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

Is it spring?

Saturday was a lovely, sunny, spring-like day. I knew it was just a tease, but I got out to enjoy it anyway. The chickens were out tromping around in the mud, happy to be out where they could run around. As soon as they saw me, they rushed to the fence, thinking that I might have treats for them. I didn’t, as I had not yet peeled the carrots for my lunches. They soon went back about their business.

Treats? Have you got treats?

With temperatures in the 40’s, I put on my Wellies instead of my pack boots. I still wore wool socks underneath. It wasn’t that warm! The Wellies were also a good choice because I would be walking through water. Rain earlier in the week had left us with huge puddles in the low spots. Since we don’t keep rain gauges out in the winter, I don’t know how much rain we got. It might not have been as much as the puddles suggest. With the ground frozen, nothing soaked in. Here is the puddle by the willows. No tadpoles yet.

Puddle by the willows, with full south exposure to the sun, had no ice

All the snow was gone from the field except in pockets out of the sun’s reach.

The last bits of snow in the field

I walked to the creek where I saw evidence of a recent flood. The grasses on the bank were matted down and surrounded by fresh silt.

Matted grass and fresh silt by the creek suggest a recent flood

There were coyote tracks.

Fresh coyote tracks

And raccoon tracks.

Raccoon tracks

But no deer tracks. The creek was running swiftly.

The creek had plenty of water in it

The west trail was under water. Unlike by the willows, this puddle, shaded from the west by trees, was covered with ice. With childlike delight, I broke through the ice, my feet warm and dry in my boots.

My trail through the ice

Farther along the trail, the ice (which probably started as snow) had melted around the grass to produce artistic patterns reminiscent of stained glass.

Ice imprinted with grass designs

The south path, which is shaded on the south side and thus gets hardly any sun, still had ice an inch thick.

The south path was covered with an inch of ice

At first, the ice was close to the ground so it merely cracked and sagged underneath my feet. I was able to skate along as long as I didn’t get my feet too far away from my center of mass. As I approached the road, though, the water got deeper, and I went all the way through. This slowed me down. I had to step carefully until my foot went through the ice and the water underneath to rest on the soil. I shifted my weight to that foot, picked up the other foot, and gently planted it on the ice a little farther ahead to begin the sequence over. I was pretty proud of myself for getting to the other side still dry.

It was so nice to be outside in the sun, smelling the damp earth, and splashing around in puddles. Surely spring is just around the corner!

But no. The next day was below freezing again. The sun came up in a blue sky while I was doing the chicken chores. By quarter to nine, clouds started moving in. Flakes of snow drifted in the wind all afternoon. Winter is back. Bah.

The quest for a clean water bowl

The flu has been in the news quite a bit lately. I can’t feel smug at having been vaccinated because the vaccine missed the mark this year. It is bound to happen now and then. It would take a crystal ball to know for sure which strain was going to make it big in any given year. We had a laugh the other morning when one of the morning shows had a headline that read, “Winter causes flu.” Terry said, “It’s like that old song,” and he sang, “Whenever two or more of you are gathered in His name, you get the flu.”

It is also the season of catalogs. I got one from Premier Poultry Supplies a couple weeks ago, and I saw a “chick stand,” which was a plastic platform designed for holding the food and water for chicks so they wouldn’t kick chips in the trough. What a great idea! Plus, we could use it now for the water bowl in the big coop. After we put the pinless peepers on, we (and by “we” I mean mostly Hilda) got to worrying that the peepered hens couldn’t drink from the nipple waterer. So Hilda got out the heated dog bowl. And the girls filled it with wood chips and poop every day and night (Hilda changed it in the afternoon).

My first thought was to put it on bricks, and that helped some.

Heated dog bowl on bricks

When I saw the chick stand, that seemed even better. Hilda agreed and put in the order. The chick stand came on Friday, and I put it in the coop Saturday morning. There is a puzzling aspect to the design. The outer edge comes down to about ½” from the floor while the edge of the hole in the middle is much thinner. The obvious question is why is there a hole in the middle in the first place? Unless the food is directly over the hole, a chick could fall down in the hole and be trapped. If the food is directly over the hole, will there still be room for the waterer on the side? We’ll have to see when the time comes.

Chick stand with a big hole in the middle

Meanwhile, the dog bowl sits nicely in the middle. At first the girls were skeptical. Would they stand on the platform? If not, could they reach the water? I thought maybe they could, but no one stepped up to demonstrate while I was watching.

The girls regard the new platform with suspicion

This morning, however, I saw them drinking from it. They can reach the bowl without standing on the platform. Furthermore, there were no wood chips in it.

The peepers do seem to be helping. The feathers are growing back on Blanche’s back.

Blanche with new back feathers

Dorothy is sporting the beginning of tail feathers as well, I think. It’s hard to tell when they are so small.

Dorothy's tail feathers may be growing back

I have mentioned that Hilda shovels the snow from around the coop door. I offer the following photo as evidence that chickens will, in fact, walk in the snow. This shows a trail from the coop door to the shade shelters, which they have been using as dust baths. All it takes is sufficient motivation.

Chicken tracks in the snow

Cat sitting

January. Ug. You just never know what to expect. 52°F Thursday morning; -3°F today. At least we got rid of all the snow for a couple of days. Hilda remarked that she appreciated having no snow and frozen ground as she could go check on the chickens without putting her boots on. We are supposed to get more snow tonight and into tomorrow. The first flakes are swirling on the biting cold wind already.

I don’t hate winter, but it’s not my favorite. So many layers. It seems like I can fill a whole laundry basket with the clothing from a single day. And we have six to eight weeks before we can reasonably expect nice weather.

Not much shaking here this week. I’ve had to declare a moratorium on baking until I 1) eat all the stuff I’ve already made and 2) lose the holiday poundage. I love to bake in the winter. It heats up the kitchen and provides the carb-laden and/or slow roasted comfort foods that cold weather seems to demand. Bread, muffins, oatmeal nut bars, cookies, cakes, pot roast, meatloaf, braised chicken, baked squash….mmm.

Classes begin on Tuesday, and I am loathe to go back to work. I love my job, of course, but somehow not working always seems better than working. Soon I’ll be rushing around every morning to get out the door promptly at 7:15 with my tea in a sippy cup to drink on the road. No more lounging in my jammies with a steaming mug. Sigh. Still, it isn’t as hard to go back for spring semester as it is for the fall, when the garden is still in full swing, and there’s so much harvesting and putting up going on. Now there’s nothing really to do but sit around the house. And bake.

Jane has gone to Florida for a month with Jan. I’m feeling bereft without one of my major pillars of emotional support. I don’t begrudge her. She’s retired and deserves to have a vacation where it’s warmer. We are taking care of Skippy in her absence. I send her pictures every day so she will remember how cute he is and how much we miss her. I am including cute cat pictures in this post because I don’t have anything else photo-worthy.

Skippy stays in his extra-large kennel when no one is at home. When he’s out, he spends most of his time on my lap. He still has not warmed up to Terry, which is too bad because it is hard to type with a cat on your lap, and I would get more done if Terry could take him now and then. 

Skippy not being helpful as I try to type

I’ve had to put him in the kennel now so I can get this post done without being pestered.

Sometimes he likes to lie in the valley between my legs.

Down in the valley, valley so low

Sometimes he curls up next to my arm.

So cute!

Sometimes I am just a bath mat while he washes his face.

Bath time

When Terry lets him out and I’m not home, he tends to sit on the chair under the table where it’s safe.

Hiding under the table

And that’s all for next week. I’ll try to think of something more exciting for next time. Don’t hold your breath. It’s winter.