This is the time of year where you can’t leave your car windows rolled down, for fear that your neighbors will jam zucchini through the window and run away.  And if you hear the doorbell, you better get there before the person runs away and leaves a basket of orphan zucchini on the porch.  Unless you’re me.  For some reason, I can’t manage to raise prolific zucchini out here.  I tried planting three zucchini plants this year, just to have enough…and they turned out to be yellow squash.  Well drat.  On the other hand, I can honestly say to friends, “Yes, I’d love some!” when they offer me excess zucchini, so I suppose that’s my lot in life, to be the sink for others’ zucchini overload.

Why do I want zucchini in the first place?  I have to say, the primary reason is the following recipe.   It’s probably my favorite cake.  It’s moist, and not overwhelmingly chocolate, and has just enough orange to be different.  And did I mention that it’s moist?  Amazingly moist.  So good.  And crazy easy.  Anyone can do this, seriously.  You might find yourself wishing for more zucchini!  (Incidentally, one medium zucchini will generally suffice for the three cups called for.)

Chocolate Orange Zucchini Cake

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 3/4 cup butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 cup milk
• 3 cups grated zucchini
• 1 Tbsp orange zest
• 1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup plus 2 Tbls fresh squeezed orange juice
• 1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour regular bundt pant. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beat well. Add 1 tsp vanilla and the milk, beat well. Stir in the dry ingredients, mix until well blended. Fold in zucchini and zest and 2 Tbls of the orange juice.

Pour into prepared bundt pan. Bake for 50-60 minutes until a toothpick inserted halfway between the edge and the center comes out clean. Allow to cool.

When cake is completely cool, invert onto a serving dish. In a small bowl, combine the powdered sugar, orange juice, and 1 tsp vanilla until smooth and it drizzles easily. Pour glaze over the cake.

Strawberry season is either nearly over or completely over, depending on where you are in the country.  (We have maybe a week more here…got a late start this year!)  Raspberries are up next, then we’ll be into boysenberries, marionberries, tayberries, blackberries, blueberries…yum.

I had so many strawberries this year, I made four batches of jam, two gallons of strawberry ice cream, a batch of strawberry shortcake, and now a strawberry pie.  Strawberry pie is one of my favorite ways to eat fruit.  This recipe works with just about any berry, though.

I eated a piece before I thought to take a picture...

Whatever Berry Pie

• About 3 pints of whatever berries you have (all the same or a mixture)
• 1 cup of sugar (more if they are really tart, less if they are super sweet)
• 2 Tbls Clear Jel (or corn starch)
• Water
• One blind-baked pie crust (just means you baked it with nothing in it)*

Wash your berries.  Remove stems and cores from strawberries.  Line your baked pie crust with about two pints of the berries, depending on their size.  Don’t fill the crust all the way; leave room for the jelled part of the filling.  You can slice strawberries or leave them whole, other berries you can just pour into the pie crust.

Put the remaining berries into a saucepan, and crush with a potato masher or some other mashing instrument.  Add the sugar.   Pour about 3/4 cup of cold water into a small glass, add the 2 Tbls of Clear Jel or corn starch, and stir until completely dissolved.  Pour this into the berries and sugar.  Stir well.  Cook on medium heat, stirring constantly.  Bring to boil, and boil until the mixture thickens and turns clearer, about3-5 minutes.   Pour the thickened berry mixture over the fruit in your pie crust.  Stick in fridge until firmly set, several hours to overnight.  Serve with ice cream or whipped cream.

*So, er, about the pie crust.  You can get a premade frozen one at the store, and just bake it at 425 for about 20 minutes, and that’s fine.   Or you can get some of the Pillsbury pre-rolled dough, put it in your pie pan, and then do the same.  Or you can get a Krusteaz “just add water” mix, roll it out, then put it in the pie pan and bake.   (If you do either of the latter two, you should use a pie chain, pie weights, or dried beans to hold the crust down flat and prevent it from bubbling up or shrinking.)

Or you can make your own crust.  It’s not that hard.  It’s just a step further than the Krusteaz, really.  And it tastes better.

Pie Crust (one double crust or two single crust)

• 2 1/2 cups of all purpose flour, pastry flour, or a combination (I like about 1 cup of pastry flour to 1 1/2 cups of all purpose)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup of very cold butter, lard and/or shortening (I usually use 1/2 cup of butter, 1/2  cup of lard or shortening)
• Ice water

Measure the flour into a bowl.  Stir in the salt.  If you are using a combination of fats, take the shortening or lard and “rub” it into the flour, with your hands.  You’re aiming for a texture like corn meal or crumbs.  Then dice the butter finely and toss into the flour mixture.  Mix as little as possible, but distribute the butter evenly.  (If you’re using all one kind of fat, rub it all in, or cut it in with a pastry cutter or two knives.  It will just have a shorter flake to the crust is all.)   The final texture should be like coarse meal, and it should still have bits of fat in it.

