Adventures in Home Canning

by Celia Hayes

This latest adventure in home food preparation was my daughter's notion, upon noting that the aisle in our local HEB set aside for housewares and appliances had a new section for home canning supplies; including a sort of starter kit for novices; a large light-weight enamel lidded kettle, with a rack and some implements to shift around the jars ... of which there were also a nice assortment in various sizes. I was certain that we had a huge canning kettle in the garage – a gift from a military friend who was moving to another state – but we couldn't readily find it, as the garage is stuffed with items that my daughter has bought for that residence of her own which she hopes to have one day. But we…

Waxing the Cheese

by Celia Hayes

That is something which sounds vaguely like something which only ought to be done by consenting adults, in private and behind closed doors, but  . . .  well, it's really rather prosaic, in the process of making cheese. It's the final thing done, before stashing the wheel of cheese in the lower shelf of the refrigerator to age for the required number of months. Well, to all but the parmesan; that variety ages, dries and hardens bare and un-waxed for a year, before getting a slathering of olive oil. It will be another ten months before we can even sample it and know if it is any good, but it already is looking dry and waxy, rather like the less expensive supermarket parmesans.

This months' cheese-making…

Fun with Fruit Brewing Wine

Like many of these things that I am reluctant to do at first, but get talked into and eventually start having fun – getting into the home-brewing and cheese-making was my daughter's idea. Many months ago, I had noticed that storefront location in a local strip mall was now taken up by an enterprise called Home Brew Party. I was unwary enough to mention this to my daughter. At the next opportunity, she dragged me inside  . . .  and was promptly carried away by the possibilities of making home-brewed beer and wine.

A portion of one of her intermittently ginormous but infrequent paychecks went towards buying two equipment kits – one for wine, one for beer: a couple of…

The Home-Brew Gateway Element

by Celia Hayes

So, my daughter and I have been experimenting with a lot of do-it-yourself food, lately;  Breads and cheese, beer and wine, mostly. It's part of our family culture, or it might be in our DNA, an ancestral proclivity to have a go at something, since it really can't be all that hard. Well, some things are a bit tricky, and require a lot of instruction and experience: fine cabinet-making, for instance. And installing HVAC systems. And automobile maintenance – just not interested in that. But we have found that we have had pretty good results with many of our own D-I-Y projects, especially the food-based ones. What's so complicated about following a recipe, and making a food-product for the household just…

The Cheese Stands Alone

Ours doesn't – in fact, the pile of home-made and ageing cheeses currently takes up about half of the bottom of the refrigerator: half a dozen waxed roundels, awaiting their time to be consumed. No, there's quite a chummy little gathering, of farmhouse cheddar, of jack and Leicester, and one or two others, plus the gouda which still has another two weeks to air-dry, and a wheel of caraway cheddar which will come out of the cheese press this very afternoon, and join the gouda. Dunno what I am going to do about the furry little patches of mold growing on the surface of the gouda, though – probably scrape them off very carefully, baste with salt and wax  . . .  waxing the cheese sounds kind of suggestive, doesn't it? My…

Blessed are the Cheese-makers

By Julia Hayden

We’ve always been do it-yourselfers when it came to  . . .  well, a lot of things. Mom made all of our clothes, for instance: all of hers, mine and my sister’s dresses, for ordinary and for special occasions. My Dad practically built his and Mom’s retirement home himself – the first iteration, anyway. When it burned down, and had to be rebuilt Mom and Dad were fifteen years older and took the easy way out. He had always done all the maintenance on the family cars – in fact, he was still working on cars, almost to the last day that he was fit and well enough to  . . . which led to some awkward moments when Mom donated the car that he had been working on to the local PBS station this spring,…

Created Thursday, 04 February 2010 17:41

Adventures in Old Lamps

I can't remember when I discovered that it wasn't very hard to re-wire table lamps, or replace plugs and swap out one-way sockets for three-way, so that an ordinary lamp would become reading lamp. Stripping half an inch of insulation off the ends of the wires, threading them through the lamp-base and securing the bare wires around the little screws in the socket base; it's not rocket science.

More recently, I discovered that all the little bits that hold a lamp together and attach a shade are a standard size and thread. We've bought lamps at the thrift-shop or at yard-sales because they have a pretty base, and been gratified with how much better they look with new hardware and…