Pumpkin Rolls

One of the things I did over Christmas break was  make my family's favorite pumpkin roll recipe to serve for Christmas dinner. 

I did tweak the recipe slightly to reduce the sugar in the rolls after consulting Chat gpt: 

It's recommendation was to do 2-3T of sugar minimum, so I did 2T. 

The batch makes quite a few and of course I had to step out on an errand right in the middle of the rise/baking. So, I used my front deck as a refrigerator to slow the rise until I could bake them. 

I didn't want the cats to get into them, so I wanted to have all three trays under a tote for protection. But how to stack? One pan came with a lid tall enough the dough wouldn't touch. For the other two pans, I tried these metal condiment cups. 

Not quite tall enough; the rolls were touching the pan above. 

How about glass jars? I found two baby food jars the same height and placed them at opposite corners. 

Not too tippy! 

They all fit perfectly under the tote. 

When I got home, I brought the rolls in, let them warm up some, and baked. They took longer than expected to cook, probably because they were cold from outside. After taking out the first two pans and sampling one that wasn't quite done, I popped them back in the oven to finish cooking. That fixed it! 

Overall, I thought the texture and color turned out fine, but the flavor was lacking. Next time, I'll add more salt and probably do more sugar. Maybe an 1/8th of a cup?

RIP Christmas Tree

Epiphany has passed so it's "acceptable" to take the Christmas decorations down. 😅 That's the way we did it growing up. Of course, they can stay up longer, but they can't come down before Epiphany. 

Our tree was dropping needles, so it was time for that to go. The corner looks really empty; we definitely need to rearrange the living room pronto! 

The lights have been fun, so I'll keep those up longer. Maybe hang them up around our living room window. I'm keeping our nativity scene up longer too. Not sure about the stockings... they'll probably come down soon, especially if we rearrange the living room.

The tree ended up on the deck for the goats to nibble on. They came over to check it out and give it a nibble, but they're not super interested right now. 

They've been getting greens regularly since G brought leftovers from the garden center and goats do get tired of eating the same thing over and over. 

One last thing we'll do with the tree is shave a disk off the bottom. We'll drill a hole in the top to make an ornament and write a little summary of our year on the back. 

Determined

Just a fun Jaron story for my post today...

He's become fluent in crawling, so he can travel from room to room. Typically he is on the hunt for G or me, but recently, he has been more exploratory. Time to baby proof everything!!!

This morning, he crawled from the living room all the way to the nursery. At first I thought he was on the hunt for me, but when he saw me in the kitchen, he grinned and continued down the hallway. 

In the nursery, he went straight to the diaper bin and pulled one out. He did get distracted by toys, but when I came into the room he called for me. He had me help him stand, then took off walking while I held his hand/flipper. 

I directed him to the bathroom, wondering if he had to go since he took the diaper out, but he led me right back to the nursery and the changing table. I guess he did just want a diaper change! 

Freeze Dried Purple Potatoes

The collection of purple potatoes we bought earlier this fall from a local farm stand were all sprouting. We cooked them up in a gigantic batch of mashed potatoes. 

G spread the leftovers on our freeze dryer trays. After freeze drying, he pulverized them in the food processor. Now we have instant purple potatoes! 

 

Subbing in 5th on the 5th

Back in the classroom again today. This is the classroom where I did the long-term subbing a couple years ago, so I'm very familiar with the day's schedule and the curriculum. Their regular teacher knows me well, so she planned a normal day of lessons with the students. A nice challenge for me as opposed to the usual easy days teachers plan for subs. It felt like I had never stepped away from teaching. 

Of course the students were chatty since this was their first day back from Christmas break. We managed though. The day was busy enough there wasn't much down time for mischief. 

The second class of 5th graders had a little extra time after their English lesson for me to read aloud. We picked the book Lost in the Wild, a choose your own adventure book about surviving in the Boundary Waters of MN. The class wanted to die, so they tried choosing bad idea paths. We did finish one storyline that ended with the death of the sister, and then went back to try again. We ran out of time but were able to finish the story after social studies later in the day. I could tell the students were waffling between making choices they wanted to and ones they thought would end in disaster. It was cool to listen to their interactions as they debated what choices to make. A surprise to no one, we kept going with endings and revising choices all the extra time we had, so we had to stop in the middle of a story thread- the boy just found his sister trapped by a mama bear. They had me leave the book with them so their regular classroom teacher could finish reading it to them sometime.

My day ended with PE. Not my favorite subject. You'd think it wouldn't be so bad being the teacher instead of the student. Wrong. All the squirrelyness comes out at PE, even the typically well-behaved kids. We played four corner hockey. It was the first time they were exposed to the game and they were super confused even with the video explanation. Basically, there are four teams- one in each corner of the gym. They have a goal made of cones and there are four pins set up in the goal. Each team wants to knock down everyone else's pins and bring them back to their goal. Sounds simple enough. 

Setup took a ton of work: 20 cones, five in each corner. 16 pins, four in one color for each corner (the bonus pin, one per team), three of one color for each team (although I suppose you wouldn't have to have them be color coded. Then there are a ton of foam balls rolling around the floor which are irresistible to students with hockey sticks. So the majority of the class hit balls with their sticks while I tried to get the PE set up students actually setting things up. We only played for 10 of the 30min PE time when it was all said and done. Lots of grouchy kids tattling that someone snuck into the goal to knock down a pin or went behind the goal to knock them down. I'm sure it will be more smooth the next time they play. Not many of them enjoyed the game, so I'm sure there will be a lot of complaints the next time they attempt to play it...

Now time to head home and see Jaron! I'm curious how he did hanging out with G all day at work...

Merry Christmas!

I'm going on Christmas break! See you in the new year! 

Christmas Tree

I grew up with a real Christmas tree for a few  of my formative years, at least, before my mom got sick of picking out all the needles from the carpet. I was so sad when she got an artificial tree, and she said when I have my own place, I can have whatever kind of tree I want. 

Even though I've been on my own for over a decade, this is the first real tree I've put up. Or rather, G put up. He did the heavy lifting. 😜 When we first got married we decided we'd only have real trees. The year we got married, I put my artificial tree up and we got rid of it after the season. Our first year, we moved/were remodeling the new house, so we didn't set up a tree. Last year, we were in the hospital with Jaron. Third time's the charm! 

G got a nice one from the garden center. They aren't selling trees this year, instead they got a few for their employees and longtime patrons to purchase. 

Ours arrived on our homestead before Thanksgiving, but because of our travels, we waited to put it up until we got home from Japan so no one would have to water it. Of course, it was buried under a snow bank. Then the frigid temps made G want to wait until warmer weather showed up to bring it in the house. 

Thankfully warm weather came and the tree made it inside ...

Jaron loves it. So far he's stayed away from it, although certain ornaments really lure him in. I hung the soft, nonbreakable ones around the bottom. 

I have all my ornaments from when I was a kid, and we have the ornaments from the wedding ornament shower G's family hosted for us. No ornaments from G though. I told him I felt bad the tree is mostly "me" and he said, "Well, let's get mine from my parents'!" We sorted through their decorations and brought a whole bunch back. We have a lot of ornaments... Still, I found room for his too. 

Tada!
 

One thing we didn't discuss about trees is what goes at the top. Me: star. G: nothing. I won that battle. 😄