Awful. Miserable. Interminable.

And I looked at the calendar this weekend and realized that we have a yard full of snow (which at this point is not very picturesque at all) and the entire section of the yard that has the vegetable garden beds in it has had a huge amount of snow shoveled on top of it from the driveway. Which means that even with this week’s glorious weather (sunny, in the 50s every day), while we’ve had some major melting, I’m not going to have a garden bed warm enough to tuck cool weather early season crops into.

Snow is reflective like that.

So, this morning, when I spoke to The Boy, I asked him to do me a bit of a favor and try to unearth one of the beds from the snow. Somehow, the snow, in the melting and then refreezing, etc. had become very icy and heavy, so he only got about half of it done and I had to finish up when I got home. But as you can see from the photo, where he’d cleaned off the snow, the dirt was nice and soft and un-frozen and I dug and scraped off the rest on the bed (though as you can see, there is a bit of snow still frozen there on top of the soil). Depending on what happens to the weather in the next couple of weeks (I might have to put some clear plastic over the bed to help things along), by early April, it might be warm enough to plant things such as:
Lettuces
Kale
Chard
Broccoli
Cauliflower
spring onions
Beets
Chinese and other cabbages

Having something green pop up will be absolutely wonderful.

Wednesday Update: I stuck my handy-dandy extra meat thermometer in the soil this afternoon and it measured 32.9 degrees F. So, we’ve got a whole lot of warming up to do to get that bed to 50 degrees. I’m casting about for whatever we have laying about to use as a frame to raise up and put over the bed that I can cover with a big sheet of plastic to act as a green house. More to come!

But I digress. As many of Aunt Toby’s readers recall, I have a keen interest in small business, in entrepreneurship, in plain old ‘following your passion’. Although long after the 2010 Winter Olympics has faded from the collective memory, in the chronicles of international curling, I am sure that the growth of interest in the sport is going to be tagged to the pants worn by the Norwegian team this year. But my interest in this story actually is in the company which designed and makes these pants, which are technically golf clothing, Loudmouth Golf.

Brown Alumni magazine

Scott Woodworth, “a graphic designer who lives in Sonoma, California, with his wife, Cathy, and sons, Robert, 13, and Bailey, 14, turned his passion for audacious attire and brightly colored geometric designs into a men’s clothing business targeting a particular subspecies of golfer. “Loud mouth guys may be a little obnoxious,” he says, “but deep down they are good guys. You put those pants on, you are going out to tell jokes and have fun.”

“..After he moved to California, he noticed that golfers there dressed in muted tones. That would have to change. So in 2000 he went to the fabric store, bought a bolt of powder-blue stuff that depicted Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck riding in golf carts, and had a local seamstress make him a pair of pants to wear at a charity golf tourney. “They were horrible looking pants,” he says, “and I loved them. Guys kept asking me all day where I got them.”

He found a clothing manufacturer and ordered seventy-two pairs for his newly formed company, Loudmouth Golf. Six weeks after placing a classified ad in Golf Digest, he’d sold half his inventory. He doubled the next order, and before long he’d drafted his children into helping him pack merchandise from his garage. It was good-bye graphic design and hello clothing business.”

The international interest in the pants crashed Woodward’s server and he is scrambling to restock this particular model, with delivery scheduled for April.

For people who dream of having their own business and who feel that all the ‘needs’ that need to be filled are gone, I’d like to mention that crazy pants for golfers are not necessarily something that screams ‘a need needing to be filled’. What Woodward did, by wearing crazy pants to the tournament and getting comments was actually an unconscious form of focus group testing – on the fly, certainly, but testing nonetheless. Woodward’s advantage was that he also realized that there was a market there (the need) that no one else was doing anything about and that he could fulfill (filling it).

A lot of people would like to start a business, but many times they allow their fears of risk or lack of knowledge to stop them. Woodward was a graphic designer – it is not as if he grew up in the garment business (as Isaac Mizrahi did – Mizrahi’s father owned a dress design and manufacturing business). The difference is that Woodward got on the phone, called around, asked questions, found more people who could answer more questions, found more people who could help him, direct him, show him resources for fabric, sewing, manufacturing and so on. And that’s how he started and has grown his business.

