![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
picturethat posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
bakerstreet
processions posting in bakerstreet
FIND THE BEAUTY Today, we'll press below the obvious. We'll dig deep to find the true beauty that's within. For some of you, we'll need to dig deeper. |
funandcutememes posting in bakerstreet
asoftermeme posting in bakerstreet
paintbrush posting in bakerstreet
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
homesteadandchill_feedFollow my easy recipe to make delicious homemade elderflower cordial (sometimes called elderflower syrup). The delicate, floral flavor of fresh elderflowers come together with bright notes of citrus to create a concentrated sweet and tangy syrup.
Mix a splash of elderflower cordial in sparkling water to make a refreshing natural “soda”, or add it to cocktails, mocktails, desserts and more. See a complete list of ways to use it at the end of this post.
This is one of my favorite spring or summertime treats!
I have nearly a dozen wild elderberry bushes growing on my property, but unfortunately the berries never get very large or juicy in our dry climate. So this recipe is a perfect way for me to use the flowers at least, along with our homegrown lemons!
RELATED: Don’t miss our elderberry syrup recipe, homemade elderberry tincture, or easy elderberry gummies recipe!
Elderflower cordial and syrup are often used interchangeably, though they’re made with a slightly different process.
Cordial recipes are typically more complex, using citrus and/or citric acid for a sweet-and-sour flavor profile and natural preservative, while simple syrups are usually made with only sugar and water. Also, cordial is often made by macerating the elderflowers (soaking them in sugar for several days) rather than quickly boiling them.
Yes, you can absolutely make this elderflower cordial recipe using dried flowers. The flavor will be slightly different (a bit more earthy) but still delicious. Since dried flowers are more concentrated, simply use 1/3 to half the amount (e.g 1/3 to 1/2 cup of dried elderflowers to 1 cup fresh).
This recipe makes about 1 quart or 4 cups of finished elderflower cordial. Feel free to double it if you have a lot of flowers!
While some other elderflower cordial recipes quickly heat everything together, I prefer to avoid boiling the flowers and let them passively soak for a couple days instead. This helps preserve the delicate flavor and maximum nutrients possible. I think it’s worth the wait!
However, if you’re in a rush and want to make your elderflower cordial in one day, you can simply combine all the ingredients together in a pot, bring it to a boil, simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, let it cool, and then strain and bottle.
After a couple days of soaking, it’s time to strain the finished elderflower cordial! To do so, I like to line a fine-mesh strainer with cheesecloth for extra filtration. Using cheesecloth also makes it easier to squeeze out every last drop of syrup.
Store homemade elderflower cordial in the refrigerator.
When made with citric acid (a key preservative), elderflower cordial should last for at least 3 to 6 months (or longer) – though I always use it up before then! Without citric acid, plan to use it within 1 to 2 months.
If the syrup grows mold, becomes cloudy or slimy, or develops off odors/flavors then it has gone bad and should be discarded.
PRO TIP: If you didn’t use citric acid, you can simmer your finished cordial for about 10 minutes before bottling to help sterilize it and extend the shelf life. Heating the mixture can also help neutralize the toxins (cyanogenic glycosides) found in the stems, if you’re concerned about that or didn’t remove them well enough.
Get ready – you’re in for a treat!
Well friends, I hope you enjoy this easy elderflower cordial recipe as much as I do! Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments, and come back to leave a review once you give it a try.
You may also like:
The post Easy Homemade Elderflower Cordial (Syrup) Recipe appeared first on Homestead and Chill.
moosejuice posting in bakerstreet
groupon posting in bakerstreet
![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
mark posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenanceHappy Wednesday!
I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!
Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!
Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.
whentheymeme posting in bakerstreet
purplecatselfpublishingadvice_feedOn the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, host Howard Lovy talks to Allyson Longueira, associate director of publishing at the graduate program in creative writing at Western Colorado University, about what authors need to understand about book design, from typography and interior layout to covers and branding. They discuss how design choices signal genre, how authors can better communicate with designers, and where to draw the line between creative control and trusting the experts. Longueira also explains how thoughtful design supports readability and market positioning, giving authors practical ways to approach the visual side of publishing with more confidence.
