Relaxing Weekend

We had a beautiful warm sunny weekend!!  And we FINALLY made it to the cabin!!  In a previous post I told the little story about why we couldn't get there last time.  This time we took our Side x Side, but we still could've made it in the truck cuz we found that someone had filled in that big mud pit.   So we still didn't get that old bed to the cabin, but that's okay.  Another time.

There really isn't much to tell in this post cuz nothing exciting happened.  It was just a time of quietness, tranquility, privacy, and work.

First, we had to vacuum up all the dead flies.  The cabin is full of them every spring.  Pretty disgusting.  But that's just part of cabin life, I guess.

Then Chuck wanted to cut some wood up.

So while he was doing that, I went for a stroll in the woods to check on my blueberries.  Last year they didn't do well at all.  This year they are looking pretty good -- so far.

After my stroll, Chuck was still cutting wood, so I bleached out the outhouse and got that all cleaned out.  Another one of those spring cleaning projects.

Then I made myself a nice hot cup of tea.

Since the outhouse was nice and clean now, I wasn't afraid to use it.  Therefore it didn't bother me to know that the tea was going to run right through me and I would have to use the outhouse.

So I sat outside on the porch sipping my tea, listening to the sound of Chuck's chainsaw, and admired my clean outhouse.

Soon enough the sound of the chainsaw stopped, so I went over there to see if I could help him with anything.  Now he was splitting the wood and throwing the pieces into piles.

I knew he wanted the wood stacked in the wood shed, so I told him, "if you bring the Side x Side over here, I can load this up".  So he did, probably thankful for a little break, and I loaded the wood into the Side x Side, while he continued to chop away (he's pretty sore today).

And then we stacked it into the wood shed.

All that kindling wood was removed and put onto the porch for easy access before we stacked the new wood.  The wood shed is pretty full now.

After the work was done, Chuck went for a stroll through the woods with me to see the blueberries, and then we took a joy ride on the Side x Side through the trails before we packed up and went home.

There now you see?  It wasn't an exciting weekend.  But it was nice being there.  

How about a big pile of moose poop for excitement?  No?  Well, I tried!

Kasha Encounter

I found some kasha (buckwheat) flour at the Natural Pantry store last week to experiment with it.  It's kind of an ugly unappealing color and has a funny smell to it, but it's supposed to be really good for you.   It boasts of having all of the amino acids that a human being needs, especially lysine.  Plus it's high in copper and magnesium and your B vitamins.  AND it's high in protein, easy to digest, and gluten free.  (not that gluten is an issue for me).  But in this recipe, only 1/2 cup was distributed into the whole thing, so that's probably not enough to be of much significance, but just to make myself feel better, I figure anything healthy that's added to the evil white flour has to make the evil white flour not as evil.  Just my theory.

It looks and feels exactly like volcano ashes.  It even has the little black specks in it.  When you rub it between your fingers, it feels like soft talcum powder.  If it tastes anything like it smells, do I really wanna eat it?

In one of my recipe books, I found a recipe for Kasha Bread.  The recipe calls for kasha groats that I was supposed to cook, but I modified the recipe for kasha flour instead, since that is what I was working with.  I looked at some pictures of kasha bread on the internet to get an idea of what kasha bread is supposed to look like, but they all looked unappetizing to me because they looked dense.  I guess I learned to expect healthy looking brown breads to be heavy and dense.  I like my bread light and fluffy so, feeling turned off of this experiment, I was going to give up it, while I imagined myself chucking a hard brick of bread into the garbage and saying "well, THAT was a waste of my time!!".

But then curiosity got the best of me so I went ahead with the experiment.  The recipe called for 7 cups of flour total, which I knew was going to make a lot of bread, so I cut the recipe in half, using 2 cups "evil" white flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour, and 1/2 cup kasha flour.  Usually I don't use a 2:1 ratio of white/wheat flour cuz the bread ends up heavy.  I usually prefer to use a 3:1 or a 4:1 ratio.  Plus, not knowing what the kasha flour was gonna do it, my hopes for this bread weren't very high.

Maybe it's because I had to modify the flour into the recipe (instead of using whole groats), but I ended up using extra white flour because the dough was too moist.  But after I got it all kneaded together, I became more hopeful for the outcome of this bread.

The drought turned out nice and soft, and didn't feel heavy at all, and it had no problem rising.  See my finger indentation?  It's ready to shape into loaves now.

Instead of the tradition 9x5 (meatloaf) pans, I prefer to make my bread in the 8x4 pans.  Every time I make bread in the 9x5 pans, the slices won't fit in the toaster very well.  Besides, I like my bread slices a little smaller anyway.  So I divided the dough into two 8x4 pans.  And they rose very nicely.

And here is the finished product:

Don't let the brown color lead you into thinking it's one of those dense heavy breads.  This bread actually turned out nice and squishy, and it tastes good too!  This recipe is a keeper!  NOM-NOM!

And it passed the hubster test!!!

