Wasn’t the recent eclipse amazing?!? We were lucky to be pretty squarely in the path of the most recent display of the moon eclipsing the sun during the middle of the day. How cool as well as rare! We were so excited to share the special event with friends and family that we started by celebrating with an eclipse party the evening prior to the big day.  We finally had a nice rain a couple of days prior so the weather was delightful and the fields were rebounding from the much needed precipitation!

To celebrate, we offered a farm table full of the week’s harvest with a relaxing dinner of Salmon Nicoise…the only items not from our fields were the Salmon, olives and anchovies! (Um, well, the lemon, vinegar and olive oils for the marinade and dressing were additional exceptions but who’s counting!) Here are our lovely platters…Yum!I had the most fun making the eclipse cookies to share with our guests and a few special neighbors. I have a great affinity for rolled cookies…it must have been something I caught from my mother who made rolled cookies with great ease. I don’t remember her ‘teaching’ me to do this so I think I am just imitating her actions. I catch myself blowing the excess flour from the cuts so as not to make the cookies too tough and addressing the hierarchy of the first rolled dough vs the second roll out…anything after that was baked as scraps which are absolutely the best treat to eat since they somehow don’t count for much but are so very tasty to the sweaty cook!

Of course her grandfather (who we all called Pappy) owned a small bakery in the little Indiana town where she grew up; so she learned from the best since his wife, Grandmother K (Kettlehut), knew all the tricks and could bake circles around anyone and everyone! It is no wonder that my mother knew her way around the kitchen!

I must say, I have all of her old cookie cutters which bring back very fond memories but better yet, I even have her cardboard substitutions for the shapes she didn’t have in her collection. She would make a stiff paper cut out of a shape she wanted to represent and then tediously use a knife to cut the dough around that shape. She made an ax for George Washington’s birthday which was celebrated when I was little before we somehow glommed onto the current Presidents’ Day celebration. Is it my imagination, or wasn’t there also a cherry cluster for that special cookie day? Maybe one of my siblings could confirm this. If so, where did it go? But she also made a shamrock for St. Pat’s (she loved to tell us that she was part Irish!) and a gingerbread girl; this most likely was her response to making her tin gingerbread boy cutter happy to have the love of his life present beside him baking away on the cookie tray! Here are her cut outs that I so treasure. Is it ironic that they were cut, in part, from what looks to be the cardboard from egg cartons???So it was no wonder the night before the eclipse party that I began to ponder the cutter shapes I would use for my eclipses. An aha moment came about when I decided that my variety of snowflake cutters could serve as the ‘Suns’ and a variety of coordinating circles would work as my ‘Moons’. I think my mother would have approved.I made my ‘go to’ almond flavored dough for the suns and a delish chocolate flavored dough for the moons – sandwiched with vanilla icing between the two. I dusted them with powdered sugar to make the moons look like they had the proper craters. I giggled the whole time I made them! Of course we served them with our fresh, cold, farm cantaloupe and ice cream!So eclipse day dawned bright and sunny but I had a morning’s work to do before the celebration since I had harvested honey from the bees the previous Friday and wanted to extract it from the combs as soon as I could. I dragged out all the equipment again for this (hadn’t I just put it all away?) and did a final extraction (nearly 50lbs!) leaving the bees plenty of their own for the long winter days. I then put the newly emptied honey supers out in the yard for them to feast on and they went wild for hours cleaning them up!

They weren’t the only ones going wild. We did some of that here too as we were waiting for the eclipse. Of course we had to be careful to keep Coulter indoors so he sat very patiently with his Gramps watching the sky go dark and then bright again while I ventured out to capture some of it on video. (Excuse my camera fiddling…those dark glasses meant I couldn’t see what I was doing!)  Light to dark…

Then dark to light…

So while we were going buggy for the eclipse, it seems to me that the bugs were quite present everywhere I looked. Let’s just start with the growing presence of spiders in the chicken coop…this is no doubt a chapter from “Charlotte’s Web” and I have no intention of discouraging the spiders who have spun an intricate and on going construction between the coop ladder and the over head light fixture that so cleverly traps their prey.Here is another fellow I found in the coop one morning…a young grasshopper whose future remains unsure since he would be snapped up as a wonderful breakfast treat for the chicks if he ever gave up his overnight perch from the ladder step.This dragon fly was found hovering in the blueberry patch recently; isn’t he lovely!Of course not all insects are satisfied with the great outdoors…some find their way inside as proof of this praying mantis who I found upside down clinging to the edge of the shelf in the mudroom as he peered around wondering what to do next. I solved this for him by gingerly picking him up and re-launching him on the other side of the screen door! Last but not least are the Monarch Butterfly caterpillars that have found my herb garden to be their best meal…Good thing I already harvested plenty of dill!

We have been swamped with melons of all sorts…As well as green beans… And tomatoes…All of which have been well received by our weekend egg and produce subscribers who eagerly embraced the recent offering of pizza dough to accompany a roasted cherry tomato pizza recipe that we shared. I wasn’t sure there would be as many people ready to make the dough for the yummy pizza so I presented it for sale one recent weekend and it was a hit! Here are the individual packets of dough ready for customers to pluck from the coolers and take home to rise and bake. With all the excitement of the recent weeks, no one is happier than little Coulter who is so proudly sporting his Big Bro shirt these days! Hurrah…everyone is looking forward to pushing a baby buggy next year! Congratulations to the Ward family!