The post Audio Interview: How Authors Can Work Effectively with Book Designers with Howard Lovy and Allyson Longueira appeared first on The Self-Publishing Advice Center.
dreamlocket posting in bakerstreet| The Reincarnated Lovers Meme | ||
  | ||
| Everyone knows the feeling of when you see someone and you know you've seen them before. Isn't that a part of déjà vu? But what if the connection you have with that person goes beyond the superficial recognition of familiarity? Perhaps you were connected once...in the most intimate of ways. Some religions and philosophies believe in reincarnation of souls, and it's said that souls could be reincarnated together - once again to follow out the same path they did before. Or maybe not. Maybe it could be a second chance for fixing things that went wrong before, like the a tragedy or circumstances keeping you apart. But can you take that chance? Do you even want to? HOW TO PLAY
| A. THE PAST( Read more... ) | |
shiftyeyed posting in bakerstreet
knitsock posting in bakerstreet
adisastergay posting in bakerstreet
Someone, whether it be a friend or a total stranger, has fallen asleep on you wherever you happen to be; you are a rather comfortable pillow to them.
What do you do?
krampused posting in bakerstreet
sarabi posting in bakerstreet
| o1. comment with your character and prefs in a top level. o2. reply to others, complete with pictures and gifs! o3. cook up something shippy from those inspirational ingredients. |
link 'em: embed 'em: shrink 'em: |
selfpublishingadvice_feedWe start the week with some good news that segues interestingly out of the news that many indie authors have found alarming at the end of last week. The indie corner of the internet has been filled with little other than discussion (much heated) of Draft2Digital's decision to introduce fees for new and low-activity accounts in the face (it claims) of a vast increase in artificially generated content.
The post News Summary: Bookshop.org Sales Surge 55% to $70 Million; E-books Now 5% of Total Sales appeared first on The Self-Publishing Advice Center.
darkmountain_feed1.
Let us start like this: there are three salmon dancing in the river. Of course, they are not dancing, but let us also say there is a young man standing on the undercut bank of that river. He is holding the slim waist of a vine maple and watching the salmon with the same clutching intensity as he does the election. Let us say he would like to think the salmon are dancing.
2.
So let us start like this: there are three salmon mating in the river. The young man knows the jargon. He knows the males are engaged in intersexual competition. He knows the female is digging out a redd in the gravel substrate with the paddle of her tail. She will then lay her eggs in the disturbed sediment, and the victorious male will spill his milt in the water over them.
The young man is reminded of something, perhaps apocryphal, that his cousin once told him – that the ocean is at least one per cent whale sperm.
3.
But let us start like this: there are three salmon courting in the river. The male salmon charge each other like horny torpedoes and the female is preparing both their lover’s bed and the cradle. The young man feels like a voyeur, watching them. He feels even more like a voyeur because he is getting aroused. This is not, he hopes, because they are fish, but because, he hopes, of the earnestness of the act. There is so much desire, he thinks, thrashing around in the water.
Let us also say the young man used to take Prozac and he has recently stopped. He has gotten through the nausea and mood swings of the withdrawals, and he is sadder now, but he can finally feel his penis again.
4.
And yet, let us start like this: there are three salmon dying in the river. That is what they do when the mating is done. The young man knows this. The young man smells this. The corpses of several other salmon litter the banks, the ones that have not yet been dragged away by bears or coyotes.
The salmon were born in the river, but they live in the sea. They return to the river only to mate and to die. They return to the same river they hatched in. There are some who travel as far inland as Montana. The salmon eat nothing on this journey. By the time they arrive, they are already mostly dead.
The young man thinks, though he does not know, that they can smell the water they belonged to. Or something like smelling. Something close enough for him to sniff the air and agree with the dying salmon. This must be the place.
