After the last couple of days, I plan to take it relatively easy today.
Part of “taking it easy” for me includes finally doing my morning rounds as usual!
Since I’d gathered a larger harvest yesterday, I didn’t expect to gather anything today. I did find a couple of things to pick though. A handful of Carminat purple beans, a single green Seychelle bean, a hot pepper and…
The clusters still look quite green, but I noticed some of them had already started to drop seeds among the melons in the trellis bed. So I grabbed a clean bucket and tried just shaking the seeds into it. Things were still too damp with dew, though, so I broke off the seed heads that were starting to drop seeds and dumped them into the bucket whole.
Quite a few seeds were dropped into the bed, so I think we can expect a fair number of self sown onions in there in the spring!
There are still some seed clusters that are very green that got left on the plants to be gathered later. For now, the bucket of seed heads is in the house, sitting in a sunny spot in the cat free zone. We’ll collect more seeds after the seed heads have dried off.
I made no effort to separate types of onions in here. There was really no practical way to do so. There would be only two types of onions – a red and a yellow – that we had tried growing last year. At this point, if we are going to start growing onions from our own seeds, there isn’t as much need to keep track of varieties, or even keep the seeds separate. It’s not like we’re going to be packaging them up for sale or anything like that.
Which means that when we start seeds for next year’s garden, we’ll be having Onion Surprise. 😁
I had a long day taking my mother to her specialist appointment in the city yesterday, and now another long day with her today. I did have time to do some of my morning rounds, though, and was able to gather a good sized harvest!
In the giant colander, there are a good number of Chocolate Cherry tomatoes from by the chain link fence. I also picked a few green Seychelle beans from the bed shared with the Crespo squash, and I even found a few on the one plant next to the purple Carminat pole beans. There are even some Royal Burgundy bush beans in there.
I found a melon lying on the ground in the raised bed – it harvested itself! 😄 There are a couple of yellow peppers, plus a Sweet Chocolate. Some of the peppers that are supposed to be more orange are finally starting to turn colour. There’s a single G Star pattypan squash, plus a few San Marzano tomatoes.
When it came time to go into the old kitchen garden, I knew there would be quite a bit, so I grabbed the bin. Those are all Forme de Couer and Black Cherry tomatoes in there.
Including a rude looking tomato! Click over to the next photo to see what I mean. 😄
After that, I left things to my daughters and headed out to my mother’s.
Long story short: her apartment finally got sprayed for bed bugs. There were no sign of any, so they will have to come back only one more time. Her neighbour got sprayed, too. I get the impression that apartment has been the main source of the problem in the building.
My mother then had to stay out of her apartment for 6 hours. Technically, she should stay out for 12 hours, as she has respiratory issues, but she refuses.
The neighbor says they only need to stay out for 4 hours, but I have no idea where she got that from. The notification letter they all get says the same thing. At least 6 hours.
We made sure to take along my mother’s supper time medications, as well as the information sheets the eye clinic gave her, yesterday, to go over. While we were waiting for the exterminator to arrive, I did go through some with her. I took the grid eye test, which is a flat magnetic sheet, and put it on her fridge. The grid has a black dot in the middle that is supposed to be focused on. I spent some time explaining the test to her, how to do it, and that she should be checking her left eye with it, every day. I even held it for her while she did the test, as instructed.
While explaining the grid test to her, how to take the test, what she’s looking for, I was saying, your left eye this, your left eye that, with your left eye…
Yet she still stopped at one point and said, “with my right eye, then…”
…
No. Your right eye can’t even see the dot in the grid. It’s for your left eye.
It’s going to take a while for it to stick, I think!
We had a nice chat with the manager while her apartment was being sprayed – she parker her walker across from her door and would not move until the exterminator left.
Then we had to find something to do or somewhere to go for six hours.
