Good Day, Sunshine!

It was a much-appreciated beautiful day yesterday. It has been raining endlessly for weeks, and we're expecting more endless rain over the next couple of weeks. So, it was nice to have a sunny, if chilly, day. Too bad I had to waste a minute of it getting the Big Squash. (All clear...good for another year.) Even with that, I was in and out quickly, and home before 11:00 a.m.

The ladybugs were enjoying the last gasp of the Black-eyed Susans.

I noticed one, and then as I looked, I realized there were quite a few.

The flowers are looking a little bedraggled from the rain, but they're still blooming with gusto.

The kitties were happy for the warm weather. They came out with us. Mike was busy vacuuming up leaves from our deck with his shopvac. Smitty seems to understand the shopvac is not a threat, but Sadie kept hidden under the bushes. They both enjoyed being outside without having to dodge raindrops.

It was a good day to show off the new roof. And just let me say there is only one thing more boring than spending a pretty penny on a new roof. New tires come to mind. When you are required to pay the price of the Hope Diamond for something, you want to show it off a little bit. Somehow, "Hey...wanna see my new roof/tires?" doesn't inspire interest. But here it is anyway. 

Our house is hidden in the trees, and with the sun low in the sky right now, the back side of the house shows it off best. 

So, I hope you enjoyed this glimpse of the roof. It will be the last time I show it. Sad, I know. If you ask nicely, I might show it again sometime.

Okay, but I was outside for one thing. The last time the sun shone, I noticed we had the dreaded Hairy Bittercress popping up all over. Here's what it looks like:

It is an edible weed, and nutritious. I had a salad recipe picked out to try. Nutritional value aside, it is such a bugger in a landscape because...and let me have The Google explain it to you. This quote comes from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's "Weed of the Month" series:

While urban grazers will be most focused on the leaves, I think the seed capsules are the best part of hairy bittercress. Called siliques, they look like purplish-green toothpicks standing upright around the flower. As the seeds mature, the pods begin to coil tightly until—pop! A gentle touch or passing breeze triggers the pods to explode and send the seeds flying as far as three feet from the mother plant. This ballistic dispersal strategy, known as ballochory, is also employed by jewelweed and cranesbill. 

So, yes. They seed themselves with ferocity, and it's important to pull them before they have a chance to bloom, or face the dire consequences of their "ballistic dispersal strategy."

Okay, so my recipe said I needed 60g of these. And being an American, that gram measurement doesn't mean much to me. But I knew the salad I was making had just four beets, and so I figured about half a cup would do. As long as I was picking, I picked plenty. Here's how they look straight from the ground. Their roots are covered in mud.

I first hosed them off outdoors. Inside, I snipped off the root ends and then spun them four times in my salad spinner to get them clean. They were full of pine needles, twigs, and dead leaves. In short, they were hard to get clean, but I persevered. When I had them ready for later use, they looked like this:

Okay, so it was around 2:00 p.m. when I headed up to work on the quilting. This is going great now. I'm glad I spent the many hours unpicking my first try. I worried this design would detract from the kitties on the front, but it seems to fade into the background...to my eyes, at least.

Here's how it looks from the back.

When I had the lower right quadrant complete, I stopped for the day.

I'm hoping to get the lower left quadrant quilted today. It shouldn't take all day, and so I'll probably get a start on my next challenge quilt for The Endeavourers. The reveal isn't until February 1st, but we'll be traveling after Christmas, and so I want to get it finished early.

My kitty helpers abandoned me yesterday. They were tired from their adventures outside. When I went downstairs, this is where I found them:

But let's just get back to that salad, shall we? I'd roasted the beets earlier in the day, skinned them, and then quartered them. Then, I refrigerated them. The recipe didn't say to chill them, but I figure a "salad" is cold, right? So, here's how it looked when I added the dressing and sunflower seeds, and served it up.

I was feeling pretty smug about having pulled weeds up out of the yard and serving them for dinner. It was a lot like the feeling I get when I find a great bargain at Goodwill. Here's what The Google told me about their nutritional value: 

"Being in the brassica family, bittercress has many health benefits. It contains glucosinolates which are known to help remove carcinogens from the body. It also contains vitamin C, beta-carotine, and possibly lutein which is known to help reduce vision problems including cataracts."

