Friday, January 23, 2015

We've got ourselves a cool kid!

We'll see if I can crank out a quick blog post before we sit down to roasted chicken with potatoes and shallots, roasted squash, and two of Kali's recently created recipes (chili polenta and lima salsa chili).  It might be wishful thinking as the smaller of our two gals is showing signs of the potential for a hunger-melt-down.  But I'll give it a try!

So we have ourselves two cool kids, but one of them has been particularly delightful to be around of late.  I know stages come and go and the best approach is just to savor each one (or in some cases bear them knowing they will likely come to an end).

Both girls can often be found perusing cookbooks. Kali will often find a recipe or two that she thinks would be fun to make together.  This week she was looking through a cookbook with the things we have in excess in mind (helping us stick to our "no grocery shopping" attempts - last time we bought groceries at the store was December 4th).  So this week we enjoyed Tennessee Cornpone thanks to her inspiration.  But after looking through a good number of books she was not finding recipes that interested her so she decided to make some up.

Before the end of the evening, five new recipes had been created.  She was going back and forth between our pantry and root cellar, asking me from time to time if certain things were things we wanted to use up.  It was great!!  And she has a pretty good sense for good food combos.  So far we have downed her Red Lentil and Tomato soup in one sitting.  We'll try two more tonight and we have the last two on the calendar for the coming days.

A few other quick updates:

The third brood of chicks has hatched. It was another great hatch with 9 of 10 hatching. Unfortunately one little chick met its fate when it got stuck under a stick in the nest. We hate that!  The others, from the brief peek I got at them today, look fuzzy and quite perky.  It seems like all the adult chickens in the composting coop are pretty much taking all these new inhabitants in stride.  The only ones that seem to be struggling are the mama hens.  While we were in the coop today the one mama hen who had free reign of the place was attempting to fight with the mama hens in enclosures with their chicks.  Hopefully the oldest chicks will head out to range before too long.  There is one more brood set to hatch in a few weeks.

Progress continues on the bathroom project and in little snippets of time on other homestead tasks.  This week Jason and Jonathan started work on path and bed creation in the herb garden. Our old bathtub is now in position with stinging nettle starts.  The bathroom framing is done and today Jason started installing cement board and drywall is next. Little by little!

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