Cooking and Baking

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

Another indoor day

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Well, yes, technically it’s warmer today. We are apparently at 7C/45F right now – the predicted high of the day.

The windchill is at -5C/23F

I just got back from giving the outside cats a light afternoon feeding and, to be honest, I’m surprised by the windchill. Yes, it was cold, but I didn’t even bother putting on a jacket or hat.

The winds are high enough that it has started to tear off the plastic wrapped around the bottom of the isolation shelter. I made the doorway larger for a purpose, but with the ramp down, it’s just too open.

The plastic is also just being held in place with push pins, because it is temporary, but this plastic is just dollar store dining table protector. It’s not particularly thick or strong. We will probably have to reinforce the edges somehow – not so easy, with it already attached to the shelter.

After re-tacking the plastic with the push pins already there, I came about out with more and spent some time adding more, including some more strategic places. Hopefully, it will hold until we can find some way to shelter that entrance.

It took a while for me to do that, which is part of why I’m surprised by what the wind chill was. I was directly in the wind the whole time and yet, it was chilly, but -5C/23F? I knew my tolerance for cold has increased as I got older, but still…

Except my ears. I should have dug out the ear muffs. Getting wind in my ears causes headaches, and I can feel one coming on now.

Well, tomorrow is supposed to be a bit warmer, and Friday is now projected to reach a high of 10C/50F, with no high winds predicted, so I might be able to get some stuff done out there, after all.

Until then, it’s another inside day.

Last night, I got another tomato sauce started in the slow cooker. I had more ripe tomatoes this time and had to really pack them in there to get anything else in. Along with the tomatoes I included the last of our eggplant, some onions, a shallot, some garlic and a couple of carrots – we had to actually buy carrots this time – whatever seasonings struck my fancy, some olive oil and apple cider vinegar. That was set on low for 10 hours, and then is stayed on warm until we could get to it again.

This morning, I blitzed it with the immersion blender until smooth, set it on high for about an hour, then back on low for a few more hours. At this point, the lid was propped slightly to let moisture out, and it was stirred frequently, as the sauce thickened.

Earlier today, I cooked up a big batch of pasta, then used some of it as the base for a pasta sauce, adding it to some cooked pork bits and melting in some cream cheese, then tossing the pasta in it. I made just enough of the sauce for my husband and I, as the girls have very different tastes.

The sauce is now being left to cool, and whatever is left from what we use today will be put into freezer bags and frozen.

The sun will be setting pretty soon – it’s setting at 4:44pm today – so I’ll be heading out to do one more light feeding for the outside cats before it gets fully dark. This gives them a better chance to eat it all before the skunks start coming out. Maybe racoons, too. I haven’t seen any in a while, but that doesn’t mean they’re not showing up!

This morning, my younger daughter joined me for my morning rounds, so I could show her my full routine, for the next time I have a morning where I’m in just too much pain to do it myself. She knows I’m not a morning person. She also tends to go to bed a lot earlier, and wakes a lot earlier, so she offered to take over the morning routine for me!

I might actually take her up on that.

We shall see!

Oh! A skunk just showed up on the critter cam… gotta go!

The Re-Farmer

Finally got it done

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What a difference a magnet makes.

This morning, I was able to load the truck up with bags of aluminum for the scrap yard. It was late morning, as I waited for the rain to stop, first.

I fit in the 10 large bags I loaded last time, when the truck’s onboard computer started blaring at me, plus three more smaller recycling bags of cans from the house. I still have three large bags that I need to sort through with a magnet.

In the second photo of the slideshow above, you can see the return I got for the cans.

Last time, the weight was also just over 200 pounds, but had mixed metal in with the aluminum.

We got about $17 and change last time.

Basically, having a few non-aluminum cans mixed in last time cost us about $100.

Lesson learned!

We still have all the old batteries that can be brought in, but my brother has had to shove so many things into the barn, they’re inaccessible right now. My brother will be coming out as he is able, to organize things. So those will wait until spring. I’d hoped to get the scrap guys in this year, but until my brother can move things around, they can’t even get at some of the old vehicles anymore.

Ah, well.

After dropping off the aluminum, I headed out to the nearer Walmart to pick up a few things my husband requested. I hoped to meet up with the Cat Lady, as she has cat food, a scratch tower and cat bed donations for us. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to meet me this time. Hopefully, we’ll be able to connect next week. Her husband would like to have the stuff out of their car! 😄

She also hopes to be able to get some spays booked for us, soon. She will let us know the dates as soon as she has them.