I was going to move the truck into the loading zone in front of the doors, to make it safer for my mother to get in, but the exterminator’s truck was in there, and he was chatting with the manager. When I got there, I did apologize for my mother’s behaviour over all this.
She is still utterly convinced the exterminator rifled through her closet to find and steal 70+ year old passports. In fact, at one point when it came up in conversation, she started saying, “maybe I should call the police?” When I said no, she said I was accusing her of lying. I told her, I didn’t think she was lying, but that she probably just put them somewhere and forgot where. When she moves, she’ll probably find them again. Her response was that I was “against” her.
*sigh*
Anyhow…
It was a good thing I caught up with them, because the manager remembered to ask if my mother’s bed had mattress covers. She doesn’t, and the exterminator said she needs two – one for the mattress, one for the box spring. Then he remembered he might have one and checked in his truck. He did have one and gave it to me for my mother’s mattress. We’ll still need one for the box spring.
Then I mentioned I needed to move my truck so my mother could get in, and we said our goodbyes.
By this time, though, my mother had come out and was sitting in her walker, watching us suspiciously. She called me over before I moved the truck and started asking me questions… why was the exterminator still there? Why was the manager sitting in his truck? etc.
Oh, gosh. I just realized what she was getting at.
She thought they were waiting for her to leave, so the manager could use his master key to get into her apartment, so they could steal things.
*sigh*
Anyhow.
We got her into the truck and then headed out for lunch. There was one place she wanted to go to, because someone new bought it and she wanted to see how it was, now that it wasn’t “browny” people that owned it (it had been owned by a Korean family). *sigh* The place was still being worked on, on the inside, but when she saw the worker’s vehicles in the parking lot, she thought it was open and wanted me to go inside and check. I had to tell her, no, you can’t just walk into a construction zone!
So we went to a chicken and pizza restaurant.
She ended up ordering a vegetable pizza this time, which I normally would not have thought much of, except that my mother is once again deciding that the reason she’s having trouble with her eyes is because of food, and so she needs to eat more vegetables and green things.
There is no known cause for macular degeneration, and there is no food she can eat or not eat that will make any difference. But she heard something somewhere – maybe last week, maybe last month, maybe 30 years ago – and just latches on to things.
We’re going to have to watch her on that, because she’s going to start causing malnutrition in herself if we don’t.
I had something else, so she had a small pizza to herself, with some left over that was packed up for later. We took our time eating, though – we did have 6 hours to kill! – then went across the street to a little department store she wanted to check out, while she was out and about. I helped her get across the street, then moved the truck to park by the store, so she wouldn’t have to cross the street again. The nice thing about that was that I was able to pull up really close to the curb – and that extra height made it downright easy for her to get into the truck when she was done!
We then both went in and did a bit of shopping.
There’s only so long we could drag that out, though.
There was nowhere else she wanted to go, and there is nowhere in this town where one can just hang out. We even tried driving around parts of town we’ve never gone into before, but there wasn’t a whole lot of that, either. 😄
We managed to use up about 2-3 hours before finally just going back to her building and sitting in the common room. No one else was around, so we brought out the information the eye clinic gave her and I went over it with her. Most of it, the doctor had already explained to her really well.
It didn’t take long to go through it all.
I was completely prepared to stay with my mother until 7pm, but she told me that I could go home. She was really tired and was going to just sit and close her eyes for a while. She had her leftovers for supper, and I’d added a bottle of orange juice I’d gotten with her meal on the way home from the city yesterday, that got forgotten in the truck, so she was prepared for taking her medication with her supper while in the common room.
So I headed home.
When I got home, my younger daughter was adding more supports to the tomatoes at the chain link fence that yesterday’s winds had managed to blow partly over. I ended up helping her with that, then she moved on to start breaking down the tree that the winds blow over and onto a crabapple tree.
I had gone to talk to her when our phones both dinged. My husband had sent a message.
My mother had called and left a message on the answering machine. Something about her keys?
I had completely forgotten.
