Brrrr

Fourteen degrees below zero this morning. I waited until it got to a balmy five below before I went out to feed the chickens. Some of the pullets haven’t caught on to using the nest boxes yet, preferring to drop their eggs in a corner of the main area. And this morning, one of those eggs was cracked right down the side. Sure enough, it was frozen solid. I threw it out. The floor of the coop is not exactly clean.

So cold that an egg froze solid in the coop

We had frozen fog again this week. A couple of weeks ago, we had five cloudy, foggy days in a row. This time, the fog burned off, and the hoar frost sparkled against the blue, blue sky. Beautiful, if chilly.

Hoarfrost against a blue sky

And what says winter comfort more than braised meat? I made a pot roast Thursday following a recipe for hunter-style short ribs. I tromped through the drifted snow to the high tunnel to see how the thyme looked. It looked pretty good! A bit red at the tips, but still green underneath. I used it.

Thyme from the high tunnel

I browned chunks of pot roast, sauteed mirepoix, deglazed with red wine, added thyme, dried-and-soaked morel mushrooms, tomato paste, garlic, and paprika, and braised with equal parts red wine, chicken stock, and the mushroom soaking water. It was worky but totally worth it.

Pot roast

Yesterday, I made lemon chicken using Ina Garten’s recipe via my friend Nancy. It was written for a whole 4-pound chicken, butterflied. Four pounds? Ha ha ha. Not in this house this year. I split a 7.5-pound chicken in half. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: no one needs a seven-and-a-half pound chicken. We need to butcher a week—maybe two—earlier.

Lemon chicken

It turned out well, but needed more time to get done.

This week, we defrosted and finished the last of the Linzer Christmas cookies and January pumpkin bars. These are fine desserts in their own way but seriously lacking in chocolate. You know what that means! I can bake again! I tried another sourdough recipe, this time for a sourdough chocolate cake.

Sourdough chocolate cake. Interesting.

It’s interesting, a word that is not necessarily good when used in reference to food. It has a definite sour taste to it.  Not sure I’ll do it again, but I can definitely eat it. Especially with the fudge frosting. I had a bit of white buttercream left from (embarrassing to admit) the first round of Christmas cookies in early December. I tried a drizzle on top to be fancy. It was a failure, but at least it’s out of the refrigerator.

Jane called about 4:00 to report that she is home from Florida. Soon we will once again be without cat and turtle (tortoise). Dutchy has spent the last two days sitting in her water dish. Hard to know what turtles think about. She does move occasionally, so I’m pretty sure she’s still alive. I’ll be glad to not worry about her anymore.

Dutchy camped out in her water dish

The Superbowl is looking like the dreaded “defensive struggle.” How boring. And both teams are red and white. Pfft. I usually like to watch the commercials, but so far I have only learned that there are a lot of very strange movies coming soon. I am such a curmudgeon.

 

January snow

 It’s been a week of cold punctuated with snow. We got 5” on Tuesday. It was pretty coming down, but Terry had to run the snowblower twice because he had an early doctor appointment. The first time was so he could get out of the driveway, and the second time was after the snow stopped.

Tuesday brought a beautiful snow

We have one more houseguest while Jane is in Florida. She’s had a box turtle, Dutchy, for a long, long time. (technically, all completely terrestrial “turtles” are tortoises. True turtles inhabit the oceans. Fresh water “turtles” are terrapins, winning the award for the prettiest name.) Dutchy goes dormant in the winter, sort of. She hasn’t eaten since she got here, but she has had some water. The day she put her head down and looked dead, however, I was a bit alarmed. But after a day, she opened her eyes and looked around again.

Dutchy having a winter's nap

The big storm was scheduled to arrive on Saturday evening. The forecast was dire—a mix of rain, sleet, and heavy, wet, heart-attack-inducing snow. I prepared by doing all the things I had to do outside, with included cleaning Skippy’s litter box. We use pressed wood pellets and a double litter box system. When the pellets get wet, they disintegrate into fine sawdust. The top box has an open grid at the bottom so the wet sawdust, in theory, drops through. In practice, it needs quite a bit of encouragement. I take the litter box to the compost bin and shake it over that. That’s the outside part of the chore.

