Various achievements

[luzula]

Spending one last week at the family "summer" place, which I can do because coronavirus and distance teaching. It is an adequate year for chanterelles (the smaller brown kind), but not an abundant one: we have picked 40 liters so far, are drying most of them, and have fried the rest up to eat on sandwiches.

We have also picked 11 liters of rosehips at the perfect soft stage of ripeness. Traditionally, you make dessert soup from these in Sweden. So I boiled them whole, strained out the seeds and other stuff you don't want with a sieve (this takes longer than you think, though...), added sugar and a little starch, and then you have a lovely tasty deep red soup. You eat it with whipped cream, and traditionally also tiny sweet almond biscuits that you put in the soup, but we didn't have those.

Then we have also planted four gooseberry bushes, and four black currant bushes, and did other garden maintenance like spreading out old silage that we got from a nearby farmer on the garden beds. Still getting along really well with mom, also an achievement.

As for writing, I wrote one short Yuletide treat that I unfortunately can't use as my main fic, and got started on my actual Yuletide fic, though I'm still not sure exactly where it's going to go. It just got over 1,000 words. And the poly fic is at 35K and going well.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

That sounds like an excellent adventure.

How long do gooseberries take before they will be producing?

Fruit soup mmmm

[luzula]

Hmm. Two years, maybe? I'm guessing...

Yes, fruit soup is yummy.

[toft]

Sounds lovely!

[luzula]

It is! : )

[china_shop]

Wow, so productive! I knew rosehips were edible (because of rosehip tea), but I didn't know you could make soup. Cool!

*cheers on the writing, yay*

[luzula]

Thanks! You can buy rosehip soup in powder form in grocery stores in Sweden, but I guess not that many people make it themselves.

[regshoe]

Aww, that sounds lovely—I don't think I've ever eaten a dessert soup, but sweet rosehips and whipped cream must be very nice.

Yay for Yuletide progress :D

[luzula]

Dessert soups are pretty common in Sweden--besides rosehip soup, we've got blueberry soup (which I've never actually made myself, but you can buy it in powder form at the grocery store). Also we often make cherry soup in my family, called (somewhat unpalatably) spit soup because you need to spit out the pits. And sometimes we make soup from gooseberries, too.

[chestnut_pod]

Mm, so delicious! The rosehips make me think of the sweet summer Ashkenazi soups, like blueberry soup, that were such a childhood staple of mine.

[luzula]

Oh, interesting! Blueberry soup is common in Sweden as well (I've never actually made it myself, but you can buy it in powder form at the grocery store).

Also we often make cherry soup in my family, called (somewhat unpalatably) spit soup because you need to spit out the pits. And sometimes we make soup from gooseberries, too.

[chestnut_pod]

Wow, I'm intrigued by the powdered fruit soup!

We have cherry soup, too, which is always made with sour cherries and sour cream -- and we definitely always pitted the cherries first! The family lore was that it was Hungarian; it makes me happy to know it exists up northerly way as well.