Spring Foraging Fun - Chickweed!

I just learned how to identify chickweed - lobed leaves, starry white flowers(buds in my case!), fine hair on one side, and lack of sap when stem is broken. It is a bit tricky to pick it out among all the other weeds, but not too hard. I just gathered enough for a batch of sun/moon powered tea. Right now I am drinking sun/moon violet tea (from dried violets a friend got me from a middle-eastern store) and the taste is SO superior to the boiled water version. Chickweed contains natural saponins (you can use it as soap) which break down bacteria (and some people say fat cells too) and other nasties, a general nutritious detoxifying herb.
Today I also made cinnamon rolls - the recipe from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, but with stevia/erythritol and I added raisins. They were delicious!

Fruit Kimchi

I love Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation. I returned it to the library today but yesterday I tried the recipe for fruit kimchi. I didn't have any pineapple, grapes, pears or plums, but I used what I had on hand . . . results pending! (I did try some unfermented and it was very good.) I used two apples, a peach, a nectarine, 4 prunes and some raisins. I left out the cilantro, used bottled lemon juice and jarred garlic, and powdered ginger and chili. I also used cayenne instead of jalapenos, and the result was very spicy. Meanwhile I am trying to card and spin alpaca, reading library books, dreaming about next spring's container garden, and trying new food experiments. And one little tomato is starting to ripen! I know the plant will die before the flowers can become tomatoes, but I wonder what would happen if I took it inside? Also I am down to three radish plants, but the sweetpotatoes are doing well. If I get a harvest, what should I make out of them? Oven fries, fermented soda maybe?

Crabapple Sauce and a Braided Rug

Yesterday I accomplished two things: Making a jar of crabapple sauce/butter, whatever it is called, and finishing a braided rug. It was easy to braid the rug once I figured out to overlap the rag strips instead of sewing them together. It ended up about the size of a mini trampoline. That was from a big garbage bag of rag strips. The crabapple sauce involved picking the crabapples, chopping off the stems and flower ends, cooking them, adding more water and mashing them in through a colander to remove the seeds and fibrous bits (mind you, this was learned partly through trial and error and got a lot more dishes dirty than necessary), adding cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and honey, and boiling it down. Maybe next time I will figure out how to take pictures of all the steps. Meanwhile, the tomato plant is making two tiny tomatoes and a few flowers, while a few radishes came up in the planters. And I had a weird dream about rabbits half the size of gerbils, and the other week I dreamed about pigs the size of guinea pigs. Weird!