Easter bread and chorus frogs

Happy Easter! This weekend’s cooking experiment was to make Easter bread like Terry remembered from his childhood. I have a sense that his mother did not use recipes much and/or was too busy raising 13 children to pay much attention to passing her recipes on to the next generation. According to Terry’s report, Easter bread had saffron in it and a glaze on top of it. And there was no fruit it in. On this last point, he was adamant. One of the bakeries in town made Easter bread with all the same fruit that is usually in fruitcake, and it was nasty. “The only way you could eat it was to pick the fruit out, and even then you could taste it in the bread.”

I guessed that it would be a sweet dough with egg in it. I found a recipe for Russian Easter Kulich in one of my bread cookbooks (and yes, I do have several). It was wicked rich, having three eggs, three egg yolks, and a half pound of butter. The recipe called for lemon zest, orange zest, nutmeg, raisins, and sliced almonds. I’m not much into zests, but I thought the raisins and almonds might be good. Certainly better than candied citron and nuclear red and green mystery fruitcake fruits. The bread was, however, for Terry—there would be no fruit. There was no saffron in the recipe. I soaked two pinches in the water that I used to proof the yeast.

Egg doughs make me nervous. You can do about anything to bread dough that doesn’t contain egg. The more you work it, the better it is. Work an egg dough too much and you have a doorstop. I mixed everything by hand and kneaded just until it came together and didn’t spread when I made a ball. I put it in the greased bowl and crossed my fingers. An hour went by. It didn’t seem to be rising in spite of the three—count ‘em, three—tablespoons of yeast. It was, however, doubled after two hours. Whew.

I braided the dough and made a point of ignoring it for another hour. When I came back, the loaves looked good. After I baked them, they looked even better. Terry declared it the “best Easter bread I ever ate.”

Easter bread

The yellow color is from saffron. There will be no fruit!

I went out while the bread was rising to record the sounds of the redwing blackbirds and chorus frogs. I learned that they were chorus frogs from my old friend Huck, who passed by for a visit Friday with her wife, Margie, on their way to Margie’s folks’ for Easter. So good to see them after so long!

I looked up chorus frogs on Google Images. Not surprisingly, they are tiny. Still, it seems like I ought to be able to see one. If I can hear them, they have to have their itty heads above the water. I put on my Wellies and went to the south end of the property where we are trying to restore a wet meadow. The winter has been so warm and wet (thanks, El Nino!) that the area has been underwater more than it has been dry. It is a challenge to my faith to believe that anything will survive. In any case, the frogs love it. I stood still, ankle-deep in cold water, until they began to sing all around me. And I could not see a single one. The only sign may have been the vibration of the water (which is visible in the video when I stopped scanning the restored area), although that also could have been because of the light breeze.

I was also convinced that the garlic had surely rotted in the ground over the winter. To my relief, the sprouts are up and doing well.

The garlic survived the winter floods!

Last weekend the ground had thawed enough that I could move the chicken fence. My purpose was to exclude the girls from the western half to allow the grass to grow back. Rather than just making the run smaller, I extended it to the north so the hens could access the grass by the greenhouse. Miss Peckwitt was in the new territory right away. The others were more hesitant. Hilda encouraged them by tossing their cracked grain treats over there.

The area of chicken exclusion to let the grass recover

The extension of the run in front of the greenhouse

While I was moving the fence, I noticed that Cleo was digging a hole under the coop. Whether she thought it was a good place for a dust bath or is planning an escape is anyone’s guess.

Cleo makes a break for it.

By the end of the week, the grass in front of the greenhouse was not looking good. As I approached this morning, most of the hens were over there. All but Gracie ran back to the main run when they saw me. Gracie ran in circles, apparently unable to find the exit. Sadly, she found her way out before I could get the camera set to video her plight. She is such a spaz.

The western end is looking slightly greener. Terry loosened some of the more compacted soil and put down some grass seed. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t sprouted yet, possibly because it got cold Thursday. We had an inch of rain followed by an inch of snow.  That’s all right. We don’t want it to get so warm so early that the apples blossom and then freeze.  We aren’t out of the possibility of frost for another 6 weeks.

The grass looks a little greener

The grass in front of the greenhouse

I spaded up one of the chicken’s raised bed and sowed some oats that I had sitting around from the prairie seeding. (Oats are used as cover for the first season.)

Raised bed sown with oats

I covered the bed with row cover to keep the blackbirds from eating all the seed. The girls will like oat sprouts.

Covered with row cover until the seeds sprout