Sprinkle the flour mixture with 1/4 cup of ice water, and toss with a fork.  Add more ice water and toss the mixture gently until it’s all dampened, and you can squeeze it into a ball.  Don’t knead, just gather and press.  The goal is to work the dough as little as possible, and keep it as cold as possible to keep the fats from melting into the flour.

Divide the dough in half.  Put one half in a ziploc bag in the fridge, save for another pie.   On a floured board and with a floured rolling pin, roll out your dough into a circle to fit your pie pan.  It’s easier to transfer to the pie pan if you roll it  up on your rolling pin, put it over the pan, then unroll it.  Flute the edges with your fingers, or just trim the dough to the edge of the pan.   Fill the crust with a pie chain, pie weights, or dried beans, and bake at 425 for 20-25 minutes until lightly brown.  Cool completely before filling with the berries.

Today was one of those days where I puttered in the garden.  “I don’t want to weed the garlic,” I thought. “Well, maybe I’ll just pull that one big weed.”  And I pulled it.  And it came out easily, and then I thought, “Well, maybe just one more.”  Before I knew it, I’d weeded all 40-ish square feet of garlic, and then I just sat there and watched the garden, and watched my kid untangling the red and silver streamers meant to keep the birds out of the strawberries (they work, incidentally.)   I glanced over and saw the top of one garlic plant all curled over and pointy.  Huh.  A scape.  I’d read about them last year, but had ignored mine and allowed them to go to bulblets and fall off on their own.  I reached over and pulled it off and bit into it experimentally.  Yup.  Garlic.  Kinda tasty.  I ate the rest of it slowly, and the thought occurred to me that with plants like these, or their wild cousins, it’d be easier to forage and cook yummy foods in survival mode.

A pile of garlic scapes from my garden. About 3/4 of a pound.

Garlic scapes are the curly tops of hardneck garlic.  They come out in the late spring (or here, with such a damp and dark spring, they’re just ready now.)  They are edible, and they taste like a cross between garlic and an onion.   I’ve never seen them in a farmer’s market, but I’m told sometimes people sell them at local farmer’s markets and fancy grocery stores.  They only come out once a year, so once they’re cut, they’re gone.  I’ve heard that if they sit on too long, they become stringy and hard, about they time they start to form little bulblets.  You can let them do that, and the bulblets can be planted to make more garlic, but it takes a long time for garlic planted that way to become viable; planting from bulb cloves is easier and quicker.  I’ve also heard that if you leave them on, it makes your garlic smaller, because the plants are putting their effort into their bulblets instead of growing large bulbs.  And that if you leave them on, it makes the garlic you do harvest store better and longer.   I left mine on last year, and my bulbs were small, and they stored very very well, so there may be something to that.

Garlic scape pesto. My cow butter dish approves.

So what do you do with a garlic scape?  I made pesto tonight.  It’s a brilliant, bright green; if you’ve only ever had pesto from a restaurant or a store, you’re probably used to a kind of dark to forest green color.  Freshly made pesto, especially with scapes, is almost electric colored.  Really good.  It has a fresh bite, but it’s not as overpowering as you’d think it would be.

Garlic Scape Pesto

• 1/2 pound garlic scapes
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup pine nuts
• 2 oz sharp sheep cheese, like peccorino or manchego
• olive oil

In the bowl of a food processor, combine the scapes, salt, pine nuts, and cheese.    If you have the little insert cup with the hole in the bottom for drizzling olive oil into a mixture, fill that up and turn on the processor and let it run until the mixture is smooth.  If you don’t, drizzle some in slowly through the chute as it blends.   You may need to stop and scrape down the sides of the processor once in a while.  If your scapes are a little tougher or older, you can sautee them first in a few spoonfuls of olive oil.  You’ll only need a few minutes, until they soften.  A blender will work in place of a food processor in a pinch, but it’s harder to get things smooth.

Toss with hot linguine or fettucine, and top with grated parmesan or reggiano cheese (or feta, if you’re adventurous.)  Refrigerate leftovers in an air-tight container.  Be aware that the pesto will darken in the fridge, and that’s normal.   Freezes well.  One way to freeze is to use an ice cube tray, fill the holes up with pesto, freeze solid, then turn out the cubes into a plastic bag.  Thaw as many cube-sized portions as you need for a meal!

