Hexemaus Farms

Adventures in Homesteading

Category Archives: Homemade Homestead

The Best Pesto Recipe for Fresh Basil

I love to cook. There’s just something creative about the cooking process that appeals to me. Now, if you ask my boys, they’ll say I never cook. My response is simply “independent living skills.” (They’re old enough to fend for themselves – and it’s a skill they should have, lest their future wives be forced to teach them how to be grown ups.)

While I don’t like “having” to cook every day (after cooking 3 meals a day for nearly 20 years, burn out is inevitable,) I do enjoy cooking for fun, on my terms, when I want to do it.

This past weekend, I harvested a boatload of herbs from the garden. I’ve got oregano, parsley and rosemary drying in the kitchen window. My basil plants, however, have taken over and are exploding through the garden fencing. I cut them way, way back to encourage bushier growth and to give myself a little break from daily flower pruning. As such, I wound up with a grocery bag full of fresh basil leaves. (And that was AFTER trimming away all the stems and sickly-looking leaves!)

Image courtesy Flickr user thebittenword, release under Creative Commons License

Sunday dinner was a lovely roasted chicken, some homemade mac & cheese, baby limas, fresh bread, and a divine pesto dip. I love pesto. Toss it in pasta. Dip fresh crusty bread in it. Sprinkle it on salad. Spread it on chicken. You name it, I’ll probably put pesto on it.

I thought I might share my favorite pesto recipe. Forgive my less-than-exacting measurements, but I’m one of those cooks that pinches, handfuls, and splashes as opposed to precision measuring. I add ingredients to taste – sometimes based on how much I have of a particular ingredient. With that said, you might need to experiment to get just the right flavor.

What You’ll Need:

  1. Fresh basil leaves
  2. Fresh garlic
  3. Pine nuts
  4. Extra virgin olive oil
  5. Kosher salt
  6. Parmesan cheese
  7. A food processor

Toss 2 parts basil, 1 part pine nuts, and 1 part garlic cloves in your food processor. Pulse until everything is finely ground. Add enough EVOO to make a thick paste and pulse some more. Add kosher salt (about a teaspoon at a time until it’s just the right amount for your tastes) and a healthy amount of Parmesan cheese and pulse a couple more times.  That’s it. That’s your basic pesto.

If you want pesto to toss in pasta or salads, you can just use the paste as-is.

If you want pesto as a dip for fresh bread, add more EVOO so that the pesto is a little thinner.

If you want pesto to spread on chicken, you might want to make the paste a little thicker. Remember, that EVOO is going to thin as the chicken bakes. Thicker pesto is also really good mixed with cold chicken chunks for sandwiches – especially on crusty bread.

If you find you have a really good basil harvest, you can freeze pesto for the off season.

What’s your favorite pesto recipe? What do you do with all that basil going crazy in your garden?

 

Hand Quilting on the Homestead

Quilting is a new hobby for me. It all started with an old quilt the kids’ father and I had for years. The piping around the edges had seen better days. Fixing that piping sparked a renewed interest in sewing – specifically quilting.

Throw in a Mom who’s a consumate crafter, and has been since I was a kid…with all sorts of patterns, old crafting books, not to mention several old family quilts made generations ago, and well…all I can say for myself is…

Hi, my name is Sandi…and I’m a quiltaholic. :)

But, as with everything else, I can’t just take up a hobby and do it like everyone else. No. That would be easy, and as I’m sure my father would agree…I’ve never been about doing things the easy way.

What’s the challenge in doing things the easy way?

So, while I do use my newly aquired vintage sewing machine to put my quilting pieces together, I have ZERO interest in machine quilting the finished piece. I just don’t see any challenge in rolling up my quilt pieces, programming a pattern on a computerized machine quilter, and walking away while the machine does all the work.

No. I want to relax with an old fashioned quilting frame, a stamped-on stencil, and good ol’ needle and thread. I want to see if I can get my stitches down to 10 stitches to an inch. I want to tune out the world and just work that needle up and down, over and over again.

Fifty years from now, I want my granddaughters to tell their grandchildren that their great grandmother made that quilt. She stitched it by hand…just like my mother told me about some of the quilts made by family members that I now own.

Unfortunately, as a novice quilter, I’ve found there’s not as much out there for us old fashioned hand quilters as there is for machine quilters. That is, until my mother and I did some digging online while on a call together. I found the PERFECT hand quilting frame, and it’s nowhere near as expensive as I had thought it would be.

It’s from a company called The Grace Company. Sure, they offer stuff for machine quilters…but they also offer stuff for us old fashioned hand quilters. I absolutely fell in love with the Z44 wooden frame (pictured above in natural wood color.) I can get caster legs for it, so I can move it around. I can tilt it, depending on where I’m sitting, or if I want to stand. I can lower the legs and work on my quilt while sitting on my bed, watching movies. I can raise them and sit in my office chair in the office/craft room. I don’t have to baste my layers together before putting the quilt on the frame. And I can even get the frame stained so that it matches better with the other furniture/stuff in my craft room.

I’ve added it to my wish list, which is quickly topping the room renovation budget. Funny, rewiring the entire room, putting in a new ceiling, new subflooring and carpeting, and new sheetrock won’t even cost as much as my quilting frame! Throw in the OttLite I want to get to clamp onto the side of the frame (pictured left), the cutting table I want to buy, all the notions and do-dads I have on my list (a good self-healing cutting mat, different size rotary cutters, quilting thimbles, the list goes on and on.) I really hope my kids aren’t expecting an inheritance.

Do you have a favorite hobby that threatens to break the bank on a regular basis?

Do you enjoy doing something the old fashioned way because it’s more satisfying?

