Our Flag - Finished

 Tonight (Wednesday) I finished Our Flag, which is published in the Summer, 2026 issue of Punch Needle and Primitive Stitcher magazine. It's designed by Crocette a gogo. This chart will not be in Etsy shop now since it's in the newest issue of the magazine.

Even though I thought I had checked everything, once I took it off the frame, I realized I had not stitched the centers of the four flowers at the bottom. Those are now stitched and even though it's a bit wrinkled, it's beautiful.

I have a plan for how I will finish this. If it works, I may have it finished by the end of the weekend . . maybe!

The linen is Tropical Stitches' Perna. I don't think this is a current color for her. I have no idea how long I've had it but I do love Tropical Stitches' linen.

As far as floss used, most of it is called for but I subbed a few colors I didn't have with stash floss.

The Focaccia Bread

 On yesterday's post about the focaccia bread, a couple of readers asked how thick the focaccia bread was since I mentioned using it for sandwiches. I don't know if I mentioned this yesterday but the focaccia bread I've always made has been thin - not cracker thin but probably less than one inch thick. Here's a picture of a piece of the bread I made yesterday.

It's about 1-3/4" (just a tad over) thick and that's probably as thick, maybe thicker, than the focaccia bread Panera uses for their sandwiches. 

This is the recipe I used and it is so good! It truly is so easy - I stirred it up in a bowl with a spoon, the description says it needs to stay in the fridge 18 - 48 hours and she shows one she left in the fridge for three days so it's pretty forgiving. I left mine in about 14 hours and it did great.

I did use whole wheat flour. The recipe called for 512 grams of flour. I used 400 grams of hard white and 112 grams of soft white. I shifted out the bran so I actually milled extra and weighed the flour after it had been shifted. The bread I made this morning, I used all hard white and only shifted the bran out of about half of it so we'll see how that turns out.

The recipe calls for 8 grams of instant yeast. I used 10 grams because I felt like the dough might be a bit heavier with the flour I used. The last change I made was to add more water. I used the 455 grams called for and then added more water until I got the dough where I felt like it needed to be. Sorry . . I didn't measure. On about the third set of stretch and folds, I felt like the dough was a big dry so I added a bit more water. I'm just guessing so use your own judgment but I probably added close to 1/2 cup extra water. Again . . just do what feels right for your dough if using whole wheat flour.

Here's the photo of our Azure haul.

This evening's pickup was great. The truck was supposed to get there at 7. We got there about 6:40 and the truck was already there, people were already there and they mostly had the truck unloaded. We helped unload it, got all our stuff loaded in the car and were on the road home by 6:50. I hadn't planned to be home til about 8 but by 8, we had everything unloaded and put away. Nice!

I got 8 cases of pint jars. Almost everything I can these days is in pints or half pints. By this time of year, my jar stash is kinda unorganized so before adding the new jars, I straightened all the jars, got the pints all stacked together, the quarts all stacked together, etc. so I'm ready to start canning season with the jars organized and knowing what I have. I still want to can more beans (pints) and the potatoes need to be canned and I do that in pints so I'll go through the pints pretty quickly.

Here's what I picked up this evening:

3 tubes of Desert Essence Toothpaste - I use that because it has no fluoride.

8 cases of pint jars

6 - 7 oz. jars of Bionature tomato paste.

3 cases of 6 jars/case of 24 oz. of strained tomatoes

25 pounds of rye berries

1 pound of organic pine nuts

1 pound of organic almonds

1 - 128 oz. jug of Sweet Zephyr Ylang Ylang laundry detergent

1 - 32 oz. bottle of Azure Dish Soap - Citrus scent

1 - 32 oz bottle of Azure Dish Soap - Lemon Verbena

1 pound organic cocoa powder

1 pound organic cacao powder

25 pounds of organic cane sugar

2 cases of Jovial diced tomatoes (6 - 18.3 oz jars/case)

3 cases of Jovial crushed tomatoes (6 - 18.2 oz. jars/case)

3 - Mullein plants in 4" cups

Since I bought all those tomato products, watch my tomatoes wake up and produce a ton of tomatoes!  :)

Bread Making Day

 You know how I like to have a schedule and plan EVERYTHING but that never seems to work. It was so easy to keep a schedule when Vince was working but now that he's retired, we do so many things spur of the moment and that makes it hard to stick to a schedule. I guess it's kinda the same way for all of us retired folks.

But . . my preferred schedule is to make bread on Monday and Thursday. Wednesdays I stitch with Debbie so Mondays and Thursdays are good for making bread. I've also asked Vince to let me know a couple of days ahead of when he's going to need Ezekiel bread and rye bread. I make three loaves of Ezekiel bread and 2 loaves of rye bread at a time.

Yesterday I had started focaccia bread so I was going to finish that today and make hamburger buns so we can have pork burgers Thursday.

I was just about to start breakfast this morning and Vince said "I need Ezekiel bread and rye bread". OK . . forget cooking breakfast. I make about 20 breakfast burritos at a time, wrap them and freeze them for morning like this so I grabbed a couple of those, let them sit out while I started making bread, then baked the burritos and spritzed them with water a few times to keep them from drying out. They were delicious and quick and I'm so happy to have those in the freezer.

This is the recipe I used and it's the best focaccia bread I've ever made. Beware that it needs to sit in the fridge for 18 - 48 hours before baking. I baked it in a 9 x 13 pan and it's plenty thick enough to slice for sandwiches. Panera has several sandwiches with focaccia bread and I love them so I'm probably going to make this recipe again for baking Saturday. I did divide this bread into three pieces, wrapped and froze two of the pieces but I like to have several varieties of bread in the freezer and I was out of focaccia so I'll leave that in there and make more.