Now that we have the truck back, we’ve got another outing tomorrow that’s been put off – a trip to the dump! After that, we need to winterize things around the house. The insulation that gets set around the base of most of the house has been brought from the barn, but we need to clear out leaves and other debris, first. That will require the catio being moved away from where it is now.

The catio sides will get wrapped in plastic for the winter. I am thinking a good place to set it up for the winter is near the shrine, for the cats that are shier.

I put the latch on the isolation shelter ramp/door. It will just need a carabiner to keep it closed – something racoons shouldn’t be able to open. I also prepped some plastic to go around the mesh enclosed lower level for the winter.

We will need to attach something sturdy across the middle, under the roof, to hang the clamp lamp heater from. After much consideration on how to get power to the isolation shelter, I’ve decided we won’t be able to set it up near the other shelters by the house. There’s just no practical space for it. So I am thinking of setting it up under the kitchen window, where the catio is now. There is an outlet around the corner of the house that it can be plugged into. We could plug in a heated water bowl, too.

There are other winterizing things that will need to be done. The forecast has us being fairly warm over the next while, even reaching highs of 10C/50F over the weekend. After that, we’re getting to where the daytime highs will be closer to freezing, and even dipping below.

It’s still relatively mild for this time of year, though. We haven’t had any blizzards – it’s not unusual to have a blizzard in October, so this is good. Especially if we’re going to be keeping cats closed up in the isolation shelter to recover from spays. Yes, it has insulation in the upper level, and passive solar with the window. Yes, the bottom level will be covered in plastic. Yes, we will even have a heat source in there. It’s still not the same as being inside the sun room, or the cat house!

Once the winterizing is done, it’s back to cleaning up the garden beds and, if all goes well, finish assembling the new log framed raised bed, now that I no longer have to worry about harming squash vines.

That should go relatively quickly, since the bed walls are just one log high. I’m still holding out hope that I’ll be able to start on the permanent trellis supports, but those will be more complex to assemble. They have to support themselves until the matching raised bed is built, and they eventually become part of a trellis tunnel.

Those are the plans, anyhow!

We shall see how far we actually manage to get.

Oh! I just realized, I haven’t mentioned how the Crespo squash turned out!

The squash was roasted plain, so we could try them in different ways. I first had a chunk as a savoury side dish, just adding some butter and salt and mashing it up on my plate. I quite liked it. Then, I had another piece, mashing in a bit of butter again, along with brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. That was also very good, though I think I liked it as a savoury dish better.

The description for the seeds described Crespo squash as a particularly delicious variety of pumpkin. I’ll be honest, here. While I quite enjoyed it, it doesn’t compare to, say, the Red Kuri, Candyroaster or Pink Banana squash we’ve grown before. However, I’m not entirely sure the Crespo squash reached full maturity, given how much green there was under the flesh when we cut it open. Plus, some types of winter squash taste better after being in storage for a while. I would definitely want to grow it again, but if we could only choose one or two winter squash varieties, I would choose something else.

I had started a tomato sauce in the crockpot and decided, since it was handy, to include some of the roasted squash. This sauce included San Marzano tomatoes ( I had enough that there was no room to add more tomatoes from the freezer), with maybe two Forme de Couer in the mix, plus a yellow bell pepper from the ones ripening in the living room, a few shallots, and the pieces of roasted squash. It was seasoned with salt and pepper, plus dried sage, thyme and basil. Last of all, I added a splash of Krupnik (not an affiliate link) – simply because we happen to have some right now.

When the tomatoes got to the stage where I could blitz the whole thing with the immersion blender, it was left to cook down overnight to thicken it, though we would dip into it to use with our meals every now and then. Before I started writing this post, I decided it was thick enough to jar up. By then, we had enough to fill two 750ml jars, plus one 500ml jar. Once they are cool, they will go into the fridge to use right away.

My taste buds are far from refined, so I honestly couldn’t tell you if adding the squash or the booze made any difference! 😄

As for the rest of the roasted squash, I can hear my daughter in the kitchen right now. She’s making pie out of it!

I’m really looking forward to seeing how it turns out!

The Re-Farmer

First try with the Crespo squash!

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It has taken us four years to get to this point!

Four years of trying to grow Crespo squash before finally getting a real harvest out of it.

