Cooking and Baking

A mostly quiet day, mother issues, plus, cats. ðŸ˜„

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Today was expected to be chillier, with the forecasted high covering at, or just below, freezing, depending on what app I looked at and when. The next two days are supposed to be much warmer, and likely the last warm days of the year, so I’m planning activities accordingly.

Since moving out here (I forgot all about our 8 year anniversary here, almost a week ago!), our plans tend to very much revolve around the weather and the seasons!

The day started out with my usual routine, which always starts with tending to the yard cats.

Furriosa looks hilariously furious! Pinky is healing well and seems absolutely indifferent to her surgical site. I supposed her shaved belly must feel at least somewhat cold, but being in the heated isolation shelter is probably enough to make up for that. Especially when she has three kittens to cuddle up in the bed and keep her warm!

We’re going to have to do something about the second bed in the lower level. The litter box has been kicked around, and it is being used – somewhat – but they’re also using the lower level cat bed as a litter box, too! The trick will be to open up the ramp door to reach all that, without letting Pinky escape. The kittens have zero interest in leaving, but there’s still a chance she might. I believe she’s been trying to scramble through the roof. The rigid insulation above where the extension cord comes in is now very torn up!

Things that we’ll need to deal with, during the next few warmer days.

The first unexpected part of the day was an early phone call.

From the Home Care coordinator.

She got a report about my mother yesterday.

My mother had called me last night and, at one point, she started going off on how the home care workers, these “educated people”, didn’t know how to use her microwave. It’s so simple! I’d explained to her that her microwave is so old, none of them would have seen one like it before, and to give them time to learn how she wants things done, now that they are doing meal assists on top of her med assists.

Now I know why it was on her mind.

It turns out that when one of the home care workers went to use the microwave, my mother suddenly said NO! very loudly, grabbed her arm and sort of slammed it on the counter (not sure how that would have worked considering how things are laid out in her kitchen), then did the microwaving herself. The worker told my mother not to touch her like that and my mother did apologize.

Still, this is the sort of thing that could get her home care cancelled outright, and between my siblings and I, none of us are in a position to take over if that happens.

We talked about it for a while. One of the things that is part of the issue is how my mother is having more difficulty finding her words and gets very frustrated and angry. She expects everyone around her to just know what she is trying to say, what she wants, what she means. There’s no excuse for taking it out on people – especially not physically! I explained about my mother not understanding why people don’t know how to use her microwave and how, with her, she leaps to thinking people are stupid for not knowing things she finds obvious. This is not a new thing, by any means, but it is getting worse as her ability to communicate declines.

I assured the coordinator that my siblings and I would have a talk with my mother about it, and extended my apologies.

Then I updated my siblings in our group chat about my mother. I just finished doing that when my younger daughter came over and asked me what my plans were for the day. She and her sister had been talking, and were hoping to be able to go hunt for some energy drinks. More specifically, Monster energy drinks. They’re out of stock or of limited stock lately. We’ve tried other brands and have not been impressed by them.

I really miss Beaver Buzz! No one carries those anymore though, according to their website, places like both grocery stores in town still do. Maybe in other provinces, because I’m not even finding them in the city.

We decided to go into town and see what was available at the grocery store and, if that didn’t work out, we could at least try a gas station. They tend to have the individual cans at much better prices. We left early enough that, after checking the budget, we were able to grab a late breakfast, too.

Once at the grocery store, I picked up a few things as well, taking advantage of the trip, while my daughter did a much larger shop. Including energy drinks. She found 4 packs of Monster, on sale, and got the last three.

That done, we were soon on are way home. I considered stopping at the post office to see if any packages came in, but our timing was off. It was still morning, but they close at 11:30 for 2 1/2 hours, and we were just leaving town as they would have closed. When we got home, I checked tracking and found that yes, we did have two “attempted deliveries” (which means, there’s a card in our mail box). A third item is now in the city, though, which means it’ll show up on Monday morning. I decided to wait until then, since one of the items that came in today is the micro SD memory card to go with the security camera I got to monitor the isolation shelter.

I just realized something else this camera could be used for. We will have to trap the more feral cats and, with the females, we’ll have to do this in the winter, before they go into heat in the spring. The problem is, we aren’t able to monitor a trap and don’t want to risk a cat (or raccoon, or skunk…) freezing to death before we can check the trap. If we have this extra outdoor, solar powered security camera, we can set it up and we should be able to get notifications, and check the live feed.

Hhhmmm… that could work.

But first, it needs to be set up to monitor the isolation shelter, so we can tell when the raccoons are trying to tear their way into it again!

Hopefully, we’ll be able to get that done next week.

