Seed Starting

One of the most alluring features of our home is the sunroom at the back of the house. This undergoes the conversion to seed starting room over the next few weeks, although I have already started a flat of them and will likely do another two before I arrange more shelves. Although my seedlings stretch more thinly than commercially grown ones (I do not use grow lights, so the tiny plants stretch towards the sun until the days grow longer), they usually fare well once in the ground. In my opinion, sun is the most important factor to starting seeds without grow lights, and the sunroom offers plenty of it.

I start seeds for the variety. There are dozens and dozens more varieties available via seed catalogue than you can buy in your garden centre. This year for the first time, I received a catalogue from Heritage Harvest Seed - I cannot wait to receive my order, which includes the very rare Reisetomate, Canada Crookneck Squash, and Worcester Indian Beans.

I also start seeds for the wonder. Simply put, it is amazing to watch them grow.

I do not start seeds for the savings. I get too excited and buy too many seeds. In theory, however, you could save quite a bit if you split packages with friends, or used up all your seeds before buying new ones. Or only bought exactly what you needed. I am neither organized or controlled enough to manage this.

That being said, my favorite types and varieties that pass the "easy-peasy to grow and maybe even economical" test include:

• Tomatoes - any type, but our family finds in particular that paste tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and heirloom tomatoes offer savings and are easy to grow. I pick varieties recommended for home growers from my favorite seed companies, but also ones that look interesting: that is how I have tried Sicilian Saucer, Big Brandy Hybrid, and this year the Reisetomate, and Opalka.
• Kale - Darkibor hybrid - I had success overwintering this kale for 3 seasons before it got in the way of an expanding garden terrace. It did not survive the transplant. However, it was prolific, and worth a try for the gardener who likes kale.
• Squash - I have had success with both butternut squash and pumpkins. I am going to try tucking them into beds near the front of the lot (and the road), which I am converting into perennial space. This year, I am also growing zucchini, something I've held off on because I have a friend who drops off mega-zucchinis every week. It's payback time.
• Beans and radishes - all kinds, any kinds. Both germinate readily when sown directly in the soil, meaning that you don't even need to start seedlings!

I generally seed everything within a one month period, creating a timing disaster come planting time, and consequently everything goes in late, and bears fruit late. This year will be different. I repeat! This year will be different! I am exceptionally pleased with myself for having already started a flat's worth of perennials.

My seed starting routine

1. Select your seeds however you will: my selections are largely based on what I want to eat, what has grown well in the past, what looks interesting and unique to grow, and approximately how much space we have. I write a list of the kinds of seeds I need that year - there are likely a dozen or so types/varieties on that list - then select seeds from catalogues, grossly exceeding the number of things on the list. I make one in-person trip to William Dam Seeds. I have yet to pass a season where I don't buy at least twice as much as I need.

2. Plan out when you will start each type, and write the dates down on a calendar. (I have a calendar dedicated to gardening and also record the actual dates that I seed things, as well as projected planting dates, etc). I use instructions on the packet and an approximate last frost date. Sweet Domesticity gives an easy-to-follow schedule in her Seed Starting Bootcamp post, which is much more comprehensive and knowledgeable than this post is.


3. Prepare your materials: pots, trays, and medium. I am using newspaper pots this year, as after a few years of working with Jiffy Pots I have decided they don't hold enough soil, and therefore require more frequent watering. I generally use cheap seed starting trays and their fitted covers, but managed to misplace all but two of them this year. So I am jamming my seeds into take out containers. You SHOULD make sure your trays are rinsed out. Mine this year were not, as evidenced by the strange seedlings popping up from the bottom of the tray. For medium, I usually buy whatever seed starter is available at Canadian Tire. It is not the cheapest option, but generally comes in nicely contained small-ish bags, which don't make a mess in my sunroom.

4. Plant according to your schedule. I add soil to the pots, moisten them with water (which also helps keep your paper pots together), arrange them in the tray, create my labels, and then plant.

I plant 2 - 3 seeds per pot, again, according to the instructions on the packet for depth. I always cover the tray, preferably with a fitted lid, which keeps the soil moist. Seedlings are labelled and the tray is placed in a window with southern exposure.

And if for no other reason, at the end of winter, starting seeds is a wonderful way to rejuvenate hope for spring.

