News from the Farm: Use your zucchini!

We like to say that the only time you need to lock your car in Vermont is during the summer, when everyone's looking for places to ditch extra zukes.  So, stuck inside because of all this Irene-induced rain, I thought now's a good time to share my three favorite ways to use it all up and free myself from zucchini-wasting guilt.

Once you have bored of zucchini bread, ratatouille, and sauteed zukes try :
Chocolate Zucchini Cake, Zucchini Relish, and Zucchini Pasta:

1)  Chocolate Zucchini Cake
          I use a recipe from Fanny Farmer's baking book, a sweet oldie timie cookbook I got years ago at the Strand in NYC.

• 3/4 cup butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 1/2 cup flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 cups shredded raw zucchini
• 1/2 cup milk

Cream butter and sugar, then beat in eggs. Sift together and add flour, baking powder, soda, cinnamon, salt and cocoa. Mix well. Add vanilla, zucchini and milk. Stir until well blended.

I usually use two squares of baker's chocolate, never seem to have oranges to zest and sometimes substitute honey for some or all of the sugar (we have hives so there's ample honey around here).
Other thoughts are adding some hot pepper (maybe something smokey like ground chipotle), adding raisins or chocolate chips or making cupcakes with frosting.
I skip the frosting, throw it in a tube pan, sprinkle powdered sugar and call it a day.  (bake at 350 for an hour for tube pan.)
SOOO Good warm!

2)  Zucchini Relish
This is just like pickle relish, but tastier and with zucchini (obviously)
I use "Margaret Hawes's Zucchini Relish from Putting Food By (on of my two canning/freezing/drying bibles).  Here's the recipe, but remember the things you don't want to mess with are the vinegar and sugar (unless you know what you're doing) but I alter the seasoning and the vegetables, depending on what I have in the pantry and in the garden.

Ingredients

• 10 cups finely chopped zucchini (if small, leave in the seeds; if over 8 inches, remove seeds)
• 4 large onions
• 4 green bell peppers, seeded
• 4 red bell peppers, seeded
• 1/2 cup salt
• 2-1/2 cups white vinegar
• 4 cups white sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 2 teaspoons celery seed
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

Preparation:  Wash and peel zucchini, removing stems and blossom ends; remove seeds if squash is cut in large chunks for grinding. Peel and quarter onions; seed and quarter the bell peppers. Put vegetables through the food grinder, using a coarse knife. (With a food processor, use the shredding disk: the steel blade can make these ingredients lose too much texture.) Put ground vegetables in a crockery or stainless steel bowl, stir in the salt; keep the vegetables in the resulting brine by holding them down with a weighted plate. Let vegetables stand overnight. The next day, drain off the brine and rinse vegetables with cold water; drain again, and squeeze well by hand. Mix cornstarch with the sugar and four other dry seasonings, add all to the cold vinegar, blending well. Over medium heat, bring to boiling, stirring well to prevent lumping. When sugar is melted and the syrup is clear, add the vegetables; simmer 30 minutes, stirring often. Pour into clean very hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch of headroom; adjust sterilized lids, and process for 10 minutes in a 185 F/85 C water bath. Remove; complete seals if necessary.

3)  Zucchini Pasta

This is so good, even my kids that don't like sauteed zukes, love this pasta.  When cooking, I'm not much for measuring and mostly use recipes as "guidelines," as my husband says, so use your judgement and your taste for proportions:

About half a stick of butter

a few cloves of garlic

a couple small zukes or one big one, shredded

a bunch of fresh basil

parmesan or romano cheese

Sautee everything but the cheese, throw it over a pound of pasta and grate a bunch of cheese over it.  The yumminess here does come from the glutteny, so don't be shy with extra butter, some olive oil, lots of garlic and basil, depending on what you like.

We also shred zukes with lots of basil and freeze it in quart-sized freezer bags so we can eat this all year long!

A Bonus Use of Zucchini:

No matter how good we are about harvesting zukes daily, we always end up with those hidden mosters no one can eat....no one but the chickens and the turkeys.  Our oldest son recently got a potato gun from a friend. This is a plastic gun that you stick into a potato, making a little potato pellet, then shoot it off.  We now send Luca off with his Zucchini gun and huge zucchini and he sits in front of the chickens and turkeys, firing off food!  It entertains his little sister and brother too, so it's a HUGE bonus for me!

Shhh! Clandestine photo shoot in the Little Hill Studio

Recently some friends came up to the studio, and while they waited for me to arrive, they did some dressing up and playing with hats.   Among the images they sent me from this spontaneous photo-shoot is one of my fave hat pictures of all time:

I love the intimacy of this picture, the playfulness and humor and self-affection in her expression.  There is a whole story here - she has been trying on many hats, and each has transformed her, emphasizing different facets of her character & reminding her she is debonair, glamorous, innocent, gamine, worldly, woodsy, funny, sexy, edgy, romantic, hip, old-fashioned, seductive, cute ... intimidating ... funny ...

This is perfectly emblematic of what I love best about making hats, and watching people wear them. 
Hats are the poetry of fashion.  They are transformative, quickly-grasped (or not...), and the art is in the play between function, form and brave aesthetic leaping. 