There were four harvestable squash out of the three vines, though the first one to develop sort of stagnated early on, stayed dark green and never got very big. In the photo above, you can see it in the front row, third from the left.

The largest squash with the damage visible is the big Crespo squash we wanted to make sure to cook first. However, with losing our hot water and having to constantly heat water for washing anything, we didn’t get to it until now.

It was remarkably easy to cut into! I expected to have a harder time of it.

The colour is not only quite a deep orangey-yellow, it actually stained my hands a bit, by the time I finished scooping out the insides and removing the seeds. Which suggests to me that this squash has quite a bit of beta carotene in it.

I cut it into quarters, then cut out the stem, which you can see in the next image, before putting it in the oven. Aside from adding a bit of water to the bottom of the pan, nothing else was done to it. I want to be able to give it a taste without any seasonings, first.

In the last image, you can see the seeds, washed and draining. There were very few seeds that got rejected. I supposed we could roast some for eating, but I don’t actually have any interest in doing that. Later, these seeds will be laid out on a parchment paper lined tray to dry out.

I set the oven for 350F for about an hour before stabbing the pieces with a fork, then adding another 45 minutes. As I write this, they are soft and appear to be cooked through. I’ve shut off the oven and left them in there, just in case there were some undercooked parts I couldn’t reach.

Today, I was actually planning to get some stuff done outside but, while it is warmer than yesterday, it has turned out to be a rainy day.

Sort of.

It’s been raining off and on since last night. It’s supposed to start raining for real at about 7pm and continue raining through to about 10am tomorrow morning. Since some of what I hoped to get done today involved power tools, I decided to postpone it!

There is a bit of concern about the winter sown garden beds. When the seeds were sown, the beds were completely dry and did not get any watering. It’s cool enough that it’s unlikely they will germinate, but if they get wet and don’t germinate, the seeds may rot. If they get wet and do germinate, they may freeze. The heavy leaf mulch, however, should protect them from both possibilities.

I hope.

So today I’m focusing on indoor stuff, but still garden related. We had a box of San Marzano tomatoes in the living room that were fully ripe. Those are now soaking in vinegar water. Later on, I’ll remove the tops and tails, and get them in the crock pot for the night to make tomato sauce. There might be room enough to use some of the whole tomatoes we have in the freezer right now.

Once the oven is free, we have lots of peppers that have ripened and are starting to dehydrate in the living room. Those will get set onto trays to dehydrate fully and faster in the oven. Except, maybe, the hot peppers. There are so many of them. We might instead string them up and hang them above a heat vent, instead.

There was also a large colander in the old kitchen, full of tomatoes that were further along in ripening. Every now and then, I go through the bins and pull out the ones that are blushing and set them in the colander until it’s full. I went through those, setting more San Marzano, and a few mystery compost tomatoes, into a bin for the living room to continue ripening. The cherry tomatoes went into a small colander for general use and snacking in the kitchen. These are the Chocolate and Black Cherry tomatoes in there, a lot of which still need more time to ripen, plus a couple of little red tomatoes from the mystery plant that self seeded among the Red Thumb potatoes. When we harvested the tomatoes before our first frost, that plant had many small tomatoes on it, all still very green. I’m glad to see that they are actually ripening now. Judging from the colour and the size, I am guessing it is from the Mosaic Medley mix we grew in that bed a few years ago. That was a mix of cherry and grape tomatoes. These are so small, though, and with how the clusters were formed, I’m tempted to think they might be Spoon tomatoes. They’re big for Spoon tomatoes, but as something that has self seeded, it’s possible they reached a size they might not reach when grown as transplants.

Well, whatever they are, they are a tomato, and my family likes tomatoes, whatever the variety!

Aside from all of this, I hope to take advantage of today being an indoor day and start editing a couple of videos, including the October garden tour video using footage I recorded on Nov. 1. 😄

But first, lunch – and maybe a taste of that Crespo squash!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 garden: Thanksgiving dinner harvest, plus, this is what $230 looks like

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Tomorrow is Canadian Thanksgiving, but our turkey needs to be cooked, so we will be having our dinner today.

But first, I had to make a trip to the nearer city for a few things. Only about half of today’s shopping came out of our regular budget, though, as my daughter sent me funds for the other half.

Not pictured was my first stop at Canadian Tire. There, I was able to sanitize two of our 18.9L/5 gallon water jugs and refill them – the price at Canadian Tire is much lower than locally, so if I’m making the trip anyhow, it’s worth getting our refills done at the same time.