The finished linguini. And freshly made tomato basil soup. Nom!

Rheum rhubarbarum sounds like some character out of a bad space opera, but it’s the scientific name of rhubarb.  Just one of those weird little trivia tidbits that get lodged in the wrinkles in my brain, probably because I’ve always liked the sound of it.   And right now, rhubarb is on my mind!

Three of my four monster rhubarb. That bed is 4 feet wide for scale.

About 10 years ago, when I got my first house with a yard, I planted a vegetable garden, including a small spindly rhubarb plant.  I didn’t know what rhubarb was for.  I’d never eaten rhubarb.  But I knew it was edible, and it had a cool name, and was supposedly easy to grow.  And it was inexpensive, and what the heck.  I planted it.  It grew.  Happily.  For two years, without me harvesting a single stalk…because I wasn’t really sure about it.  I’d walk by it and give it the hairy eyeball once in a while, as it started to look more and more like something out of Little Shop of Horrors.   I was mildly afraid it would grow pods, and then the neighborhood would be taken over by vegetable replicas of my neighbors.

And then one day, my mother in law saw it, and asked if she could have some of it.  “Um…sure.  What do you do with it?”  I didn’t even know how to harvest it, or how to tell if it was ripe.  She just ripped half a dozen stalks off at the base, and took it home and made a pie.  When we had dinner at her house later, my husband offered me a taste of his piece of pie, since I’d never had any.  I took a bite, and then took his plate and told him to go back and get himself a slice.  It’s amazing stuff for something that looks like red celery on growth hormones.

Since then, we’ve moved, and I transplanted my rhubarb.  I also split it, and now I have four giant alien mounds out living amongst the strawberries and asparagus.  It keeps us in ample rhubarb, which apparently you can’t get in parts of the country.  Alas for them!

Rhubarb leaves cast in concrete, for a future pond waterfall.

If you’ve never harvested rhubarb, here’s how to tell if it’s ripe:  Is the stalk big enough to use?  That’s pretty much it.  It’s always “ripe”.   To harvest it, grab a stalk down low and twist while you pull, to tear the entire stalk off at the base.  Discard the kind of woody base end, and remove and discard the leaf.  The leaves aren’t technically poisonous, but they contain extremely high levels of oxalic acid, which can damage your kidneys and stomach, and really is about the same as if they were poisonous. Don’t eat them.  Do make yard art with them.

And what to do with your rhubarb?  How about a buckle?  I’m rather fond of buckles, and I made this one the other day for my husband, to deal with the annual excess of rhubarb.

Rhubarb Ginger Buckle

Ingredients
¼ cup unsalted butter
½ cup sugar
1 large egg
¾ cup all purpose flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups rhubarb, diced

Topping
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 cup finely diced  candied ginger

Preheat the oven to 350.  Butter an 8 inch pan.

In the bowl of a mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add the egg, beat until thoroughly mixed.

In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and salt.

Add the dry ingredients and milk to the butter mixture, alternating dry with milk, and beat until smooth.

Pour the batter into the 8 inch pan, spread out to cover the bottom of the pan.  Distribute the rhubarb evenly over the batter.  It will probably cover most of the batter to the point of it being hidden, and that’s okay.

To make the topping, in a small bowl combine the sugar, flour, cinnamon, grated ginger and diced ginger.  Add the cold butter, and cut in with a pastry blender or two knives until the mixture is crumbly.  Sprinkle the mixture evenly over the top of the rhubarb.

Bake 40-45 minutes, or until the topping is golden brown.  The center will remain very moist; a cake tester is not accurate for this dish.

Serve warm or at room temperature.  Excellent with vanilla ice cream or fresh whipped cream.

I remember when I was first really learning to cook from scratch, I tried making bread a few times.  Abject.  Failure.  Invariably, the bread would rise high and then crash in the oven, becoming brick-like and flat, even indented, on top.  Eventually I learned how to make decent “rustic” breads, but making white bread kept eluding me.  The kneading.  The “doubling”.  The fussiness of it all.  But I decided a couple of years ago that it would not remain the one basic baking skill I lacked, so I learned to make it.

I started with a no-knead bread because it seemed pretty non-intimidating, and worked my way up from there, to finally tackling White Sandwich Bread, which for some reason I’ve always seen as the Master’s Level Course in Bread Baking.  Turns out, it wasn’t that hard.  Who knew?

First, I use my stand mixer.  I have a Kitchen Aid, and I love it.  LOVE it.  Seriously, if my house were on fire and my kid and husband were already out, I’d have a hard time deciding between my photo albums and my Kitchen Aid. (Okay, not really, but I love it a lot.)  The dough hook means no hand kneading, which is a bonus for me, since I have tendonitis in one wrist, and that kind of hard kneading motion leaves me in pain for days.   It’s got a large bowl, and it serves well for rising as well as mixing.