While digging in her purse at one point, my mother gave me her keys to put in my pocket, so they wouldn’t get lost.
They were still in my pocket!!!
I had dashed into the house to get my purse when the phone range again. It was my mother, trying again – from the number on call display, a neighbour had let her use their phone. I told her, I was leaving right then and there!
When I got there, so was so apologetic about having me drive all the way back again. Meanwhile, I was apologizing for forgetting I had her keys! It was pretty funny!
Enough time had passed that she had eaten her supper and taken her medications. It was still early to get into her apartment, but by less than an hour, so we went in anyway.
I had offered to come back to help her put things back and she had said no, so this actually worked out.
I was able to put the mattress cover on her bed – and found out that they’d given her, and others, mattress covers long ago. She didn’t want me to put it on her bed, and basically scoffed at the fact that they had been given them in the first place.
*sigh*
So, somewhere in her closet, she had 2 more of these. Maybe when my sister next visits my mother, she’ll be ablet to find one and get it onto the box spring.
I made up her bed and put a few things away.
If she didn’t have to wait until the health care aid came to help with her nightly medications, she would have gone to bed right then and there!
I did make sure to set out the little miniature tagine bowl and lid I’d brought for her. She thought it was adorable! This will be a handy container for the health care aide to put her pills into, after removing them from the bubble pack, so they can both easily see that the right number are in there. Plus, my mother can more easily pick up the little bowl to take them, rather than trying to use her hands. Some of her fingers are deformed with arthritis.
The extra trip was good for another reason. I had forgotten to hit a bank machine earlier, to take cash out for the septic guy. We’re almost into October. Time to get the tank emptied for the winter.
We’ll need to contact the septic repair company again, too, and hopefully get a date on when they can come and repair the leaking pipes at the expeller!
I really hope we’re not getting ghosted by this company. We’ve had this happen before with other companies, in the first couple of years after we moved here. I have reason to believe it has something to do with our vandal defaming us, though I have no actual proof. Our vandal has a past history of trying to prevent companies from doing things here at the farm, and even on property in the heart of our little hamlet that my parents used to own. Then, when they tried to sell it, he drove off two potential buyers!
Yes, he felt he was entitled to that property, just like he feels he’s entitled to this property, too.
Of course, it could be this company is just really busy, trying to get jobs done before winter. Unfortunately, with past experience, I can’t help but wonder.
Well, if we don’t hear from them after trying to call them back several times, there is another company we can contact again. They are in a completely different town that our vandal doesn’t really go to, that I know of, so the chances of them having any contact with our vandal is very low.
The main thing is that this gets repaired before the ground freezes.
Thankfully, our system has still been working so far, even if the greywater is all just soaking into the ground, as if we had a septic field instead of an expeller. The leak must be pretty close to the surface for the ground to become saturated like that, so if it doesn’t get repaired, the whole thing will freeze, the greywater will have nowhere to go, and the ice will break the pipes even more.
*sigh*
Tomorrow, I will hopefully not have to go anywhere, except maybe the dump. I don’t know if I dare to to the nearest landfill again, with how bad it has gotten lately (I don’t want another flat tire!), but the next nearest one is also open on Saturdays. I just need to find it.
If all goes well, though, I’ll finally be able to catch up with stuff here at home!
Like prep and freeze a whole lot of bell peppers and melons, and either freeze whole tomatoes, or start another sauce in the Crockpot.
I had another sleepless night last night (courtesy of the cats!), so my daughters took care of most of the morning stuff. That let me get at least a couple of hours of sleep before I headed out to the garden, just before noon.
We got a smattering of rain yesterday evening, so I used one of the side walls from the broken market tent to cover the onions that were curing outside. Once things were warmer, I uncovered them again, so they could get some sun and air flow.
We’ve got some warm, sunny days coming up, and mild overnight temperatures, so I lifted the bottom half of the vinyl sheets wrapped around the box frame over the eggplant and hot pepper bed.
