chromedome

This one speaks very directly to my own sense of humour. At one point, when my kids were small, my then-wife and I were in the kitchen cooking or cleaning (I forget which). My wife, gesturing absently in my direction: "Pass me over a towel, please?" Me: (Drops towel on the floor, picks her up - eliciting a startled squawk - and passes her over the towel) This is the place where I often say "I found it much funnier than she did," but in this particular case she also laughed pretty hard.

Found by my GF on Facebook:

Last night was one of the coldest nights of the year thus far (perhaps the coldest), with our deck thermometer showing -20 (about 0F) and the various forecasts projecting wind chill in the -25 to -28 range. So of course, that's when the breaker for the outdoor outlet on the south side of our house chose to randomly trip (we keep a couple of "garage ready" freezers on our deck, and once in a blue moon their cycles will overlap and trip the breaker). Which, in turn, meant that our heated chicken watering bucket became an unheated bucket, and was frozen almost solid by morning. Not a Really Big Deal in the scheme of things, but it meant some extra running around for me on a morning I'd hoped to be done with the critters quickly because I have work-related deadlines coming up. Anyway, the breaker is reset, the solid block of ice melted out of the waterer under the bathtub tap, and "normal service has resumed." Kind of a minor thing, but I could have done without it. Especially given that with it being so cold, I had to manually empty and refill all of the waterers in the quail cage as well. Usually only the three in the bottom row are frozen, so it goes much faster. I always bring out moderately hot tap water when I feed/water the critters on these cold mornings. If there's just a thin skin of ice in the rabbits' bowls, I can just pour the warm water right in and it'll melt the ice. With the birds' waterers (I have a regular gravity waterer in with the chickens, as well as the heated bucket) I'll plop them right into the bucket of water for a few moments, and that loosens them up enough that I can twist them apart and knock out the ice. We'd planned to have a heated gravity-watering system in place for the quail by winter, but fell a bit short due to a late-year cash crunch. The quail shed has a shelf, sized and positioned to hold a 5 gallon bucket, up near the peak of the roof. We'll have a spigot on the bucket, and a flexible tubing running from cage to cage, where a tee-connector will run the water into a small drinker attachment for the birds. A low-voltage wrap-around heating wire (the kind people use to keep their pipes from freezing, in cold climes) keeps the water running in the tubing. We have all the bits except for the tubing and the heating wire to wrap around it, because the bloody tees are an unusual size and the tubing needs to be special-ordered. Maybe by February? We hope to have a similar system in place for the rabbits by next winter, as well. On another note, the young man who bought a breeding trio of rabbits from us last week wants to come over when we harvest the next batch. He'll trade his assistance with the process for a bit of education, which is perfectly reasonable.

I fear for our friends Stateside, as the regulatory regime there is actively dismantled (I'll leave it at that, because it's a topic that's inherently political, and I can't get into it any further without violating board rules).

Yeah, I've long since stopped posting those. But hey, for the first time in a while, we have a change of pace. Si Ji Mei brand Wuhan Egg Sheets with Glutinous Rice (that's a mouthful) are being recalled in BC and Alberta for salmonella. https://recalls-rappels.canada.ca/en/alert-recall/si-ji-mei-brand-wuhan-egg-sheets-glutinous-rice-recalled-due-salmonella

You know those big water pitchers they use for drinking water in meeting rooms and buffets? For a 4 inch-deep hotel pan, I used those and did 2 of rice, 3 of water. Cover the pan well (we used the heavy commercial plastic wrap, then foil) and pop it in your oven. Sadly I don't recall the actual cooking time, which is fairly important, but it was probably something in the range of 45 minutes to an hour.

Here's a look at my quail condo this morning, looking more like a quail-sized "ski chateau." And yes, the deep snow in front of it is my driveway, so the snowblower and I will be taking some exercise together once I've finished my article this morning. Not pictured: the chicken run, the middle of which has collapsed under the snow load. I really should have thought about that when I got home and saw how the snow was falling. If I'd swept the roof then, and again at 10 when I was out to give the critters their night-time feeding, it probably would have been fine. Now I have a reclamation project ahead of me that will soak up a few afternoons of my time.

A tip of my hat to the marketing team responsible for that one.

I'm 60-something, so I can't crank stuff out like I did in my 40s (see my back-in-the-day foodblog), but you're right... it's hard on the back unless you're really, really careful about matching the height of your work surface to the height of your chair (or your standing height, as the case may be). In this case I was mostly using small parchment cornets, rather than a piping bag. The ones requiring a solid fill I just dipped, rather than piping and then flooding with the royal icing, because although the result isn't as professional-looking it's a whole lot faster. The fun bit is doing the Christmas trees, dotting them with "decorations" in different colors. When I make my cornets for the higher-volume piping (like the blue decorations on the sugar-cookie snowflakes, or the white ones on the gingerbread cookies), there's always a strip of parchment left over at the end. I use those to make smaller cones for the little "detail stuff" like this. I do one color at a time, starting with blue because I make lots of that for the snowflakes, and then finish up with small bits of yellow and red that I mix up on the fly. I just try to mix 'em all up randomly, so each tree is different. Occasionally I see specialized, themed "quins" for decorating cakes and cookies, and maybe one day I'll find some that would work as miniature decorations. I did find some mini candy-cane quins a couple of years ago, and put them on some of the trees with tweezers, but I didn't have time to do it properly with all of them and multiple kinds of decorations. Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure I remember seeing yellow star-shaped quins at Bulk Barn (for the Americans, that's a wonderful bulk-store chain* we have up here), so I could maybe give each tree its own star next year. That'd be worth the extra effort, maybe. Last year I did one where all the "decorations" were at the bottom, and told my GF "Little kids decorated that one." *Bulk Barn's site: https://www.bulkbarn.ca/en/Products A young American's reaction to encountering BB during a visit went viral in 2022, and it's still fun: https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2022/11/american-tourist-bulk-bar/

By request, some photos of the cookie binge. First, here's an overview of the spread. ...and some of the decorated cookies. Closeups of a couple of 'em (note the food-colouring stains on the fingers...). Last pic is cookies monogrammed for three grandkids out west (initials S, M, and L, because the yellow icing gooped a bit and they're not entirely as pretty as I'd have liked). Glad to have it all done with for another year; they're all packed up and ready for mailing/hand delivery. For the curious, if you scroll back to the panoramic view, we have (clockwise from top right): snowman sugar cookies, Christmas tree sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies, the three big personalized sugar cookies, some zimmtsternen, vanillekipfeln (not sure of the spelling on that, there may be an 'r' in there somewhere toward the end), a shortbread-ish ball cookie known to us as "Russian tea cakes" but which is also known as "Pecan meltaways" and many other things, linzers with raspberry and apricot filling, the "faux linzers" I spoke of earlier, gingerbread snowflakes and gingerbread people, and finally snowflake sugar cookies. I had tubs with additional quantities of several of these, but this was enough to give you the idea. Not pictured were ginger crinkles, which are much like gingersnaps except soft and chewy (I'd parked those on top of the fridge and forgotten them until after the pics were taken), and chocolate-filled sandwich cookies because I realized while setting up the photo that I hadn't actually made the ganache or filled them yet.

Woo hoo! So... six months old for next Christmas. Just about right for wide-eyed and highly photogenic bewilderment.