Dreary week

February will be over soon. Praise be. Once we get to March, we can begin to hope that spring will come after all. The beautiful frost of last Sunday morning melted before noon. Monday kicked off a dreary week. It warmed up and rained prodigiously. The snow melted. The creeks and rivers flooded. The days were gray and foggy. It got cold. The floodwaters froze, but the water continued to drain away under the ice. As I drove to work, I passed corn fields with plates of ice frozen around the stubble eight inches above the ground. It looked cool, but I didn’t have an opportunity to get a picture.

By today, the waters had receded. The birches that looked so pretty last week looked like this today.

River Birch this morning

The maple forest has been underwater for six days.

Maples under water

On a positive note, Dorothy has at least one tail feather that is getting some length to it. I’m sure that’s good for her self-esteem.

Dorothy's tail feather

Frosty morning

When I got up this morning at quarter to six, I thought someone had stolen the world. There was nothing but white outside. Fog or snow? A rabbit nibbled at the frozen remnants of grass along the edge of the patio bricks. It was too dark for a picture then, but as it got lighter, I took this one of the rabbit tracks.

Rabbit tracks in the fog

 I don’t know if these were all from that one rabbit or if we had a rabbit invasion during the night. Either way, rabbits were busy. All that activity for dead grass? It didn’t seem worth the effort. When I went out to do the chicken chores later, the tracks upstairs told a different story. The rabbit(s) was/were after bird seed. Hilda said she’d gone out in her jammies to chase a rabbit away “and liked to froze to death!”

It was fog, not snow. As the sun came up, it lifted to reveal a world of sparkling frost on every surface. So beautiful! Each needle on the white pine was coated in crystals.

Frost covered white pine needles

Which looked like this on the tree.

White pine

And this on a collection of trees in the fog.

White pine and spruce in the fog

Here is a nest from last summer in the small oak tree by the road.

Abandoned next in a small oak tree

The sun broke through later. This is the back yard.

When the sun came out

And here are the river birch, white against the blue sky.

River birch 

My skin gets dry in the winter, what with the cold weather and low humidity. As I have accumulated a collection of white creams in tubes, I knew it was only a matter of time before I got them mixed up. One morning, my face was so dry and itchy that I opted for cortisone cream instead of my usual lotion. It felt dry when I put it on. Wow, my skin must have been in worse shape than I thought! And then, I smelled the minty freshness….

Toothpaste, left; cortisone cream, right

Could have been worse. At least I didn’t glop up my toothbrush.

Snow day

I don’t know why we even bother with Groundhog Day. Who are we kidding? There’s always six more weeks of winter. In fact, winter didn’t even get bad until after Groundhog Day. Beginning with the snow I complained about in my last post and this past Sunday, we got (by Terry’s account) 17.5”. Chicago had nine consecutive days with measurable snowfall. Temperatures were below zero several mornings, once going as low as -9°F. I had to leave extra early to get to work on time, and my car turned from red to white from the salt. We had a snow day Friday.  While it is always lovely to turn off the alarm and go back to bed, I will have to scramble a bit to get all the lab material covered before the midterm. I always hope that if we have a snow day, it will be for Lab 3 because there’s only a few things that are on the midterm from that. But Lab 3 came and went, and Lab 4 was the one my Friday class missed. So it goes.

All the snow that caused classes to be canceled came during the night and had stopped by the time I got up for the second time. Because I was going to be at a meeting all day Saturday, I used my free time to get the jump on lunch prep, making yogurt and carrots and celery sticks.  I took the carrot peels to the girls, and only four of them even came out of the coop. As you may recall, carrot peels are usually the Best Thing Ever.

Only four hens would brave the cold and snow to get the carrot peel treats

Sunday morning was brutally cold again. I didn’t even bother to open the coop door, knowing that the hens wouldn’t be interested in going outside. I noticed that Hilda had started a picket fence of icicles in the snow. She removed them in the areas where people and chickens were because, as she quoted from A Christmas Story, “icicles have been known to kill people!”

A picket fence of icicles from the coop

I keep telling myself to stay out of the kitchen. I began last week with four possible breakfasts in the freezer: nutty oatmeal bars, buttermilk waffles, sourdough pancakes, and bran muffins. I finished the bars, but am still working on the rest. Really, this filling the larder has got to stop!

And yet, when I was done with the chicken chores, I just had to get my hands in some dough. Because I also had two loaves of sourdough bread frozen, I decided to make pizza pockets for my lunches. You may be thinking, “Pizza pockets? Who would make those when you can get them already made? Can you even do that?”

And the answers are “Me” and “Yes.” It’s therapeutic, especially the 8 minute knead. Oh, the wonder of bread. I love how it starts as what is usually described as a “shaggy mass” and through persistence and the magic of gluten becomes a lovely, smooth, elastic ball. I simply cannot understand how anyone could voluntarily give up gluten. It is so awesome! Here it is after a 45 minute rise.