As soon as I was able to, I called my mother to have a talk with her. When I brought up that the Home Care coordinator had called me this morning and why, my mother immediately said that she realized she’d done the wrong thing and apologized. From how she described it, the home care worker had her hand on the dial of her microwave (which has a dial for the timer and a start button; that’s it) that my mother had pushed away. That actually makes more sense than what the coordinator described to me on the phone. We talked about it for a while and my mother went off again about how they didn’t know how to do things, like use the microwave. I had to keep repeating that her microwave is nothing like modern ones – and even with modern ones, there’s still a learning curve, because they’re all different. To her, not being able to use her “so simple” microwave means they’re all stupid. It took a while to talk her through that.

Then she started going on about her upcoming MRI. She is clearly working herself up about it and was trying to get out of having it done. She doesn’t need it. There’s no reason for it. It’s so late on a Sunday night…

We already went through this last night, but we went through it again. It’s Home Care that needs it, in paneling her for a nursing home. She had some difficulty separating out that this isn’t about her thinking (cognitive decline), but about her physical brain. I finally said that, if they found a tumor or something, they’d be sending her to a hospital, not a nursing home. Not quite accurate. In the end, she fell back on the “it’s a scam”, and starting talking about how they just want people to die. Especially old people.

I had to distract her from that one but I have to admit, she’s not wrong about that last part. Considering the insane rise in MAiD killings, what was done to seniors during the illegal lockdowns resulting in thousands of deaths, on top of the thousands of people in Canada dying every year on waiting lists for tests and treatment, she’s got a point. Some areas – major cities, mostly – are far worse than others. One thing is for sure. Once she does get admitted into a nursing home like she wants, my siblings and I are doing to have to be on top of everything going on with her treatment. If she gets in to the one in town, where she wants to be, I’ll still be the closest and can check on her, but also, that particular nursing home did very well by my dad and my aunt, so I think she’d be okay there. It’s hard to say, the way things are changing these past few years, though. Especially with our current provincial government.

But I digress.

Towards the end of our conversation, I reiterated with my mother on making sure to treat everyone nicely, and she started telling me how much she loves all the girls, how beautiful they all are (it seems some of the new girls are very pretty) and how nice they dress (one of them wore a shirt with flowers my mother really liked). She said some of them stop to chat with her as well, and she really appreciated that. Lately, she says she hasn’t been going to the common room of her building, as it’s getting so hard for her to move around and she doesn’t even get dressed for the day, so having someone to talk to helps her a lot.

She so needs to be in a care home!!

After talking to my mother, I updated my siblings again, then started to send an email to the home care coordinator to update her as well.

Which is when the phone rang.

It was Home Care.

This time, the scheduler.

They are short staffed and don’t have anyone for my mother’s Monday med assist, at 9:15am.

We’re already doing her two Sunday evening assists ourselves, as my brother and I get her to her MRI.

*sigh*

We’ll see how it goes, but we might be able to just leave her morning meds in her little covered bowl for her before we leave her place on Sunday night. Her morning assist is the longest time slot, though, as they also help her with breakfast, empty her commode, apply the Voltaren to her back and hip and help her get dressed, if she needs it. It’s not just about getting her her medications anymore.

We’ll make that decision when the time comes. For now, though, I’ve got it in my calendar and I’ll be ready to do it, if necessary.

I did let her know about the call I got about my mother from the coordinator. She remembered the report and commented that she doesn’t usually see reports about my mother and figured she was just having an off day. !! I made sure to let her know my mother was very apologetic about it, and the lovely things she said about the ladies at the end of our conversation. Home care workers put up with a lot of crap (sometimes literally), so I wanted to make sure to pass on something good!

That done, I sent my email updating the coordinator. I did remember to mention this time, that my mother has been commenting about how her vision is getting worse. Which means her macular degeneration is getting worse. Normally, I’d be getting her to the specialty clinic in the city for treatment, but she physically can’t make that trip any more. Just getting her in to do the MRI is going to be hard enough on her, and that’s about half the distance away!

All that done, the rest of the day was pretty routine.

When doing the evening cat feeding, I changed things up a bit for the isolation shelter cats. I’ve got some ground pumpkin seeds again, so this time their can of wet cat food got made into a cat soup that included the ground pumpkin. If any of them have worms, that would help, but just be good for them in general.

I have got to remember to order more lysine. We’ve been out for a while.

After feeding the cats (I counted 27 this evening) and doing my evening rounds, I had a while crowd following me. A dozen, to be exact.

Fancypants, in the first picture, won’t let me come near him, but does like to follow me around!

In the next picture of the slide show above, you can see the three of them that were trying to trip me up while I walked!

Once back in the inner yard, I spotted that big tom again. I have seen him all of twice before today.

While in and out of the sun room, I was able to pet one of the little tuxedos. There is one confirmed female that lets me pet her, though she is still nervous about it. When the next two are to be brought in for spays, I think this one is big enough to be an alternative if we can’t get two adult females.

