It’s that time of year: the delicate and unique fragrance of elderflowers wafts through the air. The creamy yellow-white clusters are now in bloom, heralding the coming purple berries. Having previously tried a remarkable imported elderflower soda, I thought I’d try my hand at making an infused elderflower syrup that could be used to flavor water kefir or create delicious summer cocktails.
First step: pick many elderflowers. The recipe I used calls for a quart jar full of the blossoms. If you’ve seen elderflowers, you know they’re tiny, so that’s a lot of flowers. Fortunately, the bushes have grown large and big clusters of the flowers were within easy reach. The chickens came around when they saw that I had a container in my hand, but all they got were a few unlucky beetles that flew off the flowers. Continue reading “Backyard Bounty: Elderflower Syrup”
Have you heard about “hygge”? It’s a Danish concept that translates roughly to “coziness” and/or “wellbeing”. The Danes have long, dark winters, and yet are considered to be some of the happiest people in the world. Could there be something to this philosophy that’s transferable to our daily lives? Let’s explore further.
This morning’s breakfast: our chickens’ eggs, potatoes cooked in lard from a local farm, and homemade sourdough toast. So good, we could eat it everyday!
We hope you had a relaxing, peaceful Thanksgiving! We enjoyed ours, with the exception of a fermentation…shall we say, incident?
A packet of San Francisco style sourdough starter has been in the refrigerator for years. We love sourdough bread, so we pulled it out and reactivated it.
We strive to use as much of the natural bounty on the farm as possible. So far, we’ve made water kefir with the mulberries and blackberries that grew untended. We’ve also been keeping an eye on several black walnut trees that will drop nuts in the fall, with the idea that we’d like to have our pigs (yet to be acquired) take advantage of those.