Assembling Flash Sale Orders

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.

Tastes Like It’s Good for You

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. 🙂

Living Like a Local

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.

Elderflower Syrup Sold

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….

A LOT of Elderflower Syrup

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.)

Pretty Presents

I still get a lot of pleasure out of wrapping up pretty presents of cookbooks and homemade curry powder for folks, especially when they’ve asked me to inscribe a sweet note along with it. 🙂

Busy Morning Today

I had an iGov meeting from 8:30 – 9:30, and then I lured Anand into accompanying me to the farmer’s market with the promise of fresh donuts. He didn’t realize that it also involved being a beast of burden until AFTER we had gotten there…

Saw multiple people I knew, including the OPALGA+ folks staffing the donut booth, some old friends, a parent from OPRF who knew me from board meetings, etc. Anand was a little bewildered, “Do all these people actually know you? Do you know them?” Well, they know my face, anyway — that’s part of what happens when you run for office. Suddenly, you get a lot more visible, and people have opinions about you… 🙂

Lots of fun stuff at the market, per usual. Along with the staples, I got a ghost cucumber (supposed to be thin-skinned, basically like a regular cucumber, but cool-looking), and some sprigarello (a leafy Italian broccoli, apparently). Not sure what to do with the latter, suggestions welcome! We got a 3-year-old cheddar and a 6-year-old cheddar because Anand asked what the difference was, so we’ll do a taste test later and see which he likes better.

I’m mostly excited to make myself a tomato-mozzarella-basil salad for dinner, with olive oil and balsamic. I’d do it sooner, but the next few hours will also be hectic — I have a Clarion training from 12 – 1:30, and then we immediately drive Kavi to the airport for her flight to Argentina, and then we come back and drive Anand to a birthday party at 4.

But there will be chill time after that. 🙂 And I got half a peach pie, so that’ll likely be part of dinner as well…