Pinky (last photo) not only allowed me to pet her but, while I was walking around, followed me and meowed for attention. She’s still a bundle of nerves and skittish, but she was purring up a storm and allowing full back pets, and even some neck and ear skritches. If we can keep this up, we should be able to get her into a carrier for spay on the 28th. If not… well, we’ll grab whichever ones we can! We’ll just have to make sure not to put food out until after we’ve got two into carriers.

The outside stuff done, today I decided to use up that bone broth I made recently, it a great big pot of pork stew. Normally, I’d use beef broth in a beef stew, and even looked at beef in the grocery store this morning, but it’s just too expensive. So I just cubed one of the pork roasts we had.

When it came time to add the bone broth, I was very impressed with how thoroughly gelled it was. I even gave it a taste while it was still cold, and wow! Talk about concentrated flavour! It worked really well with the pork, too.

Here we have pork stew with fluffy baking powder dumplings, which get cooked right on top of the stew at the end. Those dumplings are one of our favourite things about making a stew! I got the recipe from an old Whole Foods for the Whole Family cookbook, from La Leche League – the 1981 edition – that I hung on to. I got it used and kept it for about 30 years. Then had to throw it out because a cat peed all over it when it was left open on a table. *sigh* I know I wrote the recipe down somewhere in an old blog post, but on an old blog that I can’t even log into anymore (thanks, Google). I think. Still can’t find it, so I went by memory. Seems to be very close! I’ve tried looking online, but all the baking powder dumpling recipes I’m finding seem different.

So I’ll write it down here, so I can find it again, when needed!

Fluffy Dumplings

2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
about a 1/4 tsp salt
(optional: dried parsley flakes)
1 egg, beaten
water

Mix the dry ingredients. Once the soup or stew is done and still simmering, add the beaten egg to the dry ingredients with enough water to make a very sticky dough. More like a very thick batter. Drop by spoonful’s onto the top of the soup or stew. Cover and leave to simmer for 10 minutes. No peeking!

One of the things I can’t remember is if the original recipe used one or two eggs. Also, was it 1 tsp or 2 tsp of baking powder? Whatever the original was, this version here cooks and tastes very much the same as I remember. Delicious.

And… that’s pretty much it for today!

Until next time…

The Re-Farmer

Gorgeous sunrise, and the bone broth is done

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While doing my morning rounds, I just had to try and get pictures of our very dramatic sunrise! I think this one turned out rather well.

The light fog we had really made things glow!

I also remembered to get a picture of the bone broth I made, before tucking it into the fridge.

I started off by roasting the meaty bones, lightly drizzled with avocado oil (it was handy) and sprinkled with salt. Those went into the slow cooker with chunks of onion, celery, carrots and ginger, plus salt and pepper. The slow cooker was set on high for 1 hour, then on low for 8 hours.

Then it sat on “warm” for quite a while, as I wasn’t able to get to it right away. Once that was shut off, I allowed it to cool before trying to take the big pieces out. I have a large slow cooker, so it took quite a long time to cool down to a temperature that wasn’t dangerously hot. I am losing my grip strength as I get older, and I didn’t want to risk burning myself if I dropped something.

I took out as much as I could with tongs, first. The meat had fallen off the bones, and that got separated out (and became a snack, later on). Then I set up a stock pot on the stove and strained the liquid through a fine mesh sieve into the pot. All the strained out solids got tossed.

At this point, I would estimate there was a little over a gallon – maybe 5 litres – of broth. I then started reducing it, which took a few hours.

I considered reducing it to the point where I could set it in the oven for a final dehydration, which would have given me “portable soup”.

In the end, I decided against it, because I had the other ingredients added with the bones. Though, according to the video, the “keep warm” setting on my oven can’t go low enough to dehydrate it properly.

By the time I decided it was reduced enough, what was left fit into two 750ml jars. These were meant to go into the fridge to use right away, rather than being canned, so I just used regular lids, not canning lids, loosely added until they cooled down completely.

Which took all night!

Here is how it looked by this morning.

I’d say there’s roughly 5 cups of broth and maybe 3/4 cup of fat on the top between the two jars. The fat can be used for any high heat cooking. Since the broth was reduced so much, we now have a concentrated broth where just a little will go a long way.

Now I’m trying to think of what I want to make with it, first!

The Re-Farmer

I know that feel

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Yes, indeed, Ghosty.

Yes, indeed. I feel much the same way.

Usually, her eyes are blood red. I think this is the first time I’ve seen them looking black.

Those are her back feet, of course. That box up by the ceiling is a favourite perch.

I can’t say I got a lot accomplished today. Certainly not outside. I at least got a dump run in. They have a different attendant now. A guy in a high viz vest and a clip board, even. I hope the older woman that needed a cane that used to be the attendant is okay.

After showing him the card that we have to prove we actually live in the municipality, and aren’t coming in from some other one where you have to pay to drop off your garbage and recycling, he asked what was being dropped off. When I told him it was just household garbage and recycling, he told me I might not be able to get the recycling in. The bins were really full, so it would have to go into the pit.