So there you go. And they are prolific enough that nobody should go hungry this winter here at the Three Cats Ranch...except cats. Cats do not like greens. Please add in some mouse if you're making this for cats. Oh yes, and if you're interested, here's a link to the original recipe. I've rewritten it for my American friends who, like me, don't understand measurements from the Metric system. Also, we don't call them "beetroot." To us, they are just "beets." And the salad was good! The bittercress tastes peppery like arugula.

Hairy Bittercress and Roasted Beet Salad

adapted from Eatweeds

Serves 2

Ingredients:

4 beets

1/4 cup sunflower and/or pumpkin seeds

2 tablespoons maple syrup

2 tablespoons hazelnut oil or olive oil

1 tablespoon sherry vinegar

1/2 cup hairy bittercress, loosely packed

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400ºF.

Wash the beets and roast in a covered baking dish for 50-60 minutes until tender when pierced with a skewer.

Spread the seeds out on a baking tray and toast in the oven with the beets for 5 minutes when they should be lightly browned.

Whisk the maple syrup, oil and vinegar together.

While the beets are still warm, slip skins off. Halve, quarter, and then halve each quarter. Chill for later use.

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl. Have a taste, you need to get the balance right between the salt, sweet and acidic flavors. Adjust accordingly if they are not quite correct. 

* * * * *

Okay, so that's where things stand. We're back to heavy rain today. It's a good day for sitting at the machine and quilting the Fancy Cats.

Food and Cats

What could be better than food and cats? Smitty says I have it the wrong way round. Cats should get top billing. And I had a whole load of cats when I tried to sew the binding onto It's Raining Cats and Dogs yesterday. Sadie has claimed this quilt as her own, and she's not ashamed to say so.

Yes, and the binding strips too. All mine.

She was a little put out at coming face to face with a woofie, even if it is just fabric.

Smitty to the rescue.

Don't you worry, little lady. I'LL save you! 

(He's been watching Dudley Do Right videos on YouTube.)

Sadie was put out enough by the woofie she decided to leave the area. I had only Smitty to help me with the rest. He was extremely helpful as I pinned the end of the binding strips together.

I found him a new job holding down the quilts to be sandwiched pile.

And with so much help, how could I not be successful? One binding...sewn on. Hand-stitching to follow. I'll get started on that today.

Between that and housework, I'd used up most of the day. But Mike and I had a fun evening planned. We attended the 1st Founders Dinner at one of the local wineries where we are members.

The evening started with some delicious appetizers and a solo guitarist playing classical music. The appetizers were flowing freely, and eventually, we waved them off. Dinner was to follow, after all. This one was a crostini with some duck pate with an onion jam. So crunch and tasty.

This one was some golden beets roasted and diced up with some creme fraiche, then piled onto a beet chip. I really liked this one. I'm a beet lover.

Ply me with enough wine, and I'll let you take a selfie.

Here's the dinner menu. I hope you can read it.

The first course, soup, was so tasty. The "broth" part of the soup was made from roasted fish that had been pureed, so that it had no butter or cream in it, and yet, it had the same creamy texture. That little "log" lying across the top was a sort of savory sweet biscuit-type breadstick. The soup had some razor claim and Dungeness crab. Yummy.

I totally forgot to take a picture of the second course. It was fish with the most interesting watermelon radishes...so named because they were red in the center and green around the edges. I'm most sorry I didn't get a picture of them, but I found this one on Flickr.

(image source)

We also had our first taste of sunchokes (aka Jerusalem artichokes). When I'd eaten everything on my plate, I realized I'd forgotten to take a picture. For a moment, I considered walking around to some total stranger to see if there was anything left on their plate. That should have made me popular, don't you think?

Okay...so moving on...third course was this sort of ravioli looking thing. It was layered pasta and filled with stinging nettle. No stinging though. The stinging part is neutralized in the cooking, and it was really tasty. It was foraged from the fields at the winery. The little greenery on top is bittercress. It grows in most gardens in the spring and causes the worst weed problem. Once it goes to seed, it explodes when you try to pull it up, spreading its seeds everywhere. I've talked about bittercress in the garden before. You can read just one of my blog posts about it right here. Before it goes to seed though, it is edible, and rather tasty. And it's gratifying to be able to pull it up and eat it alive.