And second, I use a good recipe and good ingredients, fresh yeast and good flour being the keys here.  I find that recipes that call for “packages” of yeast are a little more prone to failure than recipes that actually call for a measured amount, but that may just be my experience with a particular recipe or particular brand of packaged yeast.  (Plus, packaged yeast is MUCH more expensive per ounce than a jar of yeast.  Keep it in the fridge, it will last months.  Keep it in the freezer, it’ll last even longer, but if you don’t warm it up before you use it, it’ll take longer to “wake up.”)

I thought I’d share my favorite “sandwich bread” recipe.  I don’t often use it for sandwiches, I admit; I tend to just slice and eat it.  But it is SO good with fresh turkey, or as toast…

A loaf with a buttered top, straight from the oven.

Stupidly Easy White Bread

(Adapted from King Arthur Flour)

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons instant yeast
• 1 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3 Tablespoons sugar
• 4 Tablespoons butter (room temperature is best)
• 1/4 cup dry milk
• 1/4 cup potato flour or instant mashed potato flakes
• 1 1/8 cups lukewarm water (give or take, start with a cup and add the rest if needed)

Attach the dough hook to your stand mixer, and put all of the ingredients in the bowl of your mixer.   Don’t worry about making a well, or adding the sugar and yeast first, or whatever.  Just glob them all in and turn on the machine.  Mix until the dough is soft and smooth, about 5-7 minutes.  Overmixing isn’t really a problem with this dough, so if you’re in doubt, keep mixing.  You might need to add a little bit of water or a little bit of flour to achieve the right texture.  I would err on the side of too little flour, as the more you add, the heavier the bread will be.   Remove the bowl from the stand mixer, throw a tea towel over it and let it rise for an hour until it’s puffy.  Don’t worry about letting it double, just let it get puffy.  (I often rise mine in my top oven while cooking something in the lower oven.  Just enough heat without too much.)

Grease an 8 1/2″ by 4 1/2″ loaf pan.  Take the dough out of the bowl and shape into a log that will fit nicely in the pan.  You can do it on a work surface, but I usually just manipulate it in midair and flop it in the pan.  Cover with the tea towel or a proof cover and let rise again, about an hour.  This time you want to wait until the dough has risen about an inch above the rim of the pan.  I find the second rise goes faster than the first almost every time for me, but YMMV.

Preheat your oven to 350.

Remove the cover from your loaf pan and bake the bread for 35 to 40 minutes.  Err on the side of too long, or the interior may not be thoroughly cooked.  If the loaf starts to get too brown, cover with tinfoil for the last 15 minutes.

Remove the bread from the oven, and it should turn out of the pan easily.  Put it on a wire rack to cool.  If you want a softer, “sandwich bread” type crust, brush the top with melted butter while the bread is still warm.  Cool it completely before you cut.  I know, it’s hard to wait with warm bread, but this type really does cut better if you wait until it’s completely cool.

Happy Mardi Gras!  Or Fat Tuesday.  Or day before Ash Wednesday.  Or “last chance to pig out before Lent”.   Or something.  Being neither Catholic nor from the South, it’s all very nebulous to me.  Mostly to me it means purple/green/gold, beads, masks, and King Cake.  I realize none of the above really have anything to do with homesteading, or raising food, or being self sufficient, or honeybees, or anything much at all I usually talk about here.  But hey, home-baked goodness associated with a party, I need no more excuses than that!

I remember the first time I tried a King Cake.  I was working at a Behemoth-Sized Telecom Company in Bellevue, WA, and one of my coworkers brought one in.  He apparently was from the South, or his family was, or he’d been there, or something.  I’m vague on the details except for the cake.   Anyway, the idea of this big, sloppy-looking pastry with a plastic baby baked inside was interesting enough to stick in my head.

This year, I found a recipe for King Cake, and decided to make one for Fat Tuesday.  Here’s the recipe, happy Fat Tuesday!

King Cake

• 1/2 cup warm water
• 4 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast
• 1/2 cup sugar, plus two teaspoons (separate)
• 4 cups all purpose flour, plus a bit extra
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• zested rind of one orange
• zested rind of a lemon
• 1/2 cup warm milk
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 5 egg yolks
• Little Plastic Baby (like a Cake Wrecks Carrot Jockey)
• 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 3 Tbls lemon juice (use that one you just zested)
• 1 Tbl water
• Purple, green, and gold coarse sugar crystals

In a small (but not TOO small) bowl, mix the yeast with the warm water and 2 teaspoons of sugar.  Set it aside in a warm, draft-free place for 15 minutes.  If you don’t use a big enough bowl, you may return to find it’s crawled out of the bowl in search of a new home, so use one that holds at least a cup and a half.