Now, you can be sure that there are people already out there, already in the sports clothing business, who are riffing changes on the Norwegian Curling Team’s pants. Maybe they called up some curlers and asked them if they liked the pants or perhaps what they wanted in pants to curl in? Maybe they are producing them in water repellant fabrics for skiers or snow boarders. Maybe they are producing them with bibs. Or matching jackets. Or matching shirts. or with zippers down the legs. Or glow in the dark? Maybe someone has decided that the whole curling pants thing is a fluke – in Canada, the big deal in curling clothing from what I have heard is colorful sweaters. Maybe someone is going to try to reproduce the diamond motif in a heavyweight sweater. A heavyweight sweater with a zip in the front.

Gad. The opportunities are endless.

For one thing, it’s non-directional. It has no warp or weft. It is not knitted. It just IS. And because of that, there are things you can do with it that are more difficult to do with woven or knitted goods, and most of the time, those things are fun and interesting: accessories, trim, that sort of thing.

And now Aunt Toby has to tell you a secret: I am accessories mad. I have always loved them. It’s genetic: My mom had purses out of every skin except I think for fish(and that only because it had not been developed at the time, I think), including several out of species that are frankly out of reach or endangered (same diff) at this point. In many cases, she had shoes that matched the purses. Although if you went through my drawers (well, what holds my clothing etc., not..ahem..the other sort), you’d find more scarves than anything else (I am passionately fond of scarves), I do love a nice purse, an interesting handbag. And my big beef in life is that either I can’t find them or if I can, they are usually out of reach in terms of price. Very annoying indeed.

And the one class of purse that I can NEVER find, either in the size, material, color or price is a clutch. Not one of these:minaudiere

These are not clutches. They are interesting and sort of, IMHO, “carry-able jewelry”, but I am the sort of person who imagines social occasions ending with my being in a mess, needing to call and pay for a cab, a small injury…that sort of thing. You can’t carry a wallet, lipstick, credit cards, a cell phone, Bandaids™, car and house keys, etc. in one of these. At most, you carry A credit card, A lipstick, one of those weeny and flat cell phones, and a car key that actually will get given to the valet to park the car, so you won’t have to put it into the bag at all. Actually, I have seen hard cases for sunglasses that were bigger than some of these socalled evening bags.

Aunt Toby requires something capacious. Not that I want to be able to carry a tire iron, a set of vicegrips™, and a roll of duct tape in my evening bag (although goodness knows, I have had an evening where the experience ended with the DH requiring all of these, but they were in the trunk of the car and were used to haul up and secure the exhaust system so that we could get home in one piece). But invariably, when I go out, I will meet someone who either will want to give me their phone number and email address (or vice versa), or wants my recipe for making biscuits or home-made noodles, or the URL for fabric or interesting covered buttons or canning supplies (all of which Aunt Toby has had tattooed on her brain and can be called up on a moment’s notice). And that requires a pen and at least a small pad. And perhaps a calendar (you see where this is going, I am sure).

Enter: Hot Patterns Plain and Simple Envelope Clutch. Hot Patterns Clutch
“Oversized, lined, slouchy Clutch has a carrying strap on the back and closes with a zipper under the front flap; flap also features concealed magnetic closures. Clutch is completely flat, and the interior has 1 large zippered pocket and a smaller open/cell phone pocket.”

I had already bought some leather, but being the ‘belt and suspenders’ person that I am, I decided to give it a trial run. Not exactly a ‘muslin’ because I wanted it to be something that I could use as intended if it worked out. I also wanted to give a trial to some interfacing that I thought would work well, Pellon™ Peltex. It’s described as ‘firm’ – it’s also described as being a substitute for foamcore™ and cardboard. That should have been a clue that it might have been too firm for the project but I soldiered on.

