peanut butter cookies (again)

 1 egg, no milk

 

preheat oven 350 degrees, parchment paper on baking sheet

cream 1/4 c. (half a stick) butter and 3/4 cup creamy peanut butter with 1/2 cup packed brown sugar and 1/4 cup white granulated sugar

mix in 1 large egg and 1 tsp vanilla

combine in separate bowl 1 cup flour, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt, mix thoroughly to avoid clumps of soda or baking powder

mix dry into wet ingredients just until dry is fully combined

 make small balls not much larger than fifty cent pieces and press down on top with a fork to flatten

 

bake for 13 to 15 minutes, pull out and put onto a cold surface to harden and avoid overburning the bottoms by leaving them on the pan

will be crumbly, but undercooking is also better than overcooking, as they continue to 'cook' for a few minutes after they are out of the oven and overcooked ones get very hard when they cool

 

assemblage of thoughts

1.) keeping all those odds and end vegetables in the freezer and bags of split peas and lentils in the cupboard pay off making big pots of soup to eat during this freeze in.. even if Esme and Mark don't eat it, I eat it and they can eat the other things.  I just don't actually get to making the pots of soup often enough and when they make dinner I usually eat it with them.

2.) we did the stock up runs last week 'just in case' and just in case did happen - we bought extra goat feed, cracked corn and chicken feed, and we've opened them all.  I should have stocked one extra bag of dry cat food, too.  We have enough because I stocked up an extra stack of their wet food they get every night - but it would run out before the other feeds

Our prep was running after work to what place was open - feed store one day, propane the next day (we stood in line for an hour, luckily did get some), stocked up on a few groceries that day which we are using now - Esme found the very last gallon of whole milk at that time the store had - and we are using it - and the store was out of almost all kinds of bread and many vegetables already - next day hunt for bread and a few other things, got one loaf, next day : hunt for bread for Grandma and a case of water, dropped her off one loaf from the same place we got one the day before, which we used just a little bit when the power was out and the well was off.  

used : both containers of ready-to-mix pudding I bought, Esme's ramen, frozen biscuits, bacon, split peas, all the cookies, baking powder

could have used but then found some in our storage : quart jar rings!  and we need to find the propane adapter for the bottle - we didn't need to use the camp stove this time around but we came close , I filled all four clean quart jars we had with water and put rings on them and put them in the room with the propane heater in case we really did get to a bad level with our water.  we wished we had filled up the two five gallon buckets and set them in the bathtub (our bathtub does not hold water long-term) although we had filled about six gallon containers and used three of them before the 9 hour power outage ended.  We were SO lucky to not have pipes burst.

glad to have had in storage : brown lentils, whole wheat flour, regular flour 

3.) Mark and Esme aren't eating the soda bread, either - but I am.  I've had it every day since I made it in some way or other.  I had put half of it, sliced, in the freezer, and put that in hot soup today.

4.) when I'm studying lots of languages together, my facebook has NO idea nor my pinterest - they're picking it up somewhere as a cookie or something, and then my ads and recommendations are in all sorts of wild languages.  Interesting, but also eyebrow raising.

5.)  you'd think I'd start editing one of my books, yea, you'd think that

6.) did start a weaving, made a washcloth, finished a rug, and cleaned part of the upstairs

7.) did the budget for the next few months being pessimistic because I have missed a week of work and I know we will need to be even more careful

8.) reminded myself that risking vehicle, life or limb is the worse of those situations, multiple times, and of course I still beat myself up about it every few hours

9.) audited my knit items that I've made that I was told by many 'you'll never use that' etc... yea, ta-da, using all of it, thank you.  It's not time wasted.  The shawl that took months to finish, wrapped around me right now.  The other little shawls that were 'why do you need that?' one of them is in my bed as an extra shoulder cover at night.  The gloves that took weeks, each pair, EXTREMELY useful, and when one is wet the other one is ready.  The rugs and small wraps and slipper socks and hats and scarves.  I've got them, and I know how to use them.  The queen sized knit striped blankets I spent more than a year making - four of them - one for each of us and one for grandma - we each have one on our beds right now and are using them.

10.) staring at my garden seed trays that I never planted much out of last year, but did use the things I did plant

11.) Mark has grown an absolutely enormous and lovely aloe vera crown from the bits he took off my plant upstairs that is still struggling to live

12.)  Turkish, Polish, Czech, Japanese, Lithuanian/Latvian, French, and that guy in the podcast assures us that if we don't focus on just one language for an extended period of time we'll never learn it.  Spock Eyebrow.

