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!
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.
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.
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.
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! 😄
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 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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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 