And we have an egg! My eldest went out to check the chickens, and they have started laying again after almost 5 months. Phew! I still have powdered egg in the freezer, so the experiment to see if we could last without fresh eggs was successful, but I don’t think we will repeat it next year. I may save some powdered eggs, and I may try glassing some, but I’m not above buying fresh eggs when the hens have their hiatus.
Now where is the rest of her body? Oh, curled up in the hammock directly behind her. Camera angles are amazing tricksters. No photoshopping here. She does love her hammocks.
I’ve been baking more bread since I discovered that Heritage Wheat doesn’t bother my digestive system. Recipes cavalierly throw around “rise until double” and I have been bumbling along hoping I wait long enough (but not too long) for the dough to rise to “double”. So what is double? To see, I blew up three balloons, one 5” in diameter, one that was double the first in volume (6.3” in diameter), and one that was double the first in diameter (10” in diameter). Hm. The double in volume seems smaller than my successful proofs, and I have never achieved the size of double in diameter.
So I went looking for an explanation and found this article. The author goes much farther into mathematical models, but at the end, suggests a better method: the finger poke method. With practice, one should be able to tell how long to prove dough by pressing on it with a finger and seeing how the dough reacts. If the dough springs back, it needs more proving. If the dough stays depressed, it is over-proved. Somewhere in the middle is the right time.
I now can’t get the Pillsbury Doughboy image out of my head. If this method is correct, he was under-proved, by the way. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? Here you go.)
Trail cam caught the image of a wild rabbit! I haven’t seen one of those in awhile. I was afraid the local cat population had taken them all out. I’m glad they are still around.
You’re welcome for the ear worm. Happy singing.
Yesterday my weather app said that we were getting heavy snow. What was falling from the sky is not what I call snow. It made a “tink” noise as it hit the ground and bounced… then stuck. In the morning it looked like we had and inch of snow on the ground, but it was completely solid and could hold weight, no footprints in this accumulation. The National Weather Service describes sleet as frozen raindrops that bounce. The Farmer’s Almanac says sleet is rain mixed with snow. (They also have an article on all the words for snow. Cool.) But none of that adequately describes what was happening here. I think the best term is “ice storm”. I have seen ice accumulation before, but not where the ice layer can be measured in inches. There was a pile of the stuff out our front door that could hold my weight.
I was able to pick up a bit that was on an outside cat hammock, and when I zoomed in I could see the tiny, tiny round ice. No crystals at all.
It did eventually start to snow for real, all on top of that thick, thick ice.
Critters and Craft 