A Walk in the Wet Woods

We had some serious wind and rain this weekend and most of the snow is melted. So we all headed off into our woods to help take down the pop up deer blind and to look at how big the river was down by the bridge.

As we walked, the boys protected us from imperial troops.

While my dh was loading up the blind, the children had a great time sliding on ice and busting it up.

The river was very flooded. We amused ourselves for a while floating ice chunks down the river (the children) and reminding children to not lean too far out over the water (me).

The main channel of our river is the light brown part in the center of the picture. All the ice in the surrounding woods is due to flooding. As we were there, the ice started to crack in places. That was a spooky sound.

Down by the bridge we found a coyote's print.

An arty shot for brother Mike.

On the way back, we found some ice that had frozen around tree trunks and remained there in thin sheets while the river water dropped. It made a wonderful "glass crashing" sound when you hit it with snow balls.

The chickens were out also. It seems that they will come out and walk on the snow if they can see a little ground. If the ground is all snow covered, they won't come out. These are our Silver Tipped Wyandottes. I think they are our prettiest chickens.

Clucklin and his group of girls on a bare patch in the woods. As you can see, they prefer the bare ground to the snow.

My own personal Chef

My dh made me a gourmet meal last Saturday night. He enjoys cooking when he has the time. And when he cooks, he cooks gourmet. He's pushing veal into a pan for our veal stew with asparagus.

Our first course was Beet and Orange salad and Basil and Olive Focaccia bread. I forgot to take off the presidents' placemat from Stephen's spot. oops.

A close up of the bread. The recipe called for whole olives in the bread. I think next time I'll make it with half olives so that they distribute better thoughout the bread. This was the one thing that I made for the meal.

And here is the Veal stew with Asparagus. The green puree is asparagus puree. The veal had been cooking for 2 hours and it had the best sauce around it.

And now for dessert. We are having roasted pears with red wine caramel. Making the caramel sauce was an "action dish" (my dh's expression). He started off with just sugar in the pan.

He heated it and waited as it started to melt...

and started to turn brown.

It is perfectly brown now.

Then he poured in a mix of red wine and water and boy did it splatter. The recipe even told us "to stand back when pouring".

The finished product. The pear was roasted in the oven for 40 minutes in the caramel sauce. Then the red wine caramel is reduced into a sauce and poured over the pear. A sprinkling of balsamic vinegar and a dollup of sour cream and you have a fantastic dessert.

Merry Christmas!

Some highlights from our Christmas celebration. At exactly 7:00 am, the children were up. Actually they were out of the room at 7 am. They had been up before that, revving up for the morning but they weren't allowed out of the room until 7 am.

Deborah received Kirsten and she was thrilled. She says that Kirsten is her daughter and has slept with her since Christmas.

Aaron received his first pocketknife this Christmas.

We had a church family over for dinner. It was quite a dinner and we barely had room for all the food on the table!

They brought crackers to snap open just before dessert. The children really enjoyed that.

Of Food and Snow

Now that Christmas is over, I can catch up on the blog. We had a great Christmas - more on that later. For now, let's look at some food. I made this crockpot stew before Christmas. I added just a little tomato paste to the liquid and it not only made the stew taste better but it gave it a beautiful sheen.

I also make spaghetti sauce using only our yellow tomatoes. We had one heirloom tomato plant that make lovely small yellow tomatoes. For color, my dh suggested that I put peas and pancetta into the sauce. The sauce had a wonderful tartness to it.

On one occasion of getting 8 inches of snow, we made snow ice cream.

As some of you know, we've gotten a lot of snow up here. The children have a canyon of snow along our front sidewalk.

The snow drifted down to the egress windows in the basement as well.

We also had gym class where the boys loved climbing on the huge mounds of snow around the parking lot.

And now for some art-y snow pictures.

A Busy Visit with Grandma and Grandpa

My parents came for a week's visit after Thanksgiving. We packed a bunch of stuff into their week. Nathan and Grandpa got the model train running.

Besides the gingerbread house/camp site, we also put up the inside Christmas decorations. Something new this year - fancy balls hanging down from the lights.

The mantle with new lights.

We had a lot of painting time.



Nathan also made some "icicles" for our shelf downstairs.

Reading with Grandpa.

My dh and I also had a wine and cheese tasting time with my parents after the children were in bed.

Saturday night we had the double whammy of a piano recital and the Handel's Messiah at the Symphony. Everyone did very well at the recital - even me!

We were also able to go catch Bolt at the theater and rent Prince Caspian. I told you it was a busy time!

Gingerbread Camp

The boys and I entered a Gingerbread house contest last week. Nathan and I did most of the work. We made the gingerbread and then I made the lovely Royal Frosting that hardens into a rock. We also got our first experience working with fondant. That was sticky. I had to keep putting it back in the fridge to cool it down.

First the details. Here is Santa peeking out from behind a tree. And yes, I know that the trees, people, and tents are out of proportion. But I wasn't about to start over at this point!

Our lovely girl?boy? roasting a marshmellow. Deborah told me that no one would roast a marshmellow IN the fire but that was the only way to hold up the "flames" so that they looked right.

And now the final product! Ta Da! We got a second place ribbon in our category.

A Visit to the Children's Museum

We have a new Children's Museum in our area and last week, our homeschool group took a field trip there. It was a lot of fun, even for the big kids. They had a great water table there. You could crawl under and get inside a plastic bubble and have your friends pour water on you. Very cool.

The big boys immediately set out to create long plumbing runs. When one of the workers mentioned that another group of children had made the pipes run all the way from the intakes here to the waterwheel, our boys were determined to duplicate the feat.

And they did. They ran the pipe under water, under the yellow bridge and over to the water wheel behind Nathan. They all got plenty of water on their clothes, but what does that matter when there is a challenge to overcome?

Aaron using the Force!

They had a great "doctor's office" and "dentist's office" for the children to explore.

There was even a wall of glasses that the children could try on. I even found ones that looked just like my cool, huge, tinted glasses from high school.

I personally liked this piece. It is a map of the United States made with license plates.