How to Make Raspberry Syrup

 Making Raspberry Syrup is easier than you think and you'll never buy that bottled stuff when with a little fore-planning you can have fresh waiting for yogurt or pancakes.

Start out by soaking your raspberries in a light tincture of white vinegar for about 15 minutes to kill all fungus spores they picked up in the store. You might even get some nasty insecticide and fungicide off them, too.

Pour them into a colander to drain. Don't worry if some come apart. They are the really ripe ones. Wait about five minutes and pour them into a container with a cover. The cover is very important because raspberry juice stains.

Now, hold the jar of sugar over the container of raspberries and prepare to sprinkle sugar on them. Allow your cat to bump your hand so you spill about a half to two thirds cup of sugar on them. Bless out cat.

Shake the container a bit to distribute the sugar and cover. Place in refrigerator for a day or two.

Take out and use your hand blender to blend them into a syrup or you can just leave them whole like I do.

Remember, the calories don't count because it is all your cat's fault.

P.S. If your cat refuses to cooperate, dip a little catnip or tuna on your hand. If you don't have a cat, well your life is not complete but you can always claim you dropped the jar of sugar.

Herb Scissors

Normally when I buy a specialty scissor I have a really bad experience. This comes from my days of sewing. So when I saw these herb scissors and considered my ineptitude at fine chopping herbs with any knife I tried (and I have a drawer full) I decided to take a chance.
They are the best investment I have made lately. They work like a charm. I haven't cut myself once. My fresh herbs are finely diced and ready for cooking or drying in a few minutes. I love them.
Now, there are several manufacturers and I went with the cheapest as I really couldn't see any difference between them. They are even all the same color!

Downcycling

When you reach a certain age, you find you say things about the past and people look at you like you are totally, completely and irrevocably insane. And so it was when I mentioned there once was no garbage service.

Well, WHAT did you do with the garbage??????

What garbage??????

All left over food was buried in a trench in the garden where it composted for the next years plantings. If some animal dug it up, well, they have to eat, too.

Everything that broke was downcycled. Now you know what upcycling is but you probably never heard of downcycling.

Let's take the lowly shirt that finally through stain or ripping just died. That's your garbage. In our world it had several fates. It is was a particularly good design that fit really well, it was cut apart and use as a pattern to make more just like it. If it wasn't, the good parts were cut out put in the quilting bin where it would eventually reincarnate as a quilt. The large worn pieces became rags as this was before the wasteful and infamous paper towels. And the small strips would be tying up tomatoes and rotting the next season becoming mulch. Gardens were really colorful in the spring with plants neatly tied up with multicolored cloths in cute bows.

Machinery was disassembled into parts and the good bits saved for when the next one needed parts. Manufacturers didn't change parts by a millimeter or so every year to make certain you have buy new ones from them. They weren't driven by greed but the need to produce the best product. The bits that couldn't be reused were made into something else: flower pots, stepping stones, the prospects were infinite and to be considered in the winter when you couldn't do much else. Stray bits of metal became hair clips, kitchen utensils and art work. Wood was reworked or burned.

So what did you do with the things you didn't want any more?

You had a red dress and a blue dress. You didn't wake up and decide, I'll toss the blue one and wear the red everyday for the rest of the year because you weren't nuts. You might try to trade it with a family member or friend to get something "new". There just weren't things you didn't want any more.

There were things that were too small, weren't needed like toys and cribs or fit anymore. Those were treasured give away items for which the competition was stiff. It was not unusual to exclaim when visiting, "If you ever decide to part with that, I have dibs on it." Dibs were carefully recorded and honored. Normally, they resulted in a trade. You never remarked, "Oh, wasn't that so and so's dresser." That was bad taste.

So as I watch the 30 something's cruising the garage sales and big garbage pickups to upcycle things, I have to laugh. They think they are trendy. I've been doing that my whole life. Finding the first second hand store was a mystical experience for me. Our secondhand stores were old barns everyone had fixed up where you brought things you didn't need and no one had dibs on and just left them there. Eventually, someone would drop in, need it and take it home......sorry....you were not permitted to leave spouses, small children or mother-in-laws. Good cooks and strong backs were already spoken for.