As you can see in the foreground of the photo above, Syndol is checking out the eggplant and hot peppers I harvested out of there this morning!
This is the rest of today’s harvest. We have a first today!
Yes, a couple still have some green on them, but I wanted to get some of the weight off the plants. It was much the same with the few tomatoes I collected today.
Also, yes, that is a mutant Little Finger eggplant on the left! I actually remembered to bring pruning shears to cut the stems – they are surprisingly spiky! – and it was rather a surprised to cut one stem and get two eggplants! There are two Classic eggplant in there, too. I’m harvesting a bit smaller, as the large ones we’ve harvested before were getting pretty seedy inside. Mind you, we could leave some longer just to collect the seeds, but it’s probably too late in the season for any of the ones still on the plants to have viable seeds to collect.
The long, straight hot peppers were easy to harvest, but the curled one was so twisted around the stalk and another pepper, I ended up breaking off the top of the pepper itself, rather than the stem.
We also have one melon today, and one purple Dragonfly pepper. The colour is very much the same as the eggplants!
Pretty darn good for near the end of September in our area!
The German Butterball potato plants have all died off, so we should be harvesting those, soon. A few of the winter squash are starting to look ready to harvest and get set aside to cure, too. The one Jebousek lettuce that seeded itself should have seeds ready to collect, too. The kohlrabi look like a total loss, though. The flea beetles just decimated them. 😢 We finally got some to actually grow, and this happens. *sigh*
As we build up our raised beds, making it so they can be covered with insect netting is going to be important! I would really like to grow kohlrabi and cabbage and brassicas in general, but it looks like that’s just not going to happen until we have a way to protect them from those flippin’ flea beetles!!
Well, my upcoming stock up shopping schedule has changed again.
Normally, I would be heading into the city for our first stock up shop in a couple of days (Thursday), but I’ll be taking my mother to the eye specialist, instead. With that in mind, I’d already picked up a few things I knew we’d be running out of, yesterday, when I got more cat kibble in the town north of us. Grocery prices there are much higher, so I didn’t much at all.
Today, I wanted to refill our two empty 18.9L/5 gallon water jugs in the town nearest us. The only other thing we needed was more bread. Before I left, I asked my daughter to message me if she spotted anything else we were out of that couldn’t wait until Friday.
When I parked at the store and checked my message. Nothing from home to add to the shopping list.
There was, however, a message from my brother, asking if he could call me this afternoon about my mother.
Nothing he was in the office today, I figured it was urgent! So I let him know I’d just parked in town and that he could call me on my cell phone right away, if he was still able to.
He was.
Long story short, he got a call from the public housing department that owns the building my mother lives in. They don’t want to evict a 90+ year old woman, but if she doesn’t let them in to check/spray her apartment for bed bugs again, they have no choice.
They are going to be there on Friday. They even have an exact time (usually it’s between 9am an 5pm, and would have been done tomorrow, not Friday), and a manager will be there, due to her accusations of theft.
Right away, I assured my brother that I would be there. I had already been planning to go there tomorrow, as they usually come on the last Wednesday of the month.
The city shopping can wait.
As her Power of Attorney, my brother gave them permission to do in. I’ll shoot to be there earlier to move things away from the walls – they just need room for the wand to reach – and run interference with my mother. She has to stay out of her apartment for at least 6 hours. Given that she has respiratory issues, it should really be 12 hours, but that would mean spending the night somewhere. None of us have homes accessible for her, and she is no longer willing to rent a motel room. It was during a time she spent the night in a motel that she believes the exterminator stole stuff from her. Stuff that makes no sense for anyone to steal.
The guy my brother spoke to told him, they have to deal with this sort of thing all the time, unfortunately.