Here is a picture of Kiska who doesn't care at all for Kasha Bread.

Pre-Gardening

I didn't want to write so many posts about gardening this year cuz I know that gets tedious and boring to all my many numerous fans out there (yeah, all two of you!), but I wanted to show you what we are doing different this year.  Here is a picture of the greenhouse that we found at Costco:

For the price, it's actually a pretty good one.  During the first few days after we put it up, we kept checking the temperature inside to see how it fluctuates during the day, just to get an idea of whether or not it would be warm enough.  And, oh yes, it does get it warm in there!  And humid!  

So yesterday, we went a little farther in getting it ready for planting.  Here Chuck is mixing up some new dirt to put into the planter pots:

This year, we decided to try these "Smart Pots" after Chuck heard about them:

They are made of some kind of fabric that's supposed to absorb heat and also let the roots grow freely.  My initial intention was to have one pot for each tomato, zucchini, and cucumber plant.  But right now I have 10 tomato, 3 zucchini,  and 3 cucumber plants started, and at $7 for each Smart Pot, it would be expensive to use only those for these plants.  So we came up with another alternative:

We put a garden bed inside the greenhouse.  The greenhouse is 10' x 10', and the garden bed is 4' x 8', so that gives me room on either side of it to line the sides of the greenhouse with pots if I still want to use them.  This year we are starting with 4 Smart Pots just to try them out.  So I'm going to use one for tomatoes, one for zucchini, and one for cucumbers, and the last one for corn.  Then I will plant the rest of the tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and maybe some corn in the bed, and that way I'll be able to see if there's any difference as to what growing method works best.  The bed will also provide me a little more room to start more seeds in there if I want to.  I am just waiting until late May to make sure it'll stay warm enough there at night cuz we don't have a heater in there.  Maybe next year we'll have one if this year proves that we need one.  The plants that you see there on the left are the ones that I keep hauling out there from my windowsill every day when I know it will be warm enough in there for them.  So far they seem to really like being out there, but every so often I have to go out there and check to make sure they aren't getting burned up.  So far it's been working to partially keep the door unzipped and/or open up the window flap if it gets too hot in there.  By the way, I get a sentimental feeling every time I go into the greenhouse because Chuck mixed some fertilizer into the dirt and it smells like a barnyard in there!!  AAAHHHHHHHhhhhhh..............!  I love the smell of cow manure!!!

While Chuck was mixing dirt together, I decided to try planting some of my "cold weather" seeds.

On my window sill, the only "cold weather" plant that I already started was a lettuce plant.

It looks pretty lonely, doesn't it?

The other veggies that are supposed to be able to tolerate frost are radishes and spinach, so I went ahead and planted a few seeds.  But I didn't plant a whole row because I wanted to have a "continual harvest" - planting a few seeds every few weeks or so will give you a continual harvest instead of a whole bunch all at once.  Since I'm the only one who enjoys radishes, I thought this would be a good idea. Plus, if for some reason the seeds don't sprout on account of being too cold, then at least I didn't waste a whole row of seeds.  By the way, I saw this idea on Pinterest:  to write the vegetable name on a plastic utensil and stick in the bed.  Why didn't I think of that!!?

Kiska came out to join in what she apparently thought was "much ado", but for some reason she was being really skittish and kept running back into the house every time she felt spooked about something, like an airplane flying overhead, or maybe Chuck was getting violent with his shovel in the dirt, or the zipper on the greenhouse door was too loud, etc.,  I don't know, but she must've been in and out of the house a million times.

Here is how my rhubarb and chives are doing right now.  Coming along just fine!!

I've already snipped off some chives twice to use in my cooking.  I won't have to buy any green onions now for awhile.  I know, my flower garden looks terrible.  One of these days I will rake all those dead leaves out.  I always like to try and get that job done before the spiders get too prevalent.

So far, we haven't seen any moose in the neighborhood, and that's a good thing.  Maybe this year we will actually get to enjoy the fruits of our labor.  Now........I wonder how our blueberries at the cabin are doing.  We tried to go to the cabin this weekend, but instead of bringing the side-by-side, we brought the truck (because we were hauling Justin's old bed to the cabin to put in the loft).  Halfway through the backroads we ran into a deep squishy mud hole that had "TRAP" written all over it.  So Chuck tried to get past it by another way that ran adjacent to it.  That one didn't look AS BAD, but I kept telling him "don't do it, don't do it, don't do it".  He attempted it anyway, only with not enough "oomph", and of course we stalled in the middle of it, and the tires were happily spinning, yet we did not continue moving forward.  He managed to back us out of it, but he wanted to try it again.  Then it started POURING RAIN.  I told him, "the rain is only gonna make that mud hole softer and squishier.  I would rather turn around and go home then dig us out of a mud pit in the POURING RAIN!".  He still thought about it for a few minutes cuz he hated the idea of turning around and going back home.  But thankfully, he listened to me, which proves there's a first time for everything.