Of Mice and Men and Chickens

It isn't a conspiracy if it's a business plan. Never forget that.

Two things have happened in the past couple of weeks.

1. Eggs have been declared really, really bad for you after years of being the PERFECT food.

2. People all over the net have been reporting their hens are going broody.

The first one you have probably read all the articles about and decided not to buy that dozen of eggs on your next trip to the grocery.

Where the second one is concerned, you are probably saying, "what the Hell is broody?"

Broody is when a hen gets 'depressed' and stops laying.

So, let me give you a possible scenario and see if it makes sense to you.

Before the advent of something called Laying Mash, hens only went broody when they were just starting to lay and didn't have the hang of things or when they got older and were winding down their reproductive cycle. My relatives ate at least two eggs a day not counting what they got in things like cookies, cakes and various dinner products. They lived well into their late 80's when 60's was considered old and then, they died of natural causes, not heart attacks.

Then came Laying Mash. Laying Mash is a commercially prepared chicken food fed to hens that contains hormones to cause the hen to lay one or more eggs per day unlike her natural cycle which can be an egg every two to three days. Hens which laid daily were highly prized and bred for more chickens.

Now, when you expose an animal or human to a hormone from the time it is an egg and its grandparents and generations before it are exposed to this hormone, the receptors in the brain become overloaded and shut down. They are no longer sensitive to the hormone and it takes more and more hormone to turn them on or off. My guess is we are now sliding down the other side of the bell curve and these chickens no longer have any sensitivity to the hormone that causes them to lay eggs.

What do you do when you have spent years building a huge audience for eggs and suddenly your hens are not laying eggs? Do you admit you have been feeding them toxic amounts of hormones that by-the-way might be affecting you, too? Or, do you pay a hospital or university to produce a study showing how bad eggs are so no one notices the reduction in stock because they aren't buying them anyway?

Well, I'll let you decide. Which option do you think Corporate America would take?

A New Dinner Idea

Tonight was left over night in the Druid home. I had left over brown rice couscous and maple chicken. So I took some sunflower seed oil and added a tablespoon of ginger, garlic and lemon grass to it. When hot, I added a little green pepper and onion. I cut the chicken into strips and added it and then the couscous. One more tablespoon of curry powder went in and the whole mess was heated and blended. It was beyond delicious. Not a drop is left. A little curry and your left overs have a brand new life.

Day 1.5 of Butter Experiment

When we tried the butter in the crock tonight, it was too soft and fell into the water when removing it from the reservoir. There are two things that may have happened. It may have been too soft when we put it in the reservoir and not packed well enough or the temperature in the house may just be too darned hot. My aunt's farm was in West Virginia in the mountains.

More tomorrow. We are chilling it down in the fridge and then bringing it out again.

Keeping Your Butter Soft

If you are health conscious, like me, you want to use butter rather than some strange cotton seed (toxic) oil product called margarine or whatever they are making the yellow colored goop out of today.

BUT, you hate the fact that it is the hardest substance on earth, beat by a diamond by very little, and unless you manage to warm it up every blasted time you will tear up whatever you try to spread it on and then, when warming you usually melt the bottom, get the middle the right consistency and have the ice hard top floating.

If you are as old as I am, you remember this wasn't a problem on the farm but just don't know why except that your aunt had a real ice box.

It turns out there is a thing called a butter keeper that you sit on the table filled with butter and water. It keeps the butter nice and soft and it doesn't spoil for at least 30 days. I know you don't believe a word of it, but I remember that little crock on my aunts table.

So I sought one out and guess what, they still make them. They keep about a half a stick of butter, which you have to soften to fit into the cavity, at the right spreadable consistency. You add about a 1/2 cup of cool water, insert the butter crock and you are good to go. You do need to change the water every three days.

It works by creating a vacuum that air doesn't enter and thus, the butter doesn't spoil.

I bought one and this is day one....stay tuned for the results but remember, I am in South Florida and it is the SUMMER!

The exact product I am using is featured on the right.