It's Friday already again, and I think it's time for some pictures to make the week end with a bit of colour, especially as the weather forecast for here is mumbling something about "cloudy, and not much chance for sun". Which is a pity, because there's several spots of crocus flowers hanging out in our garden, looking like this:



and they are only waiting for the sun to shine down on them to open up to something like this:


but totally refuse to do so unless there is, you know, proper sunshine for more than five minutes.

There's also some iris, however, and these are undaunted by clouds. They just pop up one day and stand there in all their blue glory:


Totally undaunted by anything the weather might throw at them. When we had a bout of snow on Monday and Tuesday, and everything was suddenly all white (including our willow fence),


the iris still went "What? So there's snow, do you want me to care?"


Pretty little iris. I like your attitude.

About a year ago, I sort of decided that keeping bees would be a nice thing to do, as there are too few bees around hereabouts, and it can never hurt to have some more. Bees are wonderful, astounding and fascinating creatures - they not only produce honey (which I don't eat so much of, but I still like it quite a bit), wax (one of the main reasons why they were cultivated in the Middle Ages - there's much less wax to be harvested from a hive than honey) and propolis (I always have a bottle of propolis dissolved in alcohol in my travelling kit), they are also the reason why we get to eat fruits and vegetables. Many, many edible things would not be there if it weren't for the bees...

However, before taking the lives and well-being of several thousand creatures (like 30-50.000) into my hands, I'd like to have some proper grounding in knowledge and experience. So I spent this Saturday learning about the many things that can befall bees and make them suffer, or even die.

One of the things every beekeeper these days has to cope with, and be on the lookout for, is the varroa mite. That is a parasite originally living off Asian honey bees, but it has spread to almost everywhere worldwide these days. The other bees, though, have never developed coping mechanisms for this parasite - so without treatment, the mites will suck on the bee brood and the adults, shortening their lifespan by about one third. Which means that without treatment, the winter worker bees will not survive until April, and die about at the end of January or in February instead. With a lot of the workers dead, the hive cannot generate enough warmth anymore, and there are not enough bees to get the colony going again in spring - so the whole hive will die off.

Another thing, that I will hopefully never have to see myself when keeping bees, is American Foulbrood. This is a bacterial infection that targets the bee brood, and the younger brood is very vulnerable to the bacteria - as little as a single one is enough to infect a one-day old larva. The honey from a hive with this disease is still safe for human consumption, and in some countries it is acceptable practice to keep the symptoms down with antibiotic treatment. However, this means that the honey you buy might contain spores of the bacterium - completely safe to consume for you, but dangerous to bees. If bees eat that honey, they carry the bacteria back to their hive, and there the nasty little buggers can wreak havoc. A hive that is infested with AFB has to be killed off, and the hive box and equipment has to be either burned to destroy it or disinfected completely. If you have AFB in Germany, you have to inform the authorities, there will be an off-limits area established around the stricken hive, and all hives inside the area will have to be tested for AFB as well. This disease? It's really, really nasty. And it can be spread by honey that is perfectly fine and healthy for humans to eat.

Which means... please don't spill honey outside, or leave honey for insects to find and eat. Make sure any honey containers are rinsed, or closed properly (or both) before tossing them. Your honey spills could kill off a bee hive - or even several.

... apart from some knitting, that is:

I went for a little walk with the most patient of all husbands, entered a building, handed a card over to an elderly lady, and received a sheet of paper with lots of boxes to tick in return.

Boxes were ticked. Then I brought the sheet into another room and handed it over to a guy in a white coat, who stuck something into my ear, asked me a few questions, scribbled some notes on the paper and signed it.

I carried it into yet another room, where yet another guy pricked my ear and did some stamping on the paper and the card, and a third one handed me an aluminum box with a few plastic items in it. And the sheet of paper, joined by a second and third one.

In yet another room (I carried the box there), I lay down on a comfy recliner, told some lady my name and date of birth (while she was looking at the papers), got handed one of the three sheets, and then she stuck a needle into my arm.

About ten minutes later, my right arm looked like this:

[caption id="attachment_2213" align="alignnone" width="677"] The barcode in the wrap matches the barcode on my paperwork and the bag plus the test tubes that my blood went in. It's more or less just decorative on the arm, though!


 
And you've probably figured it out by now - we went to donate blood. I've been doing this since I turned eighteen, with a few years of hiatus inbetween, and it's a really nice thing to do. We usually team up with a friend or two, which makes this a nice and social evening for us. It's a good feeling to be able to help somebody else (plus you get your blood checked, and will be informed in case there's anything really amiss with you), there's lots of nice and friendly people there, and after the donation you get coffee and a bite to eat. Donating blood also has some health benefits for the donor, so it's an allround win-win situation. Yay!

One of the things that come up frequently when I do presentations or demonstrations of textile techniques is the value of textiles. We're so used today to going into a clothes shop that sells things for ridiculously low prices that our estimation of textiles and their worth tends to be very low.

The ridiculously low prices are not without their own price, though - only it's usually not us here who are paying it, but cotton farmers, clothing factory workers in Bangladesh, or everyone in the area where cotton is grown when water supplies are used up and the groundwater level plummets (no wonder if up to 20 000 litres of water are used to produce one kilo of cotton), or is poisoned by herbicides and pesticides.