5.
We should probably start like this: there are only three salmon dying in the river. That is not entirely true. There is a fourth a hundred feet upstream at the foot of a waterfall. It is a tall waterfall, the roaring, cascading kind that the local chamber of commerce would put in tourism advertisements if it weren’t a waterfall near a quarry. But there is a single salmon throwing itself at this waterfall. Salmon are used to leaping over waterfalls, but never any this tall. Each time it throws itself against the slick rocks, it dies a little more. But the young man does not think it counts, because it is dying in vain. It is not dying the way it should.
Even if he were to include this fourth salmon in his tally, it is still not enough. There should be hundreds of salmon courting and dying on this stretch of river. There should be, but fisherman have caught them, or dams have stood in their way, or the rivers have been too warm, or erosion from clearcut hills have buried their redds.
‘Don’t you know this?’ he asks the three mating. ‘What’s the point?’ And the young man is very sad. He feels like they are, all of them, just the same as the salmon throwing itself against the waterfall. He feels like he should have stayed on his medication.
6.
Maybe we should start like this: there is a young man standing on the undercut bank of a river who has recently stopped taking his anti-depressants. He started taking the medication because of affirmative answers to certain questions on a quiz:
Over the last two weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems?
He never felt he would be better off dead, but that always seemed like a failure in logic.
The young man answered these questions this way – indeed, he took the quiz to begin with – because he believed he was living at the end of the world. There were many reasons for this, and good reasons too, but the salmon were high on his list. Not these salmon, but salmon in the abstract. Salmon as a metaphor for something greater.
The young man’s favourite place in the world is here: the high forests of Idaho. He loves this place because both he and his wife are from here. They met in school, across the mountains, but did not fall in love until they came home. The first time they made love was out picking huckleberries in a redcedar grove. She tripped and was swallowed up by the patch. He waded over to help her up. Her hand had reached out from beneath the leaves. When he grabbed it, she pulled him down with her. He remembers thinking, as he struggled not to finish, that the trees were the second-most beautiful things he had ever seen.
Idaho’s are maritime forests, so lush and full four hundred miles from the ocean because of the salmon. Without the salmon, there would be no huckleberries, no redcedar, no slim vine maples. Salmon grow fat on smaller fish at sea, then carry all those oceanic nutrients inland when they migrate home to spawn. Their bodies, washed up on the sides of the river, are God’s way of spreading fertiliser.
Idaho’s are maritime forests, so lush and full four hundred miles from the ocean because of the salmon. Without the salmon, there would be no huckleberries, no redcedar, no slim vine maples
7.
So we start like this: There are three salmon and a young man gathered on a river at the end of the world. The three salmon are mating, because that is what they do. The young man is watching, because he does not know what else to do. The salmon have travelled over five-hundred miles of river to get here. The young man has recently stopped taking his anti-depressants. He took them because he thought he was living through the end of the world.
He was, but they made him feel less sad about that.
He stopped taking them because they made him feel less of everything — less interested in courting and mating most of all. Less interest in sex led to less physical intimacy led to larger and larger gaps between him and his wife in their bed. They did not pick huckleberries anymore, or watch salmon, or touch each other at all. And despite the Prozac, this made him sadder than the end of the world ever had before.
He has come to the river today to watch the salmon run, maybe the last salmon run on earth. He wanted his wife to come with him, but she did not think it was a good idea. She was, in fact, worried about this decision of his. Is, in fact, worried about this decision. She watches the clock and fiddles with her car keys.
He watches the salmon and he does not know how to feel. He watches them from an undercut bank above the river. He is holding to the slim waist of a vine maple, but when the undercut begins to give way beneath him, his grip is not strong enough.
The young man tumbles into the river. The river swallows him up. He hits his head on a tree root or a rock or a furious, horny male, and everything goes black.