13.) If we had breeding goats they'd be dropping tons of babies right now - seeing it all over the feed, quadruplets, quints, sextuplets, etc. etc.. one goat is a lot, and fifteen chickens - and I don't spend quite enough time with them as it is. 

14.) We are thinking about getting a few more chicks this year because of the aging out of the flock we have - and winter hardiness was always a big point for us - the Sapphire Gems have done fairly well, still have four out of the six but the two that we lost a few years ago were one right after the other.  The Cinnamon Queens have been the best.  I feel sorry for my little Americaunas sometimes so much smaller than the others, except the yellow one, Speck, which might have been a cross over from another box, because she grew up an entirely different color and size than the others.

 15.) lots of notes, what we need to stock up on again, budget, reminders for later etc.

 16.) ribboning the extra whole fresh carrots and putting them in the freezer from the meal a few weeks ago worked great - the last of that went in the soup today.

17.) when the soup is nearly overboiling on the stove, the celery seed smells strongly *ha* 

split peas

frozen bits of bacon, onion, summer squash, carrots, ginger,  

 bit of olive oil

celery seed

 black pepper

small bit of 5 spice powder

water

boil long until the split peas are well mushed

blend it all up, put up a quart jar to cool and then in the fridge

eat the rest

*eating the rest* 

 

  

Sing the Golden Path

Sing the golden path

what else can you do? 

in this space between winter and spring

it is not foolish to dream

of the flowers in winter

only to expect them

to suddenly appear

 

 

 

scouting trip - ice safari

 Because I'd much rather be out there on foot and see how bad it is, than to get into my car and end up down a ditch at the first turn etc.  We were wondering if 39 degrees might be enough that we could get out and get over the roads and get a new tank of propane - but seeing this, I don't think so.  Plus, as Mark put it 'even the dog with adaptive four wheel drive took a slide of course people and cars will, too'.  I saw evidence of even deer couldn't keep their footing and slid noticeably in their footprints - and a video online of a deer trying to get down a hill that just ended up doing a belly slide all the way down.

 In order, from the beginning to the hill where I fell on my own tail and decided to come home.  I didn't split open my knee again, which is good.   

 

 

 

 

and that was the big hill I've been stuck on several times before.  A few years back I got stuck on the OTHER side of that double hill and had to stash the truck in a neighbor's yard for two weeks until someone helped us pull it out.  It was either there or I was going down one of those gullies with it, and I gave up and walked the rest of the way home.

Knitted these gloves on my 'pseudocode' pattern a long time ago now, and still using them.  I have a green pair that doesn't have the enormous cuffs - but on occasions like this I can see why I originally made them like this.

the ice can be pretty, too - but there is still a whole heck of a lot of it out there

did try to take some pictures of the turkey and deer tracks out there - but on the phone camera it is mostly white on white, hard to see them. 

Hard won small progress from yesterday - lots of ice bricks thrown to the side, but still only about a 4 foot by 4 foot area cleared.  It is sleet on top of actual ice on top of hardened sleet again and then powdery fluff beneath it.  Mark says 'this is why this almost unplowable out there - and why driving over it when it is melting is so slick and compacts it worse.'   This is how hard I tried to get down to the gravel yesterday when it was barely 32 degrees out - I might go try again after a little bit here but I will not be trying to get out and get to town and back.

 

making bread

Made some bread today, strung up my frame loom, and went and chopped at ice with some results but still not enough to trust getting in and out - tomorrow the top temp should be 39.... and then not again until Monday.  I'm getting pretty stressed out - but keep tamping it back down.  What else can I do? 

 

 https://www.foodabovegold.com/soda-bread-without-buttermilk/ 

 Made this today, with the older bit of milk that was in the fridge that hadn't soured yet - it requires you to sour the milk with vinegar, so I thought that was a good use for it.  Plus I still had three total eggs left - and whole wheat flour in the freezer.  Mark and Esme won't eat it - but it tastes good to me with soup and also with pears and hot coffee.

 

for posterity (in case that other site disappears)

preheat oven to 400 degrees, greased baking sheet

1.25 c milk and 1 tbsp of white vinegar, mix and let sit for 5 to 10 minutes 

mix 2.5 c. whole wheat flour, 1 c. all purpose flour, 2 tbsp white granulatedsugar, 2 tsp of sifted/crushed baking soda, 1 tsp salt - mix well, cut in 1/4 cup of butter until it makes very small 'pea' sized bits

mix the egg into the milk mixture, make a well in the dry ingredients, combine until just all ingredients are together, do not overknead, form one large loaf and place on greased sheet, flatten slightly and cut a deep X on top, bake 45 minutes, brush all over with melted butter when removing from oven, let sit for 15 to 20 minutes, slice - keep infridge in plasticbag, freeze or use all in a single day.  The hard bits are good in soup or to make 'bread pudding' out of using fruit and syrup.

