Does this dog look "rurnt"?

She does look kind of guilty.  My friend Tracey said I should blog this -- so this is for you, Tracy!

Trixie Lou and Ophelia

When I left our little pooch at our friend's house (not Tracy) for the weekend while we traveled up to Maryville in east Tennessee for our daughter to interview at the college for some additional moulah, I said, "Don't let her out in your backyard with your chickens, because she can't be trusted with them -- I don't let her out with ours and I haven't had time to work with her on training her to stay away from them".

Trixie Lou McMuttsly was given to us by our across the street neighbors last summer when they had to move to Pennsylvania to take a new job pastoring a church up there.  They had found her abandoned near the house they were staying in for free in Alabama during their year of unemployment while they tried to sell the house here.  They named her Trouble and ultimately brought her back here when they had to vacate the free house.  She was cute but crazy, and spent a good bit of time standing in the street barking insanely -- running away if you tried to pet her.  After some time at doggy reform school, and a renaming to Trixie, the neighbors convinced us to take her last July, as our 14 year old mini dachshund had been put down the previous December.

"I know you like to play with strings, please play with me?"

Does this look like a murderer?

If Belle won't play, maybe Ophelia will

She gets along great with our two cats and other dogs.

exhausted

But I wouldn't trust her with chickens.

My friend said she thought it was snowing, but then she heard her dog, Huckleberry -- an Australian shepherd kind of dog whose greatest pleasure is to protect baby goats and herd chickens -- barking up a storm.

Huckleberry had Trixie cornered and pinned with his paw, but it was too late.  3 of the 4 chickens were injured beyond help.  The fourth, Foxy Gigi (so named because she was the only survivor of a fox massacre of my friend's mother's 20something chickens -- picked off one by one on successive nights -- several years ago) with wisdom beyond what one would expect from a tiny chicken brain, hid out up in the coop safe from the mayhem.  She wouldn't come out for three days.

Despite Germantown being a suburb of a major metropolitan area (Memphis), back in the 60's and 70's when I was growing up, a rural lifestyle was just beneath the surface of this bedroom community.  Most of my friends parents or grandparents had come from and still had connections to "the country".  Fathers and brothers hunted.  And farms, with chickens and cows and acres planted in cotton, surrounded the Brady Bunch style subdivisions that were being built.  And everyone had dogs.  Dawgs.  And everyone always said that if a dog got a taste of blood, especially chickens, "that dawg is rurnt" (ruined).

I don't think I'll be letting Trixie Lou in our backyard.  And she can count herself lucky we don't live in the country and our livelihood doesn't depend on our stock or hunting.

March Calendar (366 Day Challenge)

I'm participating in the 366 Day Calendar Challenge at Kate Crane's blog The Kathryn Wheel.  Each month this year participants are supposed to create a calendar page, and write, draw, or otherwise note something on each day's square.  Below are my February pages, all completed.  I just collaged a bunch of Asian themed bits and pieces together (along with a cut up tissue box), and the calendar squares are cut from an Asian newspaper.

left side

right side

Here is my March spread.  March is very much a spring month here, although we will still have cold, even below freezing nights and some cold days -- but everything is greening up and some seeds go into the garden.  So I chose some spring like colors and scraped them onto the pages and added a little doodling.

Home-made Hamburger Buns

baked hamburger buns

Home-made hamburger buns are easy to make, and so much better (and cheaper!) than store-bought.  They are especially easy to make if you have a heavy duty mixer, like a Bosch or KitchenAid that will let you mix and knead a large quantity of dough at once.  I make enough dough for 32 hamburger buns, and store the buns in the freezer.  I use the same dough recipe that I use for rolls and bread.  It makes about 4 "batches", each batch can be made up into 8 hamburger or hotdog buns, or 12 rolls, or one loaf of bread (so 32 buns, 48 rolls, 4 loaves -- or any combo of them).

I am fortunate to have a wheat mill, so I order wheat berries in 50 lb bags and keep them in two 25 lb containers, like the one above.

I grind about 9 cups of wheat at a time.  Into the mill, which then shoots the ground flour into the flour canister.

The mill has several settings to determine coarseness or fineness of the grind, and I can grind corn, beans, or other grains.  You see the flour above.  I pretty much just use winter white wheat berries, which grinds into whole wheat of course (since it is the whole berry), but it bakes up more lightly and has a milder flavor than red wheat -- it is more like white flour, but has all the nutrition of whole wheat.  So all my baking uses 100% winter white wheat berries and I don't have to mix in "white" flour to get a good rise.

Here we go with the recipe (adapted from a recipe in the book "Hearth and Home" by Karey Swan.  The picture above is of mixing up 3 cups of warm water, 2 Tablespoons yeast, 1/3 cup oil, 1/3 cup honey, 3 cups of whole wheat flour and 1/4 cup of gluten (the gluten is optional).  Then you let it sponge (sit) for 10 minutes for the yeast to activate.

sponge with yeast bubbles after sitting

Add 1 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3 room temperature eggs, and enough flour to clean the bowl.  For me, here in the humid southeast this can be anywhere from 3 1/2 cups to 4 1/2 cups of flour.  After 3 1/2 cups I add additional flour by the 1/4 cup.

This what it looks like when it "cleans the bowl".

See how clean the bowl is when I dump out the dough?

And there is the big glob of dough ready for a few turns by hand just to smooth it up.  Rather than using additional flour on the board or on my hands, I use a bit of oil on the board and on my hands.  This keeps you from kneading in too much flour and keeps your dough lighter.