Next was Vince's Ezekiel bread. I don't like the taste of it and I detest making it but . . I do it! 

That's the grains/flours that go into the Ezekiel bread. The recipe I use calls for rye, barley, hard red wheat, millet, lentils, pinto beans and great northern beans. There they all are - freshly milled.

Two loaves of this will go into the freezer. Vince eats this every morning as part of his breakfast.

Final bread for the day - rye! That's another one Vince likes.

It seems like I'm making these two recipes once a week but I know it only happens about once a month so I'm not really complaining.  OK . . I am but mostly because that Ezekiel bread is a gooey dough and I have to use my hands and I hate sticking my hands in gooey stuff.

Tonight we have to drive about an hour for our Azure Standard pickup. It was supposed to happen at 3 p.m. but then it got moved back to 7 p.m. Then we get home and have to at least get it all inside the house. This one was a large order for me. I haven't ordered since January. I told Vince I'm going to try to make three larger orders per year instead of doing it monthly now that we have to drive an hour each way to our pickup. Going forward, I'll probably try to order in March, July and October. I don't like to order in November because we never know when our order is going to be delivered and we could be going to meet the truck the day before or after Thanksgiving and I don't want to do that.  Then December - February there can be snow and ice. When we went for the January pickup, it was 14 degrees, the wind was blowing and I think the "feels like" temp was below zero and there was about 8" of snow in the parking lot where we met the truck and guess who forgot her coat at home! Yep . . it was so cold - never ordering for a winter delivery again.

I'll try to get a picture of our "haul" and share what I got and how I use it if it's anything weird.

 

Egg Piercer

 Learning new things, especially those things that help in the kitchen, makes me so happy. I was watching Homesteading with the Zimmermans today. I love her!

She showed this gizmo for poking a hole in the bottom of an egg (raw) before boiling it and that makes a tiny little pin hole in the bottom of the egg. Ruth Ann said it allows hot water to get around the egg and results in a super easy to peel egg. 

She showed it in action and it seemed to work perfectly. We no longer have Amazon Prime and I'm hoping Vince can make it through the Prime Days (or whatever they call the days with all the specials) without signing up for Prime again  . . though he told me today he could sign up for just two days. I hope he doesn't but . . anyway, Walmart had the same thing Amazon has and it was $2 less at Walmart and we get free shipping there too.

I can't wait to try this thing. I've tried "boiling" eggs in the Instant Pot, then submerging them in ice water and that helps but sometimes when I get eggs that were are so very fresh, the Instant Pot trick doesn't even work.

It will be a couple of days before the poker arrives (Thursday).  You can bet I'm going to make egg salad for sandwiches as soon as it arrives.

Sourdough Starter

This post is more for a friend who has been struggling a bit with her sourdough but, of course, everyone is welcome to read it.

I've been thinking about it and have a question for any sourdough experts. Is it possible (or even likely) that an older a starter is, the more active it is? Even if that's true, I'm sure it would depend on the health of the starter but what I'm wondering is . .  my starter is probably 6 years old. Maybe it has adjusted itself to how I do things, to my water, flour, etc. I have no idea.

I fed it this morning and I was peeling a ton of garlic so I was able to set a timer and take pictures along  the rising progress.

I will add, and this is one of those don't do as I do things . . I don't measure. I like to have a very dense/thick starter. For starter/flour/water, my ratio is probably about 1/2/1. I will often add a bit of sugar or honey to the starter when feeding. If I do, say I have 1/2 cup starter, 1 cup flour and maybe 1/2 cup water, but probably a bit less, I would add about 1/4 tsp. sugar or honey. And, my water is highly chlorinated city water (which makes me sad!) but so far, my starter has not complained.

The above photo is one hour after feeding. 

This was 2 hours after feeding.

This was not quite 2.5 hours after feeding. I was getting ready to go downstairs so I put it in bowl, knowing that by the time I go upstairs, it will have gone over the top of the jar and made a mess on the counter.

Other things I was doing while in the kitchen . . in the blue bowl is focaccia in the making, there's a pint jar of garlic getting ready to start fermenting. In the back bowl is another starter - what was left in the bowl after I put some in the jar in the photos above. There was only a bit of starter left in the bowl - maybe 1/4 cup so I need to get it built back up. Between making bread, crackers and now pizza dough, we go through a lot of starter.

It's zucchini season and I'm looking for recipes. This zucchini salad was delicious! The recipe called for lemon juice and olive oil but I subbed balsamic with Italian herbs for the lemon juice. I didn't have pine nuts so I use some macadamia nuts and some pistachios. We pick up our Azure Standard order tomorrow and I have one pound of pine nuts coming. I've been out for almost a month so I'll be happy to get those things.

Appliance Funny

 This is really funny to me. I just finished writing the previous post about the problems with the shelves in two of our freezers. Then I went to Facebook and the first thing I saw was this memory:

On this day in 2025, the appliance store came to pick up the non-working 2 or 3 year old fridge and bring a new one. That was very nice and very appreciated (even though we had paid for an extended warranty) but we had not had a working fridge in the kitchen for six months. The appliance store did give us a loaner which we kept in the garage. 

I read it to Vince and we laughed and the next thing on my Facebook page was this memory!

On this day four years ago, this little stove was supposed to be delivered from Lowe's. It was going to be the canning stove in the basement. But, it arrived damaged and then there was something weird . . maybe they had sold this stove to someone else and the one they tried to deliver, aside from being damaged, was not the same stove we had purchased.

By the time Vince got done having his say, this is the stove they ended up delivering.

IF we ever move from here, I'll probably leave the G.E. stove upstairs since all the appliances match but I will take this stove with us. 

All's well that ends well, right?