Elderberries, Basil, Baking and Brewing.

Last week was the first elderberry picking of the year. I did a second picking Monday morning, early.

The dried elderberries from last weekend are done, so we transfer them into a bowl and put the next batch in.

The previous batch yielded almost a quart after drying.

We found that if the clusters are all black, with only minimal green berries, scraping them off with a fork works really well.

Seppi has adopted our potted basil plant, and named it “Basil.” He likes to water the plant to within an inch of his life, but was reluctant to pull leaves off of it, for fear of hurting his beloved plant.

We reassured him that they would grow back.

And in the meantime, dehydrating the leaves would allow us to preserve basil’s flavor all winter long.

In the meantime much baking is happening, last minute baking to be turned in for the Pierce Co fair, to be judged this very day.

Evie chose eggnog banana bread.

Ellie is psyching herself up to make some whole wheat scones. The flour for this is the last of our wheat harvest from 2024, that Daddy ground up this morning. It should be enough for three batches of scones.

Which was fortunate. I was letting Ellie make them all by herself, without instruction. She has made them enough times, and she is quite good at it. However, she came out to interrupt my elderberry processing: “Daddy! I need help! You know the milk in the scone recipe? Well I added the milk, but I thought the 2-line-3 meant ‘two or three cups.'”

Oh, what did it actually mean?

“2/3 cups. So I accidentally added too much milk.”

She had indeed. Her ingredients were floating. We did some quick math, and found that she had added enough milk for three batches. So she used the rest of the flour to make a double batch of dry ingredients and mixed them in.

It worked quite well, and she was able to proceed normally from there.

Meanwhile, Evie’s banana bread is coming out.

Absolutely gorgeous loaves.

And now we had 24 scones, and Ellie only needed to turn in three for judging, so we had some delightful scones for lunch.

The blackberry juice from last week was taking up too much space in the refrigerator. I had thought of making jelly, but we didn’t have time to boil it down, so instead I just made another batch each of wine and mead.

And there is our dehydrated basil, to go in a jar on the shelf for the winter. (Hopefully this is just a first harvest, because it is nothing like enough basil for our family).