Winter Wonderland

There is something so beautiful in the snow laden branches of winter. The delicateness that each snowflake has been placed atop of the previous one. At a distance it looks like just a pile, but up close there is intricacy. In either perspective it is beauty. This is the world that my family is living in. In the opens I would say we have a good 12 inches of snow with some areas of less and some of more depending on how the wind has blown the snow. At night the temp has dropped to -17 degrees F at the coldest so far. I know this is nothing in comparison to my friends living in Alaska and to what the weather will get to as we get into January and February.

Our wood stove has been working hard and what we thought was a lot of wood, really isn't, so back to cutting wood we will be going. Our wood demand will slow down a bit now that we have all 9 of our deer skinned and quartered and are not heating our barn. We have a lot of butchering and grinding ahead of us, but at least we are able to do that in our kitchen. I forget every year how sore my left shoulder gets after all of the grinding to make burger. Yesterday alone I made 31 packages of burger, with each package being a bit more than a pound. My hope is that we will have enough venison to last us until next deer season so we will not have to buy any beef. (big money savings) We also have a couple of geese, a few grouse and a hand full of ducks in the freezer, along with a couple of wild turkey legs left over from Scott's turkey season this past spring.

Now that winter has tucked my garden in with a nice thick quilt of snow until spring's warming sun returns, I am going to try some new adventures. I have this wonderful book "The Encyclopedia of Country Living" by Carla Emery that has inspired me, intrigued me to get crafty and creative and be more daring. This is a fabulous book that can teach you things from gardening to canning, to milking a cow (this I already know) to making candles and everything in between. I am going to try and make my own pasta. Although I do not have a nice little pasta machine, so no macaroni or fun shapes, but I should be able to make good old fashioned noodles if I can get the dough rolled out thin enough. I am 100% Norwegian with Lefsa making in my blood, so I should be able to handle that. There is nothing better than a nice thin piece of Lefsa, my Great Grandpa Odin was the best. But back to pasta (Lefsa can be another day's post)! All you need are a couple of eggs, a pinch of salt and lots of flour. Simple! I may even try some fun colorful noodles such as green (from spinach) and red (from beets) and I wonder if I can even turn some orange from carrots. We shall see. What a great way to get my kids to eat even more veggies, not that they don't already, but veggies are good so what can it hurt.

As technological as this world is getting these days (i.e. all of these blogs and fb and tiny smart phones) there is something comforting in the smell of fresh baked homemade bread. Today I have acorn bread baking. "Acorn?" you may say. Yes, acorn! I received a small vac bag of acorn flour and wild rice flour from a dear friend a couple of years ago and I have substituted acorn flour for wheat flour in one of my bread recipes. In 2 1/2 hours we'll be able to find out how it tastes. I can't even imagine how much work it was to roast and grind enough acorns to hand make this flour. Crazy, and after a year like this of hardly no acorns, the deer and other critters may just be knocking on my door to get a taste of this bread. Hopefully it won't be too hard of a winter on our woodland friends this year. I do kind of cheat when it comes to making bread. When I first started, I did it all by hand, the kneading and mixing and rising. It was great therapy for my hands, but now with 3 kids I have resorted to the bread machine that we received as a wedding present. Much easier and Scott even makes bread from time to time also. Just put in all the ingredients in order, push start and in 3-4 hours you have bread. With all this "getting back to our roots" I know that using a bread machine is "technology" but this way it just leaves me more time to try making pasta and such. At least it is still homemade.

I'll leave today with posting a picture of the beautiful winter sky the other afternoon as I was waiting for Adin to get off the bus from school.