Lovely, elastic pizza dough

I divided into 8 pieces and was very proud of myself for controlling a compulsion to get out the scale and even them up to the nearest 1/8 ounce.

Divided into 8 pieces

I then rolled and stretched each one and filled it with sauce, sausage, and cheese.

Filling the pizza pockts

I sealed the seams, cut a steam vent, and baked them. During this time, all the cheese leaked out through burst aneurysms on the folded edge in spite of the steam vent. Pizza pockets with a cheese chip on the side.

Pizza pockets with cheesy aneurysms

By afternoon, the sun was out and the temperature was in the teens. It was a nice day to be out, so I shoveled the deck. Here is the “before” picture. The snow was pretty deep.

17.5 inches of snow on the deck

It seemed light and fluffy, so I started shoveling it down the stairs, thinking that it would fall to the bottom. Not so. It just stacked up. I gave that up and started heaving it over the railing. It was a good workout, certainly. I found that if I cut straight down with the shovel, I could carefully remove the snow in big blocks. The upside was that I got rid of a lot of snow at once. The downside was that those chunks seemed like they weighed 20 pounds. It took me two hours to get the deck cleared.

After that, I slogged out to the solar panels to brush off the lower three rows. That took another hour. I was beat. I came in the house and took a nap. I feared I would be unable to move the next morning.

But the next morning, I was fine! Good for me. I can still do a decent day’s work.

It is NOT spring.

I thought the nice weather last weekend was a tease, and I was right. Winter is back with temperatures in the teens and a biting north wind blowing snow horizontally. Bah. The chickens wouldn’t even come out of the coop for scratch grains or carrot peelings.

Snow flying horizontally

Terry has been keeping busy cleaning up a massive oak tree that fell in the backyard of a friend of mine. When she posted about it on Facebook, I emailed her with an offer to have Terry cut it up in exchange for the wood. It has been a win-win all around. The tree brought down several other trees as well. Here’s as much as he’s brought home so far.

Terry's stash of firewood

And here he is looking pleased as punch. He’s gotten quite profligate about how much wood he uses each day to keep his shop warm. No more need to ration supplies!

Terry is pleased with his haul

I just finished reading Michael Pollan’s book, Cooked. In the back was a recipe for whole grain sourdough bread, including making a starter from natural bacteria and yeasts. I already had starter, so I figured I’d give it a go. My general rule of thumb for this kind of bread is no more than half whole grain or you end up with a door stop.  The recipe was 60% whole wheat and 15% rye. Door stop.

And yet, the recipe did call for soaking the whole grains overnight, a technique I’d seen on America’s Test Kitchen. The presoak softens the bran so it doesn’t cut up the gluten as much. Maybe it would work.

Tw days before baking, I woke up my starter by feeding it in the evening and the next morning. That evening, I made the leaven by mixing whole wheat and bread flour with some of the starter and put the rest of the starter back in the refrigerator. In a separate bowl, I weighed the whole wheat and rye flours and added water. In the morning, a bit of the leaven floated in water, just like it was supposed to. So far, so good. I mixed it with the soaked flours. Every hour for five hours, I wetted my hand and turned the dough in the bowl. It did not look like it was rising much in between. Door stop.

I split the dough in two on the floured counter. The recipe said to roll each loaf in bran (which was sifted from the whole wheat flour before soaking, which I was totally not going to do) or dust the rising bowls with rice flour. (There was a note that you could use a proofing basket if you had one—HA HA HA HA! Who owns a proofing basket? It’s probably lined with linen. I can only dream.) I was also not going to buy a whole box? Bag?-- I don’t even know how it is sold—of rice flour for 2 tablespoons. What else would I use rice flour for? I always have wheat bran on hand, so I rolled away. It didn’t stick everywhere because of the flour from the counter. It seemed to me that the dough was going to cling to the rising bowl, but the recipe didn’t say to grease it. Maybe there was enough gluten that the dough would stick more to itself than the bowl? Maybe the dough had to climb up the sides to rise properly?

After two hours, I preheated the Dutch oven. I tried to turn the dough out into the hot Dutch oven. It stuck to the bowl. Massively. Of course I did not have a dough scraper on hand. Damn it. I did the best I could to free the dough from the bowl with my hand. I’m sure the dough was completely deflated by the time I shook it around in the Dutch oven to get it more or less loaf-shaped. This was NOT good.

And somehow, when I took the lid off the Dutch oven, there was not the door stop I was expecting, but a loaf of bread. Pretty flavorful bread, in fact. Was it worth two days? Hmmm.

Whole grain sourdough bread