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Carnivore Oak Park is going to start carrying a little of my food-themed jewelry and hand-sewn indie-designed tea towels; perfect for your holiday gifting! I’ll be dropping off these pieces later today (probably around noon), in two options – rich saffron threads, chili flake and gold leaf. Hyper-local – I live just a block away.

One of the libraries has a monthly spice club, and they had me do little curry powder packets for their club – Eliana packaged them up for me, with some recipes, etc., and it just came out very cute.

Quick note for locals that there are jars of freshly-made Sri Lankan dark-roasted curry powder (lovely as a grill rub, or on popcorn, as well as in curry) at Carnivore Oak Park, along with signed cookbooks.

And Roshani noticed that there were some hardcovers of Vegan Serendib at The Book Table, so I stopped in and signed those too.

Slept very weirdly last night, just waking up over and over. I feel okay right now, but moving slowly, and I suspect I’ll crash at some point today. Oh well!

I still managed to assemble the flash sale orders this morning. Next steps are packaging them up, adding ice packs to the ones with confections, asking Stephanie to make up paid shipping labels (she needs dimensions and weight for that), and then running them over to the post office.

Spent a little time this weekend making elderberry syrup, which is supposed to be a tonic for colds and such. It’s a little bitter until you sweeten it with honey, but it does taste like it’s good for you.

One tip I found said to freeze the berries before trying to remove them from the stems, and that definitely made it much easier to pop them off without making a big mess. Last pic is elderberry syrup and elderflower syrup. Would be amusing to serve paired ice cream scoops made with those.

The first few times I went to Hawai’i, Jed treated me to a lot of sightseeing and tourist stuff, which was great — helicopter tour, snuba, visit to the Dole Plantation and the queen’s palace, lots of eating at local restaurants.

This trip, I pretty much went straight to friends’ houses, shopped at local markets for groceries (and poke), and cooked (sometimes re-cooking leftovers to be more curry-ish).

For writing retreats, I love the novelty of travel; it’s very stimulating. But I also like going to the same place again and just living like a local — I end up with a lot more time for focusing on writing.

Avocados from my friend’s tree. So nice. It was producing more avocados than the two of us could keep up with.

Well — I posted to my local garden club group about having made too much elderflower syrup, and people asked if I was selling it, and I basically sold it all in about 20 minutes? That was funny. I’m throwing in some of my extra redbud syrup to each order, just ’cause.

I’ve used up all the elderflowers on my bush, since I wanted to let a bunch go to berries, so that’s it for this year….

Okay, it turns out that the recipe I used makes a LOT of elderflower syrup. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with it all, but I suppose it’s time to go look up some recipes. At least one cocktail, though, I think! I’m thinking an elderflower white wine spritzer would be perfect for accompanying a lot of sweaty gardening….

I might offer a small bottle or two in the next flash sale — would people be interested? I also have some little bottles of redbud syrup left.

I left a fair number of flowerheads on the bush, so those are turning nicely into berries, so soon I’ll be able to harvest these and make jam. (Elderberries need to be cooked to be edible.)

Finally harvested some elderflowers to make syrup. Followed the recipe from SpruceEats: https://www.thespruceeats.com/elderflower-syrup-recipe…

It’ll be ready in 3-5 days, so we’ll have to check back to see how it tastes.