Aunt Toby is very very bad when it comes to reading directions. My brain doesn’t seem to work the way that the technical writers’ do, and many times what gets me through are my 40+ years of sewing and the drawings and diagrams. In this case, what got me through was Ann Steeves’ experience with the pattern Ann Steeves’ Review
and my giving it a good think in terms of what I thought it looked like on the inside at the after end. (Please note: I did contact the lovely people at Hot Patterns and Trudy offered to ‘fly me in’ using emails, but I am a very stubborn sort of person and seem to feel the need to figure things out myself, even if I end up doing it wrong).
The difficult part for me was visualizing what was happening on the inside on the lining pieces, which have, on one piece, a zippered pocket, and on the other piece (because it comes in two separate pieces), a patch which is separated into a regular pocket and a pleated pocket for a cell phone. The individual techniques involved in making the purse are not difficult at all; here is the list of techniques:

1. Cutting out the pattern pieces. If you are making this from leather, using some sort of marker on the back side of the material is key – you don’t want to use pins to mark this.
2. Cutting out, trimming for seam allowances and then Ironing on interfacing. The interfacing I used produced something that would substitute for a portfolio – very stiff. I need to find an iron-on interfacing for leather that will give it some substance but still allow for the slouchiness.
3. Putting in magnetic fasteners. Marking these on the back of the material is key. Also making sure that you put the opposite part in the proper place on the other side of the front so that when you close the clutch, it will actually lock in place. it helps to give this a trial run before you put the fasteners through the material.
4. Putting in centered zippers. You will need to have 1, 10” zipper for the pocket in the lining and 1, 16” zipper for the opening into the clutch (which is NOT in the top of the bag. You need to visualize this as a grocery bag with the top stapled shut and the opening in one side. That is where the other zipper is going to go).
5. Straight stitching, trimming and cutting corners – this will help give the corners shape.
6. Rolling. (rolling? – yes, rolling) There are several points in the process where you will need to roll the body of the clutch in order to make the sewing easier. One of them is putting on the strap on the back (see Ann Steeves’ photo at the link above). The other place is once you’ve attached the lining pieces to the seam allowances for the opening zipper and then want to sew the lining together. It really helps in terms of sewing the lining pieces together if you roll the front of the bag into a cylinder to keep it out of the way of the needle. Then, when you want to fasten the back of the bag itself to the front, you will want to roll the lining into a cylinder to keep it safe as well. Needless to say, putting Pellon™ Peltex on the felt did NOT make rolling easier.

So, here are the two places where I think people might get frustrated and how to do them.
The front of the clutch:
Once you’ve ironed on your interfacing (if you are going to do that) and put on the magnetic closures corresponding to the marks on the pattern, go to the corresponding lining pieces. One will have a pocket with a zipper on it – do that and put that on the lining piece to correspond to the markings on the pattern. The other one will look much too long for the other piece of the front of the clutch. Don’t panic! This will be folded to provide a protective flap at the entry to the purse.
Put the top and bottom pieces of the purse front together using the magnetic closures – the edges where the zipper is going to go should line up. Baste that edge together, flatten out, and then put in a centered zipper (this is where the bigger zipper goes). Remember, if you are making this out of leather or faux leather or Ultrasuede™ or something like this, don’t use pins..use tape or something because you don’t want to make holes).

Take the piece of lining with the zippered pocket. With it facing you with the pockets opening up, fold toward the wrong side, 5/8”. Take that fold and place it right up on the tape of the zipper, on the larger piece of the bag front. Visualize when you put your hand inside that zipper, it will go into the pockets to pull out your cell phone, right? Tape that down. Flip that over and using a zipper foot, sew next to the original stitching you did to put the zipper in, BUT NOT ALL THE WAY TO THE OUTSIDE EDGES. Remember, we’ve got the be able to roll this thing around to put the lining together and then do the bag outside seams, so you only sew these lining pieces down to the bottom stop and at the top stop.