 

above - post bake. below, pre-bake

and I've strung up the loom with some leftover pink warp and am working it in blue acrylic yarns.  At that point it had only just then crossed the freezing line again outside - before that, it would really have been futile to be trying to clear the ice.  I went and spent a half hour or more chopping at ice until my lungs whistled, and puppies chewed on my gloves and shovel - so I gave it up and said I had done a fair to good job for the day as it was.

Still stressing that tomorrow will be another day of just 'working on it' and maybe we can get out, and can we get back in?  It will not be a day I can get into work and be on time, and I just have to deal with what I can do for everyone in my care for the day, which Mark reminds me, is also myself.

*growl* and sleep
 

more pictures after ice storm

 

pictures ice storm

heavy ice on the cedar tree over the porch

little Melody goat has had to stay out for an hour or so at a time here and there - because of house training etc. she is a goat after all etc - the dogs and cats have been coming in and out as they wish but mostly in

the sunrise this morning glinting on the ice in the trees

counted chickens - I saw everyone except the second rooster - and he had disappeared from -my- view for a week a few months ago and then showed up again  

 It took us SO long and two people giving all the effort we could to get that chicken door lock (and the whole door, apparently, as was necessary) unfrozen enough to open the door and get water to them - I was able to put food in with a tube but water was not so easy.

 

 We did not go anywhere today - but I did walk up to the road and look at it.  No one had been by except myself, the dog, and wild creatures (deer, rabbit, bird).  The snow had a hard layer of glaze over it that even my footprints did nothing to break the surface - just a bit of scuff in the top most layer of sleet.  At a few places the ENTIRE road bed cracked at the edges but the middle stayed solid.  There will probably be no going anywhere tomorrow, too - even at the height of the whole 32 degrees we might get at the warmest part of the day.

 

 

It doesn't look like much but actually - it really is - it is like a huge smooth hard sheet of hardened snow like a motorcycle helmet over the entire road - and it doesn't stop at the top of the driveway, it keeps going onto the county road. 

 

 

Again, counting blessings that the water is good and the power is fixed.  A lot of people in the area were still out of power today.  Esme was worried about not being able to login to her college or email the instructor - but then she found she was missing a letter in the name and at least got the email through.

 It will be what it will be - as for how long we will be stuck without being able to get into work or school.  Hopefully Wednesday or Thursday there will be enough of a shift during the warm parts of the day to at least make things passable.... but then it gets cold again after that. We will need propane by then, certainly, but not as critically as if the power was out.

ice storm Sunday January 25 Tennessee

 It snowed yesterday and I stayed home from the post office - as it was forecasted to be so heavy I wouldn't get back in even if I could get out.  Then about 1 AM, it started to sleet, and then to have freezing rain, and the power went out (after flickering several times) at about 6:20 am.  The entire outside was frozen ice over the snow - even chopping out a brick of it to put it in a bucket it was extremely difficult.  It never melted, either - right now, twelve hours later in the house, it is still a block of ice.  

 It was 9 hours later that they did get it back on - and luckily, our water pipes were not frozen and busted.  That was our fear, and still is, until the outside temperatures actually warm up.  Grandma has propane heat and a gas stove, but her water was in question, too.  She said everything was okay afterwards.

We used the propane heater we have here during that time, but just in the one room, and I used the brick stove out in the kitchen here with the tea candles, a brick, and three radiating bread pans.  It got hot enough to make a cup of tea on - but only for about three hours.   

I was dressed up all in my layers - three shirts, three pants, three or four pairs of socks, a big sweater with a hood, a shawl that wraps around and ties, another small blanket pinned around my waist and a big blanket around my whole self on top of that.  I told Mark I felt like a jawa with my hood up - and he was half-asleep he said that Jawas wore brown, and then shone the flashlight on me, and yes, the blanket and the sweater were brown.  Then he said 'But, you're taller than a Jawa, there's that'

I stayed out in the kitchen and read Opening Atlantis for a few hours sticking next to the brick stove and it actually radiated quite a bit of heat for two teacandles.  The kitchen only got down to about 52 degrees during the whole nine hours.  Esme slept under lots of blankets and Mark stayed near the propane heater.  

