Poutine and so much more!

 On many evenings, we see one or two opossums and/or a skunk underneath the bird feeder. Terry got worked up about it at first (“I don’t want no skunks coming around!”), but now he seems to look forward to their visits. If there’s a contest, the skunk wins, but lately we’ve seen a possum and the skunk feeding together for quite a little while.

When I went out to do the chicken chores yesterday, I saw bloody footprints. They were partial, but the two widely-spaced toes that were visible suggested that the foot belonged to an opossum.

Partial bloody possum footprint

It had walked from the side door of the garage most of the way down the driveway and cut over toward the third and fourth oaks. Poor thing. It’s not bad enough that it has to walk around barefoot in the snow, now it had a wounded foot too!

Possum trail

I told Terry the possum had a cut foot. He thought there was a body somewhere. “No,” I said, “just tracks.”

“You’d better count 11 chickens,” he said. I hadn’t thought of that. The tracks did come from the general vicinity of the coop. Still, the possums and skunk don’t come around until after dark. I was sure the girls would be safely locked down by then.

“If it was a murder,” I suggested, “I think there would be more blood.” Also, there weren’t any feathers. When I went into the coop, the girls were all well and happy.

We’d been waiting for the drywallers to have time to fix the cracks in the upstairs walls since October 5. They finally came Wednesday morning and were done by noon on Thursday. Just like that. It took almost as long to get the dust cleaned off of every single surface in the house. Now Terry is calling around for painters.

Ready for the drywallers

Just before Christmas, I decided that I had to get serious about cleaning out my parents’ stuff. I set a goal of being done by the new year. Everything else was put on hold. I almost made it, and I’m all done now except for some things that will take a lot of time, e.g., photographs.

I took the last load to Goodwill on Thursday. After that, I indulged in some remedial baking. I’d come across several recipes I wanted to try during the three weeks when I didn’t bake at all. First up were peanut-butter-filled chocolate cookies from Cook’s Country. I made the filling first, rolled it into 16 balls, and stuck it in the freezer. Then I made the chocolate part and divided that up. The dough was easy to work with, much like Play-Doh. I flatted the chocolate cookie portion into a disc and wrapped it around a peanut butter ball, times 16.

Cookies out of the oven

Peanut butter filling

The cookies were tasty, no question. They were also huge. I think it is a surface area problem. In order to have a detectable amount of peanut butter on the inside, there has to be a considerable amount of chocolate cookie on the outside. I could eat a whole cookie if I was really hungry, but we mostly eat cookies as desert, and I can’t do more than half a cookie after a meal. So I froze some of the cookies and cut the rest in half. You do what you have to do. We’ll soldier through.

I inherited an air fryer from my mother. I had no idea how to use it, so I ordered a cookbook. So far, I have made French fries. The first time was a success, so for the second time, I thought I’d try poutine.

“What’s that?” Terry asked, even though he should have known from the cooking shows we watch.

“Fries topped with cheese curds and beef gravy,” I said.

“I think I would like poutine,” Terry said.

What’s not to like? It was going to be especially good because the gravy was left from the Christmas roast. When we ran out of beef, I froze it for a future time.

Poutine

Terry admitted later that poutine didn’t sound like something I would make. Fat on top of fat on top of starch? Yeah, not my usual schtick, but delicious!