Take the other piece of lining for the front of the bag – it’s plain right – no pockets, nuthin’. It also looks too big for the other half of the front of the bag. With the wrong side of the bag front facing you, line up the top edge of that top piece of the bag with the top edge of the lining piece. Smooth the lining down to where the other side of the zipper tape is. Secure that in the seam allowances and stitch the lining on the tape all the way through to the other side of the bag. You now will have about 4” of flap. There are directions on the pattern sheet to handle this. Here is what I did (because I am annoying this way): visualizing what I felt this was meant to look like (that is, that there would be a flap across the zippered opening), I folded under a 5/9” hem and sewed that. Then I folded the flap again and secured that against the place where I had sewn the lining to the zipper tape and sewed through all of this. This produced this situation:

Then, with the bag front and the bag front lining facing me(just like in the picture), I put the back of the lining on top and sewed that on, rolling up the bag front as I went so that I would not catch that. You can sew the lining all the way around because you do not need to turn that inside out. At that point, I had this situation with the bag front. My kind assistant opened up the zipper so that you can see the opening, the pocket AND the other zipper, which is part of the zippered pocket in the other part of the lining.

At this point, what you have facing you is the right side of the front of the bag. Placing, right side to right side(making sure you get the strap in the right spot), the back of the bag on top, and rolling away the lining as you go, I sewed three sides of the bag, leaving the fourth open so that I could cut and trim the corners and turn it inside out, putting the finished lining bag into the inside of the purse. I then ironed down the seam allowances at the bottom and sewed those closed to finish the bag.

Materials:
Bag: Wool Felt
Lining: Polyester ‘technical’ taffeta
Magnetic Closures: two sets
Zippers: 1, 10”, 1, 16”
Interfacing: Pellon™ Peltex

Will I make this again: You bet, but with something softer than Peltex, which I think would make terrific bills for newsboy caps but just ruined the look of this. However, having said that, I actually like this; it’s sort of portfolio-y and my son made the observation that it would be a perfect way of sneaking in a mini-laptop into an event. He would think of that.

When I saw that ketchup, I knew that it was time to stock up. Passover is not for another month, but I can tell you that the more unique items (the baking mixes, the salad dressings, the breakfast cereals and the ketchup) tend to disappear quickly. So, if you don’t see any of those items on the display, find the department manager and ask if the store will be getting any more shipments in before Passover. You might even ask the manager whether or not you can order case lots of items for personal purchase.

Not that I am advocating running around to all the stores in your area and buying up all the Passover items, but stores will order more if they think they can sell more. If you don’t see a well stocked Passover display in your area, you might wish to contact your local Jewish community and ask whether they are doing co-op buying for Passover – but do it quickly. Passover is one of those holidays in the religious calendar that is very important and Jewish families will have been planning for this for several weeks at this point.

If nothing else, tuck this fact in the back of your head: There is one time of the year when, if your supermarket has a well-stocked display, you will be able to find products that do not contain grains, corn, or corn sweeteners. And that is the month before Passover.

Eat in good health.

You will need:
Some sort of firm fabric to make a panel of – it needs to be slightly longer than the fly is, and twice as wide. Firm fabric would be twill, denim, the sort of thing Dockers(tm) or Dickies(tm) pants are made from. If it’s lighter than that, make the panel slightly longer than the fly is and three times as wide You’ll be folding the panel in half if it’s firm fabric, into thirds(with one edge inside) if it’s not very firm. You basically need a panel to put buttonholes into, so you need something firm. I put four 3/4″ buttonholes into my panel, with the first about 3/4″ down from the top. You will be tucking the top edge under the waistband seam, so you will therefore end up with the top buttonhole about 1/2″ down.

