Sticky Bun Day!

 Happy Sticky Bun Day! I don’t know how official this designation is. It was listed on the “free” calendar that Terry got with his order of obscenely expensive beef sticks from Burgers’ Smokehouse.  In February, the holidays include the familiar Ground Hog Day, Valentines [sic] Day, Presidents Day, and Ash Wednesday as well as lesser events, such as the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras. Then there are several that the Burgers’ Smokehouse Research Department had to dig deep for: Homemade Soup Day (Feb. 4), Make a Friend Day (Feb. 11—is this so you have a date for Valentine’s Day?), Sticky Bun Day (Feb 21) and Toast Day (Feb. 25—mark your calendar!).

As far as I’m concerned, any excuse to make sticky buns is good enough. It worked out well when my Dad was alive, as he ate three right off the bat. We have more leftovers now. When I mentioned this to Terry, his response was, “And you think we’re going to throw them out?”

Caramel pecan rolls, a.k.a., sticky buns

They are best fresh from the oven, but a short time in the microwave can almost restore them to their previous glory. The real problem, of course, is “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” I’ll work it off when gardening season starts, right?

The turkeys showed up again last week, but only four this time. Other than looking for bird seed that isn’t there, they spend a good deal of time under the deck. I wonder if they are looking for gravel for their gizzards.

Turkeys emerging from under the deck

When I first saw the turkey in the middle, I thought it was sitting in the snow. It turned out that it was standing in a drift, and it struggled to get out.

Seen from a different angle, the turkey in the middle is up to its belly in a drift

Later in the week, we had this unusual cloud formation. It looked like someone had stuck four huge fingers in the cloud and smeared it toward the horizon.

Odd cloud formation

What with Sticky Bun Day, I suspended my sourdough experiments for this week. I was moved to try Edith Wallace’s Cracker Torte. I mentioned a few posts ago that I was reading How America Eats by Clementine Paddleford. When I got to the Cracker Torte, I could not imagine what it would be like. Whipped egg whites, sugar, cracker crumbs, and chopped nuts. Would it be like a meringue or spongy? As luck would have it, I ended up with the requisite 3 egg whites when I used three yolks in knoephla (NEF-la) soup. I froze them until we were done eating the sourdough chocolate cake. The first thing I learned was that frozen and thawed egg whites will still whip. Whew! I whipped the egg whites by hand, thinking that it would be easy. I was surprised at how viscous they became when I gradually whipped in one cup of sugar.

Egg whites whipped with sugar is more viscous than you might think

I folded in cracker crumbs and chopped walnuts and baked it.

Cracker torte fresh from the oven

It didn’t look bad, although it fell quite a bit, as egg-white based cakes are wont to do. I topped it with whipped cream, covered it with foil, and chilled it overnight, just as Edith instructed.

The final product

Actually, it was pretty good. The outer crust was slightly chewy, giving way to the crunchy nuts within. The crackers seemed to only contributed salt to counteract the sweetness of all that sugar, although it wasn’t salty. And there you go.

It just started snowing again. Terry is so excited about shoveling snow again tomorrow. NOT!

No sign of spring

 I’m not sure what atmospheric conditions make the sun look like a white smudge on a gray slate (is that redundant?), but this is what the winter sun looks like. The milky light has no warmth to it, and even though it isn’t nearly as bright as in a clear sky, the unbroken whiteness of the snow makes you squint anyway.

Winter sun

The cold continues. I shouldn’t gripe about it. Six or seven below is nothing compare to the -40°F that I endured every morning for two weeks when I lived in North Dakota. Still, it’s getting to me. When the snow is flying horizontally by the windows, and you can’t remember when it was even as warm as 20°, and it doesn’t seem like spring will EVER come, you just need to do some brunoise to lift your spirits. Or maybe that’s just me. I find the quiet, focused meditation of making tiny little cubes of vegetables soothing.

Celery, carrots, onions, and potatoes in brunoise cut

Plus we got a hot and filling Graupensuppe (German barley soup) to sustain us through another winter night.

Graupensuppe

This week’s sourdough experiment was crumpets. This recipe is pure genius on the part of King Arthur Flour. It takes one cup of discarded sourdough starter and transforms it into 4 crumpets with the addition of three ingredients (sugar, soda, and salt). What I like best is that it does not make an overwhelming quantity of product. Four crumpets don’t even have to go in the freezer.

Crumpets on the griddle

Fork-split crumpet with butter and jam

I made my second loaf of sourdough bread. This loaf does have to go in the freezer. Still, I ate all of the first one in two weeks, which is faster than most other breads I make. I just can’t leave it alone! I often have it for breakfast AND lunch. So delicious!

My second loaf of sourdough bread, even more beautiful than the first

We had some visitors this week. Six tom turkeys appeared, walked all over the property, including all the way down the driveway and back. They checked underneath the feeders in vain. Hilda has not been able to get out to feed the birds this winter.

This turkey came quite close to the house

Two turkeys coming toward the house

It was fun to watch them hiking through the snow. They did the same thing that humans do—try to walk on top of the snow only to break through with a lurch as the crust gives way.

Note the difference in snow depth

I was struck by how much their tracks look like little dinosaur feet.

Dinosaur tracks!

More snow may or may not be coming. The forecast changes daily, a clear sign of an unstable system. Stay warm, y’all!

 

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!]