HELP! The Cork's Stuck INSIDE The Bottle!!!!

I've worried and fretted over this since September. I pushed the stopper too hard and it popped down into the carboy - WITH THE CIDER/SUGAR/YEAST IN IT (of course).  I ended up just sticking another rubber stopper and airlock into the neck of the carboy and fermenting my hard cider with the old stopper in it. Calm down, it was sterile! Today was the day to rack the cider. Which I did. And then . . . what to do with the carboy and bung?

Well, Hubby, being the fix-it guy he is, went to the home-brew place in town and asked. Here's the complicated 3-step process:

1.    You take your basic plastic grocery bag, twist up the bottom only enough so it fits into your bottle, and gently fit it almost all the way in.

2.    Turn your bottle (carboy, jug, whatever) upside down and jiggle it a bit until the stopper is trapped between the bag and the side of the bottle (depending upon the size of the bottle, you may need to blow a little air into the bag at this point - just be prepared to do whatever you gotta do to trap the stopper against the side of the bottle).

3.    Pull on the bag.

Et viola.

This works with glass or plastic bottles and carboys: likewise with corks or rubber stoppers.

Thanks, Home-brew Dudes! Thanks Hubby, for asking the question (and knowing who to ask). OK. On to the next crisis. And I take back my earlier rant about the evils of the plastic grocery bag.

The Absolute No Fail Perfect Every Time Pie Crust

Pie crust is made up of a few simple ingredients probably pretty universally known the world over. Flour, fat, egg, water. Yep, pretty simple.

BUT (finger-in-the-air caveat) . . . there are a few secrets to the perfect pie crust. And a few more to score the The Absolute No-Fail-Perfect-Every-Time Pie Crust.

Secret #1:  Cold. Use cold ingredients, refrigerated egg, coldest water you can come up with, etc. I'm beginning to understand the whole granite pastry station and marble rolling pin thing. Cold is essential to pie crust.

Secret #2: DO NOT OVERMIX!!!!! Maybe this should've been #1, 'cause I can't stress enough that overmixing makes a tough crust. And yes, in the pie crust world, overmixing is a word - a very, very important word. The dough should look shaggy, perhaps even lumpy - though the lumps shouldn't be any bigger than peas. I find that my OCD comes out when I use the pastry cutter and I want to mix the ingredients to a Play Dough consistency, so I use ye olde two knife mixing technique and barely cut it enough to incorporate my ingredients. Maybe you're someone who's strong enough to avert your inner OCDness and can use the pastry cutter. Use your own discretion.

Secret #3:  Do not use your hands! See #1. Your hands are warm. See #2. Your hands naturally want to make something smooth and pretty (like Play Dough), not something shaggy and lumpy (like The Absolute No-Fail-Perfect-Every-Time Pie Crust).

Bonus Secret!:  Lard. If you've just butchered your pig or bagged a bear and have some fat just layin' around, render that stuff down and use it in your pie crust! It's the best. Or, if it's not butchering time, you can buy a little box of lard from the ethnic section of your store. Or, you can just use vegetable shortening like Crisco. Butter flavored Crisco is amazing. Butter doesn't work (I think this is the only equation where butter or bacon isn't the answer), vegetable oil doesn't work. You must use either lard or shortening. It's the The Absolute No-Fail blah,blah,blah,blah rule.

Here's the recipe:

3 Cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups lard or shortening
1 egg
1 Tbsp vinegar (white or cider, doesn't matter)
5 Tbsp COLD water
This recipe calls for 1 tsp salt, but I've made crust both ways and I can't discern a difference so I leave it out. It makes me feel better about the lard.

All our neighbors have at least one apple tree. We have two. And our neighbor down the street brought us two boxes of apples from his tree this week. And I just spent an afternoon pressing cider with Zombie Team Neighbor (so fun!) who I dibs for my zombie apocalypse team 'cause she hunts wild mushrooms, has a cider press, ferments booze, gardens and stuff. So, since it's apple season in the 'hood, I'll show you what I'm typing about.

This is what you need:

Though, I should say you don't need some of this stuff. When I was a poor college student, I rolled out dough with the side of a glass. Just make do with what you've got.

                                 And the nesting straw stuck on the egg is definitely optional.