Skippy and a clean litter box

I also gave the chicken coop a good cleaning. The wood chips stay clean a lot longer in the summer when the girls run around outside all day. In the winter—hoo-boy!—the wood chips are barely distinguishable in the solid mass of chicken poop after a few weeks. TMI, I know. It looked and smelled much better when I was done.

Clean wood chips in the coop

The girls are laying very well. We’ve been getting 4 to 7 eggs a day. The pullet eggs are getting a little bigger all the time.

Seven eggs on one morning

When I was done in the coop, I took the old water (I put fresh water in the waterer daily) to the high tunnel. Amazingly, the lettuce, mâche, and spinach look pretty good still. The beds get dry, though, so I water sporadically. In another month, who knows? Maybe the plants will pick right up where they leave off. Still not sure about the sad, sad, little onions.

Lettuce on theleft, mache on the right with dying radishes in between.

Spinach on the left, more lettuce on the right

With the outdoor work done, I turned to the kitchen. I suffer from SABD—seasonal affective baking disorder. I started with bran muffins (sort of healthy) and orange chocolate chip scones (chocolate has antioxidants).

Bran muffins in the back, orange chocolate chip scones in front

Now that the sourdough started is ready, I made the sourdough pizza dough. It needed to rest frequently before I could get it stretched to 12”, but it made a lovely chewy crust.

Pizza with sourdough crust (tomatoes have health-boosting lycopenes)

I also started a batch of sourdough bread, which was really the whole point of putzing with getting the starter going. The recipe, recommended to me by my brother, requires an overnight rise. On Sunday, I got out my new ceramic bread pan, formed the loaf, and left it to rise. It was the best loaf of sourdough bread I’ve ever made, maybe the best I’ve ever eaten.  Just as Doug said, the crust was shatteringly crisp.

Sourdough bread (the staff of life, after all)

And I still have six sourdough recipes to try, and those are just the ones I’ve printed. King Arthur has many more.

The storm came on schedule, dumping another 5” of snow along with a wicked east wind. The deck, on the lee side, got buried.

Drift on the deck

There was a big drift between the house and the chicken coop, coming all the way up to the top of the propane tank. While Terry was slaving in the driveway again, I helped with a little tiny bit of snow removal by tunneling through the drift and clearing a little bit of the run so the girls could stretch their legs.

A path to the coop through a drift

And now it's February, the short month when winter gets very, very long. Only baked goods will carry us through.

Sourdough waffles

 At the end of last week, the sky was an unusual color, as shown in the picture. As is common in winter, the clear sky that allowed us to see some sunlight meant wicked cold nighttime temperatures. We had the first below zero reading Friday morning, but only -1°F. The trees can take that.

A sunny but cold day

Some of my readers wanted to know what an egg looked like covered with muddy chick
en footprints. Here you go:

Muddy chicken footprints

My sourdough starter was finally ready. It smelled both yeasty and not unpleasantly sour. The true test is that it doubled in volume after feeding in a couple of hours. The photos were taken at noon and at 4:30 p.m.

Sourdough starter at noon

The same starter at 4:30

When my brother sent me the link to his favorite sourdough bread recipe on the King Arthur Flour website, I found a number of other recipes to try. Brilliant marketing, actually. If you have ever experimented with sourdough, you know that you have to feed the starter weekly, and if you have no immediate starter needs, you have to throw away a good portion of the previous starter so the waste products don’t poison the whole thing. What does King Arthur do? The starter instructions say, “Hate discarding so much starter? See ‘Tips’ below.” The tips have a link to a whole lot of recipes that use sourdough starter, including chocolate cake! I printed up 8.  That will keep me busy for awhile. First up: sourdough waffles for Saturday breakfast. I mixed up most of it Friday night, as instructed. In the morning, I added the rest of the ingredients, included a teaspoon of baking soda. The recipe said it would bubble, but it was far more than I anticipated from so little soda. The result was an incredibly light waffle, crispy on the outside and soft in the middle. It was like changing air into something that could hold maple syrup and pecans.

