French Silk

A looooong time ago, I gave my dad coupons for baked goods for Christmas. 

He gave them back to me that same day with his requests written in and said make them whenever. Unfortunately for him, whenever apparently = years. 😅 I've had them on my fridge since. Yes, in my little Courtland apartment, the Nicollet house, and now our Mankato house. 

My pie crust recipe makes enough for two crusts, a top and bottom. Since I only used one for the pumpkin pie, I had a crust leftover. Time to finally cash in Dad's coupon. 

I'd never made a French Silk pie before, but that seemed to fit the season better than pecan. 

Did I have all the ingredients? Eh, for the most part. No unsweetened chocolate. In true Emily fashion, I searched for a way to make it myself from scratch. Low and behold we had all the ingredients for that on hand. 

Melt cocoa butter in a double boiler, whisk in cocoa powder, cool (in small chunks for easier melting later). 

Looks beautiful doesn't it? Anyone who tastes is in for a rude surprise though - very bitter. 

Time for the innards. 

Pretty easy to mix those up. Cream butter and sugar. Add melted chocolate and vanilla. Beat in each of the three eggs for 4 minutes each egg. Spread in crust. Chill. 

Whipped cream on top. Voila! 

Eat It

Funny Jaron story. I have some pickled teeny brussel sprouts from our garden last year that I want to get out of my fridge, so I've been making a push to eat them. 

I offered some to Jaron for lunch today. 

He put one in his mouth, chewed it for a second, and then spit it out and said "no." 😂 

I said, "you're not going to eat that?" I ate one of the brussel sprouts on his tray. 

He said, "eat it," and held it out to me. (Sometimes he feeds me the things he doesn't want to eat). 

I opened my mouth so he could drop it in... And then he put it in his mouth. I guess it was worth a second try if Mom eats it.

But a moment or two later, he grimaced and spit it out, offering it to me again. 😂

I signed him up for a spring session of ECFE, a messy art session. We've gone twice so far, and both times he's eaten the art supplies. One of the stations was making cloud sand with baby oil and flour. Jaron kept putting fistfuls of the mix into his mouth. The helpers thought it was hilarious; they expected him to take one taste and spit it out. 

I guess that's what you get when you feed your kid weird food. They can't tell the difference between craft supplies and food. 😂 

Paint was this week's taste. I stopped him before he could eat too much. Thankfully there's been a water play table each week and Jaron happily spends most of his time there. He's needed a new outfit both times, but that's a small price to pay for not having to clean up the mess. 😊

Speaking of messes... He really enjoyed his blueberry sauce on pancakes the other day...

Note the blueberry on his eyelid, forehead, and arm. 😆

Eggshell Feeder

I caught Mina in the dog house the other day. 😂

I also caught our garlic coming up! 

Since Jaron and I were outside, I decided to do a little shed maintenance. Those pesky mineral feeders kept getting knocked down by the goats as they turn around to eat out of the end of the feeder. 🙄 One even cracked along the back where it hangs on the wall. I swapped the cracked one for the cat feeder. The cats won't mind a cracked feeder. 

I moved the mineral feeders to the back area away from the food. We have two varieties of mineral, mostly to test which the goats like more. The feeder on the right is the winner! DuMOR is the favorite. 

Next shed update was to make an egg shell feeder for the chickens. They need oyster shell or egg shells to give them calcium to keep their shells thick and hard. Whenever we put shells in the compost, the chickens eat them up right away, so they're definitely craving more calcium. I've been saving shells for a while, so I crunched them into smaller pieces and filled a juice bottle with them. 

The Internet provided the idea for a gravity fed feeder. Two boards, a tuna can, and a couple of screws are all you need. 

And a bottle and a couple zip ties too I suppose. 

They were easy enough to throw together, I made two more. One for kelp (provides iodine) and one for grit. They get enough grit free range from pecking at our driveway, but in the winter it'd be nice to supplement. 

Here they are hanging in the shed! 

I wonder how quickly the chickens will discover them.

Library Books, Lost and Found

I know how notorious library books are at getting lost. I worked in a library for almost two decades, so I've experienced plenty of people who 

A) admitted to losing books and paid for a replacement right away

B) found the book right after they paid for a replacement 

B) claimed library books had been returned and demanded that we look for them on the shelves because we forgot to beep them in. Occasionally they were found on the shelf. Most of the time not, and the book or movie would show up a few days later in the outside dropbox. 

All the years I taught, I checked out hundreds of books for my classroom and never lost any. So I'm pretty good at keeping track of library books. 

Jaron has a stack from the library I keep in the living room on a particular shelf. So far I've been able to keep track of them pretty easily, but somehow in mid-February I lost three. Yes. Three. 

I distinctly remember putting my finished library book in the library bag along with two of Jaron's selections I was tired of reading. I also remember rushing to get out the door for a speaking engagement, remembering I needed books to entertain Jaron during class, and swapping the library books for books we owned. 

That's the last time I remember seeing them. 

I thought I had returned them, but I got a renewal notice. Wait, not returned?? I could see a librarian making a mistake and not checking one book back in, but three? Not likely. And thus my search began. 

At first it was looking in the most obvious places. Nothing. Then the unlikely places. Nada. This continued for about a month here and there until I finally got an overdue notice. Time for a serious search. 

I decided to search the entire house from wall to wall, top to bottom. I made a list of all the rooms in our house, the cars, even the garage, checking them off as I went. 

Jaron searched too. 

Oh wait, that was busy work while I searched. 😆

Every cupboard and shelf, inside closets, under beds and dressers. No library books. 

I kept coming back to the thought I'd returned them, but there being three missing made me question. 

I only had a few rooms left to search, and none of them seemed likely. I had to contemplate paying for the books. G recommended going to the library to look for them myself, but I wanted to finish the search at home first. 

This week I got a renewal notice for some other Jaron books. I noticed one of the missing books wasn't listed. After logging into my library account, I realized that one of the missing books was not on my account anymore! Could that mean I did return them?!

G actually searched the library shelves for me on Monday while I had a chiropractor appointment. And guess what. He found both! They were on the shelf where they belonged. 

Somehow all three missed getting beeped. 🤦‍♀️ All that searching and wracking my brain for nothing! But at least the lost have been found. 

Beer Bread Muffins

I found a very good cheesy beer bread recipe longer ago that has since become my go to when I need to use up old beer. 

This time, instead of making a loaf, I tried muffins. 

The butter bubbled up and I worried it would overflow, so I put the tin on a cookie sheet to save my oven. 

They turned out pretty good! 

The next pan didn't get filled quite so high. 😅 

I didn't have any issues with butter overflowing this batch. 

I also sprinkled the herbs on top instead of mixing them into the butter. Then I brushed the tops with butter at the end. That worked just fine too. 

Most went in the freezer for future use. I've found they freeze and reheat quite well! 

Bigger

The ducklings are quickly growing. We had them in a box in the laundry room, but they've graduated to a bigger box in the garage. Only three didn't hatch, so we ended up with seven out of 12 (one got cracked partway through incubation and we got rid of it). My guess is those three must've been the ones not in the turner. 

The broody hen up in the haymow is still broody. There's a second one up there often, so maybe we'll have two mamas. How far into the 21 day incubation are we? Not sure, but the weather forecast looks pretty nice coming up, so maybe the chicks will make it.

I caught these two sharing a nesting box. 😂

Someone else is getting bigger too. Must be going through a growth spurt...

After I took this picture, he topped his meal with about 2/3rds of a cheese stick. 😱 Where does he put it all???

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?