He also said they don’t think my mother has bedbugs, but they’ve been spraying her neighbour’s place for the past several months. If her neighbour has them, it would not take much for them to spread to her apartment. Plus, the eggs can stay dormant for up to a year. However, if the egg casings get sprayed, when the hatch, the hatchling will die as soon as it emerges. So even if she doesn’t have bed bugs, they still need to spray a certain number of times to ensure it stays that way, as far as the eggs go, at least.
So that pushes the city stock up shopping off to Saturday.
Ah, well. We’ll deal!
I still only intended to get just bread and water refills, but I still looked around.
It turns out they had some really good sales on. So good that some things were completely out of stock. The sale ends tomorrow, so that’s not surprising.
The store itself in in the process of being completely rearranged, too. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s going to be a lot more logical in organization – and it looks like they’re expanding their international section, too!
So I ended up getting more than intended, and not all things I would normally get.
This is what $61.89 before taxes would have looked like – not counting the 60¢ for the bottle caps that got paid for when I picked them up at customer service. I cashed in a winning lottery ticket that paid for them. 😄
My loyalty card, however, had $20 I could take off the purchase, so this actually cost $41.89 before taxes.
This is what I got:
Each item shows how much the sale prices took off. You can see on the bottom that the total discounts and savings was $39.11, or 39% of the sub-total. That would be the sub-total before the $20 was taken off, so that means I had $59.11 in taken off altogether, leaving me with having to pay only $43.33 after taxes.
The things I normally would not have picked up were the boxed cereals, the instant puddings and the granola bars.
With the whole chicken, I try to get those on sale whenever I can – especially with it being over $8 off, like today.
The fruit juices were something I was looking for specifically for my daughters. I find fruit juices way too sweet. They’re basically like mainlining sugar, but it gives my daughters something different to drink.
With the bread, I usually get rye bread, but at $2 a loaf, I got two regular loaves of whole wheat bread, one whole wheat Texas Toast and one white sandwich bread.
With the cereals and granola bars, I got four different types for our 4 very different tastes.
The instant puddings were only $1 each and, at first, I picked 4 different flavours. Then I noticed they were all “low fat”. Fat is flavour, so that means they had to replace the fat with something else to make them taste good; usually sugar. So I went for the regular kind, but there were only two flavours that weren’t sold out.
Funny. There were plenty of low fat versions in stock. 😄
So, not the shopping trip I planned, but a pretty good one, I think. We got some things that are very occasional treats that I only pick up when the prices are good. Sometimes I’ll get them at Costco, but there usually isn’t a lot of space on the flat cart for what are essentially frivolous purchases.
Not too shabby, I think. Especially with today’s food prices!
I was able to say hello to the babies this morning, and cuddle them for a bit. One of these mornings, though, I will need to bring a daughter along. The kittens are getting big enough and active enough to climb out of their “nest”. When I first opened the door, the calico was in between a bucket, their bed set up and some netting. If I can get someone to snuggle the kittens and keep them warm, I want to take more stuff out of the old garden shed that they might get hung up in. Ideally, we’d move them to the baby jail in the sun room, but the room is too busy, I think. Both with us going in and out, and other cats. Broccoli would probably move them out.
We’ll figure it out. For now, I’m just happy she hasn’t hidden them already.
While continuing my rounds, I had to get some photos of the lilacs on the East side of the house.
The ones by the house bloom a bit earlier than the same type of lilacs that form a hedge along the north property line. The house itself creates a bit of a microclimate for them. The rest of this type of lilac are just starting to open. I expect to have a sea of lilacs blooming out here, tomorrow morning!
My husband and I were going into the city to meet with a friend at a shopping mall. We decided to make a date of it and leave early to have lunch (well… breakfast, really) together.
No, we didn’t go to a restaurant or anything. We went to the food court!
My husband was quite content with a burger and fries, but I had something I haven’t had since we left the city.
Oh, my goodness, it was so awesome!!! The only thing I didn’t care for was the edamame. I don’t like it to begin with, but these were incredibly salty, and had strings. I ate a couple, got a string caught in my teeth that took ages to get out! LOL My husband tried one and actually spit it out.
