Jammy Oatcakes with Chocolate

Confession:  I kind of got into a groove with these Jammy Oatcakes.   

They're fast.  They're easy. They're fun. They don't involve snow.

Plus, we kept thinking of new combinations. And we had to try every single one of them.  


And they were sooooo good. 

Especially these cherry almond ones.   And then we put some chocolate chips in them and the angels sang and all was right with the world, even with the snow. 


Cherry Almond Chocolate Chip Jammy Oatcakes
www.rurification.com

• 3 cups oatmeal
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup finely chopped almonds
• Handful of dried cherries [optional]
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup cherry jam
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 cup mini chocolate chips

Heat the oven to 350.

Melt the butter, jam, milk and vanilla in the microwave until soft.   I heated it for 1 minute in our microwave and it worked fine.   The butter was soft, but not completely melted.  That's fine.

Mix the oats, flour, salt, cherries and almonds in a mixer while the wet stuff is warming.  Don't add the chocolate chips yet.  Then add the wet stuff and mix it all together thoroughly.

Once everything has been mixed up, make sure it's not too warm.  You don't want to melt the chocolate chips when you're mixing them in the dough.   When the dough is cool enough, mix the chocolate chips in quickly.

Use an ice cream scoop to measure the cakes.   Pack the scoop hard and then pop them out onto a cookie sheet. [You don't have to grease the cookie sheet].   Flatten the cakes a bit with a fork.  Mine were 2 " rounds after I flattened them a bit.

Bake for 15 minutes if you want to eat them hot.  [They hold together better for eating warm and they are fabulous for breakfast!]

Bake for 10 minutes if you want to let them cool and eat them later.  [They'll finish drying as they cool].

Makes 20 cakes, 2" rounds.

Winter Queen Anne's Lace

Our Queen Anne's lace blooms well into November - getting shorter and shorter as the weather gets colder.

The flowers curl in and go to seed and the calyx folds up just a bit.   A lot of them freeze dry in the field.   They're beautiful with frost and snow on them. 

And they're beautiful cold and dry just like this. 

Sweet Potato Starts

It's always a scramble around here to find sweet potato starts.    For me the problem is that I'm ready to plant sweet potatoes long before it's a good time to plant them.  

You have to wait until well AFTER the frost date.

Really.

You have to wait.

Trust me.

And then wait some more.

And by then, everything else has been planted and there's a lot of other work to do and I've forgotten to keep my eyes open for slips.    And then they're gone!

So I've been thinking for a long time about growing my own.   But I heard somewhere that it was hard.    So I kept putting it off.

Then, one day last week, Lily brought me a few sweet potatoes out of the pantry [which stays around 50 degrees all winter] and said - 'Look at these.  They're sprouting!'

So I guess it's not so hard to sprout them after all.    I mean, they did it all by themselves.   In a dark box in a cold pantry.  

Which is just as nature intended.    Duh.  

I found a couple of sites with descriptions on what to do next.   There are a few different approaches.   Check them out:

http://www.outlawgarden.com/2012/04/25/grow-your-own-sweet-potatoes/

http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/how-to-plant-and-grow-sweet-potatoes/index.html

http://www.mnn.com/your-home/organic-farming-gardening/stories/how-to-grow-sweet-potatoes

http://www.waldeneffect.org/blog/Growing_sweet_potato_slips_in_gravel/


I think I'm going to do mine the way Outlaw Garden does hers [first link above].   I'll keep you posted.

What The Trees Hang Onto

This is a very big tree at the end of our road.   I've passed it thousands of times.

Sometimes I imagine that one day there will be a sign on it that says Honey!  with an arrow pointing down our way.

Someday.   Maybe.

In the meantime, I walk by it and say hello to the neighbors cows and then turn around and head back home.

We were picking up cans one day on our walk and looking more closely than usual at the debris around the tree and Eric noticed something.

Something blue that was not a beer can.

Can you see it right in the center of this pic?   

It's the bottom section of a very old fence post.   The top is long gone - broken off.  

I don't think the roots are going to let the bottom go any time soon. 

Dryad

This tree.



This tree is....



This tree has....



It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.



There's something a little inappropriate about cleavage on a tree. 