Would you spend $500 on a wooden quilting frame to keep from having to baste quilt layers or make it easier to work on large areas? (My kids might think I’m nuts…but they should be happy I’m going the cheap route. Computerized machine quilting frames run $2,000 and up!)

The $5 Fence Puller

Our garden fence project is the first bit of fencing I’ve taken on around the farm. I’ve helped install picket fencing and similar pre-fab fencing, but I’ve never erected any kind of fencing myself that required stretching or pulling wire fencing.

In hindsight, as we wrapped up the fencing portion of our little garden project, there are some things I’ll do differently next time. However, I’m actually kind of proud of one solution we came up with during our first fencing project.

It’s the $5 fence puller.

Now, keep in mind, this is just garden fencing. This isn’t something meant to keep in large livestock. I just don’t want the dogs (or the deer) getting into the garden and destroying everything. But still, we wanted the fencing as straight and snug as we could manage it.

Knowing that Josh (being the bigger one in terms of upper body strength) would be the one stretching out the fencing for me, I figured just grabbing the wiring and pulling – even with gloves on – would cut into his fingers. Not to mention, he wouldn’t be able to really pull the fence tight.

So I came up with an idea. I used a scrap section of 2×4, some screw eyes, and some mountain climbing hooks to create a hand-held fence puller.

I’ve seen fence pullers meant for use with tractors. I’ve seen fence pullers that resemble jack stands that let you hand-crank wire fencing until it’s snug.

But come on now…this is just a garden fence. We aren’t talking hundreds (or thousands) of linear feet of fencing. We aren’t talking something a 1200lb horse is going to rub against to stratch a fly bite.

It’s a garden fence.

I just need to keep the dogs from digging and the deer from eating the foilage. At most, I need to keep about 150lbs of animal from getting to my tomatos and grape vines.

We’re also only talking about 30′ of 4 ft light-weight fencing. We didn’t need anything fancy or complicated…just a way for Josh to get a better grip and more leverage.

I could have added a couple of heavy-duty screw eyes on the opposite side and used the lawn mower to pull the fencing, but the posts are only 12-15″ deep. (Thanks to more concrete and blocks under the brick walls.) Too much pull would have upended most of the posts. (I wasn’t about to double the work to add corner braces and all that stuff for just a little wire garden fence.)

I actually bought four stout screw eyes and four mountain climbing hooks, but we only used three. (To leave space between them for Josh to get the best grip.) The mountain climbing hooks are the cheap 99 cent jobber-do’s you find hanging near the keychain stuff at virtually every hardware or car part store in Anytown, USA. The screw eyes came in a box of assorted sizes from Wal-Mart. The 2×4 was just a scrap piece from some framing project or other.

The concept is simple. Clip the climbing hooks to the fence, get a good grip, and pull. Josh braced his feet against the brick walls on either side of the fencing. He literally sat down to pull the fence. Just dug in his feet, grabbed onto two good spots at either end of the 2×4, and leaned back. Easy schmeasy.

I know it’s not an Einstein-ish invention, but I’m proud of me anyway. I came up with an easy solution to the problem, standing in the check out line at the hardware store…and it worked. In fact, it worked well enough that we are going to add a few more screw eyes and hooks to make it lawn mower-capable when we’re ready to stretch the dog kennel fencing.

Not bad for a poor white girl, clueless about farm life. :)

Vintage Sewing on the Homestead

As if I don’t have enough projects on my to-do list, I’ve taken up yet another hobby/set of projects. What can I say? I am an overchiever. If I don’t have 43,000 things going at any given time, I’m bored senseless. Or maybe it’s just ADHD. Who knows?

Years ago, when I was much younger, my mother (the consumate crafter) taught me how to sew on an old Singer. At the time, I must confess, I really did not have much interest. I wish now that I had paid more attention. Luckily, I realized this past week that I remember far more of those early sewing lessons that I had thought.

Some friends of mine found me an old vintage sewing machine on freecycle.com. It’s still in its original drop-down table and everything. Naturally, since I had NO CLUE how long the machine sat up unused, and I could see it was missing a few minor pieces, I took it to Frank at Branum’s Sewing and Vacuum Center over in Augusta.

Frank did a beautiful job getting it all ready for sewing! He even dated the machine for me!

According to Frank, it’s from the 1930′s. I did some digging and learned the machine is a “badged” machine, built by some sewing maching company – but branded by the department store that sold it.

Apparently, between the late 1800s and 1930s, it was popular for department stores to contract with a manufacturer to build machines to be sold under the store’s “own” label.

Yesterday, I spent the day setting up a sewing nook in my office for my “new” vintage sewing machine. Amazing that the little table fit perfect into the closet in the office. :) Even cooler, my little folding table fit perfectly underneath the drop down side.

 

I can slide the folding table up under the sewing table when I’m not using it, then pull it out when I’m working on a project.

An old wooden quilt stand holds fabric waiting to be sewn so it doesn’t get wrinkled or damaged.

I’ve decided that my first project will be curtains for Josh’s bedroom. He picked out the fabric. I picked out the style…something simple and easy to put together while I learn the ins and outs of my vintage machine. (It’s an uber basic model, with just straight stitching options…but all machines have their quirks.)

I didn’t pick Josh’s curtain project on purpose. He just happened to be with me as I browsed Wal-Mart’s sewing department. Once I get his curtains done, Mike and I will go shopping to pick out fabric for his curtains.

And maybe a quilt for Raydin’s new big girl bed at Grandma’s house.

And some baby doll clothes for Alexis’ babies.

And some cute summer dresses for both granddaughters.

And the dining room could use some new table cloths with curtains to match.

And then there’s a pile of zippers to fix, hems to mend, and other misc. repair projects needing doing…