The main thing we needed to get at Canadian Tire was some mold and mildew resistant primer. We will use that on the exposed bathroom walls, before putting on the tub surround.

I was also able to get a few other things as well. One was a tube of transparent Kwik Seal, which is both an adhesive and a caulk that is waterproof. We’ll be using it on the overlap of the catio and isolation shelter roof panels. I also picked up some 6×3/4 inch wood screws, as we ran out, and a latch that I think should work on the ramp-door on the isolation shelter.

Before doing to the till, I checked out the display of vehicle organizers and accessories for the truck. What I found, though, was an emergency hand crank flashlight and FM radio that was on sale, so I grabbed that for our emergency kit. I think it has a port for charging a cell phone, too, but the packaging didn’t have a detailed list on it. We’ll need to test it out, later, anyhow, and will be able to see, then. Eventually, I want to get a version that can also be charged with a solar panel. I’ve got a couple on my wish list that have different charging ports, different lighting options, etc. that I want for the house.

The Canadian Tire purchase totaled $81.91 after taxes, with the most expensive item being the quart of primer.

After that, it was across the street to the Walmart. This is what $232.58 looks like.

The kibble is for the inside cats, with an extra for the outside cats – I put our last 40 pound bag into the bin today, and that will last about a week. The shelf is the other thing I needed to make the trip for. With the wardrobe out of my husband’s room, he still needs a shelf. I’d have preferred to get a better shelf, but when it came to the smaller higher quality shelves, I was looking at twice the price for half the shelf! So this will do for now.

There are also some supplements; some Vitamin D and some Magnesium. On my daughter’s list was the coffee, creamer and energy drinks, plus some sort of heat and eat. Until we can get the hot water tank fixed, we’re trying to avoid dirtying dishes as much as possible!

Then, because it’s cheap turkey season, I got a frozen turkey; the medium turkeys are $22. I also got a couple of packages of bacon, one of which is for the turkey.

Oh! I almost forgot. I also got a collar with breakaway buckle for the cats. Syndol still has his collar, but I want to get collars on the other cats that got neutered, so it’s easy to tell them apart. Unfortunately, the first collars I got for them have disappeared. They were likely on too loose. I’ll start with getting one on Stinky, since he is one of the crowd of white cats with grey that can be so hard to tell apart at times.

Once I was home and everything was put away, I headed outside to do a bit of harvesting for our Thanksgiving dinner.

I started off with getting some German Butterball potatoes, and the last Uzbek Golden carrots (not counting the ones that went to seed).

I also harvested a few sunchokes, and the last Purple Caribe potatoes. There were two plants I’d left to grow longer, and between the two of them, I found a whole 6 potatoes, and one of them was really small.

If you click through to the next picture, you’ll see the squash I selected for Thanksgiving. Being part of the Wild Bunch Mix, I don’t know what kind it is. We only had the one survive to be harvested. It looks like it could be an immature Long Island Cheese.

We shall see how it tastes!

Since we’re trying to use as few dishes, pots and pans as possible, I was shooting to make our Thanksgiving dinner a one roaster meal.

I almost made it.

I started by oiling the bottom of our big roaster, then lined the bottom with slices of onions and shallots. Then all the carrots, potatoes and most of the sunchokes were laid out over the onions as flat and even as I could make them.

I say “most of the sunchokes” because, as I was cleaning and preparing them, I found several of the largest ones had some sort of worm in them!

Ugh.

The turkey itself was kept plain. After getting a thorough washing and the wings tucked under, it went on top of the vegetables. Then I took a package of bacon and wove the strips over the top of the turkey.

With all that in the roaster, there really wasn’t room for the squash. My husband doesn’t like winter squash, anyhow. So that got cut into chunks and peeled, and put into its own smaller roasting pan.

The good thing about winter squash getting harvested too early, because of frost, is that the shell is soft enough to use a vegetable peeler on!

I kept the squash simple, too. The chunks got pieces of butter spread out over them, then they all got sprinkled with brown sugar.

The turkey went into the over at 450° for 15 minutes, uncovered. Then the heat was reduced to 350°, and the roaster covered with foil (the turkey is too high to use the lid). The squash was put into the oven at this time, too.

As I was writing this, the oven timer went off. The squash is now ready and out of the oven, but it will be a while before the turkey and vegetables are ready.

