October/November 2024

 I seem to be fully into my cooking/baking season around here! Not much gardening left, and it's cooled off to where I can use the oven without worrying about not having A/C. So I've been spending my on line time with my mushroom identification groups, looking at recipes, and finding new books to read. It's a process...changing from my outdoor living program to indoor living.

First time making eclairs - and I've heard since that you can start with puff pastry....but no, I love doing things the hard way! This recipe starts with water, salt, and butter in a sauce pan, adding flour, making a dough that you knead eggs into.  The recipe called for piping this dough into 4" rectangles. I just put blobs on parchment paper, and they puffed up nicely. Then it called for piping whipped cream into them...I did pipe that in as there wasn't really a way to do otherwise. Then the chocolate mixture was to be piped on top.  I just spread this. They were truly delectable, but a royal pain to make.

Other culinary adventures - chicken noodle soup with homemade noodles, chicken pot pie using the last of the garden vegetables, and lasagne using homemade pasta, Soupa Toscana (copycat Olive Garden variety) and multiple types of cookies.

Then the outside chores began again as a "bomb cyclone" hit us hard. We were without power for 3 and a half days. A gust must have zeroed in on our lakeshore, because all three kayaks were swept off the bank and into the water. Even the big rowboat was moved several feet. 

All the deck chairs were thrown about, 

three roof panels were ripped off the greenhouse, 

and we have no fewer than a dozen trees all over our 10 acres that were uprooted. Many were quite large, but all managed to miss all our buildings! 

The night of the storm, we lay awake for hours listening to pine and fir cones (that sounded like boulders) hitting our metal roof and thumps and bumps that sounded like trees falling.  In the morning, in addition to the downed trees, branches and tree debris littered everything. We'll be cleaning up for a long time, but the happy news is our power is back, and we have about a year's worth of firewood on the ground.

We do have a generator, which made living through this power outage a lot more tolerable than in the past. And in retrieving the boats, I managed to get in a "polar plunge". Not on purpose, but not too cold either. It was such a nice day that I was already thinking I might take a plunge.