You start with your big bowl and put three level cups of all-purpose flour in there. That's dry measuring cups, not wet. Sifted or unsifted, doesn't matter. Add the 1 1/2 cups of lard or shortening. Cut it together with two knives until the shortening lumps are no bigger than peas.

In a cereal bowl put all your COLD ingredients. 1 egg, 1 Tbsp vinegar, 5 Tbsp water and mix with a fork. Add contents of the cereal bowl to the ingredients in your large bowl and flip it around and stir it up with your fork until there's no more flour on the bottom of your bowl. Roughly divide the dough into four sections - the recipe makes two two-crust pies.

                                            Don't mind the apple bits in the cider vinegar!

Put some flour on the counter, roll out one of your four dough lumps (I love Grandpa's rolling pin), scrape it off the counter with your spatula or pastry knife and roll it onto your rolling pin at the same time, then wheel the dough off the pin and onto your pie pan. This technique allows you to transfer the rolled dough from the counter to the pie pan without rippage or other crust-tastrophes.

This is where I'm gonna interject two layers of apples (usually my rule is about 8 apples per pie, figuring one apple per serving), each layer covered with one Tbsp sugar. You can add cinnamon if you want to, but Neighbor Down the Street's apples are naturally a little spicy so I'm gonna leave it out. You can dot the apples with butter to add some richness. I always figure the richer the better, so my apple pies are dotty.

Roll out the top crusts. Then roll them onto the apples in your pie pan. Crimp the edges. Try out your art-work. I like to cut a picture of whatever the pie is into the top crust. Cherries, berries, in this case, apples. This allows steam to escape. And then I wet my fingers with water and rub them on the top crust and dust it with sugar. 'Cause if you're going to have a piece of pie, you might as well get all the sugar you can, right? Plus, it looks prettier after you bake it.

Then you bake it. 350 degrees (why is there no degree key on my keyboard?) for 40 minutes. And people will rave about your apple pie and your crust and ask for your recipe. And you can airily say, "Oh, a little flour, a little fat, an egg - you know - ingredients are ingredients!". Or, you could save them years of pie-angst and tell them the secrets of The Absolute No-Fail-Perfect-Every-Time Pie Crust!

Oh, and extra-credit bonus - don't bother doubling the batch. It doesn't work. If you have more than two pies to bake, start the crust recipe all over for each pair. The amount of ingredients in this recipe is scientifically engineered and mechanically calibrated to be just right - any more and it'd require more mixing (tough crust) - any less and you'd only have 3 crusts!

Murder of Crows

We do a lot of (ok, some) stuff around our house in town to foster the presence of Little Brown Birds. We have a couple of bird baths, bird houses, I hang short yarn ends on the shrubbery in the spring for nesting materials, and I know for certain they help the chickens eat their food. We don't put out feeders any more just because of the cats in the neighborhood, but we did for a while.

I don't know all the types of Little Brown Birds in my yard, but my Mother-in-Law tells me most of them are Juncos. I especially enjoy one particular bird house on top of the swing. Every year we get at least one bunch of bird babies out of it and I can see it from my bedroom window. I love waking up to their song, and I sit on the edge of the bed and watch them for a few minutes before beginning my day. It's such a gentle way to start the morning - especially after years and years of waking to an alarm clock at O-dark-thirty!

This is my favorite birdhouse.

And here are this years' occupants patiently waiting for me to move away from their home. Such a shy young couple!

Yesterday afternoon I heard the familiar raucous cawing of several crows in the yard. Noooooo! I ran out and looked and three or four crows are flying around the top of a redwood tree. They're being dive-bombed by a couple of mostly ineffectual Little Brown Birds, but the crows won out. While I was frantically trying to get at the pellet gun, they proceeded to kill and eat the contents of that nest. Not sure if there were hatchlings or just eggs in there. They were just about done by the time I located the tin of pellets and gone when I finally had the pellet gun loaded and ready to put some sting in their butts. Murder of crows, indeed. They probably flew right back over to the nearest fast food restaurant and ate stale french fries out of the dumpster for dessert. Or some flattened, dried out road kill lying in the street. Nasty birds.

I've heard that crows are smart and that they can remember an angry face for years. I hope they remember this angry face and make our yard a no-fly zone. But I'm ready now and the loaded pellet gun is leaning by the door.