The rest, however, was blissfully delicious!
After placing my order for the Bento box, I noticed they also had tempura vegetables. We tried doing that at home during our New Year’s fondue, but we really need a proper frier do to that. So I ordered some, and they were absolutely fantastic!
When offered chopsticks, I made sure to accept them. I’m not good at eating with chopsticks, so it forced me to eat slowly. 😁 It would have been sooo tempting to finish it off too quickly, if I were using a fork!
I know there’s a lot of negative things said about food court food, but honestly, I don’t see why. Yeah, you have the usual fast food places, but there were also options for Greek, Italian, Korean, Thai, Chinese and Japanese food, plus various other specialty cuisines, all freshly made.
So we had ourselves a lovely meal together, then headed over to our pre-arranged meeting point.
It was so fantastic to catch up with our friend! Being able to keep in touch online is great, but there’s no equivalent to being able to give someone a great big hug, and spend time together! Hopefully, we will be able to get together again, before he leaves the country again.
The trip was hard on my husband, of course, and he did have to say he’d reached his limit, but he was so very happy to be able to make the trip, and wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Right now, after being home for a while, I’m having a battle with myself. I could go outside and try to get some overgrown lawn mowed… or I could go to bed early, and get an early start on the outside stuff. I got only about 3 or 4 hours of sleep last night, so I think early to bed is going to win out!
Tomorrow is our last average frost date. After that, it should be safe to start transplanting things outside.
And we still haven’t finished shifting those beds over, or harvested more dead spruces for the raised beds, because of the weather we’ve been having!
Well, we do have places we can start transplanting or direct sowing into. Just not a lot, yet.
It’s not even just about co-operative weather, but a co-operative body!
Yeah. I definitely need to get a good night’s sleep, so I can work more effectively tomorrow.
Which means, I need to get my butt off the computer!
Our basket has been put together and blessed, in preparation for tomorrow, when we enjoy the contents as part of our Easter celebrations.
Our traditional Easter baskets were one of my favourite things, when I was a kid. I loved our Easter celebrations more than Christmas – plus, I usually have my own tiny basket for blessing, too!
Everything in the basket has symbolic meaning. Along with the Polish traditional items, we’ve added a few of our own, over the years.
The most important part of the basket is the bread, which represents the Body of Christ. Many people use a paska, or babka, bread, made with saffron and raisins. We’ve made braided breads similar to challah, or purchased a rustic loaf of some kind. During blessings at church, I’ve seen people with nothing but a loaf of rye bread in their basket. It’s the one thing no Easter basket would be without! This year, we made a simple, overnight bread.
Of course, there are eggs, which represent resurrection and rebirth. They can be elaborately decorated pysanki, with the designs also having symbolic meaning, plain coloured or shelled. In our basket, we have shelled eggs that were pickled in the liquid from pickled beets, a soy sauce brine and turmeric. You can tell by the colours, which is which! We also have kraszanki (kra-shan-kee); eggs boiled with onion skins. Plus we added some little chocolate eggs.
The sausage represents God’s favour and generosity, while the ham represents great joy and abundance.
Salt (we used truffle salt this time, simply because we had some) represents prosperity, justice, and is a reminded that we are to be the “salt of the earth”.
Butter (I made a parsley butter this time) reminds us of the good will of Christ, which we should also hold towards all.
Cheese (we have a cheese ball, this time) represents moderation.
Other traditional items include horseradish (ours is still frozen in the ground), which represents the bitter Passion of the Christ. It is often shredded and mixed with beet juice to make ćwikla (chveek-la or chveek-wa) symbolizing the Blood of Christ, and bacon, representing God’s overabundant generosity and mercy.
This time, we have a little jar of apple cider vinegar, though we’ve used many other types of vinegar over the years. This represents the vinegar, or sour wine, that was given to Jesus just before he died on the cross, and represents judgement, purification, humility and redemption.