The bin for glass was overflowing, so our glass went into the pit, along with one of our bags of recyclables. I could only get two into a bin.

I’d hoped to get some stuff done outside, as we were supposed to hit 2C/36F today. Which we did, but the wind chill was significantly colder. As I write this, we’ve dropped to -1C/30F, and the wind chill is -12C/10F.

I did get some progress inside, at least. I got home so late from my mother’s yesterday that I didn’t start the beef broth I had meant to. I got that done started today. The meaty bones got roasted first, and then into the slow cooker they went, with onions, garlic, carrot, celery, ginger, apple cider vinegar, salt and pepper. And water, of course. That was left on high for an hour, and now it’s running on low for 8 hours, and there’s still another 4 or 5 hours to go.

While the bones were roasting, I took out the last of our peppers from the garden. The Sweetie Snack Mix peppers that I picked while still green took a while to ripen indoors. Some of them just withered, instead. We ended up with red, yellow, light orange and dark orange peppers. There was just enough to cover a parchment lined baking sheet with strips. After the bones were removed from the oven and into the crock pot, the pepper strips went into the partially cooled oven. They’re now dehydrating on the “warm” setting, at 150F/66C (our oven is the only thing we do at Fahrenheit instead of Celsius). Those will probably just end up as a snack for the girls, still warm from the oven, once they are fully dried.

That’s pretty much it for my accomplishments today. Tomorrow, at least, the winds are supposed to die down, so I might get to the things I hoped to get done today.

Good grief. It’s pitch black out and feels like it should be nearing midnight. Instead, it’s not even 6:30, yet!

I think I’m still in recovery mode from spending so much time with my mother, yesterday. I still feel totally drained!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: a nice harvest, and breakfast!

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This morning I collected our largest harvest yet, for this year!

I had some help, too.

When I prepared to transplant the melons, I set up a trellis for them using Dollarama steel fence posts and welded wire mesh salvaged from the old squash tunnel from years ago. When the Spoon tomatoes were planted in the other half of the bed, I use bamboo stakes to make them their own trellis.

Well, with the melons barely growing at all, they’re not going to need the trellis. So, with my daughter’s help, we pulled the posts, with the wire still on them, and moved them over to the corn and Arikara squash bed. It’s loosely set up for now, but the 4′ square bed will get a wire fence around it – the mesh is just long enough! – to hopefully keep the raccoons from getting into the corn, when the cobs are ready. I’ll probably have to put some sort of cover over it, too, or they’ll just climb up and over.

The corn bed has plastic netting around it. Hopefully, they will be dissuaded from the corn rather than tearing their way through.

After moving the melon trellis away, the Spoon tomatoes can now be reached from both sides, so my daughter helped me pick tomatoes on one side, while I did the other.

There were lots of Spoon tomatoes to pick!

I’m glad I remembered to bring a separate container for the Spoon tomatoes!

There was also a whole two Royal Burgundy beans to pick, from the three surviving plants. I did pick a small handful of yellow bush beans last night, though, so there was enough to actually use. While checking last night, I noticed some ripening Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes and this morning, one was ready to grab.

After that, I dug up some potatoes, then winter sown carrots from the high raised bed.

In the next image in the slide show above, you can see a very wonky potato!

That was from roots.

These potatoes were picked from about the middle of the bed, so at least twenty feet away from the trees. My garden fork was digging up more roots than potatoes.

Those trees have got to go.

Then I remembered we have herbs and stuff, so I went to the old kitchen garden, where I gathers some lemon thyme, lemon balm and oregano. In the winter sown bed, I grabbed a few Swiss Chard leaves. I even grabbed some bulbils from the walking onions, since we don’t want them to spread any further.

Once inside, the longest time was spent getting all those little green bits of stem off all those Spoon tomatoes! I also set aside some of the ripest looking ones to collect seeds from, later. Their seeds are so tiny, I’ll have to consider how best to do that!

In the last photo – which looked much better and in focus on my phone, I swear! – it what I made with it. There’s still potatoes and Spoon tomatoes left, plus the one Sub Arctic Plenty tomato, but I used up all the carrots, julienned, a handful of bush beans cut small, the onion bulbils and a whole head of garlic. We still have fresh garlic left of the ones that were too far along for curing and winter storage. Then there was the chard and herbs.

When I went into town to get kibble yesterday, I also picked up some chicken legs and thighs that were on sale, which my older daughter prepared last night, so breakfast (brunch?) was the vegetables gathered this morning, plus oven roasted chicken legs.

It was very good!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: first zucchini forming, a harvest for the day, and those trees have got to go!

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First up, I spotted our first blooming female zucchini flower today!

There’s another one under it that bloomed and was done before I ever saw that it was a female flower.