Buttons – 3 or 4. I’m using 3/4″ wood buttons that I happened to have around. In your abandoned farm house, unless the owner was one of those (ahem, like I am) stashing sewers and has a big collection of buttons still on the cards, you won’t know the size of the button. And you probably won’t have a measuring tape either. But if you have buttons and don’t know the size, lay a measuring tape or ruler on a flat surface and put one of the buttons on it and measure it. Or, if there is no measuring tape available then compare the size across the widest part of the button with the first joint in your thumb. The average size of that part of a person’s body is actually about an inch and that will be a good estimate for how big the button is. That’s the size of the button hole you need to make. Mark the buttonhole placements evenly down the panel. If you have a sewing machine, use that to make your buttonholes and sew on the panel. If you do not have a sewing machine here’s how to make non-machine buttonholes:

Fold your panel into half (or thirds if it’s not really firm fabric) across the width and run an overcast stitch all the way around. Mark the places where you want your buttonholes down the length, as evenly as you can.
Center across the panel the length of the buttonhole you want to make and draw a line that long.
Take a pair of scissors, or (be careful!) a single edged razor blade or other sharp blade and carefully slit open that line. Do that for all the buttonholes you are going to make.
Take a needle and doubled thread and overcast the edges all around (if you know that arcane thing called a buttonhole stitch, use that :Buttonhole stitch
Then, line up the long side of the panel and sew that to the back side of the front panel of the fly – you’ll know where to sew by the original stitches that are in the front – that ‘j’ shaped stitching line.
Then, line up the buttons on the other side of the fly, to correspond with the buttonholes, and sew those on.

And watch the rest of the sewing adventure (and I promise, no zombies..really…)

Very sad. Because basically, what replacing a zip entails is:
1) Finding another zip. If you have another ‘ready for the dump’ pair of jeans with a good zip, then take THAT zip out to use. WARNING: when you are taking it out, just before you remove the whole thing, take a needle and thread, butt up the top of the metal teeth together and sew firmly just above the teeth. These zippers do not have a top stop on them and as I demonstrated in one of the videos, if you just remove it and do the natural thing (which is to zip the zipper closed), then WHOOPS! the zipper pull comes right off in your hand. No more useful zipper. So, sew it together at the top so that you don’t lose the pull off the ends.
If you do not have another zip to use, buy a 9″ metal toothed zipper (these are marketed as ‘jean zippers”) at your local ‘extremely large national chain of whatever passes as a sewing store” these days.
2) Take out the old zip.
3) Lining up the left hand (as it faces you) top of the new zip and snuggle it up underneath both the waistband and the extra flap (see video). Sew down the zip under the flap and with the fly facing.
4) Lining up the right hand top of the new zip underneath the right hand part (as it faces you) of the fly, pin that down and sew it down to the bottom, being careful to ‘take a left’ when you get close to the bottom of the zipper. Be sure to avoid the metal bottom stop. That is a guaranteed ‘needle buster’ if you hit it. Find it and mark it before you start down.

Enjoy the videos. For those folks who do not want to fiddle with a new zip but who DO wish to not embarrass their friends by walking around with undone flies, see Part 2.

This time, it’s slightly different because this particular hen is totally different looking than the other birds and we have a tendency to look out for her because she’s a bantam and about 1/3 the size of the Light Brahmas that she is with. The DH put some of their fertilized eggs under her and she has been a very good mommy so far. To give her more privacy and to put the chicks closer to the ground when they hatch, we moved them into another room, with a heat lamp (that’s why the color in the photographs is so red – the lamp is infrared). Readers who are familiar with the set up we had to raise the Light Brahmas when they arrived last year will remember this plywood box with the holes in it – we are reusing this as a corral to help keep the hen and her chicks inside and help hold the heat in as well.

Now, I probably should have read up more on moving broody hens – it can throw them off completely, which it did to this particular LRH. Once we’d moved her, she seemed to have no interest at all in getting back on those eggs, which considering it’s February, we were pretty concerned about. So, the DH tried a trick with an old lined curtain we had up there. He got her back into the nesting box (which my son had made out of three old feeding pans we had) and tucked the curtain all around her to block off the light. The next morning when he went out to feed her and give her more water, she was all cuddled down on top of the eggs and had gotten into the whole rhythm of the thing again. She jumps out, does her business, takes a drink, eats a little and is right back on the eggs again. Another method that supposedly works is to move a broody hen only at night, which I think the DH reproduced with the curtain.

