2020

Happy New Year!

Last Saturday, we continued our holiday eating by making New York Style Pizza, one of America’s Test Kitchen’s top 20 recipes. I made the dough on Friday. The two-day rising developed good flavor and gluten. Despite following the directions for dividing and resting the dough before stretching it, we had trouble getting it to relax. As a consequence, the pizzas were thick crust rather than the thin that they were supposed to be. Still, we found them delicious. I thought Terry might object, as he is more of a thin crust kind of guy, but he seemed happy and cheerfully ate most of the leftovers.

New York style pizza

The weather continued to be unseasonably warm up through the weekend. Monday was cold and windy. Tuesday brought snow and more wind. Terry reported that half the property had no snow and the other half had 6 inches. The half with the 6 inches included the driveway. He fired up the snow blower for the first time this winter.  

New Year’s morning was a brisk 14°F under clear skies. Small rodents (mice or voles) had been busy in the night digging tunnels to leftover seeds under our bird feeders. I guess the turkeys didn’t get them all.

Mice/vole tunnels under the snow beneath the bird feeder

I made caramel rolls for New Year’s brunch. Jane joined us and brought a couple of 300-piece jigsaw puzzles.

Pecan caramel rolls

After brunch, Hilda asked if we should see if Pat and Nancy had plans for supper. They are normally so busy that I had just assumed that they did. Not having any evidence, though, I sent Pat a text. She replied that Nancy had worship team. A moment later, she said that she could come. When I told her to come anytime and that Jane and I were working on a jigsaw, she asked what time we were planning dinner because Nancy could come too as long as they were on the road back home by 6:00.

Well! Dinner was going to be at 4:00, so we had a very fun day indeed! Jane and I finished one jigsaw and were getting the second one out when Pat and Nancy arrived. We finished that one, except for one piece that had gone missing. The puzzle was new when we started. It’s probably somewhere in the house, but a thorough search did not turn it up.

The next order of business was to open the Christmas crackers that Hilda had forgotten about at Christmas. We all put on our paper crowns and read the jokes and trivia questions. 

Hilda and I in our paper crowns

Each cracker had a wind-up penguin in it, and the box had a race track in the bottom. The penguins had wheels underneath to move them and their little feet flapped to the sides. So cute! We made several attempts at racing, but the penguins were disinclined to go straight. My penguin took a face plant right off the bat.

Wind-up penguin

After the penguin races, we played Mexican train. We had time to finish all 13 rounds of Mexican train and still have a leisurely dinner of pork and sauerkraut to give us good luck in the new year. It was a good day.