There were no male flowers open at the time, so I grabbed a couple of older ones and tore off the petals so I could access the pollen and hand pollinate. The first one had water pour out when the petals were torn off, so I used a second one, too, just in case the first one didn’t have any viable pollen. At this point, it’s too early to tell if the one I missed had a chance to be pollinated before it was done blooming.

This afternoon, I decided to use up a whole bunch of odds and ends vegetables in the fridge, along with some fresh stuff, in the slow cooker. I’ve been leaving the potato bed for the past while but decided to dig some up for today’s use.

I had dug some up before under the potato plants that had died back the most, which was at the north end of the bed, closer to that row of self seeded trees my mother left to grow. The entire potato bed died back early, without ever developing flowers, but the north end of the bed had them dying back the fastest.

Well, I’ve pretty much confirmed why.

The potatoes in that basket are from under four potato plants that were at the end of that bed. That mass beside the basket is capillary roots from the elm trees nearby that came up while I was digging around for the potatoes. I was hitting more, larger roots as well. I’ve de-rooted these beds several times, and they come back so fast!!

Those trees have GOT to go! They’re killing our garden!

I dug up more potatoes closer to the middle of the bed, and was still getting a lot of capillary roots like that, but found more potatoes under two plants, than under the four I’d dug up first.

Since I finally had a container on hand, I harvested Spoon tomatoes. It’s been a while since I picked any, so there were plenty to gather. Thankfully, the mesh on this basket is fine enough to hold the tomatoes! Some of them were so small, they would have fallen through if they weren’t being held in place by the larger ones. I had to be careful to keep the potatoes from rolling over and squishing them.

Then I grabbed a few more carrots to add to what we already had inside, and the only ripe bush beans I could find.

In the last photo of the slide show above, it shows all the vegetables I prepared for the slow cooker, seasoned and tossed with avocado oil. All from our garden!

There are the potatoes, carrots and Spoon tomatoes, of course. Plus I finally used that one big turnip that I’d left to get big and go to seed, but the deer ate most of the greens. There’s kohlrabi in there, and more beans that we had in the fridge. It took three “harvests” of bush beans to have enough to make it worth using them in anything! Oh, and there is Swiss Chard and a whole bulb of fresh garlic in there, too.

We have a large Crockpot, and the vegetables almost filled it completely. They will shrink as they cook down, though. After I left for my mother’s, my daughter browned some ground turkey, along with some of the yellow onions we still have left from last year’s garden (they have lasted a really long time!!!) and mixed that in later on.

The slow cooker was set to high for 3 hours. Since I’ve come back from my mother’s, I’ve checked on it a few times and added more time. All those potatoes need extra time to cook through, as I deliberately left them in big chunks. For I still don’t know how it turned out!

The house is smelling amazing, though, and I’m getting hungry! 😄

The Re-Farmer

Morning rounds (with a bonus video)

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Today is supposed to be warmer, but it’s still dreary and overcast out there. Which means it’s all I can do to stay awake!

The first order of business, as always, it to feed the yard cats. The adults get distracted with their kibble feeding first, then I set out the canned cat food for the kittens, some in the sun room, some in the cat house. This morning, they got some bonus cat soup from one of the trays for the inside cats that got mostly ignored (we set out 3 trays, plus some in Butterscotch’s cat bowl, every day). This is supplemented with lysine, so that’s extra good for them. After adding it to the kitten bowls, I set the tray with some still in it by the kibble house to lure the adult cats away, and it was licked clean in no time!

Poirot headed out while all this was going on, so I had a chance to say hello to her babies, and look them over. Hastings (the white and grey) is the biggest of them, and most definitely female. Miss Lemon (the mostly white) and Japp (the mostly black) are less developed and harder to tell, still, but I suspect they are also female.

I made sure the sun room was closed up with some of the bigger kittens inside, so they got a chance to fill their bellies before the adult cats gobbled up their wet cat food, then continued my rounds.

I wasn’t happy to find this.

I think the winter sowing in the bed is a lost cause now. I don’t know how they managed it, but I found a section of netting completely pushed over the hoops to one side, allowing all sorts of elm seeds in. This was even a section that was pinned down with ground staples on the fence side, but it still got pulled up. About the only benefit the netting provides at this point is to keep those elm seeds off, since the cats are still managing to either get under the netting, or just lie on top of it, and even the seed protection is being sabotaged by the cats! I keep looking for seedlings, and even the onion seedlings and what I thought might be sprouting beans seem to be gone. I do see some seedlings that I know are weeds (mostly creeping bellflower), plus grasses. This is so frustrating!

On a more pleasant note, more trees are blooming. The Saskatoons have been blooming for a while, as have the cherry trees now. The ornamental crab apples are really starting to open up. Then there’s this one.

These are on the tree that get many small but very edible crabapples on it (click through for a second image). The others in the row have flower buds, but they aren’t opening up yet, like this one.