Along with all this, I also picked up a pumpkin pie at the local grocery store/post office. We’ll just need to whip some cream to go with it.

When the time comes, we’ll be eating off of paper plates, so there’s less to wash.

It’s not going to be fancy, but it doesn’t need to be. We have much to be thankful for!

Speaking of which…

I got a voice mail on my phone from home care, letting me know that no one was available to do my mother’s evening medication assist. So I called my mother to let her know – not something I was looking forward to, after her mind games, yesterday. I made the call just before I started on cleaning the vegetables, so I told her I was going to be quick, because I needed to go to the kitchen, and passed on the message.

Before she let me go, though, she said she had something she needed to tell me. She said she didn’t want me to worry. She would pay for the septic repairs.

She then said she forgot that she had promised to pay it, earlier.

I did tell her, I never asked her to pay for it. She offered, and I was very grateful, because we would have have been able to cover it ourselves. She kind of waffled a bit, and just repeated that she would take care of it, and stopped just short of actually apologizing for her behaviour. Which is fine by me. I don’t expect her to.

Then she mentioned that she spoke to my brother last night. I asked how that was and again, she waffled. She finally just said, it was a short call, and that they talked about him coming out to put away her air conditioner, and that it would be good to do it before winter arrives.

I reminded her that my brother had been saying he needs to come out and take care of that for her; he just has no idea when he’ll be able to. I also reassured her that, even if we got snow (it’s not unusual to get a blizzard in October where we are), he did such a good job sealing the window around the AC vent, it wouldn’t matter. No weather is getting in through there! She agreed that he did an excellent job.

Ah, my timer is going off again. Time to check on the turkey!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

The Re-Farmer

Morning friend, our biggest harvest yet, and what I did with it!

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We’re expecting heat but no rain for the next while, so it looks like I’m going to be back at watering the garden every morning again. I worked on that while the girls took care of eyes baby, cleaning and treating her eyes, then feeding her cat soup with the modified kitten baby bottle. That made a mess, of course, so she was looking really bedrabbled when I finally saw her outside!

While I was watering, I saw a little green friend on the grape leaves.

I just love tree frogs! They are just the cutest. 💚

Once the watering was done, I went back and collected what turned out to be our largest harvest of the year!

While watering the G Star pattypan squash, I found a squash I’d somehow managed to miss seeing before. It’s a bit bigger than I would normally let it get, but it’s still in the tender stage. I got a pretty good handful of Carminat beans and a few Dalvay shelling peas.

There was one Yukon Chief corn stalk that didn’t survive being broken by the wind, and it had a tiny little cob on it. I went ahead and shucked it and, small as it was, it was ripe. I ate it raw, and it was quite tasty. So I took a chance and harvested the ripest looking cobs I could find. Only one probably could have used a few more days on the stalk. I decided to harvest some of the Uzbek Golden carrots, and even found a few Seychelles beans in the bed with the Crespo squash. I’m happy with the carrots I picked this morning. There isn’t much left in the bed, including the two that have gone to seed. I really hope we’ll have the space to plant more carrots next year.

I was happy to see that we FINALLY have ripening chocolate cherry tomato. Just two, really, and one looked almost ready to pick, but I left it for now.

With having such small harvests for the past while, most have not had enough to make it worth including in a meal, so we’ve been setting some things aside. We had enough that, with this morning’s harvest, I decided to use it all up. I was inspired by A Jeanne in the Kitchen’s Low Country Boil. We had no seafood, and I just used what we had. Except the peppers, since I can’t eat those without gagging for some reason, but we did have a couple of little San Marzano peppers I could use. I can’t eat fresh tomatoes, either, but I can eat them when they are cooked or processed.

I ended up using half a package of bacon, half a package of fresh sausages, frozen onions from our garden last year, carrots, beans, shelled and sugar snap peas, the patty pan squash, the corn chopped into chunks (not a way I would normally cook corn on the cob), some Russet potatoes we bought that need to be used up, and several cloves of fresh garlic that couldn’t be hung for curing with the others. I think that’s everything. Some of this was browned before adding water.

For seasoning, I used some of the truffle salt we still have left, freshly ground pepper, ground thyme, dried parsley, a couple of vegetable bouillon cubes and a touch of turmeric. I was digging through the fridge and spotted some jars of seafood sauce and oyster sauce, so I went ahead and added some of that to the liquid, too.

