From Friday to Sunday, kosa set up a table at the Toronto Ukrainian Festival. Among our spread were original art print t-shirts made by Oksana, 1 and 2″ inch folk design buttons, embroidered linen bags made by Stephcia, photo cards and dried tea by Bozena and decorative flower pins by Marichka. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it out to the Queen West Art Crawl as we had initially planned, but if we had more time, hands, eyes, ears and indefatigable feet, we would have been there.

We were also happy to dish out samples of our canned spiced peaches, pickled vegetables, pear preserves and mulled apple cider.

All fruit and veggies used for canning were either local or organic (some of them both). Our pears were hand picked by Bozena through the Not Far From the Tree program, a Toronto residential fruit picking program that is making good use of edible plants that would otherwise go to waste. Lots of the veggies came from Bozena’s family garden and some from Everdale Farm, an all organic farm in Hillsborough, Ontario.

Of course, you can’t trust a cook that doesn’t lick his own fingers. We think our preserves and canned peaches turned out pretty well if we may say so ourselves. We certainly enjoyed the fruits of our labour and encourage those of you that bought some, to try the process for yourselves, it’s not as hard as you may think! Some of the infusions we concocted for our peaches included vanilla essence, cinnamon, rum & nutmeg, and ginger clove. They were fun to make and delightful to eat, we hope to tap into the harvest season and make some more before Christmas .

Thank you to all who came by our table! We were really thrilled to have met you and shared our art and creations with you. We hope we’ll see you again and be able to chat over another cup of hot cider.  : )