BBQ Ribs

Ted Reader is my go-to for BBQ recipes. He celebrates good, rich, barbequed food, and following him on Instagram or Facebook will seriously inspire you to grill something. So when ribs went on sale before the long weekend, I decided to try his back rib recipe from Everyday Gourmet Grilling.

Horrible picture, delicious ribs.

I always BBQ my ribs. While there are a few different ways to do it, I give them a good rub with something and letting them sit for awhile, then put them on the grill low (around 325) and slow (for at least 2 hours). Turn on one side of the grill and place the ribs on the other, with a drippings pan underneath. My ribs tend to take a bit longer than the recipe calls for, probably because I open the lid far too many times - usually to add other items to the grill. Sunday evening I also grilled sweet potatoes and baked some brownies on the BBQ.

I also treated myself to Ted's Thai Chili Lime Coleslaw, a recipe I have been wanting to make since I got the cookbook. I made a few omissions: didn't grill the pineapple, didn't add the chili (I know this is nearly unforgivable), and didn't add the rum. Yep, you read right: no rum in this coleslaw.

Granola bars vs. Lemon buns

Yes, I will eat you granola bar. But I am not going to enjoy it.

Ok, I will enjoy it. But not as much as I would have if I wasn't limited to what was available in my cupboard, baked in the spirit of "use it up." Based roughly on Sprouted Kitchen's recipe, minus the dates, plus raisin paste, wheat germ and hemp seeds.

But you! I am going to love eating you, you delicious sticky lemon roll.

Made using the Kitchn recipe, but in a bread machine using the dough cycle. I reduced the yeast to 1 1/2 tsps, and probably should have reduced the flour to 3.5 cups. I had to hand knead it at the end of the cycle, as not all the flour had worked in to the dough. I let it rise an extra time for good measure.

The Ornamental Vegetable Plot

I can't recall where I first heard of potage gardens, which have now become a source of inspiration to me. Books on the subject and it's related subjects - potager,  kitchen gardens, ornamental vegetable gardens - are the ones I turn to most for developing my garden plans. After inheriting some very high-maintenance gardens with the purchase of our house 3 years ago, I have slowly started to convert the beds to be 1) more easily maintained and 2) able to produce food.

Nowhere on our property is there a chunk of land eligible for the perfectly rectangular veggie bed that I grew up with, so I had to get creative. Our house backs on a river, making the backyard a regular wildlife sanctuary. Yes, groundhogs. Yes, deer. Yes, fluffy bunnies. I decided that it would be better to grow food closer to the house, as the larger, hungrier animals tend to stay "down by the river." However, this means working with oddly shaped beds, and ones that are already occupied (overtaken, in most cases) with perennials and even some wildflowers. And serious weeds. Eek.

So I started the conversion with the least populated, most rectangular bed, a front bed that lines our driveway up to the sidewalk. While formal French potage gardens require fairly large spaces to incorporate their geometric layouts, I simply tried to make a "pretty" veggie plot, incorporating some patterns into planting and including flowers throughout. I planted radishes, cabbage, kale, beets, and runner beans with nasturtiums, marigolds, borage, and ageratum, which was completed buried under the foliage from nearby cabbages. Tomatoes reseeded themselves from last year and I was literally pulling them like weeds. By the dozen.

These pics show the garden shortly after planting on June 10th, on June 27th, and July 11th. I clearly tried to squeeze too many plants into the bed. But that is kind of my style.

I try to take road traffic and potential pollution from passers-by into consideration when planting. While it seems wonderful in theory to grow food on your front lawn, you don't want dogs to water your lettuce. For this reason, much of this front bed was planted as it was purely because I liked the look of the plants, and as a growing experiment; I was hesitant to harvest much leafy growth from a road-side location. This year I am going to try to push back the edible plants even further from the road by moving more blooming perennials to the front of the bed, and will try to find another location for my leafier plants.

Tilling near bulbs isn't practical, meaning most perennials don't mix well with annual food plants. In the top most photo, you can see two bean tee-pees; I roughly allotted the space in between them for tilling and vegetable growth. However, easy grow annuals that don't need much tilling can easily by set amongst your perennials to add a decorative effect - I personally love nasturtiums.

Though this bed wasn't a total success, I did learn some things about what thrives in it and what doesn't. And most importantly, the bed is better organized for growing this year.