Fashion is not a shallow pursuit at all (malls and big-box stores be damned.)  Self-adornment is as old as humanity, as fundamental and universal as music and language and tool-making.  It is an aspect of culture where the zeitgeist is very close to the surface, where tribal affiliations, sub-cultural alliances, gender, age and regionality meet the Socio-Economic Macrostructure filtered through the fluid ebb and flow of personal self-expression.  It is where the individual body interacts with the collective unconscious.  It is a language, a communicative repertoire, and dressing communicatively is a generous act that offers something of oneself  to others.

What do you wear when you are feeling extra communicative?  any good mirror pictures?

 
  

Forget the eyes, hats amplify the soul.

I know, heady words, right?  But seriously, there's something profound about watching people put on hats.  Take our experience last weekend at the Lincoln Center Festival of American Crafts.  We had a blast, got our human-contact tanks filled up, and played dress-ups to our hearts' content.  (Nice work if you can get it:))

But there was more going on than we could quite put our cocktail-ring-flaunting fingers on...  For instance, some people make a bee line for exactly the right hat as soon as they come in.  They reach for it, put it on, and everything goes still; suddenly their personality comes into sharp focus & we know something inexpressible about who they are, and best of all, what they like best about themselves.

 Other people start more shyly.   They tentatively choose something demure and wait patiently for room at the mirrors. Then they quietly work their way through more and more exuberant hats until they finally strut off wearing one of our wildest feathery numbers and looking fabulous...

When the right person puts on the right hat it's alchemy, pure and simple.  The hat is transformed from an inanimate object into an extension/reflection/amplification of something that person values about themselves.

Now, which of these beauties will amplify your soul?

 

Alpaca luv - so much fun!

We are thrilled to announce a new collaboration with our friend Deb at Maple View Alpaca farm http://www.mapleviewfarmalpacas.com/ !  Deb loves her gangly-yet-gorgeous babies as much as we love our beautiful (if a titch less soigne) herd. 

 A cross between a swan and a teddy bear if we ever saw it!

After a visit, Sam came home with several colors of Deb's alpaca fiber recently and we have our very first offering up on etsy!  We're very excited - as well-loved as alpaca fiber is, it seems like few people are making elegant hats felted with it!  So here goes, our very first alpaca creation, modeled by the lovely Midge Park!

Introducing Midge Park

Hello Daaahlings!  Well, it's a few days off the mark, but we have a winner for our name-that-mannequin contest (cue the bells, whistles and catcalls).

We had so many witty and charming entries, and couldn't quite decide even with the sage input of our cloven-hooved pals, so we canvassed customers at the Cabin Fever Craft fair on Sunday, and finally arrived at Midge Park as the correct moniker for our lovely, corporeally-challenged covergirl.  The name smacks of 1920s&30s girl-friday style, and evokes our pastures in black-fly season to boot! 

So, without further ado, let us present our lovely and intrepid model, MIDGE PARK!!!

 (Our girlz love her!)

Midge's dear cousin, Ms. Shannon Park provided the name and has chosen the first of the two headbands as her prize.  Shannon, dear, send us your mailing address and we'll send you your goodie!  Huzzah, and thanks to everyone for all the adorable entries!  Muah

FIRST ANNUAL LITTLE HILL WOOLWORKS NAME THAT MANNEQUIN CONTEST

In honor of Valentine's Day we'd like to present the newest member of our multi-culti-mixed-species herd and the love of Arlo's life!  But we can't 'cause she doesn't have a name! (Cue the "Aaaaawww"s)

We at Little Hill approve of love of all kinds - even animate/inanimate cross-generational love.  However, we just can't STAND her namelessness.  So we are proud to announce the:

FIRST (possibly only) ANNUAL LITTLE HILL WOOLWORKS NAME THAT MANNEQUIN CONTEST

The brilliant winner will receive your choice of the following crimson-hued headbands (modeled by our other as-yet-to-be-named mannequin, ain;t she sweet?)

How it works:  She needs a first and last name!
To enter, you should: 1)subscribe to our blog, and 2)send your entry by Friday, Feb 11 to littlehillwoolworks@gmail.com along with which headband (1 or 2 ) you prefer. Also, let us know whether you'd like to pick up your prize at the SOWA Cabin Fever Show (http://cabinfevershow.com) Feb 13, 2011, or if you can't make it there, where you'd like us to ship it!  

A distinguished panel of adults, children and cloven-hooved folk will make a sober judgement and announce the winner on February 12.  How easy is that? 

Arlo and Madame X thank you!

We don't mind the winter blues, but save us from the winter blahs!

Blue is one of our favorite colors, so we kinda like the winter blues... especially sky blues...  and periwinkle blues... and deep soul-searching midnight blues...

turns out, making coloriscious bonbons for pallet-challenged New England noggins is a sure-fire antidote to "blahs" of any kind.  We've been busy mixing dyes in our big stained stock-pots and dipping felt, feathers, ribbons and even our new straws in to see what yummy shades we can come up with.  We are especially in love with the slightly "off" shades we get when we over-dye gray Lucy and brown Hannah.  Much better than spring. Really! 

Shoveling through waist-deep drifts to deliver hay to the herd is another story - our intrepid Sam once again gets the short end of the old stick with that task!  Meanwhile, Nora is up in the studio layering mustard yellow grosgrain over salmon-colored silk... no that's no good... how about cranberry velvet over nutmeg?  hmm...

Next we are headed down to the SOWA Cabin Fever Indy Gift Show on Sunday Feb. 13 (http://cabinfevershow.com) and we must say, despite the OUTRAGEOUS onslaught of snow and more snow and more more more snow we are much more sky blue than blah.