I'm enjoying every bit of winter I can get - I love the cold weather. I have now knitted a lifetime supply of wool socks, so I'm working on a lifetime supply of knitted dish cloths since a friend gave me her gigantic stash of cotton yarn, plus any dish cloths she wants in return for her generous gift.

I found 2 small "B" grade red potatoes dying of loneliness in the pantry and made potato soup-for-one for lunch. I love any kind of soup, and that's good because that's one of my best ways to lower my food costs - eat more soup.

I've been cleaning house all day and thankfully did my baking earlier in the week and have it safe and secure in the freezer. We have oatmeal/banana/date cookies for snacking, GF muffins for breakfast on Saturday and GF banana bread for breakfast on Sunday.

We started a project in a guest bedroom closet last weekend and will finish it this weekend - completely redesigned and installed a new closet system and painted.

Going out to eat with friends tonight - WOO HOO!

-Grainlady

Well, TGIF night, that's for sure.

My day started out at 9 am on the farm. No water, the frost free spout is officially frozen. We took a 50 gallon barrel to Amanda's and filled it. 3 times. Back to the farm where we dipped it out with 5 gallon buckets and filled the tank.

OK, time to set hay. Except the tractor won't start. We spend about an hour trying to jump start the tractor, give up and wrap a chain around a big round bale of hay and drag it out to the animals. One egg that wasn't frozen, hooray. On the way home, we lost power steering in the truck, apparently a bearing froze up on the tensioner pulley and the belt broke. If it had been warmer than 7F, with wind chills of about -20, the truck might have overheated. We limped it to Dave's, where he fixed it and we came home. Right now there are blizzard conditions and white outs and the wind is about 25 MPH.

Did I mention that I woke up with a sore throat? Elery made chicken soup for supper and I'm sitting here with a cup of tea and a bag of Hall's cough drops.

Tomorrow we go out and see if we can chop down through the frozen ground to find the problem with the water. The valve is 5 feet under ground, so we may or may not get that fixed. If not, we'll be hauling water in barrels for a couple of months. (sigh)

Clink with my cup of Irish Breakfast tea, and think about me about 9 am tomorrow, out in the storm, using a pick ax to break frozen ground. Yes indeed, we farmers just sit on our butts and wait for that government subsidy, that's what we do.

Annie

Daughter invited her high school classmate over for sushi and dim sum. She made the rolls, I made the ribs and dumplings.

The pork ribs were pressure cooked in water, rice wine and ginger. Then tossed in sugar and salt, and roasted to brown. Last, I fried them in duck fat, a little of the broth created during pressure cooking, and chopped garlic and scallions. I messed up with too much salt, which bummed me out. But the broth was awesome; we drank it as a beverage.

I haven't made dumplings in a long time. So I experimented with the dough. One dough was the standard flour + water, but I boiled a beet in the water first, hoping for reddish dough. Nice in theory but I'd need to use beet juice to get enough color to matter. The other dough was spiced up with soy sauce and sesame oil. This dough was tasty but kind of tough. Not successful experiments but instructive anyway. Two of the fillings were quite standard, ground pork and ground chicken with soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, ginger, garlic, bell pepper and so on. The third was another experiment, chopped bay scallops with a neutral oil and lime zest. Not successful, the lime flavor just doesn't go with dim sum. I couldn't find my unflavored gelatin, so I used duck fat to keep the fillings juicy. That worked okay. My pleating was sloppy too.

So, my contributions to dinner were pretty flawed. Fortunately, my daughter's rolls were very good, she has gotten quite comfortable with the technique. I did make the sushi rice, old dad can do something right .

Oh, Annie, what a day! You must be exhausted. And frustrated. Pour a shot of brandy in that hot tea.
Long week at work, and it was only a four day work week. *sigh*
Boss doesn't have anything to do, so he paces the floor, and rambles on and on. Funny, I've got plenty to do, and his pacing and rambling is distracting.
Nothing on the agenda this weekend. Will go down and pull some proteins out of the freezer and put together a menu plan for the next week or so. I haven't been cooking much. Just in a funk, I guess.
Will be glad when the sun shows up and the days get longer. Depressing to leave in the dark and get home in the dark.

John, that was a fantabuliciou dinner! Every dish required a lot of skill to make, and every one was skillfully made.

Going to be making cold smoked salmon as well as smoke a few pounds of cheese this week end.

So nice to have an indoor smoker in this kind of weather.

dcarch

This post was edited by dcarch on Sat, Jan 25, 14 at 8:35