Baltic un-Birthday Bread

One of my favorite treats to make for a party is a Baltic Birthday Bread, from this super duper Canadian-flour bread machine book. It looks very impressive, and I consider myself somewhat Baltic in origin, as my father's family comes from the former Konigsberg. While that particular region of the Baltic has, and had, little cultural similarity to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, I still am drawn to Baltic culture. I am not sure how authentically Baltic this is, but I did find another recipe for it citing Estonian origins.

I simply couldn't get a picture of it whole. It is that good.

While I technically made this to clean out the cupboards (it uses sliced almonds, candied fruit, and saffron), the only reason those ingredients were in the cupboard were my aborted attempts to make it over the last few months. The texture and flavor is reminiscent of hot cross buns, soft and doughy with hints of fruit.

Cleaning out our cupboards

We are getting kitchen renos done in 2 weeks. This is excellent motivation to clean out the cupboards.

Personally, I am going to use this opportunity to find the perfect granola bar recipe. I made a batch of Pioneer Woman bars a month or two ago, and found they didn't stick together well. Our biggest need - to - empty cupboard is the baking one, which is full of granola bar worthy ingredients.

I managed to use over 7 cups of miscellaneous cupboardry while attempting to make some yesterday.  I roughly followed this recipe, but added in peanut butter (because I love it) and a banana (because I had it). They are ok. But not perfect.

Rhubarb sighted

I was ecstatic to see the first appearance of rhubarb today!

These plants were divided and replanted in a more spacious location, closer to the house, in spring of last year.

How not to make yogurt

1. Drink small coffee. You haven't drank a coffee in a couple of days, so enjoy it.

2. Put milk in Dutch oven. Snap a pic for your blog! Who cares if the Dutch oven is kind of dirty looking.

3. Start doing other stuff around your house. You should drink coffee more often!

4. When you are moving the 3rd load of dirty laundry downstairs,  notice your milk is boiling over, and that it is 20 degrees hotter than it was supposed to be. Turn it off. Curse quietly so your baby doesn't hear.

5. Know that you probably already messed up your yogurt but decide to keep going. Just in case.

6. Put Dutch oven in ice water bath. Check in between loads of laundry. When it only has a few degrees left to cool decide you won't forget about it if you only do ONE thing and come back to it.

7. Dust off your television screen. Then play with the baby. Then fold the blankets and organize the pillows on the couch. Then - crap. The yogurt.

8. Check on the milk cooling in the ice water bath and see that it has cooled 10 degrees cooler than it was supposed to.

9. You don't really have time to think about it. Let's just keep going with the yogurt. You are getting a lot done today.

10. Barely remember to add yogurt to the milk before you put it in the slightly warm oven. Don't measure, this obviously isn't going well anyways.

11. Check milky substance after the required 4 hours and confirm that you have not made yogurt, as you suspected. Toilet it.

The Kitchn has great instructions for how to actually make yogurt. And it isn't that hard.

Looking forward to rhubarb

I derive a lot of pleasure from seeing the first spring growth of perennials. When that perennial is edible, I am nearly obsessed.

Last year we divided and relocated several rhubarb crowns from the "lower" area (down by the river) to the "upper" area (by our house). While I used to do a pretty good job of harvesting all available rhubarb, I am looking forward to 1. more rhubarb, and 2. not having to climb 20 stairs to get it.

Knowing the decision was going to be a fairly permanent one, I chose to plant the rhubarb in an area that needed some foliage, but that I had found to be unsuccessful for growing veggies in previous years. The area has good southern exposure, but sees some animal traffic. I am unsure whether the same animals that enjoy eating tomatoes will enjoy rhubarb, but I figure that if they didn't eat it down by the river, they weren't likely going to eat it near our house...unless they are different animals.

Last year, rhubarb started poking through the leaf cover in late April. I'm looking forward to seeing this year's crop, and how we did in the replanting. We didn't touch the rhubarb last year, as we divided it in the spring. Detailed instructions on division at this blog, which has BEAUTIFUL pics of budding rhubarb.

Beet shake

Beets! I bought some massive, beautiful beets a couple of weeks ago, which have been sitting in my fridge begging me to put in the time and roast them. So today I decided to try Chocolate Covered Katie's Pink Energizer Smoothie.