In the large bowl of a mixer (preferably a stand mixer), combine the flour, the rest of the sugar, salt, spices, and the zests.   Stir a little bit.  When the yeast has proofed for 15 minutes, add it to the mixing bowl along with the warm milk, melted butter, and egg yolks.  Mix until thoroughly combined.

Knead on a lightly floured surface, or be lazy like me and use the dough hook on the stand mixer.  That’s why they were invented.  Add a little bit more flour as you work, until the dough is no longer sticky (don’t add more than a tablespoon or two at a time; the more flour you add, the tougher your cake will be.)  Knead until smooth, then transfer to a greased bowl.  Cover with a warm, wet towel, and let rise for 1 1/2 hours.

After the rise, turn the dough out onto your kneading surface, punch down (that means deflate it.)   Roll into a long tube.  Grease up a cookie sheet, and shape the tube into a ring.  You can use a can or a jar in the middle to hold the center open.  Rewet the towel with warm water, wring out, and cover your dough ring.   Allow to rise again for 40-45 minutes.   About 10 minutes before the end of the rise, preheat your oven to 350.

After the dough has risen, remove the can or jar and bake 30 minutes, until cake is golden brown and you want to grab it out and eat it hot.

Remove from oven, cool for 30 minutes  (really.  You can do this.)   Flip it over and drill that baby somewhere into the bottom of the cake.  Hide it well.  (You can theoretically bake the baby right IN the cake, but no thanks on the plastic being baked in my food….)

Make a glaze by combining the powdered sugar and the lemon juice and water.  Mix until it’s “drizzly”.  Drizzle over the cake, and sprinkle with the sugar crystals.  Most of the time, these cakes are pretty ugly, so don’t worry too much about style.

Dig in.  WATCH OUT FOR THAT BABY!  If you get the Carrot Jockey in your slice, you get to make the next King Cake.  Lucky you.  Save the baby until next year, and pass it on to some other unsuspecting soul in a slice of cake.

A week or two ago, I wandered into a European deli to peruse the foodstuffs, all with labels I couldn’t read.  I didn’t care.  It was fun to look at the foods and try to figure out what they were without benefit of, y’know, words.  (Try it some time, and think about what it must be like to be an immigrant who speaks no English.  Double points if you are trying to figure out which medication to buy… )  After my round of “guess what that is”,  I ended up buying some fresh farmer’s cheese pierogis, a chocolate bar filled with crystallized honey (NOM!), and a green glass bottle with a picture of a rose on it.  I assumed, and it turned out correctly, that it was rose flavored soda of some sort.  I would have been more certain about the contents if the bottle next to it hadn’t had a picture of grass on it.  Found out later that buffalo grass is apparently a popular flavor.  Okay.

Now let’s be clear here.  I don’t generally like soda pop.  Fizzy drinks containing lots of sugar give me stomach aches.  I don’t do HFCS if I can help it, and I don’t do artificial sweeteners of any kind.  Lets out most sodas except for some flavored soda waters, and frankly, I prefer still water to fizzy water anyway, so I might as well just stick to my iced or hot tea, or water.  Except for this lovely, lovely rose soda.  I’ve been obsessing about it ever since I tasted it.  I have a weakness for things flavored with rosewater, like Shrewsbury cakes and Turkish Delight.   But the rose soda is over $2 a bottle, and honestly, I can’t tell what’s in it, since I can’t read the label.  So yesterday, I bought a bottle of plain sparkling water and commenced to experiment.

Rose Petal Fizzy Water

• 3 capfuls of rosewater (distilled rose petals and water, nothing else.  Make your own or buy in a Middle Eastern deli, about $4.50 a bottle.)
• 1-2 Tbls of honey, depending on taste.   One is plenty for me.
• 16 oz of fizzy water, brand of your choice.  Unflavored, unsweetened.

Put the honey in a glass, add the rosewater, and add about 1/3 of a glass of the fizzy water.  Stir well.  This will make the fizzy water in the glass go a little bit flat, but it’s enough liquid to dissolve the honey.  Top off with the rest of the fizzy water, and add ice if desired.  Drink.

Not only does this have no HFCS and nothing artificial,  if you use raw honey it has enzymes and trace minerals.  Don’t overdo it, though, as honey still has about 60 calories a tablespoon.   The rosewater and fizzy water are calorie free.   Would be excellent on a hot day, though I’m not waiting for hot weather to drink some!

