A Special Breakfast

Breakfasts on a Sunday morning should be a little special. I don't often make this very (to my mind) tasty little concoction because my husband isn't crazy about it. But since Sundays have been decreed "every man for himself" when it comes to food preparation and eating, having me prepare this for breakfast today means he didn't have to get his own meal. Therefore, he cheerfully gobbled it up. (Not only did he seem to enjoy it, but when I started to take the last portion left out of the dish saying, "Oh, the chickens are gonna love this little treat," it sparked a small hissy fit. "CHICKENS!!?? We're not gonna waste those luscious blueberries on the chickens. Leave it on the counter and I'll finish it later.")

In case you get a hankering to give it a try, here's the recipe:

BANANA-BLUEBERRY PUFF

1 tablespoon butter

1/3 cup flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 beaten eggs

1/2 cup milk

1-1/2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries

1 sliced large-ish banana

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1 rounded tablespoon sugar

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Put butter in a 9" pie plate and place in oven until melted and hot. In a bowl, combine the flour, 1 tablespoon sugar and salt. Add the eggs and milk and whisk until smooth. Pour into the hot pie plate. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until edges are puffed and golden brown. Remove from oven. Place blueberries and banana slices evenly in puff. Sprinkle with cinnamon and rounded tablespoon sugar which have been combined. Cut into wedges and serve immediately.

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The original recipe said it would serve four but the two of us often finish it with no problem. Needless to say if you're using frozen blueberries (as I did), let them defrost first. Ones that have been frozen aren't as nice as fresh, but still quite tasty.

As you can see by the above picture, I didn't get a lot of poof to my puff this morning. Sometimes it gets grotesquely high and the next time it will be rather demure like today. It must be dependent on atmospheric pressure, or the phase of the moon, or whether I'm dressed or still in my jammies.

I keep thinking I should try using other fruit . . . strawberries and blueberries? Strawberries and bananas? Fresh peach slices and blueberries? Mmmmm, raspberries! But I like the banana and blueberry combo so much I have yet to venture away from that.

At any rate, it makes a nice, different breakfast with which to start a lovely Sunday.

A Breath of Spring

Well, it's as close to a feeling of spring as we've come for a long time anyway. Are you ready for this? Ta-dah! We had a temperature in the mid-40s today. Now I know many of you would say that such a reading in your part of the country is in the downright chilly category. But you have to realize that for us living just a hop, skip and a jump away from Santa Claus Land, it is really warm. I can hardly believe how much of our snow melted. Areas in our yard and drive that have been inches thick of solid ice for the past many moons morphed into mush today. My husband could hardly control himself. He manhandled the coil of hose out of the garage, hooked it up to the outside spigot and washed the truck!

On my way to recycling this morning, as I was driving through town, I saw a guy coming out of the grocery store and all he was wearing was a gray, short sleeved t-shirt. (Well, I mean that was all he was wearing 'on top', of course.) True, he may have been 1) delirious because of experiencing a temperature above freezing for the first time in 5 months, 2) rushing things just a bit, or 3) off his medication. But then it could have just been a case of rebellious thinking, 'I'm tired of wearing that blasted heavy parka, and I'm not gonna do it anymore.' More power to him. I'm sure he had ripples of goose bumps all over his body to keep him warm.

In celebration of this day's breath of spring and hope of flowers to come, I thought I'd share this quilted piece. It's not new but rather one I made when my quilt group had a challenge where all of us were to make a piece incorporating curves . . . a little challenging (hmmm, is that why they call it a 'challenge'?) when working with fabric which is usually happier to be stitched together with straight seams.

I'm truly not a flower fabric kinda gal but for some reason chose to use several floral prints this time.

Here's a close-up so you can actually see the flowers.

Can true spring and the hardiest of spring flowers be far away when the snow level is visibly decreasing and we're sorely tempted to take the grippers off the bottom of our Sorels?

Needed: A Dose of Sensibility

When we first moved here to Minnesota from Illinois in the 70s, I wrote my folks a letter at least once a week. Some twenty years later, my mom gave me several boxes containing all of my old letters. Mom's been gone twelve years this coming Tuesday, and I'm just now starting to read through those letters.

