Monday, November 10, 2008

The First Snow Fall of the Winter

Actually, our first snow fell on Monday, 10/27/08, but melted quickly. Two days later I took the photos you see posted here. It was quite beautiful and very soothing to the soul. Today, November 10th, we've had our REALLY FIRST SNOW, which means that the parking area had to be plowed and access to the mail box carved out for our postal delivery person.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

I'm BACK !!

A lot (and I mean A LOT) has gone on in Findley Lake since my last post in July. I'll try and tackle various topic updates in separate posts.

In my life, emotional and physical well-being are tied to my desire to cook. No cookie, no feel well.

After a very social and congenial two hour breakfast with friends at the Blue Heron Inn this morning, I was inspired to cook. Part of our morning discussion concerned comfort food. My straight forward husband goes right for the ice cream. One friend chose Asian food. My choice was whole hominy with butter, salt and pepper. When I was growing up, my Mother served us sausage patties and whole hominy. It was just in the past few years that I found out my youngest brother also opens a can of hominy on occasion as emotional and nutritional sustenance. It's funny how those totally simple foods can soothe the soul.

So starting at 3:30 pm, I started cooking up a storm. Microwaved a small pumpkin (1/2 at a time) and froze most of it for the dog's suppers. Put on a pot of 15 bean soup. Took a spiral sliced ham that we'd been working on and removed the meat. Put the bone into the simmering soup and froze most of the meat. We had frizzled ham and broccoli for supper. The extra broccoli and left over pumpkin are in a bowl ready for the dog's supper tomorrow night.

One recipe ended up a little modified due to my slip of not including sugar in the bowl. I was making two pumpkin pies using the Lakeshore Pumpkin recipe (best pumpkin pie, dense and tasty. The pies were within 15 minutes of being finished when I realized my error. OOOPS ! However, I'm into the glass half full/lemons into lemonade life so this might work out better. The Lakeshore recipe called for 1 1/2 cups sugar. I have taken to using half sugar and half Splenda, which has been OK. Tonight, realizing that I'd completely omitted both, I decided to try caramelizing brown sugar on top. Right now, I'm not sure that I performed the caramelizing process properly but, if we like the pie with a light sugar and whipped cream topping, it will end up actually less sweet than the original recipe. For any of you diabetics out there, I'll let you know if it's good this way. If it ends up that we like it, my glass will be overflowing.

I still have one more recipe to make tonight (beside completing the 15 bean soup). I make a quiche with bacon, onions, eggs, cream, nutmeg, and graham cracker crust. I find it delicious while my husband finds the sweet flavor of the crust too different from regular crust to really enjoy. It's a sweet/savory quiche. I'll post the recipe later.

Now that we've eaten supper and I've got my second wind, it's time to finish up the seasoning in the soup and put the quiche in to bake. Nice to be back.