Drying Herbs

So much mint! I use it fresh in lemonades, flavored waters, mint teas, and some salads…but hello! All winter long, I buy mint tea bags. Why not dry the abundance of mint for myself? I kept my set-up super basic:

1. pick herbs and separate good leaves from bad
2. rinse good leaves and dry in a salad spinner and on a towel
3. lay leaves out on an old thin cotton sheet on clothes drying rack in a dark room…you want good air circulation
4. after a week, store in a container in a dark place (Apparently, if the herbs are not dry enough, you’ll see moisture in the container and will need to dry it longer. My jars have no sign of moisture).

 

I also dried sage. I’m going to make sage cough syrup (basically dried sage and honey) for this winter.

 

 

These two jars are just the beginning….after vacation, I’m going to do another batch! I never realized how easy it could be!

Recent Favorite: Easy but Challenging Piano Music

It’s been about fifteen years since I’ve had piano lessons. Although I still love to tickle the ivories, I find myself playing easier music that I know really well and not spending the time to learn new pieces.  To be honest, it would be difficult to learn new piano pieces at the level that I was playing when I stopped lessons. I have lost a lot of the skill that I had. But in the past months, I decided to try to push myself a little and learn some new pieces that required actual practice and not just sight-reading. I’ve enjoyed two music books in particular:

Chopin (an easier version of some of his classic works):

Below is the song that I’ve been practicing. The easier version that I play starts at the 1:00 minute mark and goes to 5:30.  Of course, listening to this rendition inspires me to learn the original piece!  But if you’re not ready for a difficult Chopin piece, the book above is an excellent start. The CD that comes with it is a really nice way to hear the piece before learning it.

 

The second book I’ve been enjoying:

Keyboard pops (it’s challenging but fun to play the syncopated rhythm):

Here’s one of the pieces titled “Lazy Louie”. It sounds simple, and in a certain sense the notes are not difficult, but the timing makes all the difference!  Playing notes off-beat takes a little practice!

 

Often when I play, Cooper trots over, sighs, and lays down to listen. He’s a very gratifying audience, even with his eyes closed.  😀

 

 

 

Garden Gate

Before:

Two tall posts and a wire door

 

After:

Finally a proper gate!

We did not follow any plans for the gate, except those in my head, haha.

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A few considerations we had when building the gate:

1. Keep it as light as possible by not using too much wood. We tried to avoid ending up with a sagging gate.
2. Have it wide enough for a wheelbarrow to easily go through.
3. Make it attractive as well as functional. I’m hoping to plant a clematis or another vine this fall that will grow over the top.

This year, our vegetable garden is very low key due to various circumstances. We have the herb garden producing full force, two rows of garlic, five tomato plants, and a few random potato plants that came back from last year.  The rest is weeds, haha.

So much sage! It comes back bigger and bigger every year!

Rows of garlic planted last fall and getting close to harvest.

Good old horse manure, laying in a pile and decomposing, ready to be worked in the soil this fall.

We’re knocking down our hilltop raised-bed gardens because the boards are rotting through. It’s been eight years, and although I’ll miss the beauty of it, it was getting to be too much to keep on top of those gardens as well as the garden pictured above.  And so my focus is going to be on this vegetable garden.

My dreams for the future of this garden: a beautiful potager garden. I’d love for it to be full of vegetables, annual flowers, a small bench, and bordered by perennials. It’s exciting to dream, and it seems more doable now that we’ve scaled back.

Well, I’m off to clip some herbs, because this year I’m attempting to….

May Favorites: (4) Heritage Hill Tour

Every May, the Heritage Hill section of Grand Rapids holds historic house tours. It’s a great way to tour some old homes, fall in love with the amazing architecture and quirky details, bike around the neighborhood, enjoy the Spring gardens, and be inspired!

This year we went with my parents:

Our first home (which is pictured above) was my favorite. The original owner was a music lover and designed the whole house around music. He had a pipe organ installed in the house. The organ console was in the music room, but the pipes were in the basement in a humidity-controlled room. The music from the pipes would waft through the whole home because special vents were built into the floors. A man was playing the organ while we toured, and it was amazing!

No photography was allowed in the houses, and so I don’t have any pictures to show you.

And of course we brought a picnic lunch, which we ate at a park:

May Favorites: (3) Shakespeare

I haven’t read Shakespeare since high school. I don’t know any quotes from him, and I’m unfamiliar with most of his works. And I’m an English Literature major. When the book challenge that Josh and I are a part of listed Shakespeare as a category to read from, we were excited to dip our toes in. We decided to read “King Lear” (which I had read in high school), based off of my vague memories that it was an interesting play. Ahem. I had had no recollection that it was a trajedy, and a somewhat graphic one at that. But we enjoyed it. And no, I still don’t have any Shakespearean quotes to throw at you, but we’re thinking of trying out another one.

Here are my three recommendations if you too want to dip into Shakespeare:

1. Listen to it on audio. Seeing that most of the play is dialogue, the character’s voice/dialect adds so much life and passion to the story.
2. Follow along in a hard copy. It will be that much easier to know who is speaking and what they’re saying.
3. Get a book that has a short summary of each act. We read the summary first and then listened to/read the actual act. It gave us a much better idea of what was happening in the play.