Sourdough waffle with maple syrup and pecans

I am continuing with my winter reading of vintage cookbooks. Right now, I’m about halfway through Clementine Paddleford’s classic, How America Eats (1960). First of all, how great is that name? Ms. Paddleford traveled the country beginning in 1948 for her column in This Week Magazine. The book includes her favorites. It’s a blast from the past, including several savory gelatins such as tomato aspic and shrimp ring. Sounds awful? Trust me, it was. I remember tomato aspic with horror. I digress. As I was reading through a huge number of not-very-different biscuit recipes from the south and feeling nostalgic, I thought of Chicken à la King, something I haven’t made in close to 40 years.

Chicken à la King requires a sauce, and I am sauce-challenged. I have often thought about making the effort to master the Mother Sauces, but have never followed through. Chicken à la King was popular long before we knew the words Béchamel or Velouté—it was a white sauce. Anyway, I hesitated to wing it. I knew where to look for a recipe. If it’s white food, Betty Crocker never lets me down. There it was among the poultry dishes, Chicken à la King, which actually is a combination of Béchamel and Velouté, half milk and half stock. And here’s another reason I have never mastered the Mother Sauces: holy smoke, what a lot of butter!  I took a deep breath and put in an entire stick. Following the instructions thereafter (except putting in 8 ounces of mushrooms instead of 3), I made a lovely sauce. I was quietly proud. I also made Betty’s buttermilk biscuits. Full disclosure, as a child I liked the biscuits more than the Chicken à la King. Hilda loved it. “You got such good mushroom flavor in the sauce.” I wonder why.

Chicken a la King

Lots of hype about a snowstorm coming tonight. We’ll see if it amounts to anything.

Mud hens

 There are two true definitions of mud hens: 1) another name for the American coot and 2) a member of the Toledo minor league baseball team, which was named after the American coot. Even though I know it’s not proper, there are times when I think of our girls as mud hens, like yesterday, when the temperature crept up to just above freezing. The girls won’t voluntarily go in the snow, so their winter run is confined to the path I’ve shoveled from the door to the dog kennel that acts as a shade shelter.

The chickens stay to the small, snow-free part of the run during winter

In the photobelow, the hen’s feet are buried in mud. You man not be aware of the fun trivia fact that eggs come out of the chicken completely clean. I’m not sure how they manage to do it, since the egg emerges from the “vent”, which is the common opening for the intestine, kidneys, and reproductive system. Ours is not to question why. This is not to say that the eggs stay clean. I particularly don’t like muddy days because the eggs get kicked by muddy feet.

Toes completely buried in mud

One of the Wyandottes had a big adventure two nights ago. Due to the NFL playoffs, Terry came into the house early on Saturday afternoon to watch football. It was too early to close the coop on his way in, which he usually does. I had a fleeting thought about it, but failed to take action. Time passed; teams won and lost. We carried on according to our regular schedule. I went to bed to read for an hour at 8:30. Terry typically “stays up” watching TV until after the local weather at 10:20, but in reality, I often hear him snoring before I’ve read two pages. On the evening in question, he remembered the chickens with a start at about 11:00. He put his pants on and went out to close the coop. One Wyandotte refused to go in. Chickens don’t see well in the dark, as I have mentioned several times over the years. Normally, you can walk right over to them and pick them up. The Wyandotte would have none of it and flew off to a corner of the run. Terry shut the rest of the chickens in and fretted all night about the one out in the cold. Would she freeze without her coopmates to keep her warm? Would she be eaten by a coyote or raccoon?

In the morning, she seemed no worse for the wear. We hope she has learned her lesson.  We have learned our lesson, and remember to close the coop even on days when we are out of our normal routine.

My sourdough starter is taking longer to mature than the recipe says. It’s no wonder since our kitchen is colder than normal. On the third day it looked perfect and smelled pleasantly yeasty.