Last week we had some very cold weather, with the chance of snow.  Snowpocalypse, if you listened to the news.  Right.  We never saw any snow where I live, but it did get down considerably cold for a few days.  I worried a bit about my smallest hive at that point, but there wasn’t much I could do in the way of opening up the hive, as it would chill them terribly;  given how tiny a hive it is, I didn’t want to take the chance.

So this week rolls around, and the temperatures are up in the 50′s.  In mid-January.  Good grief.  That’s warm enough the bees are stirring, stretching their wings, going for elimination flights (think “finally get to poo outside the hive for the first time in weeks”), cleaning the dead bees off their porches and out of the bottoms of the hives, and generally getting busy.  The bad news is, it will also make them more active and in turn cause them to consume more of their stores of honey, because there are no flowers out now for them to eat.

Since I have that one hive which is really, really small (only one brood box, and even that wasn’t completely full before winter set in) and which I think has been the target of raiding, I decided that particular hive might need some TLC to get through the winter.  While I’m not generally a proponent of feeding the bees, that’s  because I prefer to leave them their own honey to eat rather than stealing their hard-earned natural food source and making them eat nutrient-void sugar water.  In this case, the little tiny hive didn’t store much honey at all this year, and I’m somewhat concerned that they’ll run out before there are flowers for them to harvest.  I’m also basically out of the honey I harvested this fall, and I have no easy way to feed something liquid back to them at this point anyway.  So, I made them some Bee Candy (fondant patties) to give them, so I could place it inside the hive on top of the bars of the box they’re living in and hopefully get them some extra calories.

My experience making the bee candy was less than stellar.  First off, I didn’t line the pan well enough, and then I didn’t let the syrup cool enough before I poured it into the pan, so it all ran around behind the waxed paper and made the paper completely pointless.  Then it wouldn’t set up.  Just.  Would.   Not.  I poured some of it out onto parchment paper squares, thinking I’d put the thick blobby syrup-coated paper in the hive.  Well, it was thick, but it oozed so far eventually it ran onto the counter a bit.  But then it started to SET.  It got crystalline, and when it was done, I had some cakes of sugar I could easily peel off the paper and take out to the hive.   So…ultimately a success for my purposes, but not exactly what I’d deem the best way to do things!

Today I took one of the cakes of sugar out to the teeny hive.    Given the low levels of activity, I just rolled up my shirtsleeves and tucked my hair into a cap, and had Todd help me open the hive.  It’s a Warre hive, so first I checked the quilt and filling for moisture levels.  The fir chips I’d put in there as insulation were fairly wet, but the quilt itself was dry, and the inside of the hive had no moisture on the walls at all, so yay!   Gonna equip my one Langstroth hive with a similar quilt for moisture control in the spring, I think.  After that, I peeped in at the bees.   I was surprised, they were fairly industrious and building comb upward from the bottom box.  (Not the best way to build comb, but at least I can tell they’ve been active instead of just laying in the hive dying or something. )   The comb I had put in there last fall to help feed them a little was nowhere in evidence *, though it was probably just disassembled and remade into that bottom-up, empty comb I saw.   I put the sugar cake in next to the bits of comb they’d built, and closed the hive back up.  I hope that by feeding them inside the hive like that they won’t be as prone to robbing anymore.  Last year I made the thoughtless mistake of putting a piece of honeycomb on their porch.  It had broken off when I was inspecting a hive, and I just put it next to their entrance.  Not the wisest move.  Pretty sure the other two nearby hives saw that as Open Season on the smallest hive.

I didn’t open up either of the other two Warre hives.  They were both abuzz with activity and bees, and their porches were clean-swept, so I have no particular concerns about them and just left them alone.  One of those was the hive I took the 3/4 full deep off of last fall, and they both have three boxes full to the top of comb, honey, brood, and bees.  (Well, the brood and bees have retracted for winter, but they’re still pretty full!)

I did go over and peep at the Top Bar hive.  Their activity level out front was rather low, but that’s attributable to a couple of things,  after further examination.  One, their winter cluster is in the very BACK of the hive this year, as I verified by opening up the observation window.   And two, they’ve almost completely shut down their hive entrance with propolis, so that there’s literally about a 2″ gap for bees to enter and exit on the West side of the opening.  I’m sure they’ve done that primarily because they get so much rain and weather coming in aimed at their front door that it helps keep the water out, but it also may help them with the yellow jackets and wasps that tend to frequent that side of the yard.   And though having somewhat fewer bees than at their peak, they are still basically stuffed to the gills, and will likely swarm in spring if I don’t do a split.

