8000th Egg!

On January 4th, we found Egg number 8000.

Finally - Episode I

Today was the day that I finally let the children watch Episode I of Star Wars. Their reaction to the movie is below.

They didn't like JarJar too much but they did love the battle droids and all the cool ships. They loved the light saber battles. And they asked the obvious question that somehow eluded Lucas - won't Padme be too old for Anakin if she is queen now and he is only 9 or 10? Do they elect 20 year olds to be queen? I think not. Anyway, the movie viewing was a success.

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.