Chive Vinegar

Here's another of those simple but wonderful ideas I've found on the web - chive vinegar. 

Simple, because all you do is fill a jar with chive flowers, cover with a clear vinegar (I used distilled, but cider or wine vinegar would work, and possibly taste less sharp), and leave for a week or so. 

By then the vinegar will have absorbed the oniony flavour of the chives, but more importantly it will have taken on their colour.  All that needs to be done, is strain and bottle it. So simple. Doesn't it look wonderful? I'm still struggling to come up with a use for it - I could add it to salad dressing but the impact of the colour would be lost. I feel it's best served in a decorative vinegar bottle (my mother had several 'cut' glass ones as part of fancy cruet sets) but I've yet to find the occasion.  

 

Syrups

I've been experimenting with something new in the kitchen - syrups flavoured with flowers and herbs.

The idea came from seeing posts about the idea on social media, and a scrap of paper on which I'd written down the recipe for lilac syrup. 

 I fully expected to end up with burnt brown stickiness in a ruined saucepan but syrup making turns out to be surprisingly simple. Add sugar to water and heat to dissolve it. (Don't leave the pan on the heat and walk away from it though, because who knows what could happen then)

Then add the petals or leaves (the amount varies according to which plant you chose to use but recipes for all sorts of syrups are readily available on the web). Let it stand a while, strain and bottle. 

Oh, and then test it. 

 Lilac, at the top, looks lovely even while preparing it. Lemon balm, below, looks less attractive.

Both give an unusual flavour to drinks whether added to lemonade or gin.

I'm now wondering what else I could find in the garden to try this with - lavender, roses, maybe sage or rosemary for a more savoury taste.

Colourful Stripes and Clearing the Stash

Last year I really embraced stripes in my knitting. They're colourful and bright, and, most importantly from my point of view, they help use up the odds and ends of leftover yarns acquired over the years.

This first one (above), a wool cardigan, is a bit of a cheat as I bought some balls of the brown yarn to pull the other colours together and to be sure I had enough for the button edging, but I think it's worked really well, and helped use up a variety of yarns.

Next was a cotton v-neck jumper. I'm not actually a great fan of cotton yarn - garments tend to be heavy and take forever to dry - but I've still accumulated a store of it which needed using up. There were a lot of odd balls which accounts for the random narrower stripes and the weird colour change from blues/greens to red/orange but I think overall it's worked, and is baggy enough to wear over a warm dress.

Last, and in a way the least, was a really random project using up all sorts of colours to make this short-sleeved jumper. I'd hoped to be able to alternate large and narrower stripes, but as I progressed it became obvious that in some of the yarns I just didn't have enough. Also, I didn't really want to have a white stripe as it feels too startling at the side of the more muted colours. As a garment though it's growing on me - and at least no one knows that it wasn't intended to look this way.   

    
 Something that really puzzles me though is - if I've knitted up all these oddments of yarn, why doesn't there appear to be more space in the storage drawers? In the hope of one day making some space, I've started my next project - a long cardigan, and yes, it's striped!

Using up leftovers

I always believe in using up any surplus - whether it's wool, fabric or food - so when I stumbled on two clever ideas for using up kitchen waste I had to try them; after all, what is there to lose?

The first was for cider vinegar. This basically involves putting apple peel and cores in a jar with a little sugar and covering with water, and leaving to stand for a few days. After this, it's strained and bottled (a washed out fancy lemonade bottle) and stands again to turn to vinegar. It's easy and the only cost is a tablespoon or two of sugar; my main difficulty was finding peel and cores that were good enough to use as the early apples were damaged. I filled a jam jar though, let it stand, bottled it, let it stand again . 

After a week I checked how things were going. Nice and fizzy, and smelling more like cider than vinegar. The instructions said to leave for another week and let the sour vinegary taste develop... 

At this point I decided to change the whole experiment into one of making cider. In short, I drank it. And very nice it was too; somewhere close to the sweet fruit ciders I buy, and definitely something I though I'd try again.

Second time, I somehow forgot to drink it, and when I opened the bottle it had certainly turned to cider vinegar. There are a multitude of ways I could have used it but I added it to an apple/chilli pickle I was making.

 A less successful experiment was the one trying to make beer from stale bread. Having seen Louisa Ziane from Toast Ales talking at Timber Festival about how Toast uses unwanted bread in their manufacturing process, I'd become intrigued with the idea of making something from nothing, or, at least, from scraps I was planning to feed to the birds. I'd found a very basic recipe on the web, which involved stale crusts, water and a little sugar - so nothing much to lose. After its initial few days with the bread steeping in a jar, it smelt fine, and it seemed quite believable that I'd end up with beer. I strained it, sat it in a clean jar on th kitchen windowsill and for a day or so it bubbled, but then the weather turned and cooled considerably, and the beer-making process stopped. Maybe I should have moved it to the airing cupboard to keep warm but I was worried about it bubbling over (I've had accidents with home made wine before!). I'm sure it's something I'll try again - maybe with some failed sourdough bread - but this first attempt wasn't a success.

Pirate Jumper

 I've got into the habit of knitting something special for my grandson at Christmas. Once I made a 'knight's jumper' to go with a knitted helmet; last year (because I'm slow with posting about things) I made a pirate jumper.

I've a couple of patterns with sailing ships designs but I decided they were too complicated and would require a lot of attention to charts, so I settled for a simpler flag with skull and crossed bones, and striped sleeves for a pirate-y look. 

Painted silk scarf

A couple of Christmasses or birthdays (it's been a long while since I started this post) my eldest daughter gave me a silk-painting scarf kit. Both tie-dying and batik are things I've experimented with before , but I've never used silk as the fabric, so it felt a little daunting. 

It came with all the paints needed and a ready-hemmed piece of material to become the scarf  - but without any spare scraps to experiment on, so I was a bit nervous about starting. Get things wrong, and the whole project would be spoiled.

I decided it was an activity most suited to outdoors - that way splashes of paint didn't matter - so I waited till summer arrived, then set up my work station on the patio, using elastic bands to control where the paint would go. The technique is partly tie-dying, part painting as the material isn't immersed in dye.

It didn't turn out exactly as I expected - far more white patches than expected - so I might go back and repaint some sections but it's lovely as is.

 

Catching Up

 I recently noticed that, although I've been busily making and baking over the past year or more, I've completely failed to keep this blog up to date. The last published post (there are a couple sitting in draft) was in August 21, and I've not sure that that jumper wasn't finished months before then!

Since then there've been more stripey cardigans and jumpers, 

a month of vegan food for Veganuary, a hand dyed silk scarf, a felted picture, some joining in with an online art group, 

and some bizarre experiments like making cider vinegar from apple peel and cores (a success), and making beer from stale bread (not).

It's definitely time for some catching up posts. Hopefully coming this way soon.