So I’m delighted to report that really … NOTHING is going on right now. Still.
Or at least, so little that I haven’t bothered posting anything in quite some time. So I have saved up some interesting tidbits for you to enjoy. I could probably make a bunch of little posts but I thought, ‘Nah, let’s just merge it all into one massive dump post!’.
Ready? Here we go.
Early in January, I got an email from a neighbor. They wanted to do a mid-Winter pot luck. This was in fact a fabulous idea because there’s not much going on and it’s sometimes nice to get out and be sociable.
Pot lucks of course always lend to a thrilling ‘whatever shall we cook?’ opportunity and I’m happy to say that Dave and I acquitted ourselves quite well.
The best part was that we got to serve as guest chefs at our neighbors house. They very graciously allowed us to utilize their facilities for the purpose of making edibles! Here you can see Dave putting some finishing touches on his single serving chicken pot pies (the red and orange ramekins to his left). This was a classic realization of ‘Your eyes are bigger than your stomach’. Those little ramekins don’t look like much but once you’ve eaten chicken pot pie filling down to the bottom, plus a little round of biscuit crust, it was just about right. Naturally, we landed in the overachievers catagory. I also made my sweet taters dish the night before. Normally I make this dish for Thanksgiving but I didn’t this year. 
There were also these tasty cracker dealies and a tray of deviled eggs. Two salads, a bread/sausage tray. One of the other pot-luckers brought their espresso machine –
I was beginning to think he was going to get stuck in the kitchen making coffee for almost everyone!
And yeah…I put on my dessert hat and came up with something fun. I did say ‘overachiever’ right?
There were several dacquiose involved. And a lot of concentration.
Part of the reason I chose this dessert is because A – it didn’t sound like it would be terribly lengthy or complicated (it wasn’t) and B – they did something with chocolate that I had always thought was a big no-no.
They had me melt chocolate chips in water. Now, if you’ve ever made ganache, one of the first rules of ganache is ‘DO NOT GET WATER ANYWHERE NEAR THE MELTING CHOCOLATE/CREAM MIXTURE’.
Why? It locks up tighter than the brakes on an 18 wheeler in a Michael Bay movie (right before the explosions, of course). Further investigation reveals that you can sometimes reclaim a ‘frozen’ ganache with the careful administration of other substances (some use milk, others used corn syrup). Anyway this recipe called for melting the chocolate with water then spreading it thinly on the dacquoise. The fun thing about this is the chocolate hardens into a solid layer – totally unlike a ganache which stays squishy. Makes for fun textures for your mouth to play with. It worked perfectly.
While frosting covers a myriad of sins, I would probably recommend A – doubling this particular recipes frosting quantity and B – making sure all your cake edges are pretty much even. Regardless, it was quite tasty with a couple people calling for second slices.
While the food was all very tasty, it was very pleasant indeed spending an evening chattering at folks I don’t often get to spend time with. Did I say ‘evening’? We’re all sitting in the living room merrily chattering away when I happened to check my phone for something and realized we were well into the 1:00 hour of the morning. WHOA!!! Happily though, the drive home was accomplished in like 45 seconds – literally.
I think they all had a good time as well and in fact one of the other couples has since suggested to me that we find another evening to get together and babble about anything and everything. Yay!
Continuing in the food trends, our local cafe had a Valentine’s Day event. Naturally we signed up to attend and were totally satisfied with the evenings choices. I have to say that Dave’s steak thingy was better than my chicken thingy. Nothing beat the chocolate brûlée, however.
Steak thingy.
Stuffed chicken with risotto thingy.
Chocolate brûlée. Mmmmmm.
Huh. That’s another thing I’ve never tried making. Crème brûlée. Oh, also in the newly conquered department – pancakes.
No, no I’ve never tried pancakes. Anytime there’s a pancake craving going on around here Dave steps in and POOF! Pancakes. Well. It was my craving so I took a shot at it.
Strangely, specimen #1 turned out the prettiest.
Here’s the very popular ‘It’s ready to flip on the bottom, but the top is still a little loose’ look from specimen #2.
Specimen #6, modified. Chocolate chip inclusions identified. Also featured – leftover whipped cream cake frosting from the party above.
Dave took it to a different level –
The pancakes were good, but a tiny bit too sweet, I think. All of them did also feature pure Canadian Maple Syrup though. That’s a must.
Okay then there was a batch of chocolate chip cookies. These were fun in that they used cream cheese in addition to butter and more brown sugar than white. Also, cornstarch. They pretty much stayed in the same shape that I put them onto the tray. Very POOFY. But tasty!
I decided that 2017 is the year of the American Goldfinch. 2014/15 was Common Redpolls, 2015/16 was Pine Siskins and now we have these little buggers.
The days when it was really cold, they would arrive mid-morning in great, cheeping droves. Good thing I’ve got a bag of black oil sunflower seeds.
Speaking of the weather, holy cow, have a taste of spring! We’re on our third or fourth day of above 0(c)/32(f) weather and it’s amazing. 40 fahrenheits in February? I’ll take it!
It’s also a fine chance to clean the chimney. A difficult thing to manage when your roof is buried in snow. But it shed its load of snow yesterday. Which was fun because I was outside at the time and was able to watch nearly the ENTIRE roof unload in one go.
Don’t light a fire with it like this.
Ah, clean chimney. And dirty horses.
But there’s nothing like tossing off the blankets and taking a mid-winter roll.
Followed by a brief sprint about the arena, it’s a good afternoon.
Here’s the snowload on the PooPooRoom. It, along with the icy overhang, I was suspecting of contributing to the increasingly awkward tendency of the door to not latch. That’s a bit unpleasant. Don’t want to be tending to business with the door unclosable.
Here’s the ice shelf –
This over hang was a good 16 inches and that was awhile ago. So what is the best solution to this difficulty? Put some nut job on the roof with a shovel.
I probably should’ve remeasured it before I went crazy and cleared it all but you get the idea.
The fun part of getting off the roof was just sliding off the end into the pile of the snow.
Here’s a random thing. This is the ice stalagmite that forms underneath the refridgerators exhaust vent. Dave has to break off the dangly bits almost every morning. While this may not look like much it does come up to the bottom step on that ladder. What? 12 inches? Or so? Anyway.
For a time there we had a nice sun shade in the form of roof skin sheddings that refused to drop off. There’s a good two feet or more of melty, refrozen snowy stuff hanging off there.
There’s a nice view from the poopooroom. We’ve got our winter on, for sure.
~K~
The Katbox... 