Don't you think?

More Jammy Oatcakes

Remember last week when I showed you the recipe for Jammy Oatcakes?

The ones with orange marmalade and dried cranberries?

Yeah.  Those.  They're wonderful.

I made some more with different jam combinations - because let's face it, it's snowing outside and the gardening that I've had scheduled is just not going to happen for a bit.   And I needed something to do that didn't involve staring wistfully outside at the falling snow.

Even though it's been really pretty.  I'm over the snow.   Over.  It. 

Anyway.   I dug out a jar of my favorite Pear Ginger Jam and some ground ginger and then I added a lot more candied ginger and made these. 

Oatcakes are wonderfully filling and work up quickly for a fast breakfast.   Make them the night before for tomorrow's breakfast on-the-go.  Enjoy!

Pear Ginger Jammy Oatcakes
www.rurification.com

• 3 cups oatmeal
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1 cup finely chopped candied ginger.
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup pear ginger jam
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

Heat the oven to 350.

Melt the butter, jam, milk and vanilla in the microwave until soft.   I heated it for 1 minute in our microwave and it worked fine.   The butter was soft, but not completely melted.  That's fine.

Mix the oats, flour, salt, ground ginger and candied ginger in a mixer while the wet stuff is warming.    Then add the wet stuff and mix it all together thoroughly.

Use an ice cream scoop to measure the cakes.   Pack the scoop hard and then pop them out onto a cookie sheet. [You don't have to grease the cookie sheet].   Flatten the cakes a bit with a fork.  Mine were 2 " rounds after I flattened them a bit.

Bake for 15 minutes if you want to eat them hot.  [They hold together better for eating warm and they are fabulous for breakfast!]

Bake for 10 minutes if you want to let them cool and eat them later.  [They'll finish drying as they cool].

Makes 20 cakes, 2" rounds.

It's snowing. Again.

The Snow Fairy seems to want to stay and stay this year. 

It's a good thing she's so cute.

Cool Bark

I've said again and again that I'm not so great at identifying trees by their bark.   

So it's kind of frustrating when I see really cool bark like this and I can't figure out what kind of tree it is.





Compound this with the fact that most of these trees were cut down by the power company a couple of years ago, so there won't be any leaves in a few weeks to help me out.  [I'm good with the leaves!]   So if you guys know what this is, please shout it out.  

It's so pretty how the decaying bark marked the wood underneath.



Here's a bigger pic of the log.    I'm guessing dogwood, but that's only a guess.   The log was maybe 10 inches diameter. 

Bent Tree

Down the way is a tree that took a couple of 90 degree turns during it's growth.

Here's a closer look so you can see things a little better.  Click the pic to biggify.

The tree in the back is a sycamore.    You can just see the knot [just below the cut] where the branch was that pushed the front tree into the first 90 degree turn.

Then I'm guessing the pressure from the front tree weakened the back branch.  Sycamores are notoriously brittle anyway and it probably came off pretty fast.

Cool.

Rural Lost and Found

Someone dropped these nice gloves on the road when they were hauling hay.  

And someone else picked them up and zip tied them to the stop sign so they'd stay off the road and be easier to find.

I love living out here.

Stump the Reader

This is a gorgeous stump.  

What's more - I actually know what kind of tree this is.   So, bonus points for me because generally I have no idea whatsoever what a tree is unless it has leaves.   I'm good at leaves. 

Game rules:  Tell me what you can about the tree from these pics.

Click to biggify.

Here's a close up of the stuff going on in the center.  

We're guessing ants, but that's just a guess.

If you want a hint, there's a pic of the logs below the fold.

Dogwood Pest

I noticed this damage on a dogwood from my studio window.   From the distance, I thought it was deer damage - just a bit too high for rabbit damage.  

When I got closer, I found these:

And this.

And this.

It looks like bird damage.   All at 3 feet high and under.

Weird.   

OK all you bird folks - what do you think did this?   Sapsucker?

Siberian Iris

More Blue Pollen

A few days ago I posted a pic of a bee on scilla with blue pollen.   I posted it to the bee forum and some of the beeks expressed some doubt that the pollen was blue.

You know who you are.

