Pie Fail

Our Japanese students have never had pumpkin pie before so I whipped one up for them to try. 

It baked beauuuutifully. And then we took a bite. 

A very harsh, bitter flavor similar to anise was all you could taste. 😩 I thought I had accidentally doubled the spices. 

The crust was too good to throw away and the custard innards seemed easy to scoop out...

So I mixed up the filling adding more pumpkin, some cream, more sugar, some vanilla extract, and some almond extract. 

It lessened the spiciness, but the aftertaste was still bad. Too late in the day to bake. Maybe an overnight in the fridge would help. 

This morning I pulled out the tweaked filling. The bad aftertaste remained. I decided to remake the filling altogether. 

When I added the lemon extract to the new mix, I noticed it had a harsh smell nothing like lemon. A quick Google search revealed that lemon extract doesn't go bad necessarily, but it can break down into bitter compounds. Ahhh, that explains it. 

I dumped the new filling with the bad extract; thankfully I'd only mixed the liquids, not the whole thing. I remade the filling again. Baked it again. Covered the crust with tin foil so it wouldn't burn in the rebake. 

This version tasted much better! The girls enjoyed their piece. I was disappointed with the thickness of the crust (which I had wondered about in version 1.0), but otherwise it passed muster. The place where I puzzle pieced the crust together even turned out okay. The filling didn't get underneath the majority of the pie and it was easy to cut and serve.

Now what to do with the original doctored up filling?? Dump? Or add cream cheese to salvage it?

Prosthesis Upgrade

At our last NICU follow-up clinic we also had a meeting with our prosthetic team. I call it a team because there were about five people meeting with us - the dr, his fellow, a resident, the owner of Limb Lab, and another Limb Lab consultant. Everyone wants to be part of Jaron's journey! 

They saw immediately the issues with the prosthesis. It came too high up on Jaron's armpit so he couldn't even have the arm relaxed against his body. It was too long compared to his other arm and his shoulder was pushed up if he tried to weight bear on his left side. And no bend. 

The owner of Limb Lab had ideas. So did everyone else. It was a giant swirl of conversation where people built off each other's thoughts to come up with something better. 

Turns out what we have is prototype #1. 

They took it to Limb Lab to make immediate adjustments that day. We stuck around to have Jaron try it on before they glued things in place, but he fell asleep before they could, so they eyeballed it and sent it home with us. 

Prototype #2:

Much easier to take on and off. They recrafted the seat for his residual limb so that there's not suction pulling his flipper when he's wearing it.

Reaching for the cow pictures. 😅

I can actually put it on him and walk away without worrying about him getting stuck. He doesn't seem to mind having it on. 

He will put weight on it but hasn't mastered crawling on all fours yet. It's definitely building muscles he hasn't used before! 

It was a little short after they cut the arm and made a bend. They made it easy to take the foam pad off and put the hand back on, so I did. Now the height is practically perfect. 

I put it on him in the high chair for snacks one afternoon and had him work for his food. He figured out that he needed to hold his arm down so the cup wouldn't move as he dug raisins out. 

He had so much fun, that when I took the top off so he could easily grab them out, he put the top back on. Then after he was full, he took the raisins out and put them back in again. 😂

One thing I don't love about this model is that it sometimes works its way off his flipper. As in it comes off without me taking it off. I wonder if it's too short now. I need to take a picture of it in the act and send it to the professionals. This is prototype #2- they plan to make more tweaks before making the final model and billing insurance. 

Moving Day

A friend from church came over this afternoon to hang out with Jaron so I could get some work done outside. 

First, I set up a board across the compost bins to keep the birds from scratching everything out. 

Next, I fixed the holes in the trampoline. The chicks have outgrown their box in the garage and need a new home stat.

Blue twine is this year's color.

I think the fixes will hold this year now that the trampoline is on the outside of the goat pasture. The big chickens were curious what I was doing...

Setting up some roosts was the big thing besides plugging holes.

We loaded the chicks in a tote with a great over the top and transferred them to the trampoline. Looks like we have some Polish chicken genetics in our new flock.

They were pretty nervous at first and huddled together inside the wooden box.

Meanwhile, we got the feed and water set up on a pallet to hopefully prevent waste.

A couple chicks are braver than the others. 

The last thing I got done was to set up the mineral feeders again post sliding door installation. We have two different kinds of mineral. Sweetliks is on the left, and DuMor is on the right. We'll see which kind goats like the best!

 

Sliding Door

We now have a sliding door on our shed! 

G had gotten it from a coworker giving it away, and it's been sitting in our garage since waiting to go in the shed. 