Whew.

H-Day (hatching day) is now estimated at mid-week or so, so we’ll have to keep an eye out. Stay tuned.

The DH has been collecting some of the most sorry examples of his work pants for a while, in the hopes that Aunt Toby would take pity on him and rebuild a couple of pairs. Rebuild? Yes, rebuild because by the time I get them, it’s a question of picking out the least worst pair and then using the worst worst pair as the resource for the patches. In my house, the fronts of the pants are usually the worst spots, as you can see from the photo at the top of the post. So, the backs of the legs are usually in the best condition and that’s where I go on the ‘worst worst’ to find pieces large enough to cover rips such as these. As you can see from the top, this rip goes pretty much from about 4″ above the knee down through the shin.

These jeans are actually in pretty decent condition with not only this major repair in the front, but also two worn spots just at the bottom of the rear end on both sides which need attention as well. Otherwise, they are good heavy weight pants that the DH could get a lot of work wear from in the future. These are not going to be something he’s going to wear out to the library or to go shopping, so my goal is to save the pants for him.

The first thing with something like this is to stabilize the area where that big repair will be and I do that from the back. First, I trim off all the odd fibers around the rip and turn the pants leg inside out and iron it down. Then I use a lightweight iron-on fusible interfacing all across the leg in that area. A little strip across the rip is not going to do the job for this. Since the edges of the rip don’t meet, I put a piece of muslin underneath so that when I iron on the interfacing, it doesn’t stick to the other side of the pants.

Everyone who does patches has their own way of doing things. I’ve tried many different ways – hemming the edges, not hemming the edges, interfacing the patches, and so on. With heavy blue jeans, I find what works is this:
First, unless this is a little rip of just a couple of inches, I make a patch that goes across the entire side seam to side seam. I can’t count the number of times I have done a little patch and then a couple of months later, two inches away, another area fails and I have to start again. So, to avoid the entire deal, I cover everything.
Second, I do not hem the patch. I’ve broken too many needles trying to get through all those layers on the pants and the patch.
Third, unless the rip goes across a seam, I avoid that completely since you’ve already got multiple layers there; a patch on top of that is another sure ‘needle-breaker’.
Fourth, I use a close zigzag (like stitching a buttonhole)all around the patch.
Fifth, I don’t use thread that is totally polyester or nylon – it shreds under this sort of stitching. I use combo-polyester and cotton or cotton only and a machine needle made for heavyweight fabrics.

Now, I’m pretty lucky. The DH likes his blue jeans loose in the legs, boot cut. I would not try this with tapered leg jeans because I would get myself into too tight a spot down toward the bottom of the leg of the jeans, but with a pant leg this loose, I can keep stitching across, down, across the bottom and back up to the top of the patch, rolling and unrolling the leg as I go. It makes a really good solid patch that usually outlives the rest of the blue jeans and my husband gets a lot of good wear out of them before they go beyond my ability to save them.

And what I wanted to do was reassure readers that there is nothing you can’t do with a kitchen stove that you cannot do with a grill, gas or charcoal. Now, the DH really made me work for this; I wanted him to put the grill in the entry to the garage so that frankly I’d be out of the wind and the snow (it’s in the mid-20s here and windy today), but he said I had to play it straight so that people would know that even under brutal conditions, this could be done. Well, I don’t know how brutal the conditions were (I kept getting smoke in my eyes, which is why I look sooooo happy there in the videos – I’ll bet Martha Stewart doesn’t have anyone telling HER she has to do demos the hard way), but I picked two things to illustrate just how easy doing this can actually BE: baking bread and making a fritata with potatoes, veggies, eggs and cheese.