It's not fair, it's not sustainable, and a lot of people have been talking about this "fast fashion" and its problems in the last years. (Just plug "fast fashion problems" into your favourite search engine. You'll be surprised.) There's things we all can do, though - one of them is becoming more aware of what we buy, and how often. Another thing is to try and avoid conventionally grown cotton (organic is much kinder to both producers and the environment) and look for clothes that were not produced in Bangladesh, but more locally. Buy used clothing, mend things that can be mended, and give things you do not wear anymore away instead of tossing them into the bin.

The fact that textiles are such a cheap commodity today has coloured our perception of textile crafts, and our internal valuing of fabrics. This makes it hard for many people to understand why fabrics were so precious in the Middle Ages (and also way past that time, until rather recently). Clothes used to be a very valuable thing, in our past, and I do wonder if they will, one day, be again.

Most of the recipes that I've posted during the last years were for baked goods (because I just love to bake), but today I've got something non-baked for you: Pickled Herring, as it's traditionally eaten in many parts of Germany. (Well, mostly - I made a few tweaks.)

Pickled herring (or green herring) is young (not yet fertile) herring that is put into brine and left there to ripen for a bit. These are often prepared "nach Hausfrauenart" (housewife's style), which is in a thick creamy sauce together with apples, onions and pickled cucumbers and usually eaten together with potatoes. I really love this dish, and since the fishmonger at the market in our town sells brined trout (which, taste-wise, is very close to pickled herring), I get to enjoy this more often these days.

It does not look spectacular...



...but oh, the tastes and textures!

To serve one to two persons, depending on how hungry you are (and if you serve it with potatoes or not):

~150 g brined herring (or other brined fish), filleted
about the same amounts apple, pickled cucumber, and onion

Cut the onion into rings (traditional) or dice it finely (I prefer that). I like to marinate the cut onion for a bit in a splash of the pickling liquid from the cucumbers, but that's optional. Cut the cucumbers into pieces (I dice everything!), peel the apples and also cut them up.

Traditionally, you now add a mixture of sour cream, cream and maybe even mayonnaise (you want a thick creamy consistency in the sauce), mix that with the apples, cucumber and onion, insert your brined fish and let it stand at least for a few hours, overnight is even better, for the flavours to mix and develop. It's usually quite a lot of sauce, much more than I used for the version in the photo. You won't be needing salt for this, as the brined fish is salty itself (in some cases, it's even recommended to soak it in water first to remove some of the salt), but an absolutely necessary herb for this is dill - so do add some, at least, up to a generous amount, or it won't be what it is supposed to be.

I prefer preparing this dish as a kind of salad, so I dice the fish up as well and go easier on the sauce amount. I've also recently discovered skyr, which is a traditional Icelandic dairy thing somewhere between curd cheese and yoghurt. It is fairly thick in consistency, has a lot of protein and little fat, and also works wonderfully as a sauce for this. For the salad in the picture, I added about 150 g of skyr - so it's basically about equal amounts of each ingredient (except the dill, that would be overdoing it). With the splash of pickling liquid that I marinated the onions in, the skyr ended up the perfect sauce consistency.

The result? The apple, cucumber and fish pieces are all sour, but each in its own way, and they have distinctly different textures. The onion adds some zing to the dish, and a fourth texture, while the dairy envelops all of these and lends a rich creamy mouthfeel to the whole thing. I will eat this straight, with a spoon, no need for potatoes, and be utterly ridiculously happy.

Obviously, you can adapt the amounts of the individual ingredients if you prefer more apples, or no onions, or whatever. (There's even a version where the apple is replaced by pineapple, though I'm not really fond of that.) If you're serving it with potatoes, it's advisable to make some more cream sauce, as that goes really well with the 'taters and it will be a little dry otherwise.

If you can get brined herring, feel adventurous, and do try this dish - let me know if you liked it. I hope you will!

Assorted links for you on this Friday - and hooray, weekend is almost upon us!

First of all, a post about how little changes can have rather large effects overall, sometimes without us noticing it at first: How a lamp took away my reading, and a box brought it back.

For those of you who dcrochet and like peacocks, here's a pattern to crochet a peacock feather appliqué.

Discarding Images has a picture of a very fluffy cat.

And finally, I found an online bookstore that might be an alternative to the Big River (and, as they bought them, bookdepository): wordery.com. They are located in the UK, ship world-wide with free delivery, and I can feel the urge to buy a book or two coming up, just so I can check them out.

Jim Hines has posted a long article about the Puppies in 2016, linked to the upcoming Hugo nominations. It looks like there might be less of a kerfuffle and less nastiness this year in the nominations and the voting - at least I hope so. In case you can nominate, or are just interested in current sf/f lit that is eligible, you can take a look at Hugo Recommendations, or jump right to the huge spreadsheet list of eligible nominees here.

In case you don't care about that stuff at all - here are links to cats doing Extreme Napping, and tiny cats sleeping, also thanks to Jim Hines. Our little cat does some napping at the moment, too, but it's not as spectacular...



Speaking of spectacular, though - there's been a mammoth find (literally!) that points towards a much earlier human activity in Arctic zones than previously thought. This also could include earlier human presence in North America.

Over at Ossamenta there are links to several opportunities - bursaries for attending the Association for Environmental Archaeology on the Orkneys, their research grant, plus a fully funded PhD in York about Mesolithic bone tools. Check out the blog post to learn more.