BONUS TIP: read it while being extra comfy; perhaps in bed with pillows propped up behind you.

 

May Favorites: (2) Saturday Morning Routine

Saturday mornings have fallen into a new routine:

1. Go to bed early on Friday night so that we can rise bright and early on Saturday. By Friday, I’m pretty tired from the work week, and so I actually enjoy going to bed early!
2. Have a leisurely breakfast. I never move fast in the morning, and we both love a slow breakfast of tea, toast, and eggs.
3. Hike through the Highlands (a meadow connected to Blandford Nature Center). Early in the morning, it’s absolutely gorgeous. We’re usually the only ones there, and we use this time to talk, enjoy nature, and get a 40-minute walk in.
4. Stop by Sandy’s Donuts. Yes, we always order the same thing: 2 custard-filled long johns to-go, please.
5. Come home, turn on the Flowerland Garden radio show, and enjoy our donut and a cup of coffee.

Do you have any new routines that you love?

 

May Favorites: (1) Wildflowers

I’ve never visited Blandford Nature Center so consistently as I have since we’ve owned Cooper. Long walks (regardless of rain, sunshine, cold, or heat) opened my eyes to see the quickly changing spring landscape. Flowers came and went within a week. I was able to capture quite a few:

Snowdrop

Toothwort

Yellow Trout Lily

Spring Beauty

Dutchman’s Breeches

False Rue Anemone

Large Flowered Trillium

Marsh Marigold

Wild Strawberry

Wild Geranium

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Violet

Wild Dogwood Tree

Wild apple tree

Buttercup

Mayapple

Mayapple

 

my walking companion:

 

 

 

Super Worm Moon

When I first heard the term “Super Worm Moon”, I thought that I had entered a Dr. Seuss book. How else could the word “worm” be connected with the word “moon”? But after a little research, it all made sense. And so I stepped outside on Thursday morning and gazed at the shining moon. I cocked my ear toward the ground and whether in imagination or not, I heard the faint rustle of hundreds of creatures…

 

The Super Worm Moon

-by Andrea S.

Sky so dark—

Moon so bright;

Close to earth

It gave great light.

Worms so cold—

Earth so warm;

Up to surface

Creatures swarm.

Draw them up—

Coax them out;

Let their movement

Be the shout…

                              …that Spring is here!

 

The March full moon, known as the full worm moon, is the last in a series of three supermoons. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

 

Winter and Spring Shelf

This past fall, I decided to add one spot to my home that I could decorate seasonally. I’m glad to say that so far it’s working!  Here is how I decorated it for Winter and now for Spring.

Winter Shelf:

an owl candle, a wintery print, and a list of my favorite winter things

I love the Betsy O’Neill print of a fox traveling through a winter landscape under a full moon.

 

Spring shelf:

a wooden butterfly carving Josh gave me when we were dating, a crocus bulb painting, a pot of fake greenery, and a welcome to Spring

The amateur crocus bulb painting was painted by myself at a fun mother/daughter painting session. I had a blast and want to dip into painting again!

The pot of greenery came from Ikea. To give it a more Springy feel and add more white to the decor, I pulled off flowers from another fake stem that I had and nestled them into the greenery.

after adding the flowers

 

….and now I can’t wait for Spring to REALLY arrive

because right now it’s snowing outside!

Cooking Woes and Wonders

The running joke in my house is that you better enjoy your meal ’cause you might never have it again! And that includes meals that were wonderful. There’s a restlessness in me when it comes to cooking, and while I have favorites that I repeat, I love trying new recipes. When company comes, a wise piece of advice is to serve something that you’re comfortable cooking and will taste good. But what did I do when my parents were over for the weekend? Try new recipes every dinner, of course! Thankfully they tasted great!

While cooking this past month, I snapped some pics of a few things that have been gracing our table: both woes and wonders.

Woes:

I love this recipe for brussel sprouts, but in the past, I made it with a different topping (a squeeze of lemon, salt, and grated parmesan). But this new topping (fish sauce/soy sauce/oil, chopped peanuts, a chile, and mint) was gross. Thankfully the sausages from Tanglewood Ranch were delicious!

I tried making sauerkraut. While the recipe turned out (my sauerkraut didn’t mold as it aged), it was just too sour for me. Needless to say, it went down the drain.  I don’t think I’ll be making sauerkraut again!

Wonders:

I had to use up the leftover mushrooms from my science experiment at school and this was the result: breaded and fried portabella mushrooms on homemade sub rolls, with a pesto/mayo spread and baby arugula to add a little bite. Delish!

Making a birthday treat for a crowd resulted in these: Cherry bars (made with a homemade cherry sauce). An excellent recipe to feed to a crowd!

Avocado and grapefruit “salad”. Includes mint, cilantro, toasted hazelnuts, scallions, and an oil vinaigrette.  So good in the winter when avocadoes and grapefruit are both in season!

I’ve been messing around with sourdough (making a starter and keeping it fed) and have tried a few recipes for bread, pancakes, and flatbread. 

The sourdough pancakes were pretty good, but I’m going to tweak the recipe a bit next time.

Sourdough herbed flatbread. Super easy and had a nice tang to it.

 

But don’t expect to see these if you come for a visit…

I’ll be cooking up something new by then!