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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Back from being gone

For months I have been telling my friends I will pick up blogging again in just a couple of days. But it is a lot easier said then done. Some people can achieve things where and when they feel like it, but I count myself under those that need the comfort of a home to get productive. Also situations like a full hard drive and no where to put new pictures doesn't help. 

Now, I am here. I had to loose a bunch of pictures in the downloading process (how the hell does that happen), but after all I made it. 





You can see, the kitchen is still mid works. I'm in the middle of screwing together the cabinets. And instead of a real space to store things like pots and knives, they are pretty much everywhere. The truth is, though, I really don't care. My home is where my dough is fermenting, ...






The first blessing of moving back to Belgium was the free food. Seriously, I had a hard time finding an excuse to go to the store. Aunts and uncles of uncles so to speak have too many apples and nuts. I sat cracking nutshells long before I had a car. My granny, she's a blessing, has a ton of rose bushes, so what better time passing then drying rose hips for tee. I cut the amount of rose hip with a third of dried lemon peel. The flavor is amazing, just make sure you dry them separately as the lemon peel doesn't need as long and when you make the tee, it needs to sit for a good 10 minutes for the flavor to be full and rich. 



A second blessing of living here now is the gas fire. Its a cute little heater that does the job for the whole house. You can imagine the charm of going back to basics with a cherry stone to warm up the bed. Anyway, the gas fire is an excellent place to dry things for the winter. One of the first projects was ginger. After all this is the Scratch blog, so if there is a way to get the desired ginger powder, for the coming Christmas cookies, from real ginger, I'm going for it. I took the cheese grater to get smaller pieces of ginger, put them on a kitchen towel next to the fire place and when it was all dry and shriveled up a little electrical spice grinder/ coffee grinder will get it to powder.