It wasn’t raining this morning (though I did see snow, every now and then) so I headed into the outer yard to check on the walnuts.

In the first photo, you can see the tiniest of leaves on the walnut sapling are emerging.

Click through to the next image, and you can see the little friend I found, hiding out in some of the grass that fell into the collar!

*sigh* Of course, my phone’s camera didn’t focus in the right place. I hate it when I have pictures that look great on my phone, only to discover they actually suck, when I see them on a proper screen!

Our rhubarb is doing really well with all this rain, so I gathered a few stalks before heading inside. Poirot was back with her babies, though, so I did pause to give her her squeeze treat! She is much more pleasant about it than Brussel was (Brussel no longer goes into the sun room, now that the older babies have all moved themselves into the cat house to join Caramel’s babies!). Brussel would always growl at me, then attack my hand, when I gave her the treats!

As for the rhubarb, they got cleaned up and cut up, along with some strawberries, to make a double recipe of Upside Down Strawberry Cast Iron Skillet Cornbread We’ve got two cast iron skillets and can fit both of them in our oven at the same time, so that works out. This, together with a bit of whipped cream, and some Vanilla Chai tea made for a perfect treat for such a dreary day!

I still fell ready to fall sleep on my keyboard, though.

And now, just for fun, here is the newest cooking video from Townsends. This sounds like something that would be perfect for a day like today!

I hope you have a great day today!

The Re-Farmer

Recipe (sortof): Green Soup

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Well, I should be going to bed right now, but I was peckish, so I decided to make myself a food. Which ended up being a soup.

It turned out so good, I just had to share!

This is really a “Use Watcha Got” soup. In this case, it turned into a Cream of Chicken and Avocado soup.

The ingredients:

1 large shallot, chopped (I would have used onion, but I didn’t feel like going to the root cellar to get one)
2 stalks of celery, sliced lengthwise and chopped into small pieces
2 medium sized potatoes, peeled and chopped into small cubes
1 ripe avocado, smashed into mush
cream cheese; roughly 2 oz (basically, I cut what was left of the piece in the fridge in half)
whipping cream; about half a cup
3 cups water and enough bouillon powder to make chicken stock (because that’s what I had available)
1 can chicken (a Costco can, so about a cup of chicken chunks)
enough ghee for sauteing (I normally would have used butter, but remembered we had ghee)

Preparation:

Melt the ghee in a saucepan until hot, then add the chopped shallots and celery pieces. Sauté until they start to be translucent. Add the potatoes and stir into the shallots and celery. Add the water and bring to a boil, adding the bouillon powder when it’s hot enough to dissolve quickly. Keep stirring occasionally.

After the water has boiled for about 5 minutes, stir in the smashed avocado. Return to boil and simmer for a few minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the chunk of cream cheese. Return to boil and continue to simmer for a few more minutes, stirring continually until the cheese is completely melted.

Add cooked chicken chunks and return to a simmer for a few more minutes, or until the potato chunks are fully cooked, stirring frequently.

Stir in whipping cream and return to a simmer to heat it through.

Serve immediately and enjoy!

…

I think I’ll be having seconds!

The Re-Farmer

Recipe: S**t Balls

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Today, I decided to make something I haven’t made in many years. A no bake cookie.

I was first introduced to them by a friend in high school, while visiting her place. She called them S**t Balls, and that’s the name that has stuck for me!

KH, if you’re reading this, yes, it’s you’re fault! 😂

Since then, I’ve found them by many other names. It wasn’t until I got a community cookbook from the mid 90’s gifted to me that I actually saw a recipe for them. In fact, there were three almost identical recipes, all with different names! There is 5 Minute Boil cookies, using all brown sugar, Chocolate Drop Cookies, using all white sugar but skips the salt, and Fiddle Diddles, using margarine instead of butter, skipping the coconut, but including salt.

My version is a blend of all three.

Here is a slideshow of progress photos, for a double recipe.

Here is the basic, single recipe, and then I’ll go into more detail.

S**t Balls – No Bake Chocolate Cookies

2 cups sugar, white, brown or half and half
up to 1 cup cocoa
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
3 cups rolled oats

Combine sugar, cocoa, butter and milk in a saucepan. Bring to a boil. Keep at a boil for 2 – 5 minutes (shorter time for white sugar only, longer time for brown sugar only), stirring constantly.

Remove from heat, stir in vanilla, then stir in rolled oats.

Drop spoonfulls onto trays lined with waxed or parchment paper. Cool until set. Can be chilled or frozen.

Optional ingredients:
1 cup shredded coconut (but why ruin your cookies??)
1/4 tsp salt

Easy Peasey!

First hint: use a bigger pot than you might think you need.

For my double recipe, I used our bigger stock pot. Once it starts boiling, it can bubble and expand quite a lot, and when the vanilla gets added at the end, it can sometimes foam right up.