Then we moved on to this little salad. That's a type of goat cheese in the front there. The salad was made up of frisee and radicchio with some bites of delicata squash in the mix.

Finally, this tasty chocolate pots de creme. It was made with both dark and milk chocolate, and it was delicious. It has some candied blood orange peel and pomegranate seeds on top.

And that was our evening. I love these kinds of dinners. Mike made the reservation as soon as the announcement crossed his email threshold. He didn't even ask if I wanted to go. He knew I would love it.

So today I'm going to start sewing together these little heart stitcheries. I've been calling this project "A Year of Hearts," but I'm thinking of calling it "Hearts A-Plenty."

Here's what I have in mind for it. First off, if you look closely at the June heart (second row, on the right), you might notice that I cut it wrong. There's enough at the top for a quarter-inch seam, but if I decide to leave them as is, I'll need to sew a little "mercy strip" at the top to get it centered in the block a little better. On the other hand, I'm thinking of trimming them all that way and making them square. If memory serves, they are cut to 5-1/2 x 4-1/2 inches. I could cut all of them to 4-1/2 inches square and no one would be the wiser. Except you, of course. You won't tell, will you?

Okay, and then, I picked up this little Itty Bitty Hearts pattern when we visited the Quilted Owl near New Orleans a couple of years ago.

It was a moment of insanity. This little pillow I saw there was so darned cute.

I don't usually make pillows, but I figured I could make a little quilt from it. And it's paper-piecing, so you know I was blinded by cuteness when I bought it.

Fast forward to today, I figure these little 2-1/2 inch hearts would make cute little cornerstones in the Hearts A-Plenty quilt. It isn't so much a "pattern," as it is a container for 60 of these tissue paper-piecing templates.

I need 20 for my project, and so I cut out enough of them yesterday to get the job done. I figure a block at a time won't be too painful. The plan is to make hearts in colors that coordinate with the embroidered blocks that are adjacent. It will all become clear to you soon enough. And I'll use this long-time resident of my stash for sashings and borders.

It occurs to me that this kind of turns it into a Valentine's Day quilt, but hey...it's hearts. What else am I going to do with it?

Okay...so I have pretty much an NBS day ahead. Let's just see how far I can get with this.

Monday Musings

Good morning, my friends. It was good to take a day off yesterday. I managed to make my way all the way around the house pulling weeds, filling my 7-gallon bucket with hairy bittercress. I'm sure I missed a few sprigs here and there, but I gave it something to think about. There were a few other unrecognized blooming weeds out there too...friends of the hairy bittercress, one assumes. I pulled up any weed that was blooming. They'll have to spread their seeds somewhere else.

My knees were killing me after that effort. The thing is...there really wasn't that much getting up and down. I mostly bent from the waist unless I came across a particularly populated patch (awesome alliteration). There were just a few times I sat on the ground and had to get up again. Just the same, I iced my knees when I was finished, and then again last night while we watched TV. This morning, everything seems fine. I worried I'd broken myself.

And you'd be disappointed if I didn't show you every blooming thing, wouldn't you? It's still a little too cold for most things, but the yellow daffodils are starting to open.

As I've mentioned, we planted more daffodils last fall, and so I haven't yet seen some of them. I saw a few of these little guys. They look like any other daffodil, but they are tiny, and their stems are only about four inches tall.

Across from where I was standing, I could see the flowering plums in bloom. They've been blooming in the valley for a while, but at our elevation, we have to wait a little longer.

The star magnolias are starting to fully open too.

This whole big shrub will be covered in flowers within a few days.

Also, the grape hyacinths are blooming.

There is still much to do in the garden. My next focus will be to deadhead all the hydrangeas. That's a job that allows me to remain standing, and so it shouldn't cause me any grief from my knees. Probably, I'll take a few days off before I start on it, though. The weather is still chilly. I had on a thermal shirt, a sweatshirt, and a heavy coat yesterday, and I was still too cold. We're expecting warmer weather by Thursday, and a good day of weather on Saturday. (We'll be attending a No Kings event that day, and so a sunny day will be appreciated.)

On the sewing front, I squared up the Fantastic Felines and sewed on the binding.

In two sittings yesterday, I turned two corners. I'm about halfway around this now, and so I expect to have it finished in a day or two.