The one I picked up tonight was written in June of 1979, and I was answering a question regarding our dairy goat herd. Just reading what I wrote brought back such memories. Waaaah , I wanna get goats again. (Please, somebody stop me. I don't want to be tied down with twice a day milking right now. I don't want to lie awake nights in mid-winter wondering if the goats are staying warm enough.)

The nucleus of our herd was just being built at that time. We had three Nubian milkers: Maggie, who was 5 years old, and the best goat ever personality-wise and a good, steady milker; Misty, 4 years old, a sweet, small doe who was a lovely frosted silver color; and Debra, 3 years old, a beautiful, red, huge, heavy milker who was the biggest klutz in goat-dom. She couldn't hop up on the milking stand without tripping and getting down wasn't much better. (Ever try to catch a large goat so she didn't fall on the floor?) Gosh darn, she was clumsy.

We had been taking our does down into Wisconsin to be bred but soon tired of that and decided it was time to keep our own bucks. Barley was only 3 months old at the time of the letter and had just been joined by Brisbane who was 3 weeks old. (Well, he would have Brisbane as a room mate as soon as Brisbane was old enough.)

The two yearling does not yet producing were Gretchen and Jenny. We had just had two doe kids, Zoey (guess I've always been fond of that name) who was Brisbane's sister, and Emily, one week old, who had just arrived from another homestead and was being bottle fed.

That's another thing I don't want on my list every day right now . . . bottle feeding kid goats three times a day. Or do I? No. NO. NOOOO! But, gosh, thinking of those goats does bring back good memories. Sigh.

Shore Walk

We took a late afternoon hike down along the shore of The Big Lake today.

We came across this unique ice ledge (in front of Roy) that had been created up on the gravel beach by wave action before the water froze. The gravel underneath it was undercut by nearly two feet.

When I climbed down to these rocks I found out they felt unbelievably warm to the touch. Remarkable how much they had been heated by the sun, but also very welcome. My hands were nearly numb from having my gloves off to take pictures so I stood there for a while with my hands pressed against the toasty rock.

Looks like there should be a polar bear padding across this landscape, doesn't it? It also looks like I was on a boat when I took the picture because of the tilted horizon. Nope, but I was leaning over in an uncomfortable position trying to show the shaping of the ice and snow ridges without lying flat in the snow (which is what I should have done) and I failed to hold the camera straight. The lake is frozen out as far as one can see.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

I know you all can relate. We all have days when no matter how hard we try, we can't make any progress. My wheels are spinning and not only am I not moving forward, I think I may be going backwards.

Today is Monday. (No big surprise there.) Being the old (Old?! Who said, 'Old?!'), traditional kinda gal I am, I do laundry on Mondays. Being as how it's just the two of us, I figure I should be able to get the ironing done on Mondays also. Simple. Not a big deal. I have a washer and dryer. I have a sturdy ironing board and a good iron. (Well, the good iron may be debatable right now. It leaks. In a big way. Not all the time. Just some of the time.) I keep hoping to be organized enough so that come each Monday, the only thing I have to do is the laundry and ironing. The rest of the day I proclaim to be 'free' which means no other 'have-to-dos' get to infringe upon my time once the clothes are washed, dried, pressed and put away. Perfect. Sounds like an ideal Monday to me. Unfortunately, I just don't seem to be able to get there.

It's now getting nigh onto 3 p.m. and this is my counter next to the kitchen sink. Breakfast and lunch dishes stacked up. This is unusual for me. I dislike the task of doing dishes so much that I almost always do them immediately after a meal. What's gone wrong today? I dunno, but I sure better get at them soon or it will be time to add dinner's assortment to them. (No, we didn't each have a beer with breakfast. The bottles are leftover from the guys' attempt at thirst quenching when returning from their hike last night. The bottles are waiting to be washed since our daughter has asked us to save bottles for her because she's going to get into some serious root beer making soon.)

What was I planning on doing with all my 'free' time today? Sit on my rusty-duster and knit, knit, knit on the new winter hat my daughter put in a request for. Here it is in a heap on the end of the couch where I tossed it last night after finding I was too tired to accurately follow the pattern. ('Accurately' being the operative word here.) I'm pretty sure I have to tear out about half a round before getting back on track.

There is a bill on my desk top (somewhere) that I HAVE to pay today. Also an order that I should have sent off early LAST week. I keep coming back here to my desk thinking I'm going to get both items taken care of . . . and then something else calls for my attention and I go flitting off in another direction.