Second hint: prepare your trays ahead of time. For my double recipe, I ended up using three 9×13 baking trays, lined with parchment paper.

In the first photo with the ingredients, I have doubled everything except the cocoa. Some recipes use only a 1/2 cup of cocoa, or even just 4 tsp, which is nothing. However, a cup of cocoa is a lot, so in doubling the recipe, I left the cocoa at 1 cup.

There is no salt in the photo, but as I was getting the mixture to a boil, I did add a few cranks from our salt grinder. Nowhere near the half teaspoon for a doubled recipe, but enough to make a difference. A touch of salt brings out the sweetness. Not that this recipe needs anything to bring out the sweetness!

The main ingredient is sugar, and what sugar you use can make a HUGE difference!

If you want a soft and chewy cookie, go with all brown sugar. You definitely have to boil it for a full 5 minutes, though. In the past, I’ve found ambient humidity can make a difference. Even after boiling at least 5 minutes, when it was humid out, the cookies just wouldn’t set and remained sticky and gooey. They still tasted good, but could only be eaten with a spoon!

If you like a dry cookie, use all granulated sugar, and you can get away with boiling it for only 2 minutes. With my double recipe, I boiled it for three minutes. The longer you boil it, the drier the cookie will be.

Of course, if you go with half and half (which is actually what I usually do), you’ll get a cookie that’s a bit moister, but not completely soft. For that, boil it for about 3 or 4 minutes.

The butter I used was still cold from the fridge, so I broke that up with my wooden spatula and stirred pretty constantly while bringing the mixture to a boil. It would be very easy for the sugar to start burning, so watch your temperature, too. Medium high is more than enough to get it to a boil and keep it there.

After the boiling time is done, take it off the heat and stir in the vanilla. Next, add the rolled oats and stir that in very thoroughly.

With the rolled oats, I used slow cooking oats, which have thicker flakes. You could use quick oats as well, but I find they lose their texture more. It’s just a matter of preference.

If you are using shredded coconut, it would be added with the rolled oats. Which we have never done, because none of us like shredded coconut. Ew.

Once the rolled oats are well mixed in, it’s time to drop the cookies.

I used a pair of soup spoons for this; one to scoop up the mixture, the other to scrape it off and onto the prepared pan.

Which can get very messy.

The two photos at the end with the cooling cookies, the first one is of the first tray of cookies, the second is of the third tray of cookies. You can see the first tray, there is more “spread” to the cookies, because it was still quite hot. It got easier to drop the cookies as the mixture cooled down. If you want to shape them a bit, you can use the spoons like you’re doing a quenelle, except round. I couldn’t do it with the first tray, as the mixture was still too hot and runny, but by the time I was doing the last of them, the mixture was starting to harden a bit too much!

With the size of spoons I used, I ended up with about 65 cookies in total, filling about 2 1/2 of my 9×13 trays. To chill them (and keep them safe from cats walking on them), the trays got moved onto the chest freezer in the old kitchen, where it is at or below freezing.

There you have it! A decidedly… questionable looking… no-bake drop cookie that takes very little time to make.

Enjoy!

The Re-Farmer

Thank God!

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That my brother made it out yesterday to work on the ejector, and not today.

I headed out to do my morning rounds and ended up doing short rounds, because of this.

That is -23C/-9F with a wind chill of -35C/-31F. I took this screen shot after I came inside, and it was actually colder than when I first headed out! In fact, even as I was about to take the screen shot, I saw the wind chill drop another degree.

Brutal.

I did manage to do a bit of shoveling and going around to make sure various solar panels were clear of snow. The ones for the lights in the kibble and water shelters were completely buried.

When I got to the gate to brush snow off the trail cam solar panel there, I had to get these pictures.

The photos do not do it justice. Those are the largest sundogs – rainbow or otherwise – I’ve ever seen. You can just see a hint of a complete halo.

Sundogs and halos around the sun or moon happen only in extremely cold temperatures. The stronger and brighter the sundogs, the colder the temperatures.

Needless to say, I did NOT check the ejector. I wasn’t going to uncover it and expose it to this cold. With the bright sunshine, the black tarp should absorb some heat, while protecting the heat tape around the ejector from the cold. The heat tape has all sorts of safety features to keep it from overheating, and is just warm enough to keep pipes from freezing. It wouldn’t take much for temperatures and wind chills like this to basically negate anything it’s accomplishing. I’ll see what the conditions are like this afternoon and decide if it is worth slogging out there to uncover it and check things. We’re only supposed to warm up another degree for the high of the day, but if the wind chill drops, that will make the difference.

On a completely different note, today the girls tested out the Instant Pot with rice for the first time. All the recipes and instructions are for Jasmine or Basmati rice. The rice they prefer is a sushi type rice that usually needs to soak in cold water for half an hour before cooking. I got them an Instant Pot cookbook and they looked at various rice recipes, but the chart that came with the Instant Pot said for 4 minutes for all plain white rice (longer for brown rice). They went with 4 minutes, and it seems to have worked fine.