A couple of notes and tricks here:
1) Again, don’t bring any grill into your house to cook on under emergency conditions. Period. It’s nice if you can do this on the deck and out of the wind but I did this under wind with a bit of snow. Can be done.
2) Don’t use pots and pans with bakelite(tm) or wooden handles – even if you do not have open flames, you are working with extremely hot coals and those two substances will burn and melt. My bread pan is made of Pyrex(tm) – I covered the outside with aluminum foil and greased the inside. The frying pan is an extremely long-in-the-tooth cast aluminum pan whose handle bit the dust many years ago. Again, I greased it heavily on the inside and also mixed a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in with the chopped up veggies that went into the fritata.
3) Don’t forget the hotpads and oven mitts.
4) If your grill has a temperature gauge, this is great. We started cooking the fritata ingredients when the gauge read 275 degrees, but again, the temperature at the ‘business end’ of the grill (that is, inside the pan) is not necessarily going to be the same; I’m sure it was much higher than 300 given how fast everything cooked. The breadpan was on the upper ‘indirect’ cooking area, both raising and cooking at the same time. After the fritate was done, I moved it to the center, where it would be warmer for the final cooking and browning. The bread was only there for 15 minutes before it was completely baked and brown on the top.
5) If your grill does not have a temperature gauge, use a probe if you have one. If not, use the ‘count to three’ test. If you can hold your hand about 6″ over the grill and it’s hot enough that you can only hold it there for a count of three, the fire is hot enough to cook with. Bank the coals down to a bed.
6) Some other ideas for cooking on the grill if you have:
A heavy cast iron or cast aluminum Dutch Oven with a metal or Pyrex(tm) lid: soup, stew or chili. And once it’s done, you can move the pot over to the side to keep it warm for hours.
A heavy cast iron or cast aluminum griddle: eggs, English muffins from scratch, pancakes, Mexican foods, stir fry.
A heavy aluminum saucepan with either a Pyrec(tm) or a metal lid – you can use this for anything that requires cooking in or heating up liquid: water for coffee or tea, soup, pasta and rice.

There are people out there who take every opportunity to do what is euphemistically called “camp cooking”, and have whole armories of cast iron and heavy enamel cookware that can be used to bake bread, rolls, muffins, cornbread (and cornbread sticks), fry anything, make coffee, you name it. For more information, go GSI
Camping Cookware
Outdoor Cooking
For recipes and all sorts of tips, search on ‘campfire cooking’ and ‘cast iron cooking’.

For the rest of the cooking adventure:

Bon Appetit!

There are certain times of the year when I can do and demo certain activities in more efficient ways. It’s not that I can’t demo canning in the middle of winter, but it’s a lot easier at the height of the summer when I have a lot of veggies available. But there are certain rhythms to the year so for readers who might have an interest (or who might want to ask for something specific), here is what I’m planning over the next couple of weeks:

Gardening: I’m going to have to transplant all the seedlings in a major sort of way and move them to our unheated greenhouse. I’ll probably be starting more seeds. I also am thinking about cleaning off one of the beds out in the garden and setting up my own mini hoop house out there, to see how fast the soil warms up and how quickly I can get things into the garden this year.

Chickens: We’ve got a broody hen. Between about Feb. 19 and the 25th, either we’re going to have chicks…or not. So I will be covering that. But in the meantime, we have to move them out of the room where she is nesting with the other much larger chickens. The nest needs to be closer to the ground and we need to have them acclimated to that and the heat lamp and so on.

Cooking: With all of these storms and power outages, I have offered that using a backyard grill to cook on is a definite option. I’d like to offer some experiments to show what we can do. Any specific suggestions for what people would like to see: pizza, baking bread or cookies, soup/chili/stew, pasta? Testing regular kitchen cookware vs cast iron? Just let me know.

Sewing: I have the rest of a wardrobe all planned out (green wool jersey dress et al.), but one thing I have never done with a home sewing machine is work with leather. I have a simple handbag pattern and some scrap leather and want to experiment with how this will work.

Anything else? We’re open to all sorts of questions and ideas. We’re here to serve you guys – anything that will complete the following sentence is up for grabs:

“You know, I’ve always wanted to learn how to …………………..”

Go for it! Leave your ideas and questions in the comments or send me an email at: aunttoby@kitchencountereconomics.com