix – recipe here.

Some for us and some for Christmas gifts. Now we are set for hot cocoa all winter! 

Sam and I enjoy curling up together on the couch on Sunday afternoons with a cup of cocoa. It’s so easy – just as easy as a store-bought mix, but tastes SO much better! (And for a real splurge, add a dollop of whipped cream!)

Instead of throwing lemons away after juicing, I zest them first. The zest dries in a couple of days at room temperature on a plate and then is used to refill my Lemon Zest spice jar in my spice drawer. I love, love, love these mini apothecary-style spice jars!

Cameo Joy Four o’Clocks are named after my daughter. The seeds have had ample time to dry. Now it’s time to transfer them to a labeled seed packet. The manilla packets were purchased at a thrift shop a year or two ago. I include the original source of the seeds and year they were acquired on the packet.

I saved another batch of Japanese Plum tomato seeds from another batch of tomatoes; I am calling these B grade. Japanese Plum tomato seeds are no longer available commercially and I felt I needed to save more seeds, even if they weren’t from the best fruit. Grade A and Grade B seeds are in separate packets. Several friends who are accomplished gardeners have volunteered to help me keep this variety going by planting it in their gardens next year.

Our fennel forest didn’t prosper this year; it was severely beaten back by low twenties weather in the spring, so the harvest is small but very much appreciated. The spice jar was refilled and the rest went into a backup jar.

Chocolate Box Cottage hollyhocks were literally dropped from heaven (or a bird) into the Apothecary Garden. The variety is everything we want in a hollyhock: it is tall, it blooms for months, and the flowers are a deep, deep burgundy. I noticed an infestation of tiny weevils in the seeds, so I put the entire baggie in the freezer for a week to kill them. Hopefully we still have some viable seeds here to plant.

A final autumn harvest of Zloty Lan chamomile was air-dried on the china hutch / seed saving station. Enough to fill a pint jar, which was added to my kitchen Tea Station, along with the Wild Chamomile I picked and dried earlier in the summer.

Bookshelf

QUICK-FIX HEALTHY MIX COOKBOOK
Make your own homemade mixes! They’re delicious, nutritious, and affordable.

It’s hard to argue with the convenience of grocery store mixes. They’re quick, easy, and usually require less clean-up than cooking from scratch.

Unfortunately, they’re also filled with high levels of sodium, hydrogenated fat, high-fructose corn syrup, msg, artificial flavoring and colors, and a slew of unpronounceable ingredients.

Can you have convenience and have it healthy, too? As a matter of a fact, YES!!

Quick-Fix Healthy Mix authors Casey Kellar and Nicole Kellar-Munoz share a generous helping of recipes:
Soup mixes
Bean mixes
Rice and pasta mixes
Salad dressing mixes
Spice packet mixes
Baking mixes
Beverage mixes
and SO much more, all made from simple, healthier ingredients.

Search for Quick-Fix Healthy Mix at my favorite online seller of used books using my sharebooklove link. Click the highlighted words and then type the book title in the search bar. It’s a popular book, so if it is not currently in stock you can create a wish list and they will email you as soon as it is available. Using my sharebooklove link allows you and me to both earn points towards free books, thank you! This post contains other links to products and businesses I use and appreciate; some are affiliate, some are not.

I went long this week! You have certainly finished your cup of tea by now. I do pray you have a good week.

Blessings,

Michele

Chocolate Box Cottage Diary Volume 2

Week 23: June 11, 2022

With 4 false starts to spring, gardening has resembled a chancy game of roulette. It turns out the fourth time, not the third, was the charm this year. Never have I planted and replanted so many times. We are now over a month later than our usual main planting time and it appears the weather has settled down at last.

I am thankful that I know how to save my own seeds – because buying and rebuying seeds this year could have been expensive. (I do enjoy buying “new” heirloom varieties, anyway, for fun.)

Pantry Cost Comparison

Gardening, preserving, and cooking are real work whose value is difficult to tabulate.Have you ever wondered what the cash value of your pantry is?

One year – 2009 – I completed a comprehensive cost comparison of my pantry to retail prices. It was an educational exercise, to say the least.

The value of foods I preserved by canning, freezing, dehydrating, fermenting, and storing, + garden seeds I saved, added up to… $4,747.10. In 2009!

On the Homestead

If you expand the picture of the lavender flowers (known as dame’s rocket or gillyflower) you might just be able to see a Hummingbird hawk moth hovering mid-flight, just left of center. Hummingbird hawk moths very much resemble hummingbirds.

