Things I baked on Friday:
Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Cake. It was certainly good, but not something I loved (Fred liked it more than I did), and I probably won’t make it again. The pigs gave it two (four?) hooves up.
Twice-Baked Shortbread (it was a Smitten Kitchen Friday for me!). I guess I should say I started it on Friday and finished it Saturday morning. It was simple to make, and oh my god it was good. Fred had never had shortbread before, I guess he’s lived a deprived life. When he got home, he said “What’s the doughy looking stuff on the counter?” (this was while it was “resting” in the pan overnight). I said “It’s shortbread.” He said “It smells like cookies, not bread.” Which is when I learned that he’d never had shortbread before. He declared “It tastes like pie crust”, which I guess I can kind of see. I like the shortbread a lot more than he does and the pigs don’t get ANY, is how much I like it.
I had a pretty relaxing and low-key weekend. I spent the better part of Saturday cleaning ladybug goo from around the windows in the bathrooms, the window in the stairwell and the windows in the kitten room. That took me ’til lunchtime to finish, and then I spent the afternoon hanging out with the kittens and recanning mushrooms.
I bought a huge-ass can of mushrooms at Sam’s a few weeks ago because we use mushrooms in the two dishes we eat most – an egg scramble* and spaghetti – and it seems like I’m always buying small cans of mushrooms. I figured with the big can of mushrooms, I could recan them into half-pint jars and be set for at least a little while. I canned seven half-pint jars of mushrooms on Saturday and another seven on Sunday, and I think I still have enough mushrooms to fill at least two half-pint jars. I’d tell you how much I saved doing that, but I don’t recall how much the big can of mushrooms cost OR how much an 8-ounce can of mushrooms cost, so I’ll have to do some research and get back to you on that later this week.
We had pork chops for dinner Saturday night along with green beans and sweet potato crack, everything grown here at Crooked Acres, and I have to say, it was a pretty good meal. I’m still experimenting to figure out the best way to cook these pork chops, but with spices rubbed on them and baked in the oven, they were pretty damn good.
For dinner Sunday, we had ribs cooked all day in the crockpot, baked squash, and corn on the cob – again, everything grown here at Crooked Acres and very, very tasty.
Sunday I did a lot of puttering around – recanned more mushrooms, did laundry, checked out the new chicken coop, which Fred finished early in the day, paid bills, balanced the checking account, all that fun stuff. I had thought it was going to be sunny all day, but around eleven it clouded over and even though it never rained, the laundry was still just the tiniest bit damp when I brought it inside, so I tossed it in the dryer.
It’s definitely Fall in Alabama now – Fred had to wear a hat when he was putting up the fence around the back forty yesterday. You know, I never appreciate the warm days of September and October until we hit November and I’ve got the space heater pointed directly at me, going full-blast all day long.
*Usually once a week we have a “scramble” and oven-fried homefries for dinner. How I make a scramble: saute chopped onion ’til soft, add sausage to the pan, cook ’til the sausage is browned. Drain in a colander, rinse with warm water, wipe down the pan. Put sausage and onion back in the pan, add mushrooms to the pan, add eggs (beaten) to the pan, scramble ’til the eggs are done, voila! A scramble! We don’t always have sausage in our scramble, it depends on whether I feel like dealing with it. The good thing about a scramble is that you can put whatever strikes your fancy in it – bacon, green pepper. You could even add cooked homefries to the scramble if you want, but I personally prefer to keep my potatoes separate from the scramble. Call me picky.
Saturday night Fred and I were watching Silkwood. I’ve seen the movie at least a couple of times before, but Fred had never seen it, and it seems to me that it’s one of those movies you should see at least once in your life.
So we were sitting and watching it, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Tommy, who was snoozing in the cat bed on the other couch, lift his head as if he were watching something. I looked to see what he was watching, and saw a wasp fly up from the floor, then land on my leg.
I reached out to flick the wasp off my leg (with the intention that I’d then get up and kill it), but as I reached out to flick the wasp, Fred glanced over and made a face of horror, and as he made the face of horror, I don’t know, I thought the wasp was in the process of trying to sting me or something, so I reacted like a big dorky freak, screamed and flailed around.
While Fred doubled over laughing, I moved the laptop off my lap and saw that the wasp was still sitting there, despite the aborted flicking and the subsequent flailing.
“It’s still there!” I yelled in panic, then flicked at it. It flew across the room and landed on the floor. Fred stayed doubled over, laughing (truth be told, I was laughing too at that point) ’til I yelled at him to kill the damn thing. He stomped on it several times before the damn thing gave up the ghost and died (probably didn’t help that Fred was wearing slippers, which have a soft sole). I got the fly swatter, nudged the dead wasp onto the business end of the swatter, carried it to the front porch and tossed it out.
While Fred continued laughing at me.
Bastard.
Since I hadn’t vacuumed the kitten room in a long time – I think it’s actually been a couple of weeks, except for the time I took the hand vac in there and sucked up the dead ladybugs – I decided to vacuum in there while I was cleaning on Saturday. I thought about shooing the kittens into the closet (where the litter boxes are kept) and shutting them in there while I vacuumed, but in the end I just brought the vacuum cleaner upstairs and started running it, figuring they’d all find places to hide.
They found a place to hide, all right. With the entire upstairs providing many hiding places, they apparently all felt the safest atop the cat tree. All four of them crammed themselves up there and glared at me, ears pointed out to the side, while I vacuumed their room.
They forgave me quickly, though – they always do. All I have to do to get them to come snuggle with me these days, is come into their room and sit on the floor. At this point, even Claudette comes over and asks to be petted. I have proof!
Kitten pics over at L&H.
I happened to glance out into the side yard Saturday afternoon and saw Newt looking like he was after something. A closer look showed me that he had a field mouse. He likes to catch them wherever the hell he finds them (I don’t ask) and then bring them to the side yard to kill them, whether it’s to show off for his brothers who are confined to the back yard or because he wants me to know what an awesome hunter he is. Maybe both.
So I went out and shooed him away from the mouse. I didn’t touch the mouse or get too close to it, lest it get the bright idea to run up my leg, in which case I’d be typing this from the Great Beyond, but I could tell that it was pretty lively and not fatally wounded or on the edge of death, so I yelled for Fred and then kept Newt from getting too close to the mouse.
Right after this picture is when I screamed “No, no, NO! Don’t touch it, Newt!”, and he’s such a good boy that he obeyed.
Fred picked the mouse up and asked where Newt had gotten it, which is when I told him about my don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy re: field mice and the finding of such, and he took it off to let it go in the woods and Newt shrugged a “Win some, lose some” shrug and went off to snooze near the chicken yard.
Previously
2007: Write about your day!
2006: I guess you can teach an old Fred new tricks.
2005: Can’t a girl be a dumbass without the whole world going into an uproar about it?
2004: For once, he had no good comeback.
2003: “Oh yeah. I hate this feeling. I should have just had a Diet Coke.”
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.
1999: Can you tell this irks me?