Sourdough starter looking good on Day 3

A few days after that, I was supposed to feed it twice a day. I wasn’t able to find the time, and soon it started to stink. One of the sourdough starting procedures that I’ve used said the stinky stage was normal and would go away with regular feeding, and it did work at that time. This week, however, after a few more feedings with all-purpose flour, the stink remained. I got out another one of my recipes for starting a starter and reviewed it. This one said to feed with half whole wheat and half regular flour. I tried that, thinking that the whole wheat would augment the population of yeast. It is smelling better. In a few more days, it should be ready to use. I hope.

Every cat I’ve known has had his or her quirks. Skippy is a wire-chewer, which means he spends much of his day in a kennel when we are not able to watch him and keep him from getting in trouble. Another quirk is that he is one of those cats who prefers to play in the water bowl and lick water from his paw to drinking the water directly. Messes ensue. The first year he stayed with us, I got him to drink from the water bowl by attaching the bowl higher on the cage. The year after that, he learned to prop his feet on the cage below the bowl. Last year, he learned how to put his feet in the bowl. Also last year, I learned how to put his cat bed in a boot tray to keep it from getting soaked by the resulting puddles.

Skippy with his feet in the elevated water bowl

Licking water from his paw

Skippy is particularly fond of playing in the water and then jumping on my lap with wet feet. Such a silly cat!

House guest

 I’ve never seen so much winter fog in all my life. For five days, we were socked in. Every day the hoar frost got heavier. Terry fretted. “The trees can take two days of hoar frost. They can’t take five!”

Frost on the river birch

Indeed, we lost a limb of the oak that was struck by lightning a few years back. The birch trees began to sag. Still, it was pretty.

The birch on the left is really starting to sag

Soon after the fog lifted, the wind blew the frost off the trees. It looked like maybe the sun was going to break through for a few minutes Saturday, but then the gray returned. If Jane weren’t in Florida to confirm the sun’s existence, it would be easy enough for me to believe that we were never going to see it again.

Speaking of Jane in Florida, we have our time-share cat back with us. Skippy and his Red Blanket are keeping my lap warm on these cold winter nights.

Skippy, our winter cat-guest

I’ve been sucked into sourdough again. My brother sent me a link to a sourdough bread recipe from King Arthur’s website. The last time I got burned out feeding sourdough every week, I froze some of the started. I would have said it was last year, but it was clearly labeled 2018. It was freezer burned in the extreme. I didn’t bother to thaw it to see if anything was still alive in there.

My next step was to look up King Arthur’s directions for making a starter. As in my last experiment, the starter required wild yeast. Unlike last time (when the yeast was harvested from the air), the instructions said that the yeast would be in the whole wheat or whole rye flour. I had just a smidgeon of rye flour left, and this seemed like the perfect occasion to use it. It wasn’t a whole cup, however, so I threw caution to the wind and topped it off with whole wheat. The development of the starter relies on the “good” yeast and bacteria outcompeting the “bad” microorganisms. I figured the wheat yeast would be interchangeable with the rye yeast. Yeast is yeast, right?

Whole grain sourdough starter, Day 1

Which reminds me of a joke. A farmer was having no end of woe with birds building nests in the mane of his favorite horse. He asked the vet to come out a couple of times, but nothing the vet tried worked, and it got expensive. The farmer remembered that when he was a young boy, there was an old man who knew all sorts of home remedies for man and beast. The now very old man was still living in his cottage at the edge of town. The farmer sought his advice.

“Feed the horse two cakes of yeast every day for one week,” the old man said.

The farmer was skeptical, but desperate. He dutifully fed his horse two cakes of yeast every day for seven days. Lo and behold, the birds left the poor horse alone!

The farmer went back to the old man. “Hey, that yeast thing got rid of the nests! How does it work?”

And the old man said, “Yeast is yeast, and nest is nest, and never the mane shall tweet.”

HA HA HA HA HA!

[Don’t get it? There used to be (perhaps during British Empire building) a common expression summarizing difficulties in European/Asian relations: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Don’t hear it much anymore. We are more enlightened. Too bad, in a way. It’s such a good joke!]

