Well the weather is not a ray of sunshine today.
I am still making the transition from months of being super busy with the garden and food preservation, to the quiet and peaceful passage of short winter days.
Bread baking has been of interest lately, several loaves of bread with dried fruit were baked, and consumed entirely by me! I love bread, and particularly bread with dried fruit. It is a bit of a luxury item, but as a sweet treat, it ranks up there with the healthiest. Bread here at Mist Cottage is now made exclusively with organic whole grain flour, milled right here at home. I am busy looking at recipes for Christmas treats, Panettone, Pulla, Stollen, Paska (Easter Bread), Babka, Nissua, and many more. What fun!
Making all these specialty sweet breads is fine and dandy. However, there is an issue, and that is me! If that bread is sitting in the bread box, I am eating it for every single meal! I cannot resist it. So I am on a campaign to balance my diet. First off, I will make very small loaves of sweet breads, and freeze most of them, so only one small loaf is on the go at one time.
My other measure to balance my diet, is to include vegetables in every single meal. This morning, for instance, breakfast consisted of 1/2 cup frozen chopped organic spinach (our garden), 1 medium onion chopped, olive oil, and an egg. The onion were sauteed in olive oil, spinach added and sauteed, and finally the egg was broken into the pan, stirred in, and cooked just until done. It was very good. For lunch I plan a cream of mixed vegetable soup, made from a roux, one cup of 1% milk, and a cup of cooked mixed vegetables (frozen from the store).
Canning soup bases that require only the addition of cooked noodles or cooked rice to ready them for serving, is on the to-do list. So are canned jars of chicken stew, and beef stew.
Another project that would be good to pursue during the winter, is trying to master Tattler canning lids and rings. They are reusable, and so very desirable. But the learning curve is steep, I’ve had about 80% failure rate so far. Due to the failure rate, I’ll be experimenting canning water until my skill level increases significantly.
There are a few sewing projects that need tackling, but they will have to wait until the basement insulated walls are completed. There just isn’t a horizontal work surface available for a sewing machine right now.
Worldly
Weather
-2°C
Date: 9:00 AM EST Tuesday 19 November 2019
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 101.0 kPa
Tendency: Rising
Temperature: -1.7°C
Dew point: -6.1°C
Humidity: 72%
Wind: NNW 14 km/h
Wind Chill: -6
Visibility: 24 km
Quote
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
Maya Angelou
1928 – 2014
Interesting to note that when I was doing a bit of poking around on Google about Maya Angelou, the suggested other people of interest included Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood. Well, I admire the integrity, compassion, and talent of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker… the third candidate just makes me shake my head, not in Morrison or Walker’s league, in my opinion, and I admit to being slightly offended by her inclusion.