Some years, we also include olives and olive oil, both of which figured prominently in the culture of the time (still does, in some places). The olive represents peace, beauty, prosperity and the relationship between God and His people. In the Bible, the olive tree itself represented Israel and its people. I actually did get olives for the basket, but forgot about them when we put it together, but they will be included tomorrow.
My daughters requested a trip to the city for some of their own shopping. My younger daughter found a yarn shop in the city and ordered yarn for a sweater she wants to knit for herself. The yarn was ready for pick up today, so today it was! From there, they had a shopping list for the international grocery store.
There was one surreal thing that happened during the drive in I still shake my head over.
Part of the route to the city is a divided highway, with a shallow ditch in between. The highway is two lanes in each direction, and the ditch in between is roughly as wide as another two lanes. Every few miles, there are cross roads and the occasional access lane for vehicles to turn around.
We were coming up to one of these cross roads when I saw what I at first thought was a large black dog running on the cross road towards our side of the highway. Then it rolled across both lanes and I realized it was a tire! Thankfully, there were no cars in that section of the highway at the time, and the tire rolled harmlessly into the ditch on the far side.
According to my daughter, who could look more closely as we passed it, it was smoking!
Of course, we were looking for where the tire came from. We could see a semi pulled over onto the shoulder in the opposite side of the highway. As we drove by, we could see it was resting on the rim on the front driver’s side tire!
Thankfully, the driver never lost control of his vehicle, and there were no other vehicles near it when it’s tire somehow blew itself off the rim and launched itself across a total of 4 lanes and a ditch!
That could have been so much worse!
It still feels so weird, remembering seeing a tire crossing the highway on its own!
Once in the city, my daughter and I hit a drive through for breakfast, then ate in the parking lot. Neither of us wanted to people while we were eating. 😆
Then, it was off to the downtown area and the yarn shop.
Finding the yarn shop was not too difficult.
Getting to it and parking was another story!
This area of the city is old residential, with many very narrow streets, all of which were in terrible condition. They were all 2 way streets, but most had parking on one side, leaving barely more than a car’s width to drive through.
Then we found ourselves coming up to repair crews, with three huge trucks, and no way to turn around or go around. Thankfully, one of the trucks was able to move, we squeezed through and made what should have been our last turn.
I ended up having to drive past the yarn shop, taking the next turn and drop my daughter off in the street! I was then able to drive around the block and come back to the store from the other direction and even *gasp* find a parking spot.
It was worth it, though. We haven’t been to a proper yarn shop since we moved to the farm. I haven’t even been to a Michael’s in years.
It was absolute heaven! So many gorgeous yarns! It took some major self control not to throw the budget out the window and go nuts. Not so much with the yarns that cost over $40 a hank, but there were those clearance bins…
*melt*
I know we could buy all sorts of yarn online, but nothing can beat being in the store and able to handle the yarns and see those glorious shades in person!
My daughter got her yarn and some knitting needles in the sizes she needed, and we finally tore ourselves away.
From there, we went to the international grocery store. My daughter had her and her sister’s list, but when we walked in, I saw they were having a case lot sale.
I got my own cart!
This is what I ended up getting.
The dim sum tray was a treat for supper. Delicious!
Some of the items, such as the Kraft Dinner, were both part of the case lot sale and featured items on their app that I could load onto my loyalty card.
What I like about their receipt is that they list the regular price, then the amount discounted is right under the item. Not all places do that.
So while the total was $140.18 before taxes, that was after $55.77 was taken off for the sales.
I actually didn’t realize until I was looking at the receipt at home, that my 2L of milk was only 99 cents! I had not seen any signs for the milk being on sale. I even grabbed from the back of the display, for one with a later “best before” date.
While I use the app on my phone to scan my loyalty card, my physical card being worn out years ago, my daughter has a spare physical card. I had enough points that she could get some of her stuff for free.