I’m quite happy with out it turned out, and it made an excellent brunch.

It will now make an excellent… supper, I guess. I got busy working in the garage and am now realizing I haven’t eaten in way too long.

I’ll post about the progress on the isolation shelter next, but first, I need to eat!

The Re-Farmer

Baking Day

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Today has been a productive day – finally!

While my daughter continued her deep cleaning into the kitchen, I got the truck loaded up for a much delayed trip to the dump. Each day the dump was open, I found myself at my mother’s place with the truck, so it had to wait.

After that lovely rain we had, the gravel roads were a mess and so were the grounds near the pit. I don’t like driving up to the pit. Not only am I always paranoid about backing up too close to the edge, on days like today, the edge is full of garbage people didn’t make the effort to throw further in, which means there’s all sorts of stuff where tires would go. Like the big shard of glass I found as I went around to open the tailgate!

Garbage and recycling properly disposed off, it was too to town and the pharmacy. My husband’s new painkillers at his new dose were already waiting, and I got my own prescription refilled, since I was there.

Then it was a quick trip to the grocery store for a couple of things – plus I was able to take advantage of a couple of good sales – then home. I pulled the truck into the yard and got a daughter to grab the stuff and put them away, while I took a hose to the truck to take off the caked on clay and mud! The main road to our place is really bad in patches, after all that rain. This road is designed for heavier and more traffic than a lot of the other gravel roads, many of which are in even worse condition. I know of at least one person in our municipality’s FB group that is hesitant to take her car through, for fear of getting stuck – and she’s got an infant! Unfortunately, no one in the group could give her any idea of when her road will be worked on. We’ve had a new council since the last election (I forgot it was election day, so we missed the chance to vote), and things have been crazy. Several municipal staff quit, the By Law Officer quit, then just a little while ago, most of the council members also quit. There are no longer enough council members for quorum, so no decisions can be made. The province has had to step in and take over until another election can be arranged, but they haven’t sent anyone over, yet.

As bad as the road we use has gotten, we’ve actually got it pretty good. I don’t even try to take the roads in other directions, knowing they’d be much worse. I’d rather go the long way around – and am thankful I have that option! Having to hose off the truck is a small problem, in comparison.

My daughter, sweetheart that she is, was just finishing cleaning the oven when I was done. Just in time for me to do some baking!

I wanted to do baking, but hadn’t decided what I wanted to bake, so I went through some of my old cookbooks for really basic recipes. I was going through the one we all got given to us in Home Ec class – still one of my favourites – and spotted a recipe for cream puffs, which I haven’t made since I was a teenager, so I decided to go for it.

The cooked part of the cream puff batter, which whips up incredibly quickly, has to cool before the eggs can be added, so while it was cooling, I tried an oatmeal cookie recipe from the same cookbook that I hadn’t baked in years. I couldn’t remember liking them or not, but I’d highlighted there title at some point, so I figured that meant they were good! 😄

The recipe said it would yield 5 dozen cookies. !! I think that was a typo. I got 2 dozen, plus one giant cooking I baked in a small cast iron pan. They spread out really flat. Not the best oatmeal cookies I’ve ever had, but certainly tasty. They were probably meant to be made with quick oats, not the thicksome ones I was using. 😉

Once they were done, I increased the heat for the cream puffs while I beat the eggs into the batter. They bake at 450F for 15 minutes, then at 325F for another 25 minutes.

I had made them smaller before, but the recipe said it yielded 8 large puffs, so today, I made 8 large puffs! Later on, we’ll make some whipped cream to go in them.

Once those were out of the oven, my daughter and I took a late lunch break. Later, I plan to make some basic cupcakes. Last of all, I plan to mix up an overnight no-knead bread dough and set that to rise in the safety of the oven, where the cats can’t get at it. I might make another batch in the bread machine at the same time and leave that to rise overnight, too.

Things outside will probably need another day for the mud to become less of an issue, and I’ll be getting back at working on the garden beds. It’s been a long time since I’ve done baking – my younger daughter is usually the one that does the baking – so I’m taking advantage of the break from outside stuff.

The Re-Farmer

Stroganoff on a smoker?? (video)

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Just watching a few videos with breakfast this morning and found a new cooking video from Quick Dick McDick.

Oh, my. He doesn’t go half way, that’s for sure!

Having to pause near the end to help deliver another calf was a nice touch. 😄😄

I seriously want a smoker.

The Re-Farmer