flädersaft - elderflower cordial

This morning we went out into the yard to pick flowers from the elderflower tree and make cordial! If you don't know what that is, it's a sort of juice syrup that you blend with water to make a drink. It lasts a long time on the shelf or in the fridge and is really popular here in Sweden, you can make it (or buy it made from) strawberries, raspberries, oranges, sloanberries, rhubarb ... well pretty much anything!

Anyhoo, although I think they have elderflower cordial in England too, to me it seems like the most Swedish thing ever! And people have been making it for generations! We used a recipe from recepten.nu but they are all more or less the same, if you have a swedish cookbook there will definitely be a recipe in there! Here's a look at the steps involved:

First collect your flower clusters, we used this pretty basket that's usually used for mushroom picking. Most recipes call for 30-40 flower clusters per 2 litres of water.

When you bring your flowers inside you can lay them out on a white tea towel and let them sit for fifteen minutes or so, this gives any little bugs that have been hanging out inside the blossoms time and opportunity to climb out. Then rinse them well!

Meanwhile you can cook up 2 litres of water with 2 kg of sugar (it feels so wild to empty a whole 2kg bag of sugar into the pot! That's what you need to preserve the saft and make it tasty and syrupy, though).

Pretty!

Cut the flower clusters off the stems into a big metal bowl or bucket and add the lemons.

Pour over the hot sugar-water. Then the hard part - you have to let it sit for three days before you can sieve the liquid and enjoy your cordial!

The perfect summer drink!

 The little flowers go everywhere - afterward you'll have a lot of floral decoration in your kitchen!

Organized, me?

I needed a better way to organize all my sewing thread. All my many spools were neatly packed in a box but it was impossible to see what colours I had. I had to root around to find anything, and removing one spool from the box threw the rest of them into disarray. I was thinking of threading the spools onto wooden doweling and hanging them across a frame, when I opened an old Burda pattern magazine and saw this great idea:

The perfect solution! Of course I had to make one, and it was really easy. I found a piece of cedar in our basement and measured the placement of the holes, then drilled them.  My drilling arm got a bit tired after a while so my dad helped me out.

I used my carpenter's ruler (a very handy tool, by the way, it folds up to just 15 cm in length so you can carry it in your purse, for all your emergency measuring needs) to mark 7mm dowels into 2 1/2 inch lengths (I think the mix and match approach to measurement units must be a canadian thing)...

...and sawed them off using a regular square saw and a mitre box. 

After sanding down the dowel edges and the surface of the plank, it's just a matter of inserting the pegs into the holes in the board. I had planned to use glue, but if you have a good match between drill bit and dowel size, it's not necessary.

I made the mistake of buying the doweling before I knew the dimensions of the board I was going to get, so I ran out of pegs, but as luck would have it I had exactly enough space for all my thread spools, so I suppose I don't have to hurry to finish it.

I have a mild obsession with organizing everything by colour (case in point:I recently bought a red eraser to match the box of läkerol, the tiny notebooks and the box of pens on the red shelf above my desk...) and especially with arranging groups of colours by tone, so I love being able to arrange all these colours and have them hanging on my wall for all to see!