In the Garden

First Violetta artichoke of the season and a fresh crop of lemons ripening from green to yellow are welcome in the kitchen. Learn to grow lemon trees from seeds here.

Sam adds chicken manure to the garden, Michele prepares to plant a flat of Pesto Party basil. The garden is poised for growth.

The comfrey was frozen back to the ground, then cut back all the way. It sprang back more robust than ever!

Calendula in bloom. A mixture of types grows freely in the garden, coming back bigger and better year after year.

In the Kitchen

Looking back through the pictures on my phone reminds me that we were blessed to eat well.

Monday tea with Miriam. Wish Cameo was here. Happy birthday, Cameo! I love you!

I opened the last jar of pressure canned pork for carnitas. Need to can more, it is so nice to have easy meals in the pantry ready to heat and eat.

A light wheat sourdough batard, from starter to shaping, to baking, to sliced. I am enjoying the ease of baking in a lighter weight vessel, this speckled enamel roaster from Crow Canyon is so pretty!

Dehydrated tomatoes hold their flavor well; simmering them in a little water plumps them up for a taco salad with beef and pinto beans on a bed of sliced cabbage instead of tortilla chips.

Goldenkraut is our favorite version of sauerkraut – and we’re down to our last jar. Sourdough pikelets are a simple way to use extra sourdough starter. Topped with egg salad they make a delicious open-face sandwich!

Using up the last hunk of homemade feta cheese in Einkorn tabouli salad with store-bought veggies and lots of fresh herbs from the herb bed outside the kitchen window.

Own a Bosch Universal mixer? I shared our family’s favorite bread recipe this week on the Chocolate Box Cottage YouTube channel. Make a big batch of 5 loaves; eat one and freeze four.

Book Shelf

Fermentation book picks:

If you would like to support my business, please use my affiliate link. It gives me a chance to earn free books, without affecting your price.

Beginners ~ Real Food Fermentation by Alex Lewin

Intermediate ~ Fermented Vegetables by Kirsten and Christopher Shockey

Advanced ~ The Noma Guide to Fermentation

So tell me, how do you tabulate the value of your work in your kitchen? Have you ever done a cost comparison?

Blessings,

Michele

Chocolate Box Cottage Diary, Volume 2

Week 6: February 12, 2022

Glimmers of spring are showing: sunsets painted in vivid scarlet, pink, and gold, pansy faces, a nesting duck, and pasture greening.

Sam and I celebrated our 17th anniversary with our first theatre movie in who knows how long – and then discovered it was was an “oldie” from 2010 rereleased in theaters! That gave us a good laugh! Good movie, though! The action is a bit intense for small children, but overall is family-friendly.

Dinner at a nice local restaurant, Cicily’s Pastaria, felt extra special in light of the last 2 years. Nice atmosphere, attentive service; we both enjoyed our meal.

Follow along with our week at Chocolate Box Cottage in pictures and be sure to let me know how your week went. It’s okay if it wasn’t terrific. In fact, I would be honored if you would tell me one good thing and one hard thing about your week. You’ll find my hard thing in the final photo.

Sylvester lost a hen this week. Sylvester is a silver muscovy duck, and a handsome one at that. He does not hold still well for pictures, though. The wood supply is holding out, thanks to Sam’s careful management. And a daytime moon in a blue, blue sky.

Late winter blooms: Daphne odora, the most amazing scented shrub anywhere. Wild Garden Kale, as pretty as a flower in blue and purple, reseeds wherever it pleases. Three Peace rosebushes, a combination anniversary and memorial gift.

Blessed to be loved.

Wood stove for cozy evenings, mornings, and slow cooking.

Pizza takes shape in pictures, from dough to shaping to baking to eating.

It began with a tub of dough made with freshly milled whole wheat flour and a sweet, stiff Italian starter similar to sourdough (but without the sour) called lievito madre that fermented slowly in the fridge all week ahead of Pizza Night.

Flavorful toppings: homemade béchamel sauce, (leftover) turkey, diced bacon, and red onions. And cheese. Of course.

When it came time to eat, I pulled out a jar of Lemon Boy tomatoes, fermented the old-fashioned way in 5% brine with garlic and fresh basil, for a very special and tasty garnish.

This week’s Cottage Diary entry is dedicated to my dear, sweet kitty Velvet who died in my lap on Thursday morning, February 10, 2022. For 15 years Velvet sat in my lap every morning while I had my tea and quiet prayer time. She brought me comfort when my fibromyalgia was at its worst and seemed to understand me in ways no other furry creature ever has. I’m thankful for the years with this sweet girl.