Once they were done with it, I tried it out myself for the first time, to make a beef stew. I found a basic recipe, though I had to substitute a couple of things – carrots for rutabaga, for example.

The cookbook then said to set the pot to manual for 18 minutes.

Our model of Instant Pot doesn’t have a “manual” setting. It does have a rice setting, which put the time at 12 minutes. It has a meat/stew setting that put it at 35 minutes.

We both used the “pressure cook” setting, which seems to be the equivalent for “manual” on our machine, as it allowed us to select heat levels and time ourselves. The stew is cooking as I write this – oh! it just started beeping! – so we shall see how it turns out.

It smells amazing, that’s for sure!

Time to see if I can have myself a nice hot bowl of stew on this cold, cold day!

The Re-Farmer

Stuffed winter squash experiment: a successful fail?

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Last night I went down to the root cellar to grab a winter squash and ended up grabbing two. One was needing to be cooked immediately, with some of it needing to be cut away for the compost pile.

The squash was a nice round one, and there was still about 3/4 of it that was perfectly fine – it looked like it would make an excellent bowl, in fact.

So that’s what it became.

I decided to fill it and roast it.

I’ve never done this before and didn’t bother looking up a specific recipe. I browned some ground beef, adding a packet of onion soup mix for seasoning. I also added about half a cup of leftover tomato soup, two cups of water and one cup of uncooked rice. After mixing it all together, it went into the cleaned out squash bowl.

I roasted it at 350F for an hour, stirred the filling, added another half an hour, stirred the filling and added another half an hour. At that point, I just shut off the oven and let it sit for a while.

This is how it turned out, after giving the filling another stir.

It looked pretty good to me! Some of the rice at the top was a bit undercooked, but not by much.

It was past midnight by the time it was done, but I had to at least try it! So I grabbed myself a bowl, got some of the filling, then scooped out some of the squash to go with it.

I found it a bit low on salt (I did not add any seasonings out than the onion soup mix and the leftover tomato soup), but that was an easy fix. I found it quite tasty. I even had some for breakfast, and the undercooked rice was no longer undercooked. It made a great breakfast.

Unfortunately, it looks like I’m the only one that will be eating it.

The first problem is the filling.

For many years, ground beef and rice was basically what we ate the most. Sometimes with an added can of mushroom soup, sometimes with some added frozen vegetables, etc. Whatever we had at the time, but the base of many meals was ground beef and rice. It was our poverty diet, to be honest, but my husband really likes it, too, so I kept making it even when things got better, financially. The rest of us got pretty tired of it, but my husband still loves it.

My daughters, however, hate it now. In particular, the texture of it. It makes them feel ill.

While this stuffing is mostly ground beef, there is enough rice in there that they will not eat it. They might eat some of the squash, once more of the filling is gone and they can get at it.

My husband, meanwhile, doesn’t like winter squash. He won’t eat it.

I thought he’d at least still enjoy the filling, but nope. He won’t even try it.

*sigh*

I can understand food likes and dislikes or intolerances – I’m the one that can’t eat fresh tomatoes or any peppers at all, after all. As a family, however, it’s getting very hard to find things we will all enjoy! I thought most people got less fussy about food as they got older, by my family has all gotten more fussy! Add in things like me being the only one that is NOT lactose intolerant, it does make grocery shopping a challenge. It also makes deciding what to grow in the garden more difficult, too. Winter squash is a great staple crop that can store well (if the squash get to mature enough to be cured properly). The girls like them, but my husband doesn’t. My family likes tomatoes, which I can’t eat. Some of us like peas, some don’t. Some like carrots, some don’t. Some like corn, my younger daughter can’t eat it. On it goes!

So while this experiment was a success, as far as cooking goes, it was a fail when it comes to being something the family can eat.

Ah, well. More for me, I guess.

On another note, I just had to share this.

Remember the forecast for December that I posted yesterday?

This one?

Note those temperatures on the 6th and 7th.

For those in the US, we’re looking at -20C/-4F as the high, with -33C/-27F and -34C/-29F for the overnight lows.

This is what the forecast looks like, now.

They now have a forecast of 1C/34F for the 6th and -3C/27F for the 7th. The low for the 7th is still expected to be a bitter -27C/-17F. They no longer have a 8C/46F predicted for the 20th, but we’re still expected to be above freezing.

Long range forecasts can really be all over the place!

I do hope the warmer forecasts end up being the correct ones, though. I still plan to add a ceiling of rigid insulation to the isolation shelter, for when the ladies get spayed. It’s the overnight temperatures that are the main concern. During the day, the windows will allow for passive solar heat even on an overcast day, but they will little to keep the cold out once it gets dark.

In fact, that’s what I plan to work on next.

After I have some of the squash bowl for lunch.

The Re-Farmer