Frosty New Year!

 If the Sunday comics are any indication, I’m not the only one feeling post-holiday grumpiness. I always get it, but this year I feel like I never really had that Christmas spirit, in spite of watching Hallmark films every evening. It’s a new year, and it’s no different than the end of the last year. Yes, the vaccine is a light at the end of the tunnel, but we don’t know how long it will take us to get back to the sunshine. The only thing we know is that it won’t be fast enough.

The new year has brought dismal gray skies, snow mixed with freezing rain, followed by rain, and back to snow. The driveway is glaciated.

The weather report today said, “Freezing fog.” With my limited knowledge of meteorology, freezing fog is the runner up to thunder snow for inexplicable weather events. You would think at 20°F, all the water would be frozen out of the air, but no. Freezing fog can be terrifying if black ice forms on the roads. That didn’t seem to happen this time. I suspect a great deal of prophylactic salting  

Frost on the weathervane

I will admit, the frost was beautiful. I took my camera with me when I went out to do the chicken chores.

Pines

Close-up of white pine needles

The frost covered trees made the landscape look like an enchanted fantasy world.

Oak trees

Tree branches and forbes covered in frost

This kind of frost doesn’t happen often and almost never persists all day long. It doesn’t take much wind to knock the ice crystals off, but today was dead calm all day. If anything, the trees were whiter this afternoon than this morning.

Alas, the three-day forecast shows no sunshine. We hang on, trying to stay warm and well. We don’t get Christmas cards in the mail any more, but more seed catalogs arrive every day. I’ll start going through them soon, hoping for spring.

Christmas

 I slacked off last week and did not do a post. Time got away from me.

Because of a forecast for single-digit temperatures, I went out to the high tunnel to harvest the greens I had left. I didn’t take all of them, even though I figured the ones that remained would be killed by the cold temperatures. I had to do the experiment.

Greens from the high tunnel

I have found that the best way to thin or harvest baby lettuce is to snip off the stem at the base, usually a wee bit below the surface of the soil. When I stuck the tip of my shears into the ground, I hid a rock. How odd. I poked around and finally got the shears where I wanted them to be, snipped the lettuce and put it in my harvesting tray. I went on to the next plant and hit another rock. That can’t be right. I filled this raised bed myself with potting soil, peat, and sand. There shouldn’t be any rocks! Then it hit me: the soil was frozen. Duh.

Pretty amazing, though. The above-ground lettuce was just fine, yet the roots were in frozen soil. Indeed, the outside temperature dipped to 4°F one morning, but the lettuce in the high tunnel still looked good. I will continue my observations over the coming weeks to see how cold it has to be to kill the greens.

Terry’s holiday craft project this year is making some deer lawn ornaments from a pattern my dad ordered for him a couple years ago. He’s making them from plywood. He starts by drilling a hole and the base of each notch, being careful not to go all the way through because the last layer will split out.

Drilling out the base of the notches from one side

Close up of the drilling (he changed his mind about the position of the pieces when he was tracing)

Then he turns the board over and finishes the hole from the other side.

Finishing the hole from the opposite side

After that, he cuts out the shapes with a jigsaw.

Cutting out the shapes with a jigsaw

After painting and assembly, the deer look like this:

Finished and weighted down

Even weighted down with bricks, we’ve had trouble with them blowing over. It’s been crazy windy on a couple of days.

We were pretty much done with the Christmas cookies we made earlier. Jane found a recipe for Linzer cookies she wanted to try. Jane is fine mixing dough but claims she is unable to roll and cut. She’s the only person in our pod, and we had a small Christmas Eve luncheon, rolling and cutting the cookies afterward. We each got a Christmas cracker containing a paper hat and plastic toy. This year's crackers did not include any riddles, more's the pity.

After baking the cookies, we spread jam on the uncut cookies,

Spreading jam while wearing my "cracker" crown

Put cut out cookies on top,

Assembling the cookies

And sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Dusting with powdered sugar

They were pretty darned good cookies!

I hope you all had a good Christmas and are looking forward to a better New Year!