So,  I got some more pics.

And no, I didn't doctor them.  Geez. 

Bees gather pollen and put it in pollen baskets on their back legs.  It stays put there until they get it back to the hive.   Check out the pollen on the legs of these bees.

What do you think?    Is it blue?

Jammy Oat Cakes

I love oatcakes.    Dense, full of whole grains, nicely sweet and packed with nuts or fruit.   They're soft, but chewy.  

What's not to love?

Also, they're blonde.   As in not browned.  Which is my favorite thing of all because I am notorious for not waiting until baked goods get brown before I pull them out of the oven.   Blonde bread, blonde rolls, blonde oatcakes.    Perfect.  

I decided we needed to have our own recipe for these using jam for a sweetener instead of sugar.

You get a lot more flavor, with a lot less sugar. 

It's another awesome recipe to add to my Things To Do With A Jar of Jam collection. 

You know it takes some experimentation to get a new recipe just right, so it's a good thing my family likes oatcakes.   We've been eating a lot of them.

A lot of them.   What we sacrifice for our readers.  We've tried a couple of different combinations and they are all delicious.   [More of those coming up.]

You need to try them. 

Here's the recipe for the Orange Marmalade-Cranberry Oatcakes:

Orange Marmalade -Cranberry Jammy Oatcakes
www.rurification.com

• 3 cups oatmeal
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup dried cranberries
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup orange marmalade
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

Heat the oven to 350.

Melt the butter, marmalade, milk and vanilla in the microwave until soft.   I heated it for 1 minute in our microwave and it worked fine.   The butter was soft, but not completely melted.  That's fine.

Mix the oats, flour, salt and cranberries in a mixer while the wet stuff is warming.    Then add the wet stuff and mix it all together thoroughly.

Use an ice cream scoop to measure the cakes.   Pack the scoop hard and then pop them out onto a cookie sheet. [You don't have to grease the cookie sheet].   Flatten the cakes a bit with a fork.  Mine were 2 " rounds after I flattened them a bit.

Bake for 15 minutes if you want to eat them hot.  [They hold together better for eating warm and they are fabulous for breakfast!]

Bake for 10 minutes if you want to let them cool and eat them later.  [They'll finish drying as they cool].

Enjoy!

Makes 16-18 cakes, 2" rounds.

Want the recipe for this Marmalade and a whole lot of other terrific jam recipes?   Check out my ebook:  A Simple Jar of Jam  at www.rurification.etsy.com.   You can preview the book by clicking the link on the sidebar.  Every purchase helps support this site.  Thank you!

Mini Greenhouse Veggie Starters

My genius friend Sharon told me about these a couple of years ago.    They're milk jugs.    You use them as mini greenhouses to start seeds in.   I use them for my peppers, tomatoes and eggplants.  

Start things early [in February, here] and they can stay all snug in the jugs until it's safe to plant them out in May.   In the meantime they can get big in these.

And they're double protected from goofy March weather because I keep these mini greenhouses inside the cold frames and hoop house where it's not going to freeze.

Genius, right?    I love them!



This is what you do.

Save your milk jugs.   Then cut them like this.  Cut all the way around but don't cut them under the handle.   This gives them a lid that stays on, but that you can bend open if you need to.

I cut them with scissors - just stab the scissors in right there under the handle and cut, cut, cut.

Then I poke holes in the bottoms using a skewer.  Or a screwdriver.   Or Lily's pocket knife because she always has it with her and my pocketknife is always in my purse.   Except for that one time that I took it out before I went on an airplane because I didn't want to be arrested for potential terrorism or have it confiscated because it's a cool little pocketknife. 

Poke lots of holes.  Maybe 8-10.

Usually I forget to poke the holes in the jugs until I have a couple of these full.   I hate that.   That's why I'm reminding you to poke your holes before you put the dirt in.

So don't forget.  

Then I fill the bottoms with this stuff.  From right to left:   chicken dirt, sand, potting soil. 

I love chicken dirt.   You can read about it here and here.

In this order, I put in 2 scoops of chicken dirt, 4 scoops of sand and 4-6 scoops of potting soil.

Or you can use plain old dirt.   It works too.