 

We kept cycling the goat in and out and the cats popped in and out as they pleased.  I told Lyffan she was not going to catch any of those birds - there were so many of them in all of the frozen trees - dozens and dozens of lots of different species.  I fed the chickens through their completely iced door with a pitcher and a tube, spraying the feed on the ground through that - those birds loved that.  Several squirrels arrived.  Finally, after the power came back on we went out there with hot water and a de-icer can and finally got their door open to give them some hot water.  We re-filled every bucket and jug in the house in case the power goes out again, and then made lunch for everyone, fed all the animals, and made a bit of dinner, too.  

 

I have to admit after we got some lunch and more coffee and swirled around doing all the first things that needed to be done - I had a prolonged 20 minute dizzy spell that I really don't know exactly where that came from.  Mark said maybe the air pressure being different, and all the running around stress.  I thought maybe I drank too much too quickly and got sort of a post-prandial thing.  But I laid on the couch for about twenty minutes and waited for it to go away before feeding the cats and then he made some baked potatoes for dinner, which I put a lot of salt on. 

Now I'm running the dishwasher and hoping that the power will stay on through the next few days until it gets warm enough outside to get out over the roads to town and refill more propane.  We still have about half of what we store - but Mark is using it to like he normally does to keep his room warmer for his lung condition.

 

Oh, I know we won't be going anywhere tomorrow, either - the weather looks like it will still be too cold to do anything for several days.  It is what it is. 

rolling

 It's been a hard couple of weeks - was trying to heal up from that knee I smashed up (it is finally scabbing over enough not to break open, but I still wince whenever I kneel on it, which for some reason, I can't stop doing at least once every few days), and the dental plate caused a soreness and stiffness in one side of my face that I was worried about for a while, but finally has went back down just as it had done before.  *sigh*  I've been taking the plate out as soon as I can at night, and on Sunday I didn't put it in for more than a few hours because it was finally feeling better.  Advil and antiseptic rinse and turmeric/curry powder milk just before I go to sleep.  The hard thing is I don't like to take any pain reliever too much - so even taking three or four single pills during a 24 hour day is a LOT for me - but I was able to see the difference and know that it was helping.

 

Charlotte and Minerva, watching me cook

My anxiety was really up because of that, but I've been running through my 'brain routine' to make sure I don't miss anything and to take care of what I can before it adds to my latent anxiety - and that helps a LOT, really.. it does.  When you can get something that would be a worry taken care of, it helps with the bit that just won't smooth down no matter what.  And it helps to see the difference, between something you can fix and something you have to wait out.

I read part of a book the other day - it was just so cold I spent half the morning in bed, because I could.  Every other day I've been running, work, errands, postal route.  But, Esme is really liking her college courses and work at the office job has been rolling and getting that done which it needs someone to get it done.  Told Esme that is a big thing - show up, do what needs to be done without waiting for people to stick up their finger and say 'shouldn't you be doing...' and don't put things off because they stack up and then it will be even harder to keep it all balanced and working after that.  Rest in between when you have run through the whole list and know that you've done all that you can do right now.  I also showed her my unique budget 'program' language that I have worked out the next two months in to help myself remember to account everything.  She said she actually understood it, that it was logical.

 We've also had what I would swear was a fifteen lb. opossum in the hen house - and maybe the thing that blinded my one green-egg layer a month or so ago.  I bruised him up pretty good with a hand tool and threw him out in a box he was hiding in - but I didn't actually do that much damage because he ran off and up a pole and out across a tree quick as lickety split, and then the dogs went off chasing him into the woods.  I only have the one chicken out of the twelve hens that are left that is laying an egg every two or three days - I don't know if that is the only egg we find and they are getting the rest or if that is the only egg that is being laid because of the cold.  I want to protect them better than that but I looked all over where I saw him go and couldn't find a hole in the netting or the fence - like he melted through it somehow.  I've sprayed white vinegar out there in that place and another I saw one melt through fence four or five months ago on the other side.

Now, it thinks it will snow sometime this week.  I don't need that.  We have a bit more animal feed and propane to get before that happens. Tomorrow will be a bit stressful with that run after work but once that is done we are at that 'what will be will be' state again. 

I've made pancakes, and curry, and orange chicken, red lentils and flatbreads, and bean soup and am researching using a rice cooker to cook my adzuki beans.  I showed Esme how to peel ginger when making the red lentil dish, but the 1 cup to 3 cups of water was too much for it, so half of that meal became soup.  I will have to work on that recipe now that I have the red lentils again, made a special trip to the other grocery store to get them.  I made 'seven spice' with star anise, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, fennel, coriander and yellow mustard seed.  I had looked at all the five spice mixtures available to me and found none that I liked as much as the one that I am almost OUT of...*sigh* - I had all the spices, so I just used my coffee grinder and made a batch.