Today I have just one easy housekeeping chore to do, and then I can focus on more sewing. The next thing I'd like to work on is the Nordic Star table runner I made while we were traveling. It was a request from one of my friend Sue's inlaws.

I need to make a back for it, and then it will be ready for sandwiching and quilting. I'll probably do some sort of dot-to-dot motif on this. With straight lines, I can probably create some star shapes on the quilt back with whatever quilting design I choose. I'm hoping to get it sandwiched today.

Tomorrow is going to be a run-around day. I'm getting a badly needed haircut, and then I'm going to run a few errands in town. Despite that, I'll be back here for a quicky post in the morning.

It's gray and chilly again this morning. We're expecting rain tomorrow and the next day, but then some clearing and warming. Better days are ahead, my friends. It's a hopeful time of the year weather-wise.

A Walk Around the Garden

We didn't get as much unpacked as I'd hoped yesterday. There were several things we needed to do in town, and so we spent a good part of the day running around. The refrigerator is unpacked though, and that's the worst part. I'm feeling confident we'll be able to finish it up today. We're staying home until Monday when we'll get our vaccines and run a few more errands on that side of town. 

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a little time walking around the yard, inspecting some more damage and looking for more flowers. Of course, I had company on my walk. The kitties seemed a little more relaxed than the day before.

There isn't much blooming yet, but I noticed these little mini iris blooming in one of the whiskey barrels.

Also, I looked for more crocus. There are many more coming up, but only a few blooming.

Here's a little white one getting ready to open. We planted a mix, and so I'm hoping for lots of color as more open up.

The daffodils are coming up in huge clusters, but none are open yet.

I'm happy to say our sonic mole repellant stakes were still buzzing when we got home, and they've kept the gophers and moles out of the peony bed. You can see the peonies coming up behind. Obviously this bed needs weeding badly, as does the rest of the garden. Also, I should mention that those green weeds you see there are hairy bittercress, which is edible if you get them before they go to seed. Now's the time, my friends! I noticed some out front that were blooming, and so I'm going to try to get those pulled up today. When they go to seed...oh my goodness. They broadcast their seeds terribly.

Out front, I got a better shot of the front door Japanese Maple tree. It lost a large limb. So sad.

These two trees near the "friendship bench" lost a significant number of limbs. Some are still hanging high up in the tree. We're going to have to hire someone to come and remove the ones way up high. The trees probably need the work anyway. Fortunately, the bench was not damaged.

Several of our flowering plum trees were broken off at the tops. The guy who does our tree service suggested giving them all haircuts straight across the top. They too probably need the work anyway. 

Oh, and I found one of the birdfeeders face down in the gutter. It partied too hard, I think. Sadly, the shield that protects it from the rain fell to the ground and was broken too. We'll get a replacement for it on Monday.

Mr. Smitty is happy to be back in his large catio to catch the rays of the setting sun.

Oh, and what's this? A chipmunk seems to be living under our deck out here. There are seeds and other debris scattered around the opening to his humble abode. He might want to think about moving now that the cats are back patrolling the neighborhood.

So unpacking will be the goal for the day. I have laundry to do as well, but I can multi-task laundry with sewing. There are a couple of projects I want to get going on. I want to finish up the little inchy wall-hanging, which is my OMG for the month.

I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with it...just put a border on it, and maybe a narrow stop border. I believe I have some fabrics that will be just right for this. Also, I need to get going on my art quilt for the latest Endeavourers challenge. The prompt this time around is "color theory," and I'm pretty sure I know what I'm doing for that. Reveal is May 1st, and so I need to get going soon. I'm very nearly finished with the Liberty Sampler I'm stitching. When that's finished, I'll catch up on the next two Posies blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. This was my January block:

The embroideries are from Jenny of Elefantz. February's and March's have been posted, but I haven't stitched them yet. I'm combining her BOM with this year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge and doing the borders in the color of the month. Way to kill two birds with one stone, eh?

So there's lots on the agenda sewing-wise. In all of that, I need to get going picking my bucket o' weeds until I have the garden weeded somewhat. Today, in addition to unpacking, I want to get out a pull up those blooming hairy bittercress. Just doing my part to keep them from conquering the world. You're welcome.