So that was a fortunate unplanned shopping trip. Normally, we miss these big sales, simply because we make as few trips into the city as we can get away with!
When we do go in, though, we try to make as much use of the trip as possible, so we made one more stop at Walmart to get more wet cat food. We are trying to increase how much wet cat food vs dry kibble we give the inside cats. Leyendecker should really be getting wet cat good only, since he has blocked twice now. The wet cat food is more expensive, but not as expensive as vet bills!
Speaking of cats…
I counted 31 this morning, but I did not see Sad Face.
You’d think they would stay out of the moat, but nope. They will cross through the water, rather than go around through the snow! They also seem to prefer drinking from puddles of melted snow over the water bowls. The water bowls have been very full still, when I come out in the mornings.
We are supposed to get colder, soon. The driveway is going to be insane, once all this water freezes!
Ah, well. At least we aren’t snowed in, like the East coast is right now. My friend in Halifax posted photos. They’ve managed to dig a path to the road, and have hopefully dug out their van by now. Her husband was in one of the pictures, standing in the narrow path to the road, with walls of snow reaching well above his head!
Wishing you all a blessed and peaceful year in 2024.
The family and I have successfully managed to get our fondue going!
I am glad I got the extra burner, because we emptied one almost before the oil was hot enough!
The cheese fondue mixed up nicely, but the hot plate was too hot, even on its lowest setting. Still, it was enough to get started while the oil heated.
Not pictured is the tempura batter, which got mixed up at the last minute. We still can’t do more than two items in the oil at once, as the food cools the oil down too much – which makes for a very slow meal. Perfect, as we watch Columbo and wait for midnight.
If we can hold out that long before just going to bed!
We have quite a lot of fresh onions, on top of the ones we dehydrated (half of which I powdered) and froze. Mostly the Red of Florence onions.
Which have started to grow! Not all of them, but enough that we had to do something about it.
So I made a version of this historical onion soup using all red onions, to use up the ones that were sprouting.
I made a few other changes, too, of course.
This is how it turned out.
I sliced all the onions that were starting to sprout, saving the greens to use fresh, some of which I used to garnish my bowl. We’d done a pork roast yesterday, and there was just a bit left, along with the pot juices and rendered fat from the roast. I used the fat from the roast, as well as bacon drippings, to caramelize the onions, instead of butter. Part way through the caramelization process, I added the leftover bits of pork, finely chopped – there is no meat in the version in the video.
For the liquid, I use the juices from the pork roast, which had jelled quite nicely overnight, plus water. They used just water in the video. A vinegar I had on hand I chose to add to the beaten egg yolks was a fancy, barrel aged apple cider vinegar.
My daughters had made a loaf in the bread machine yesterday, and that was used for the bread portion. The video specifically stated to use the outside of a crusty loaf, not the soft insides (which would just turn to mush in the soup!), so I sliced off the crust on the bread machine bread. The bread machine makes a relatively dense bread, particularly around the edges, so I was able to cut quite thick slices off all sides for this, and cut them into fairly even cubes. They stood up well to being cooked in all that liquid!
The only other thing I did a differently was to add a splash of vinegar to the soup stock, even though there was vinegar in the beaten egg yolks. After tasting it, I just felt it needed that extra bit of bite.
The only down side to making this soup was the length of time it took to slice the onions, then caramelize them. By the time the soup was simmering and the cubed bread added, my back was giving out and I had to sit down in between doing the other stuff. Not an issue for people who aren’t broken, like me! 😁
As for the soup, it was quite tasty. Even my husband went for seconds, and he’s not a soup person! I think it would have tasted even better with yellow onions, but that’s just me. If all goes well, we’ll have a lot more of those in our garden next year!
This is definitely a soup I’d make again, with any type of onion.
I might be getting my daughters to do the chopping or caramelizing next time, though! 😄
The Re-Farmer 