I should go over and check on my Langstroth hive if I get a chance, too, but it’s 30 minutes away in my parents’ backyard.  I have big plans for it this spring which will need to be put into action as soon as we are likely to only have days in the 40′s and 50′s.  First part of it involves inserting entirely new, foundationless deeps under the two ancient crusty deeps, and then removing the top nasty brood box as they vacate it for the new stuff.  Repeat to get rid of the second nasty brood box.   Then if we have time I’ll add a queen excluder and a super.  We’ll see.  Mostly I’m concerned with rehabilitating their yucky neglected home more than I am with getting honey out of them this year!

BEE CANDY

• 2 cups sugar (I use organic sugar, which is evaporated cane juice)
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 Tbls corn syrup (not HFCS)

Put the ingredients in a saucepan, and bring to a boil while stirring.  When all the sugar has dissolved and it boils, clip on a candy thermometer and cook without stirring to 235 degrees**.  If you cook too long, you get caramel, so watch it.   Allow to cool until it thickens and begins to turn white.  Line a small loaf pan with waxed paper, pour into the loaf pan.  Cut off a slice and feed to the bees by laying it on top of the bars/frames where they are balled up for the winter.

* I have been told by some keepers that “bees don’t recycle wax”.  Well, apparently they do.  I imagine that they prefer to build new stuff, especially when there is pollen and nectar to feed and sustain them, but they do reuse stuff.   The hunks I put in this hive didn’t magically walk away.  After a bit of research, I’ve found other keepers who say they’ve observed the same thing, bees recycling wax under certain circumstances.  In this case, it was pristine and beautiful, freshly built honeycomb, and it was inserted into the hive at a time of year when frankly, they don’t have much else to do.

** I have also been told by some keepers that you can’t boil the sugar water for bees, because it will “caramelize and kill them.” I’ve seen it repeated, but never any explanation as to how or why.  I can see the bees maybe not liking the burnt taste, but it’s still…sugar.  And carbon.  It doesn’t magically become something toxic by boiling it.   Also, all the bee candy recipes I’ve seen call for boiling and achieving 230-245 degrees.  I suspect an Old Wives Tale being passed around from keeper to keeper, here.  If someone knows differently, I’d love to hear the explanation.

On a similar note, one keeper also said that Karo Syrup would kill the bees, but in the same breath said it was fine to use corn syrup.  Um.  Karo is a brand of corn syrup.  I know, as I’m a cook and rather picky about my ingredients, and pay 4X as much for Karo as the store brand of “light corn syrup” *because* it’s corn syrup without HFCS.  It does contain vanilla, but I find it unlikely that would harm bees.  My guess is that person knows that HFCS isn’t good for bees, and is running off the old information from when Karo used to contain HFCS.

Well, not millions.   Last year we planted a Frost Peach tree near our garden, and waited to see what it would do.  This spring it had lots of beautiful pink blossoms, which our honeybees seemed to like.   And then it set lots and lots of small peaches.  Neat!

Yesteraday, we spotted one on the ground, still perfect and untouched by bugs or birds.  I squeezed a couple of the rest, and they were ripe, so we picked all of them off the tree and brought them inside, and I pondered what to make out of them.  Todd peeled one and bit into it, and exclaimed that it was really good, and offered me a taste.  I tried it, and it was definitely ripe, and very sweet.  Then I suddenly realized…he always said he didn’t like peaches!  About a month after we started dating I’d gone on a trip to Chelan and brought back peaches and cherries, and left them in a basket on his porch, only to find that he didn’t like peaches.   Hrmph.  Apparently he “forgot” and now he likes them.  Go figure.

At any rate, what to make of them?  Peach cobbler?  Tasty, but we have a tendency to not finish dishes like that, and they end up going moldy in the fridge and getting either thrown out or fed to the chickens.  Nope.  Not good.  Peach jam?  Never had peach jam.  Spicy peach jam?  Peach butter?  Peach salsa?

Today I decided upon Ginger Peach jam for about half the peaches, and Brandied Peaches for most of the rest, with four saved out for eating fresh.   The jam is really, really good, made with candied ginger from Trader Joes.  And I’m looking forward to making some fresh vanilla ice cream with whole local cream, vanilla beans, and fresh eggs from my girls, to go with the brandied peaches which were made with some spiced Solstice Brandy I made last fall.   Yum.

Ginger Peach Jam

• 4 1/2 cups of diced ripe peaches
• 1/4 cup finely chopped candied ginger
• 6 cups sugar
• 1 box fruit pectin

Sterilize 7 half-pint jars in boiling water for 10 minutes, keep hot.  Scald lids and rings and keep warm.

