More Label Ideas...

I made some fancy labels for my jelly jars last week...like the labels I made for my spice jars a few weeks ago. I had to enlarge them slightly to fit snugly inside the canning rims. Now that I have them perfectly sized and formatted for the jars, it'll be a snap to label all my preserves this way. I created the image with a circle surrounding the olive branches as a cutting line. I had my younger sons cut them out...accuracy is not critical because the rim hides the cut edge. (Some people take the rims off after sealing, but I don't.) Besides looking pretty, the labels make a nice presentation, and I can place a few jars in a basket with a pretty card when I need a quick hostess gift.

It's "Mint" to Be

My mother loves recipes. No magazine or newspaper boasting culinary instructions is safe from her recipe-clipping passion. My grandmother and I kid her about her binders and card boxes jam-packed with decades of delicious offerings...but WHO does everyone go to when they need a recipe? Exactly.

Mom also loves to garden. This week her mint was ready to be harvested...and after my boys helped cut it, we had filled a bushel basket! Now, what to do with it? We quickly decided to concoct a summertime family favorite drink...one of her fabulous recipe finds...Mint Orangeade.

Mint Orangeade
1 1/2 C sugar
1 C fresh mint leaves, lightly crushed
1 tsp shredded orange peel
2 C orange juice
1 1/4 C lemon juice
Ginger ale or Club soda, chilled

MAKE AHEAD PREP: In saucepan, combine 2 1/2 C water and sugar; bring to boiling. Pour over crushed mint leaves. Add orange peel, orange juice, and lemon juice. Cover. Let stand at least 1 hr. Strain, cover, and chill.

FOR EACH DRINK: Pour 1/3 C fruit mixture into tall glass, over ice, if desired. Fill with chilled ginger ale or club soda. Garnish with mint sprig.

Makes 6 C drink base.

Better Homes and Gardens, July 1981

But, wait...the recipe only requires 1 cup fresh mint leaves, and we had much, much more than that. Our solution? Make mint syrup. Here's how (using the preceding recipe):

Mint Syrup
In a saucepan, combine 2 1/2 C water and 1 1/2 C sugar; bring to boiling.
Pour over 1 C crushed fresh mint leaves. Cover, let stand at least 1 hour. Strain.

While mixture is standing, prepare quart canning jars, lids and rims. Then pour hot syrup (reheating if necessary) into hot jars, add lids, tighten rims until secure; invert jars. Jars are sealed when you hear lids "pop." Leave inverted until cool, then store until needed.

10 batches yielded 6 quarts of syrup.

Use Mint Syrup to make Mint Orangeade, or as a flavoring for hot or iced tea.

Enjoy!...It's delicious!

Variety Is The Spice of Life

Here's an idea that's been rolling around my head now for months. I've been wanting to move all my spices out of plastic containers into glass canning jars. I dislike the variety of sizes of containers that spices come in...it's visually disturbing to me. Looking at the ingredients themselves is so much more pleasing to the eye than brightly colored commercial labels. I like the way these jars look lined up on the counter...reminds me of an old-fashioned general store.

I used wide-mouth quart jars for ingredients that are spooned out, like most herbs and spices would be. Also for flaked coconut, which I keep in the fridge. For things that I will pour out of the jar, like dried beans, I used regular-mouth jars.

A quart jar sounds large to hold spices, but with a family of 6, I do a lot of cooking, and will have no trouble using them up before they lose potency. I always try to replenish my spices from the bulk food store, which is much, much cheaper than buying them in the supermarket. The few flavorings I use just a bit of I put into pint jars.

If you haven't tried the plastic lids available now for canning jars...they are great. I've seen the regular mouth lids in the grocery stores and stuff-marts, but I had a hard time locating the wide-mouth lids locally, so I purchased them here.

I designed the labels using Print Shop software, formatted an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet with 20 olive branch circles, then typed the names into a text box inside each circle. I cut them out, laminated them, and tied them to the jars with thin elastic. I used elastic because it will not come unintentially un-tied, but can be stretched and pulled off easily when I need to wash the jars.

This project took several hours over two days to complete. Because the labels are laminated, they will last a very long time, and I know I'll enjoy my kitchen so much more now that a lot of visual clutter has been eliminated.

How have you enhanced your home's beauty by reducing visual clutter?

Beautiful Moment

Ian and Camryn mixing up the "sponge" for our homemade bread...notice who is doing the work and who looks like she's supervising (hands on her hips, even!)

Beautiful Food

One of my goals for the down-time I anticipated this winter was to learn to bake bread from scratch. I've had a bread machine for years, and while it turns out decent bread, I don't like being limited to making one loaf at a time. There's something so impersonal about dumping the ingredients into the metal pan and pushing the start button...it seems like just another task to be completed.

Maybe it's just me, but there's something deeply satisfying about baking bread the "old-fashioned" way...something organic and comforting about kneading the dough, something rhythmic about waiting for the rise, something enjoyable about the PROCESS, itself, that modern technology has failed to reproduce.

Here's a picture of my first attempt at 100% handmade, hand-kneaded bread.
It is 1/3 white, 2/3 whole wheat. The recipe took a total of 12 cups flour, and kneading that amount of dough took some muscle! Besides the fact that I did not have my dough divided perfectly into thirds, and the large loaf had an air pocket in the middle, it turned out really well for my first try...and even the boys said it was the "best bread they ever tasted!" If I can please them, I'm happy.

I have two loaves of white bread rising as I type this...I'll pop them into the oven tonight, and we'll have fresh bread for breakfast tomorrow. We've almost finished off the first three loaves above, so I'll be baking whole wheat again in the next day or two.

Does anyone else cringe at the price of bread these days? Good whole wheat loaves around here usually start at $2.79/loaf and only go up. I'm pretty sure I can make this recipe for under $3 for 3 loaves, it might be less. Definitely less if I was buying my flour in true bulk form. I love it when the healthy alternative is also healthy for the budget!