He wakes beneath a foot of water. His body has nestled in the redd the female had just dug. The salmon drift beside him. From this angle, he’s pretty sure he’s met the males before – they were duking it out in front of the Dirty D in Astoria and, having expended all their energy, were slumped together on the curb. The female he knew in Spokane. They kissed once and never went on a second date.
The young man blinks and remembers he should be drowning. He remembers he should be drowning when he notices there is a silhouette beyond the refraction of the surface. It is a frantic silhouette, scrabbling down the collapsed bank towards him. He wants to tell her it’s alright, but he can’t speak through the water.
A hand reaches out to him. He grabs it and pulls. His wife tumbles into the water on top of him. They are too big for the redd, but the female, annoyed, has already begun to dig another.
8.
Let us start like this: there are five salmon dancing at the birth of the world.
IMAGE
Cedra Wood
Fishbone Beast Portrait
Graphite on paper
This drawing is the culmination of a project about the Salton Sea, an environmentally compromised site in Southern California. I gathered the remains of tilapia from where they lay on the lakeshore, their die-off charting the water’s yearly evaporation like dendrochronological rings, and made a wearable sculpture from the bones. I depicted the character in a series of paintings and drawings to evoke the ominous beauty found there, a sort of manifested genius loci.
Cedra Wood lives in New Mexico, USA, creating paintings and drawings that explore human ecology through visual metaphor. cedrawood.com
Our Spring 2026 anthology is a hardback collection that steps outside the human bubble and puts animals at its heart
Read moreThe post Five Salmon Dancing appeared first on Dark Mountain.
inuyasock posting in bakerstreet
what it says on the tin. leave a blank comment, include your preferences or a starter, it's all good. reply to others with a text, a dirty picture (please link all nsfw things!), misfires, misdials, drunk filthy voicemails, whatever your heart desires. |
omggirlonthenet posting in bakerstreet
enthymeme)benebellwen_feedContinue reading The Tarot Reader as Healer: Why Now, Why You, and How
justformemes posting in bakerstreet
torine posting in bakerstreet
benebellwen_feedlilpoundcake posting in bakerstreet
vibez posting in bakerstreet
picturethat in bakerstreet - Non-verbalprocessions in bakerstreet - s she pretty on the inside? / Is she pretty from the back?weebsock in bakerstreet - An oathfunandcutememes in bakerstreet - Morning sunshineasoftermeme in bakerstreet - Dialoguepaintbrush in bakerstreet - The Magical Creature Bazaarhomesteadandchill_feed - Easy Homemade Elderflower Cordial (Syrup) Recipemoosejuice in bakerstreet - Bad hoursgroupon in bakerstreet - You and I got historymark in dw_maintenance - Search maintenancewhentheymeme in bakerstreet - Dancing memepurplecat - Reading, Listening, Watchingselfpublishingadvice_feed - Audio Interview: How Authors Can Work Effectively with Book Designers with Howard Lovy and Allyson Ldreamlocket in bakerstreet - Like some never ending wheelshiftyeyed in bakerstreet - Firstsknitsock in bakerstreet - girl, don't...adisastergay in bakerstreet - eepykrampused in bakerstreet - what's your favorite au? mine's bodyguard.sarabi in bakerstreet - ♡ ｐｒｏｍｐｔｓselfpublishingadvice_feed - News Summary: Bookshop.org Sales Surge 55% to $70 Million; E-books Now 5% of Total Salesdarkmountain_feed - Five Salmon Dancinginuyasock in bakerstreet - Sweeetextsomggirlonthenet in bakerstreet - Cirque de la Lunebenebellwen_feed - The Tarot Reader as Healer: Why Now, Why You, and Howjustformemes in bakerstreet - Abrupt Kissingtorine in bakerstreet - WHAT DID YOU EAT YESTERDAY? a show and tell memebenebellwen_feed - These are a few of my favorite scentsdaddygrump in wayswithwords - (no subject)lilpoundcake in bakerstreet - The great escapevibez in bakerstreet - Random Scenarios? At this time of day? In this part of the country?zvi and krja