Delicious. Beautiful and alarming in colour. If I made it again I would reduce the amount of milk, to make a thicker smoothie. Looking forward to trying these this summer, with fresh garden beets.

Bircher muesli

I love bircher muesli.

I bumped into these Blueberry Pie Oats and learned that the process of soaking oats overnight is called bircher muesli. While the Blueberry Pie Oats recipe is a little divergent from the origins of bircher muesli, the basics are there: soak rolled oats in something overnight, with fruit involved somehow.

I first encountered this way of making oats in the What to Expect book. Their recipe calls for soaking half a cup oats with raisins and apricots in half a cup orange juice and half a cup vanilla yogurt. While I more or less stuck to that recipe, I switched to plain yogurt so it was less sweet.

This became the only thing I really wanted to eat for what seemed like weeks on end. In my first trimester I craved things in 5 minute bursts. Once the burst was over I was nauseous, sometimes just thinking about the food I had moments before craved. But these oats really did it for me (it didn't hurt that I could always eat first thing in the morning). I also liked the convenience of making it the night before, and that I could bring it to work in a handy Mason jar.

So the fact that there is whole world of bircher muesli out there for me to explore? Makes my day.

Oh no. I didn't

Despite having less exposure to the public than I have possibly ever had, I am on my second cold of the year. Of course colds are miserable in general, but with a 5 month old baby the experience is even worse. I have  little opportunity to sleep, which is the only way I really believe works to fight a cold. And sleep is absolutely the only way to overcome the restless sense of constant boredom that inevitably accompanies the cold.

So I decided to make the Awesome Allium juice from the Juice Bible. I could have tried a fruit-based antioxidant juice, but I felt like my illness has already proceeded past that. I was both intrigued and horrified at the ingredients, which included half an onion and a clove of garlic. Sure, I have problems stomaching raw garlic, never mind its concentrated juice, but how much could a clove hurt me?

After the juicing I was more confident. It was very green, green is good, right? So I too a taste while nursing my little one. I would down the rest of it later.

No I wouldn't. There would be no Awesome Allium later.

It didn't taste as horrible as it should have. At least, not at first. Yes, it made my eyes water. Yes, it was a bit spicy. But not unpalatable. Seconds later, though, as the garlic and onion spread down into my throat, I regretted my tiny tasting with an infant on my lap. She started crying quietly, as if my onion reek was painful for her to be around. I called to my husband urgently to bring me water. I practiced deep breathing. Read: do not drink this on an empty stomach.

So most of the juice remains in a Mason jar in our fridge. Yes, I want this cold to be gone, but I just can't do it.

Macarons at last

At Christmastime my husband appealed to me to stop making macarons. Or rather, to stop trying to make macarons. I was not successful, batch after batch, and he was tired of seeing both the kitchen and my nerves in a perpetual state of disarray. I started Googling "macaron fail" to make myself feel better.

But finally, I have succeeded.

Vanilla-mango macarons. Success.

There are a hundred different ways you can mess up macarons. In December, I suspect my main mess up was trying to "cheat" by using egg whites from a carton. For a real baker this mistake might have been obvious. I am not really a real baker. Of course, the problem isn't just the macarons. I always have problems making meringue, the first step in macaron-ing. I'm using an old hand beater, rather than a fancy stand mixer. It takes at least 10 minutes longer for the whites to form "stiff peaks" than any recipe I've ever used calls for. Some say ageing the egg whites is critical. They also need to be room temperature, which in Canada this time of year can still be rather cold - so I put them on the counter for hours. 

But the meringue isn't the only finicky part. Watch what kind of colouring you add to the batter, as some claim that liquid food dyes change its consistency. I've seen a video stating that you need to blend the dry ingredients in very vigorously, so as to remove the bubbles. A magazine article notes that the batter should flow "like lava" (like I have seen lava to compare!). And if you make it through all those steps without error, you can't forget to leave the macarons out for at least 30 minutes before baking, so that they form a skin and the signature "feet" appear on the bottom of the cookie.

So now I've annotated my recipe with all of the above reminders. For the filling, I used mango jam that I canned in July using Pomona's Universal Pectin (an amazing product that isn't sugar activated). They were tasty cookies, if very sweet. I might have had too many to celebrate.