Lemons, lemons, lemons

 Hello, everyone.

The homestead has a lemon tree--"Valley lemon" aka Meyer lemon. It is a mature tree and produces a lot of lemons.

Besides filling every available container with lemon juice for freezing, we are trying out various recipes.

There has been a batch of lemon marmelade made. (DH's very first time to make this.) It came out very well.

And we are making a jar of spiced preserved lemons. (Yes, he used a quart-sized jar. We're going to have to eat a lot of bits of lemon in a few weeks!) This is our first time with this, but it's basically a salt preservation and should be fairly straightforward.

There was a batch of lemon jelly tried, but we have concluded that the recipe he found online was not correct--probably didn't have enough sugar, plus the peels were not to be boiled with the juice to extract the natural pectin. The taste is good but the jelly refused to gel. 

We also found a tasty lemon pasta recipe, added a can of tuna (the good kind, canned in olive oil) to the sauce before stirring in the pasta. It was good, and it used up the juice of half a lemon and the zest of the lemon too.

More about that tomato

 Hello, everyone.

We had a couple of rainy days and I went out and saw this:

It's not yet ready to let go of the fruit, so it's still out there, getting redder.

At the other end of the yard, the first fruit to develop on any of our pomegranates:

We aren't sure if it's going to get redder or not. It feels juicy in the hand, but the skin doesn't feel like it's "papery" and it may still be storing up sugars and juice in the little arils. This pomegranate shrub is not the "Wonderful", it's one of the other two. The tag promised red fruits but as I've never actually seen the fruit of the variety, it's hard to know what "red" really means.

January in South Texas, at least this year

 Hello, everyone.

As we often do, we planted a winter garden. There were some little rows of lettuce, some little rows of "salad mix", and some tomatoes.

The best of the lot, at this point:

These are one of the large-tomato varieties...they have proven to be really susceptible to blossom-end rot. And they were late to get going as a heat wave hit after they were planted. The coloring up is just now building steam.

A springtime placemat

 Hello, everyone.

The other day's post was experimentation with fabric and embroidery. Today is the project.

The Carnival season extends from Twelfth Night (Epiphany) until Mardi Gras, the day before Ash Wednesday. (It succeeds rapidly on at the end of the Christmas festivities.) The placemat is themed to go with the whole time of Carnival.

Rosca de Reyes is the Spanish name for the King Cake.

Boeuf Gras (Fat Cow) refers to the ancient custom of giving up meat during the whole season of Lent. 

All of the fabric is from stash.

First Color Play of the New Year

 Hello, everyone.

This color play got started when DD1 asked for some placemats. Of course, stash was the first place to look. The only thing about stash is that, when you suddenly need a bunch of 2.5"x18" strips, all the lovely things in the stash are square or triangular or smaller rectangles. So I decided to try out a stash usage demonstrated in a Youtube video. Placemats being much smaller than lap quilts, there are fewer parts to each pieced square.

I started with 18 pieces of purple prints and 18 pieces of green prints, being careful to use as much of the Mardi Gras masks and beads print as possible. It was hard to cut through that many layers of fabric with my 45mm rotary cutter, but with care it was doable. If I decide to keep doing these kinds of stack-and-cut-and-combine projects, I might just get a larger cutter.

There are now a bunch of 5 inch squares, but not enough to completely build the placemats. Therefore a non-pieced area will be part of the design. This gave an opportunity to try out using the pre-programmed letters on my embroidery machine, and one of the pre-programmed border designs. (Base fabric for the embroidery here is also from stash, an off-cut from the fabric used to make the Lion Purse last spring.) This is the trial-balloon version of the Carnival design.

A pre-Christmas stroll in nature

 Hello, everyone!

Last week, taking a break in those last few days before Christmas, a group of us went for a small hike at El Sal del Rey. This is a very historic salt lake in the north part of the county. 

Long time readers may remember Sal de Rey being visited in the past. This was a return visit, and an introduction for the younger members of our party. We were four adults, two children (both under 10 years) and 3 dogs. Truly it was an expedition! And everyone in the group, even the youngest, finished the walk under his or her own power. 

A view of the lake and the sky that day. The area that looks like trampled snow is the salt. It was not a bright crystalline display that day, even though the conditions were very dry and the water level of the lake was low. We concluded that there had been a small amount of rain in the area recently.

The path from the parking area to the lake was just about 2 miles one-way. As some of the party were dogs, and some were children, we took it easy and enjoyed walking along the trail and over part of the salt to the edge of the water. 

The oldest puppy in the group, truly an elderly lady, finished up her four miles with no problem. As y'all can see, she even had a big smile on her face at the end, after having a few sips of fresh (bottled) water from the doggie dish.

Pets are allowed at Sal del Rey if they are on a leash. As it is a wildlife refuge, allowing our pups to run wild after any rabbit or javelina they see is not appropriate. (Some of the wildlife could injure the pups, too.)