Preparing Easter Breakfast

"Fear not, for Christ is risen!"

After some days with grey clouds and rain the sun is shining again today. Its bitterly cold still, but bright and welcoming. A day just made to celebrate Easter it seems.

Celebrating Easter is and has always been all about breakfast for me. Homebaked buns with jam, flowers and, of course, eggs... we dyed ours with natural but bought colors.

So yesterday we prepared what still needed to be done, bake the buns, plant some flowers, dye some eggs and, best of all, make some more butter. I really fell in love with the simplicity of this act, shaking the cream to seperate butter and buttermilk. And Aaron helped me today and seemed to enjoy it too:

  

This is how it looks like when you have done enough shaking. The seperated buttermilk is very tasty and doen't taste like the one you can buy at all, more like vey creamy milk. I talked to my granddad (who grew up on a farm) on phone while I was making the butter and he remembered how his mother used to make butter the old style in one of these wooded buckets and how much he loved to drink that buttermilk. I wish I had such an old wooded butter maker but then again, you'd probably need too much cream to fill it. 

You then can add any flavour you like. We stired in some raspberry jam for the easter buns. Actually we used a bit too much jam so the butter became a little bit too soft to shape it properly but at least it was easy to spread like that coming straight from the fridge and truely delicious!

We have not started hiding eggs for Aaron yet since it would be impossible to explain to him how to look for something he has not seen before. I love hidding though and impatiently have to wait for next year to get into that with him...

After lunch we will meet with some friends and celebrate the day together, I can't wait...

I would love to hear about your Easter traditions and news. Do you have any special plans for today?

Happy Easter to you!

A Good Friday

Today has been the first day of my holidays. On Monday we will go to visit my parents and I can't wait to go, get treated, take spinning lessons with my mom, all those good things.

For now, we just try to make our days as good as they could be: Today started with a long sleep in (including Aaron). For breakfast we had homemade bread that I baked yesterday night after I had made butter myself for the first time ever and thought this fresh butter really needs some fresh bread to go with. There is nothing better: bread, butter and salt. 

Did you know it is very easy to make butter? You just have to fill cream into a jar and keep shaking for around 10-15 minutes. 

For lunch we had baked purple potatos with fresh rosmarin and some salat. Another simple treat.

After another long nap we finally made it outdoors and back to the stone beach of Father Rhine (that's what Germans call their river Rhine sometimes because its one of the longest and most important rivers here.) The stone beach we chose again because of Aarons new passion for throwing rocks into the water. He can do this for hours and enjoys every single "plop", when the stone hits the water.

This time I didn't forget to take a lighter so we collected all the wood we could find and made a small bonfire, Aarons first open fire ever. It was magical somehow and a bit smoky... Nathan and me both forgot our mobils at home, how fortunate. We were timeless and went home with the sun set.
We only brought some water, so no picnic either, just fire and rocks, water  and this wonderful hebrew song that I love so much:

Eli Eli
she'lo yigamer l'olam
hachol v'hayam
rishrush shel hamayim
b'rak hashamayim
tfilat ha'adam

hachol v'hayam
rishrush shel hamayim
b'rak hashamayim
tfilat ha'adam

My God, my God,

let these things never end. 

The sand and the sea. 

The rush of the waters.

 The lightning in the heavens.

 The prayer of mankind.

 The sand and the sea.

 The rush of the waters.

 The lightning in the heavens.

 The prayer of mankind

I brought my new tote bag which I sewed yesterday while I was waiting for the bread to rise. The fabric is from one of those skirts I found at the flea market last weekend, I am so in love with the fabric that I wanted to make something I can carry around with me all the time. It is a very simple Purl Bee pattern and was a joy to wipe up.

I love collecting things at the beach. Mostly driftwood but since there was not very much at the place we were, and we needed all of that for the fire, I gathered stones, special stones with stripes. It's like they really want to tell a story, an ancient story. And then I found this Good-Friday-Stone (first picture). Don't you think it looks just like a cross? I felt to exhited to find such a stone on Good Friday. Imagine this stone has already been around at the time Jesus died ( and much longer of course)... I really like stones.

To all of you a wonderful easter weekend with lots of eggs and the like!

Yarn along - Preparing for Easter

Knittin and reading. My favourite things to complete a perfect day. So I am joining Ginny on Wednesdays for Yarn Along to share my passions with you. Come and join in if you like!

There has not been very much knitting in the last week, but a whole lot of weekend outdoors at the river, with the first bbq of the year, bare feet and some reading. I finally started with this novel that I found at the flea market a few weeks back. First I thought I wouldn't like it but I really enjoy it now. Its a not very challenging, easy read for sitting in the sun with a cup of coffee. For those of you who have not read it yet: it's about a woman, divorced, who travels to Italy to find pleasure, to India to find devotion and to Indonesia to learn how to combine those two things. I am still in Italy and constantly hungry. She really knows how to write about food. On my way back from work I was reading on the train and had to pass by a grocery store just to get some spinach pasta, ricotta and sundried tomatos to satisfy my cravings... How come Americans are the most passionate people when it comes to writing about Italy. All the good books I have read about Italy or that take place in Italy are actually written by Americans. They really must like that country... 

Some wee bit of knitting has been done though: a chicken and an egg. The chicken pattern again from this book and the egg pattern from the wonderful purl bee. I want to do a few more of both since they are great little gifts for easter and fast knits, once you do it ;-)

The yarn for the chicken is some left over from Aarons T-shirt Vest. The egg yarn is some handspun wool from my mum, dyed, more or less by accident because I was batik dyeing a table cloth and used that yarn to tie the cloth. I wish I had tied/dyed some more...

Last Saturday there has also been some easter crafting at work with my clients (people with learning difficulties). We did some paper easter eggs and egg cups and I just love how they turned out so I asked if I could show you some:

The eggs I have dyed with natural dyes and then scraped some lines with a knife. It just takes forever if you don't want to risk to break the egg, so nothing to feed a whole family on :-)

Totally out of context but still worth mentioning: did you read Ariannes post on Mindful Parenting over at Rhythm of the Home? I love it so!

Happy Knitting!