Why a sliding door? Mostly to let in light in the winter. There's no heat in the shed, and when the door is closed to keep the heat in, it's pretty dark.

I think it will do quite nicely! 

G has a friend handy in construction who happened to finish a job early yesterday. We're planning to do an addition to the shed this summer with his help, so he stopped over to take a look at the space. When he found out about our sliding door plans, he thought he could install that in a couple hours. So he did!

The goats seem unfazed. At first I worried that lots of junk would get stuck in the door track, but the way the door is manufactured, there isn't much space for junk to accumulate. If all else fails and it becomes a problem, we will just put a rug over the threshold to block junk from clogging up the sliding part of the door.

 

3D Printer Challenge

You might recall my brother-in-law 3D printed us an egg turner for our incubator that would fit duck eggs. He had said that he was looking for more 3D printing challenges, so send them his way. 

I saw a 3D printed item on Facebook marketplace for holding canning supplies. Not going to pay $20 for it, but I bet Chris could make it for me... 

Yes, yes he could. 

There's a program/app that has all sorts of ideas of things that can be made with 3D printing. Ivy looked through that site to find a printing plan that matched up with what I had seen on marketplace. She found a few other designs and ultimately I went with separate holders for lids and bands. 

I haven't maximized their use fully. I need to sort through my canning supplies first, but you get the idea! 

New Arrivals on the Homestead

We're hosting two Japanese students for two weeks. Well, it was supposed to be two weeks. Our two girls were scheduled to arrive Sunday night, but the blizzard caused the airline to cancel their flights. The soonest they could rebook was for Wednesday.

We pick them up last night from MSU and served them a welcome meal of spaghetti. They heard Minnesota is the land of hot dish, so their one food request for the trip was to try hotdish. Tonight's menu is tater tot hotdish, the most Minnesota hot dish we could think of. 😄

Other new arrivals are two baby ducks! I could see at least five more eggs with cracks in their shells, so there will be more by tonight for sure. 

Not new arrivals, but G caught this chick roosting on the heat lamp cord. 

Time to put a top on the box. 😅

They are fully feathered out now and are entering the awkward teenage phase. 😂

Jaron loves watching animals of all kinds, but especially birds. 

And especially Dad. 😂

He never fails to earn a smile and oftentimes a laugh when G is spotted. 😊

Goat Milk Cashew Cheesecake

My mother-in-law told me about a grocery store in Arizona near their home that carried goat milk cream cheese. My sister-in-law is allergic to cow dairy, and I know she laments not being able to enjoy cheesecake. I do enjoy cheesecake, so when I found out about the goat cream cheese, I decided to make a cheesecake while we were in Arizona. 

I brought graham cracker crumbs, arrowroot powder, and vanilla extract with me since those weren't on hand in the Arizona kitchen. My mother-in-law asked around for a springform pan. We went to the store and found goat cheese and cashew cream cheese, but no goat cream cheese. Turns out she had combined the two products in her head. No problem! Chat GPT was able to adjust the recipe for goat cheese and cashew cream cheese, keeping the recipe free from cow products. 

(There is some Greek yogurt in this recipe, and that is okay for my sister-in-law to have, so not completely cow product free). 

Make the crust the usual way. While it's baking, combine the cashew cream cheese and the goat cheese together, blending well so there aren't any goat cheese chunks remaining. Add the sugar and Greek yogurt mixing well. I must say, at this point, it was quite tasty.

Beat the egg whites into soft peaks. I did this and then had to pause for some reason, and I think the egg whites began to separate, because when I scooped some out of the bowl, there was some liquid at the bottom of the bowl. I whipped it a little bit longer to get it to recombine, but I'm not sure if that impacted the bake of the cheesecake. 🤷‍♀️

I'm kicking myself a little bit. When I first came up with the recipe, I told chat that I didn't have a springform pan. It recommended baking in the oven with a tray of water below to help with the humidity needed for a non-cracking cheesecake. I never updated the recipe to specify that I had a springform pan. If I had, I'm sure the instructions would have changed to cooking in a hot water bath. Instead, I did the water pan underneath.

The cheesecake baked nicely, even though it had quite a few small cracks.

Let cool in a cracked oven for 1 hour and then move to the fridge for at least 6 hours.

I made a blueberry, strawberry, blackberry sauce to go on top.

Here's the cheesecake after chilling in the fridge overnight.

So many cracks! Apparently egg whites in cheesecake are more likely to crack along with baking without a hot water bath. Thankfully it didn't impact the taste: purely cosmetic. 