Then I plant my seeds and put labels in the jugs.

Don't forget the labels.   If you grow 6 varieties of peppers, you'll want to know which one is which.   Or not.   It might be fun to plant a big row and see what's what later. 

I spray everything down really well with a spray bottle full of water and I bend the lids back over to close them up so they stay nice and snug and then I tuck them in the cold frame or hoop house. 

Check them occasionally to make sure they don't dry out too much.    Seeds do not like dry.   Keep them moist.

This will give you a nice head start on veggie production for the season.   That's important when you have a kid whose only vegetable is tomatoes.   

Frames of Pollen

The temps were over 65 degrees last weekend and the bees in the lang were happy.

Seriously happy.

I took the insulation off the side of the hive to let the sun warm it and within an hour there was a mass exodus of bees on cleansing flights.    It was awesome. 

Since the other hive [Tardis] died, I had a lot of frames of honey and stores to do something with - I'd just as soon the bees use it.     I went through all the frames in the Tardis to see what was left in the hive.   There were a lot of partial frames of honey, some full frames of honey and three brood frames with a considerable amount of pollen stores.

Pollen is at a premium this time of year.   The scilla and crocus are blooming, but the willow and maple haven't started yet.   The bees in the lang can use that pollen.

So, I decided to put the three frames of pollen in the lang.   The problem is that the frames of pollen are deeps, but the top of the lang is medium.   

Not to worry.   I already had an empty medium over the tardis to protect the candy, so I added another one.   I hung the deep frames in the top medium and they hung down past the bottom into the top of the medium below that was protecting the candy.  

Works great.



Now the lang has ready access to pollen right upstairs until the maples and willows bloom.   This will give them a bit of a head start.  

I'll be doing splits from this hive this year as soon as it warms up, so an early build up will be a good thing.  

Winter Gourds

Remember those weird warty stripey squash that I grew last year?   They grew up to be tan?   And then they were inedible.

So, I suspected they might be gourds.

And to test my theory, I left them outside on the patio table all winter long.

Do you know what happens to gourds when you leave them over winter?   They get nasty and moldy and eeww - but that's normal because then they get a hard shell that you can cut into to make birdhouses or not cut into and make shakers.

It's what rurified people do on the weekends. 

So I wanted to see if my weird warty stripey inedible tan squash would act like gourds and do the winter moldy eeww thing and get hard shells.    Because then I would know that they were gourds.

So I left them out all winter and they did get moldy and eeww, with hard shells.

And now I know.    They were gourds.

I'll scrub them up a bit and see if they'll make good birdhouses.   That'd be totally cute.

Maple Boil 2013

I confess that one of my favorite days of the year is maple boil day.   I get to spend the whole day outside.   It smells divine.    There's a fire to warm me up when I get chilly.   There is an unlimited amount of tea made with hot maple sap.  





It's a day spent sitting in front of the fire snuggled in a blanket with a book and a cup of tea.  

And it's a day spent hauling wood and sap buckets.  And moving the sap from pan to pan.   And taking pictures of the whole process for posterity.






Tea
If you're going to boil sap, then you have to try some tea made with it.   I like to use sap that's boiled down for an hour or so in the pot, but isn't too sweet yet.   Herbal teas like peach are our all time favorites for maple boiling day and we go through a lot of it.  

Fire
We boil in our fire pit.   Our fire pit that sits just outside off our patio.

Our fire pit that I completely dismantled in the fall so that we could dig it level and pour a slab under it. 

We did dig it level, but then it got too cold to pour the slab, so it sat in piles of bricks and blocks on the patio until the other day.  

When Lily and I remantled it.

Being that this is mud season and all, the place where we put it was really muddy.   Which is a problem for building fires and keeping them lighted.

Also, keeping the fire pit blocks from sinking to China.

So Eric laid an 8x4 piece of plywood down on the mud and Lily and I laid bricks on the plywood and then built the fire pit on the bricks, on the plywood and prayed it wouldn't burn.

It didn't burn.    Too much wet underneath the plywood and the bricks insulated the bottom plenty.

This year I built the sides higher so they'd surround the pans and heat things more efficiently.   It worked like a charm.  This was the best boil ever.