And if all the above weren't horrible, awful, bad enough, my craving for FOOD is driving me nuts today! I've been so good about cutting my portions and staying away from 'no-no-bad-things-to-put-in-my-mouth', but today I feel like I wanna eat anything that doesn't eat me first.

So what the heck am I doing sitting typing this blog entry if I have so much to do that's not getting done? Trying to catch my breath, center my scattered self, and find a sympathetic ear to tell my silly troubles to. (Yoohoo? Anybody out there?) No matter. Even if you're not listening, I'm better now. Watch out, you dirty dishes, here I come. (But maybe I should first add another beer bottle to the stack. As they say, it's got to be 5 o'clock somewhere.)

What Happened to February?

So, okay, I know February is a short month but talk about time flying! I'm still trying to figure out what happened to the (supposed) long, slow month of January, and the calendar today is proclaiming a date of March 1st. (Well, deal with it, Mama Pea. There's nothing any one has figured out to do to slow the passage of time, so we just all need to make the best of every hour we have available to us. Picture me pulling up my boot straps, shaping up and getting on with it.)

As you can see, we still have a bit of snow left in our part of the country. Won't be doing any tilling in the garden this week yet.

Although late last night while listening to the radio we heard a weather forecast warning of overnight temps dipping down to -25 degrees (!), we had only -9 degrees this morning at 6 a.m. We've had bright sunshine all day and now near 3 p.m., the temperature is a sizzling 11 above.

We've been parking our little run-about Toyota over on the southwest side of the house so it gets the warmest sunshine of the day on it. (Note the wind-sculpted snowbanks.) That way, if we need the use of a car during these still chilly (okay, frigid) days, we usually don't have to plug it in before starting it. Another advantage of all the sunshine we've been getting lately is being able to use the electricity generated by our solar panels all day from dawn to dusk. We don't have enough solar panels to run our household totally on solar (and don't want to invest the $$ in more panels right now) but are able to use the 'free' power whenever the sun is out. The rest of the time, we are plugged into the grid and darned if the public utility company doesn't keep sending us a monthly bill. The good news is that the bill is significantly lower than it would be if we didn't have our small solar system to rely on much of the time. And last week when the local power company experienced a huge glitch with the main power source coming into the county, we didn't even know it.

Made a batch of homemade soup this morning. It's a vegetarian recipe (Lentil-Barley) I've made for umpteen years but had some leftover cooked beef from dinner last night that I threw in the pot. I personally love barley and the way it makes such a thick, robust pot of soup.

Our chickens are laying eggs like there's no tomorrow so I made a big bowl of egg salad this morning, too. Roy works very hard at making sure our chickens have really good feed and he must be doing more than a little bit of a good job as their egg yolks have remained a nice orange color all winter. I'm sure the coloration must come from the green grass/hay clippings he dries and saves to feed them during the months when they aren't on pasture.

If you've been reading this blog, you know I'm in one heckuva bread baking mood. I have two batches of bread rising as we speak. Oatmeal Bread again . . . it has tasted soooo good and is such a nice sandwich bread. Also Italian Bread rising in the four small loaves to put in the freezer and use as garlic cheese bread with pasta dishes, or soup, or salad, or just because. Mmmm, love that melted cheese!

Roy and a good friend are off bushwhacking this afternoon . . . one of their very favorite things to do. J's wife dropped him off here after church, I fed them soup and sandwiches for lunch, gave them each a bag of cookies, and sent them off. They took snowshoes and are exploring territory heretofore unknown to man. I have a vague idea of where they went (probably couldn't find them if I had to though) but both of them are intelligent, woods-wise guys, each carrying a pack with emergency supplies (including eight cookies each), and as long as they're together, I don't worry about them. Our dog Zoey is with them also . . . wait, should I be worried about her? Oh well, I can always call Search and Rescue if the three of them don't turn up by midnight.

It may be the first of March but with all the snow we've had (and still have) this year, it doesn't look like it will be an early spring in the North Country. Just as well. I'm not ready to start playing in the garden dirt yet. But I am thinking seriously of dragging a lawn chair out onto the deck one of these afternoons to soak up some of the sun that is truly getting some real warmth to it now that the calendar is steadily marching toward spring.