It was a little quiet this morning. Luckily, the crows stopped at that one nest. They didn't get at the eggs in my favorite birdhouse. Maybe I'll hear them sing tomorrow.

Yard Sale Footstool Redo

I've been without wheels these last few days because Hubby is away with the truck. I'm in easy walking distance to a little corner market and I have everything I could possibly need anyway, so I'm enjoying the quiet time. We had such beautiful weather over the weekend I decided to take a peek at Craigslist Yard Sales to see if there were any close by. By happy coincidence there were! My trusty True and I walked to one of the sales in the neighborhood and guess what?! I finally found it! (Not the sale, silly, the thing I've been looking for.)

I've been looking for a small simple footstool to prop my feet on in the evenings. I didn't want a big ottoman or anything that'd take up too much space, but this little guy was just right! And at $2.00 I couldn't walk away without it.

Just right except for the ugly factor.

So I decided to fix it. Make it pretty. Replace the grubby blue crushed velvet with something . . . more.

So I took it apart.

Eek! That's MY mannish, garden ravaged hand? 

Just undid the four corner screws that were holding the top to the stool and pried off aaaalllllll the staples that were holding the different layers of coverings on it. When I got down to the cushion, I was pleased to see it was still in pretty good shape. All I need is a new cover.

I decided to crochet one from a pattern called Retro Circles by Adele at threebeansinapodcrochet.blogspot.com.au .  Just love this variation on ye olde Granny Square!

The Retro Circles were joined using the Simulated Braid Join pattern by Carolyn at Gourmet Crochet. You can see it here: Simulated braid join.

Then I whipstitched the new crocheted piece directly onto the new muslin I'd already stapled on and re-screwed the top piece to the footstool.

And here's my new li'l footstool!

Isn't it cute? Now it matches all the blocky wooden things and funky homemade things I have in my house. And it's just the right height to rest my tootsies on. For $2.00 (and a nice afternoon walk), plus another few bucks for the fabric- and yarn-stash stuff, I think it's a pretty good deal!

Best Ground Cover

Irish Moss. It's amazing. About 20 years ago we decided to put flagstone around our patio. I bought a little flat of Irish Moss to plant in all those little spaces between the stones. The yard has gone through several incarnations since then, but the moss is still going strong. And it's spread. I find bits of it in the funniest places. All over. So I started gathering the bits and put them in two of my garden beds. And then I used the bits in my greenhouse.

I think it likes it in there.

As do the grape and Roma tomatoes (at least I think they're Romas, they're compost volunteers), the peppers, the baby avocado trees and the infant apple trees I planted from seeds (but the Meyer lemons haven't peeked out yet). With the greenhouse door open all the time, it stays a relatively stable 80 degrees.

Now I need to think up another project to use more Irish Moss. It's coming up again in amongst the onions and potatoes.

Don't mind the beer can. It's a slug trap.

Maybe I'll put it around the stones in the garden entrance. The oregano is taking too long to spread. If you have a small area where you'd like a low, hardy, pretty - it has tiny white flowers when it blooms - ground cover, I'd recommend Irish Moss. It gives a really good return on your investment.

There's another ground cover we use a lot. Of the two, I'd have to say Irish Moss is the best. It wears better in foot traffic areas, but I'll post about that another time.

It's Bloomin' Beautiful!

Just had to show you . . .

I'm surrounded by a flagrance of flowers, a bonanza of blooms, a profusion of petals, a . . . . do you want me to stop?

Judging by the blooms, we should have plenty of apples and blackberries, and some raspberries and blueberries too. We've never gotten much from the raspberry brambles or the stunted blueberry bushes, but we might at least get a few this year.

But it wasn't the edibles I was talking about when I mentioned the blooms! I took a walk around the property, and then the neighborhood and was struck by the sinful bounty of flowers. They're everywhere!

My single rhododendron

And my single azalea

The lilacs smell heavenly

My Mama gave me a dried seed pod of these oriental poppies. I crushed the pod onto the four-foot-wide strip of dirt that serves as my front yard about 25 years ago. The poppies popped and are still going strong.

magnolias down the street

The rhodies and azaleas in the neighborhood are by far the showiest of the lot. Spring. Couldn't beat it if you had TWO sticks. :)