Monday, August 11, 2008

A Wonderful Summer Weekend

This summer has been hard, with all the wild fires here in northern CA. There has been no summer swimming, barbeque's, long lazy days drinking lemonade and standing in front of a fan. Instead we have had evacuations, asthma attacks, and high air conditioning bills. I was never much of a summer person until it was taken away I felt slighted, it was unfair that everyone else was out swimming, camping and staying out late watching the stars. This weekend was one of the few exceptions that we have been blessed with.

M and I took the girls out to the Fore bay with Ms parents and they swam and played for hours (please note that the dress pictured in the last post is not a beautiful shade of red). We brought a picnic of PB&J's, chips and homemade salsa, blueberry fig bars, and watermelon.
We found some beautiful shells, one of my favorite things about that place is the fresh water shells and all the bird feathers that you can collect. When I was a little girl I just loved to bring my sand pail and seeing how much "loot" I could bring home.
As for the "crafty" part of my weekend I got 10 out 28 of my denim dollars done. These are made with a pair of old jeans of my father that I dyed green, and an old grayish pair of pants of Ms. They were very cheap to make, just $5 for the dye and $2 for the embroidery floss, although the price tag is a bit heavier on my hands. Ow, why oh why did I think it was a good idea to hand sew two layers of denim together? These are for a natural play food (they can play grocery store with these) that I'm participating in on Mothering and they are also for L for Christmas.
M made the best homemade salsa I've ever tasted on saturday, it's the fermented salsa recipe from Nourishing Traditions. We made 2 batches and fermented one and just put the other right in the fridge. We haven't tried the fermented one yet, but the other batch was SOOOO good. We probably spend about $7 and made 2 quarts of salsa. We got most of our ingredients from the Farmers market (local and mostly organic) and put it in recycled spaghetti sauce and applesauce jars. How green is that?! Pictured is only HALF of what we made, we actually ate a whole jar between yesterday and today.

1 comment:

Melissa said...

Glad you guys are making the most of the summer before it's gone! I'm also making quarts of salsa like mad, but am going to hold off till I can make some whey (hopefully tomorrow). I don't like how salty the fermented salsa is when it's made without whey (and I did try to reduce the amount of salt called for in the recipe, only to have a WHOLE quart of salsa mold :( I hate throwing food away!). But isn't it great to make your own stuff that's cheaper and infinitely better than anything you can buy?!! It's one of my favorite things to do ;). Oh, and I have a *great* recipe for quick salsa that's delicious and easy, for those moments when you want some but eaten all of your fermented stuff and waiting for the next batches to mature!