For languages, I've studied such a mixed bag it is almost funny - French, Spanish, Lithuanian/Latvian, Japanese, Czech, Russian, and Polish. 

Just a bit

 I'm trying to get over a little nose congestion and have it not go to my chest.  I've had that problem all my life - Fargo was the worst with the wind and cold - but I still get it here in Tennessee once in a while, too.  Basically, I've been told, my sinuses aren't quite right but it would take a lot to make them 'right' and they probably wouldn't stay that way, so learn how to deal with it.  I eat a lot of soup and drink a lot of tea.

I made pea soup this morning with garlic and onions and clove spice, and drank it all straight down.

I've been studying Greek, trying to increase that score from 15 to 16 - and also doing Spanish-->French and French-->Spanish on my phone, and caught up on a few lessons of Russian today after watching a big cat handler's Youtube again with Esme and pointing out that I could understand some of what she was saying.  My Duolingo scores on the French-->Spanish and Spanish-->French are both sitting at 10 and 11, respectively.  My English-->French score is just hovering under 70, and I know that could be improved but the grammar is getting into 'you have to study now' territory.  I'm still using the free version, as well.  And I was surprised to see my Russian score materialize today also at 11.  They didn't have those scores back when I did the free A-level Busuu course and then caught up some practice on Duolingo. 

Found a little red photo album from my early childhood and posted a few pictures for my sister to see, and to try to figure out who the people were in them.  I was really originally looking for what the linoleum looked like in our house when I was a child - because I could remember it almost exactly.  I picked out an image on Google that I was sure was it - and when I found the picture in the album, yes, *pat on back* it was exactly the same pattern.  Those sort of things stick with you when you have a photographic memory.  I remember my mother being upset that I would trace such patterns with my fingers, and especially the mirroring in it was something I was fascinated with.  Come to discover later that patterns and dyslexia mirroring things were a big part of how my brain works - little surprise!

 

 

I was also doing my Lithuanian / Latvian vocabulary - on baba dum only Lithuanian is available and on Baltoslav both are.  I was finding it useful to look away from the screen on ba ba dum and hear the word, 'spell' it in my vision, and then look and see if the word was what I thought it was before trying to match it to the picture I also thought it should be.  BaltoSlav doesn't have pronunciation, but Google translate has gotten much better at pronouncing Latvian, and I've been watching some more Tuta's Lietas as well for that.

 Still no actual USE for these languages other than my brain works much better and less stress fully with this 'in all the boxes' than with remembering 50,000+ items in inventory per department in the hardware store I worked at.   

The New Year's Cake and Parsnip Soup

 Esme and I made the butter almond cake together today.  

 

My haul from the grocery store.  I didn't take any pictures of the cake itself.  We made hopping john of a sort, and I served carrots and the almond cake for Esme, and carrots, the almond cake, greens and some of the acorn squash for grandma and myself.

 I had looked through all of my recipes and found the recipe for galette des rois (king's cake) and decided it was too complicated.  But yesterday, I had decided that I needed to make the cake again, maybe something that I can still eat after this dental work.

 

This is what we made - it was good, a bit like sweetened cornbread.  I can't have corn products, have been avoiding them for years now on my cousin's recommendation with my other connective tissue disorder.   

 

Butter Almond Cake :

 

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter softened

1 cup white granulated sugar

2 large eggs (at room temperature)

1 tsp. vanilla extract

little less than 3 tsp. baking powder

1.5 cups of general purpose flour

1/2 cup of ground almonds

1 cup milk

1/2 tsp salt

350 degrees for 40-45 minutes or until fork comes out clean

cream softened butter and sugar, add eggs and vanilla, beat until smooth, mix dry ingredients in another bowl and add half and half with the milk beating until all combined, pour into ceramic dish, bake

 

Hopping John  

 

fry chopped bacon on low until the edges begin to crisp, keep the oil in the pan

pour drained can of black eyed peas into the grease and mix thoroughly while still heating

stir often until it begins to bubble again

put frozen chopped green onions into mixture, heat again until it sizzles and stir until the gravy thickens

 

Parsnip Soup  (a variation on the turnip soup from a while back)

 

peel and chop up into small slivers one large parsnip

put in pot with at least 2 cups (I think it was closer to 4) of water

pour in a bit of olive oil 

add frozen zucchini and onions

garlic parmesan grilling seasoning

black pepper 

 

boil until everything is soft, use a stick blender to make smooth 

add a good pat of good butter on top of each bowl