I got up early on Saturday and built a glorious fire in my glorious fire pit and boiled and boiled and boiled.   We boiled 35 gallons [8 buckets, 4-5 gallons each] in 12 hours.   Not super efficient, but pretty good.   That'll yeild us about a gallon of syrup when we're all done.    [Plus, the season isn't over yet and we may be able to get a few more buckets of sap off our tree.]

Which brings me to this little reminder.   You get 1 gallon of syrup for every 40 gallons or so of sap.   This means that you have to boil off 39 gallons of water.   Don't try to boil sap in your house.  You do not want 39 gallons of water vapor in your house.     A friend tried it and short circuited the electric in his kitchen.   Don't go there.

That said,   I often finish the syrup in the house, where I can watch it better.    We boil it down almost completely outside, then bring it in for the night and boil off the last gallon or so in the morning.    I put the finished syrup in jars and then use my steam canner to seal them up. 

Wood
Boiling all day takes a lot of wood and you want it to burn hot, so pick your wood carefully and plan ahead.

Use small dry pieces about the size of your forearm or smaller.   You want lots of surface area for burning.   In addition, I put larger pieces on either side to keep the sides a bit cooler [where we're standing and stirring] and to make great coals for cooking on later.  

The fire will need constant supervision to maintain a rolling boil in your pans.  Keep adding wood.

Pans
I use a huge turkey roasting pan that I got for $12 at Goodwill to boil in.  Each part hold 3 gallons.  I fill them both up with sap and as it cooks down, I pour the stuff from the right pan into the left pan.  The stuff in the left pan gets darker and darker, thicker and thicker.   I add new sap only to the right pan.

See that big 3 gallon pot up behind the roasting pans?  [Goodwill $6]  That pot catches a lot of heat from the fire and is an excellent place to pre-warm the sap before it goes into the big pan on the fire.     Prewarming is not necessary, but sure helps speed things up when you have big ice blocks in the sap buckets. 

I use a 4 cup glass measuring cup to move the sap from pan to pan and I use assorted ladles when I need them.     I keep a small strainer [the size that fits atop a wide mouth jar] close by to fish large pieces of ash and bugs out.

Boiling sap over an open fire this way is pretty messy.   Ash gets everywhere.   The occasional bug will fly in.   The pans will be covered, covered!, with soot and have to be scrubbed two or three times to get clean again.

It's worth it.   There is nothing like the smell and taste of your own maple syrup. 

Blue Pollen

The bulbs are starting to bloom in a big way now and the bees are starting to get out and about.  

The bees found the scilla and started collecting the blue pollen.  

You can see the gray blue pollen basket on this one's leg.

Bees only gather one type of pollen at a time.  They take it back to the hive and store it to feed to the brood [larvae] throughout the year.  

Pantry Staples

In 2011 we had a bumper crop of tomatoes, so I canned tomatoes.   And then I canned more.   And then I canned more.

We still have a few jars of them in the pantry.

Which is fabulous because I can take those plain old jars of tomatoes and make them into something wonderful now.   

Like enchilada sauce.    

Because I love enchilada sauce.

I didn't know that I loved enchilada sauce way back in 2011 when I canned these tomatoes.  

It's a good thing they were just plain tomatoes. 

So I took six of those aging quart jars of tomatoes and cooked them down by half and then sieved all the skins and seeds out and made a triple batch of my enchilada recipe and now I have fresh new pint jars of enchilada sauce in the pantry instead of aging quart jars of tomatoes.

Which brings me to my point about pantry staples.  

When you have a surplus, store as much as you can in a simple way that can be used to make other stuff later.   Like in a year.   Maybe after you've discovered something ToDieFor on Pinterest that you didn't even know you loved.   Or your youngest kiddo loved.  

Can a bunch of vegetables plain.  Put up just plain bottles of fruit.   Or freeze it.   Make simple one-fruit jams that can be jazzed up later with a spice or two.

I'm not suggesting that you do all of your canning this way because it's nice to have fancier stuff already made up so all you have to do is open a jar.  

I'm just suggesting that when you have a surplus, get it put up as easily as possible so that you have the flexibility of doing multiple things with it later.   


Make sense?