I fancied it up with the berry sauce and a couple sprigs of mint. Voila! So delicious. My sister-in-law agreed. Maybe it's been too long since I've had actual cheesecake, but I didn't detect much of a difference taste and texture wise. 

I would definitely make it again if I could find the ingredients up here...

Cold Weather

My in-laws winter in Arizona and we are usually able to make it down there for a visit sometime in late winter/early spring. We spent last week in the dry warmth of Arizona. 

It was a relaxing trip for the most part. Poor Jaron started teething the day we arrived and was miserable the first two days - congested, feverish, and clearly a sore mouth. He couldn't get comfortable. And couldn't sleep. And only wanted mom. 

So he hung out in the carrier quite a bit. I stood on the deck and rocked him to sleep while reading my book. 

But the two teeth broke through and he bounced back to his normal self in a couple days. I can feel all four of his molars coming in so the best is yet to come...

These two pictures are from when he started to feel better.

What else did we do? Tried a couple restaurants, visited a farmers market, walked around the fountain daily, and did a ridge hike (a natural path up a hill surrounded by Arizona wilderness, picture lots of cacti). 

G and I spent a little time in the pool. Unfortunately, Jaron wasn't allowed. 😭 A sign said no infants in diapers were allowed in the pool. Not even swim diapers? We decided not to take the chance since my father-in-law is president of the HOA. Hopefully they will clarify that rule before we come back. 

So, most of our time was spent entertaining Jaron. The weather was the warmest I've ever experienced on one of these trips- one day in the 70s, the rest 80s and even a 90 degree day! We soaked up the heat on the deck. 

We flew home right before the big blizzard hit Minnesota!

This was on the way down to Arizona. Jaron enjoyed the slide while we waited in the Sioux Falls airport!

Hot Chocolate From Scratch

I've been on the hunt for a from scratch hot chocolate recipe for a while. With the snowy weather, I figured I'd see what chat gpt had to say...

Not knowing how it would turn out, I heated up some almond milk separately - we like to add a little honey and lavender essential oil to make a non chocolate hot beverage. 

It turned out pretty good! I kept the recipe. Next time I'll try subbing honey or maple syrup for the cane sugar. 

 

Incubation vs Broody

To get more color in our duck eggs, we're hatching a bunch of the green ones. 

They've been growing for about two weeks now. We candled them at one week and this is what we saw:

Amazing! That they grow so quickly and that we can see it with just a little light through the shell. 

The duck eggs are bigger than the chicken eggs, so they didn't fit in the egg turner that came with the incubator. G has been rotating them by hand. 

Until my brother-in-law 3D printed us a slightly bigger egg turner. 

It works great! although not all the eggs fit. If we cut out that triangle between the eggs and extend one side, we could fit six more in the turner. That can be prototype #2. For now, we turn those four by hand. 

The ducks we have don't go broody, that is sit on their eggs. Over the years that trait has been bred out of their breed/genetics. My dad says he notices this with chickens; the chickens hatched and raised by hens are better at being chickens than the ones incubated. Interesting nature vs nurture observation. 

We do have a chicken who's gone broody. She's up in the haymow and doesn't like to leave the clutch of eggs. 

We're still collecting the eggs under her so she won't hatch any. I'm tempted to let her try, but I'm nervous about chicks hatching when it's cold. I wonder how long she'll stay broody. Maybe we'll let her sit on eggs later this month for some April chicks. 

Squash Party

Throwback Thursday! 

I drafted this post in early January and lost it in the shuffle. Jaron looks a lot smaller, doesn't he? Some of these photos are too cute to pass up, so here's the post. Better late than never... 😅

We have a bunch of squash moldering in the fruit room. Actually, most of it is keeping fine, but some are getting wrinkled and soft. We also have a box of leftover pie pumpkins from the garden center that are starting to mold/get soft, so we need to have a squash party to cook it up.

Jaron loved to pat the squash. 

And eat the leaves that snuck inside in the crate. 😜

After getting bored with that, he discovered this large cardboard box previously holding pumpkins. 

Back to the squash. 

Cut in half, seeded, baked upside down, now cooling to be scooped.

And occupying Jaron with his alphabet puzzle - a gift from Auntie Eileen for Christmas. He particularly loved the letter P. Maybe the way it fits into his mouth? 

Some of the pumpkin was quite stringy inside, almost like a spaghetti squash. Is that the variety or because it's undercooked? 

The squash got packed into cubes which went on a tray in the freezer. 

We'll use them in soups, reheating to eat plain, and even in muffins!