If starting with fresh whole peaches (as you should), drop them into boiling water for 1 minute.  Remove, and slide the peel off under cold water.  Remove the pits and chop the peaches coarsely.  Add a splash of lemon juice to the bowl you’re chopping the peaches into, and stir every time you add a peach, to keep them from browning.

In a non-reactive saucepan, combine the peaches, ginger, and the pectin, stir well.  Bring to a full rolling boil over high heat.  Add all the sugar at once, stir well, and return to a full rolling boil.  Boil 1 minute, remove from heat.  Fill jars, leaving 1/4″ headspace.  Wipe rims with a wet, clean cloth.  Add lids and screw bands, screw down finger tight.

Process 10 minutes in a boiling water bath.  Makes about 7 half-pints.

Brandied Peaches

• 5 pounds peaches (freestone peaches are best)
• 1 cup brandy
• 3 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cups water
• Whole cloves
• Cinnamon stick

Sterilize pint jars in boiling water for 10 minutes, keep hot.  Scald lids and rings and keep warm.

If starting with fresh whole peaches (as you should), drop them into boiling water for 1 minute.  Remove, and slide the peel off under cold water.  Pour 1/4 cup of lemon juice into the bottom of a bowl.  Roll the peach around in the lemon juice and set aside on cutting board, until all peaches are peeled.  Cut around peach to halve them and remove pits.  Quarter if desired, or leave as halves.

In a saucepan, combine water with sugar, and bring to boil.  Remove from heat, keep warm.

Pack peach halves or quarters into hot, sterile jars, leaving 1/2″ headspace.   Add 1/2 a cinnamon stick and 3-4 whole cloves.

Stir brandy into the hot syrup.  Fill jars with syrup, leaving 1/2″ headspace.   Add lids and screw bands, screw down finger tight.  Process in a boiling water canner 20 minutes (or 25 minutes if you use quart jars.)   Serve chilled over ice cream, or warm over pound cake or angel food cake.

My friend Hollie posted an article in her blog a while back about the virtues of making one’s own laundry detergent.  Now while I’m into the DIY thing and I like to make lots of stuff from scratch, it seemed a little more effort than it would be worth to make detergent.  I mean, doesn’t it?  I can go to the store and get something dye-free and color-free, and even environmentally friendly.  I have a husband who complains if the clothes don’t “smell right”, too, which never helps.

But as I got to the bottom of this bottle of scarily blue detergent, I thought, “Well, why not?  At least once.”  So I made the leap and brewed up my own detergent.  And y’know what?  It’s pretty awesome.  It’s  less expensive than a bottle of detergent, varying some with the cost of the particular soap you choose.  A box of Borax is a couple of bucks, as is a box of Washing Soda, and a box of each will make at least three batches of detergent (probably more, I haven’t really measured.)   I don’t have a plastic bottle to discard with each gallon of detergent, I just have a couple of cardboard boxes left at the end; I can use them to start my woodstove, or recycle them if I get them thoroughly cleaned out.  You can control the ingredients; I chose a biodegradable, scent-free Castile soap, and the resulting detergent smells like “soap”, not like “perfumes”.  I like it.   The clothes are as clean and bright as with storebought detergent, and smell just as good without the perfumes.

Homemade Detergent

• 1 bar of soap (whatever brand/type you like)
• 1 cup of washing soda (I use Arm and Hammer)
• 1/2 cup of Borax (I use 20 Mule Team)
• 3 gallons of water
• Large bucket for the detergent

Bring 4 cups of water to a boil.  Shave the soap into the boiling water, and stir until all the soap is dissolved.

In the large bucket, pour about 2 3/4 gallons of water.  (That’s 3 gallons minus 4 cups, as there are 16 cups in a gallon.)   When the soapy water mixture is all dissolved, pour it into your bucket.  Add the soda and borax, and stir well.   That’s it.  No, seriously, that’s it.

Hollie reports that hers becomes gloppy right away, within 15-20 minutes.  Mine did not.  It was still liquid the following morning, until I gave it another vigorous stirring, at which point it granulated and began to thicken.  After a few hours, it was the consistency of set-up custard.  It’s actually rather granular and gloppy, thick enough that my chosen scoop sits on top of the mass inside the bucket instead of sinking, which is kind of convenient.

To use, just add a cupful to your washer as you would any detergent.   I would suggest a bucket with a lid, although mine is in an open bucket on top of the dryer; added bonus is that it scents the room lightly like just plain old-fashioned soap, and since my cat’s litter box is in the next room, that’s a great side-effect!