This is what it looks like after a very brief kneading by hand -- just a few turns.  Now it's ready to divide into 4 parts.  Each part will make 6-8 hamburger buns (or 12 rolls or a loaf, or a pizza crust or two, or some cinnamon rolls, so you can make something for supper, breakfast, lunch all in one baking session).

shaping into buns

Shaped hamburger buns ready to go into the 375 degree oven, for about 10-15 minutes.

And here are the finished hamburger buns, ready to cool and use or go into the freezer.  The whole process takes only about an hour when you use instant yeast and you sponge the dough, as the dough does not have to sit and rise.

linking to Home and Garden Thursday; Country Homemaker Hop

Homemade Laundry Detergent

I've been a gardener, and canner and freezer of produce for for 32 years, a parent for 26 years, user of cloth only napkins for 20 years, a homeschooling parent for 18 years, a grinder of wheat for 14 years, and a backyard urban chicken-keeper for 6 years (not sure whether I've always just been ahead of the curve, or just a "come up from behind" hippie).  But, even though I had read recipes for homemade laundry detergent -- I just never did that.  Grating, and boiling, and dealing with gloop -- um, no.  Too much effort.  But Lady of the Woods wrote of a recipe for a powdered detergent -- grate the soap, mix with the other ingredients, put in a jar, print out a cute label and you're done.  The cost works out to about half the cost of store-bought laundry detergent (assuming you don't have to buy a jar) and the ingredients are readily available at Kroger.

So, I mixed up a batch, printed out a label, and we used the detergent to wash towels and napkins.  Looks like success!  No weirdness or residue, and appears to have cleaned fine.  I will say that grating that fels naphtha soap was NOT as easy as some have made it sound -- it took a while and a good bit of effort.  Maybe I need a new grater.  Or maybe next time I'll just whiz it in the food processor (it IS soap, after all -- so I think that would be fine.

Here's the recipe:  1 bar of fels naphtha or zote soap, grated (I have read you can use any soap -- ivory, castile soap, etc. The fels naphtha was $1.30 at Kroger, in the laundry section), 1 cup of Borax (remember Death Valley Days?  Twenty Mule Team?  That's the stuff), and 1 cup of Super Washing Soda.  You can add a few drops of an essential oil for scent if you want.  Mix it together, store in a container.  Use 2 tablespoons for a load.

Of course, don't forget to go to The Graphics Fairy and print out a nice label.  I just discovered the "stickies" app on my Mac Pro -- I think I need to make a sticky on my computer for "projects", like "fix up the laundry closet" (we have a laundry closet upstairs, rather than a laundry room -- and it is s-c-a-r-y nasty), so as to better show off my lovely jar with vintage label.

linking to Brag Monday; Country Garden Showcase

Record Warm Temperature

Yesterday we had a record high for the day, 79 degrees!  Our normal high is 54 this time of year.  It was sunny and beautiful.  We have had a lot of rain, making the ground too mucky to do much gardening.  However, my brother-in-law sent us home from Maryville last weekend with a huge cat litter bucket of daffodils he dug from an area of their yard where he wants to install a garden railroad.  He keeps digging out daffodils and they breath, "At last, some room to spread out!"  So he has pulled out buckets and buckets.  With the warm weather, I managed to set out all of the daffodils.  I already have a good many naturalized throughout our yard (all in full bloom right now), but I can always manage to find room for more!

They all look pretty much like the picture below -- kind of limp.  But by next spring they should be fine.

While I was scouting out spots for the new daffodils, I found this little beauty:

It's growing right next to the driveway.  At first I thought it must be a crocus.  I have no idea where it came from and it seems to have popped up from nowhere.  Then I looked closer.

It looks to be some kind of miniature iris.  This is way too early for any irises to be blooming, though.

I think it is just amazing.

linking to Show off Your Cottage

Salad Table progess report

I shared how my husband made me a salad table for Christmas here, and how I planted my seeds a few weeks ago.  Last week I had to cover it not only with the garden quilt (which protects down to 25 degrees), but also with an old shower liner when the weatherman predicted our coldest nights so far this winter -- a low of around 20 degrees.  After several cold days and below freezing nights, I uncovered the Salad Table to check on the germination of the seeds.  I have been pleased to find good germination, with the baby seedlings surviving the freeze!  So far, the Salad Table has been a success.

With any luck, I may be making my first harvest of the microgreens in 2 to 3 weeks, and some lettuce and stir fry greens by the end of March.

This past weekend we traveled across the state to Maryville, Tennessee so our 18 yr old could interview for some additional scholarship money at the college there, where she hopes to enroll next fall.  Coming back yesterday we got caught in a snow storm, with near white-out conditions, cars sliding off the interstate on the icy road -- it was quite a hair-raising drive on the Cumberland Plateau heading west.  Too scary to even take pictures!  A reminder, along with our cold snap last week, that it's still winter.  But from Nashville to Memphis it was clear sunshine, and a balmy 50-something degrees.

linking to Masterpiece Monday; Show off Your Cottage Monday; Farmgirl Friday

Easy Meal

pizza pasta

Budget (stretched) and income (flat) being what they are, along with helping one daughter with college over the past 5 years, and looking towards having daughter #3 begin college in the fall, and daughter #4 following along in 4 years, we almost never go out to eat.  Maybe once a month, but sometimes we go months at a time without eating at a restaurant.  I don't like to spend my "out to eat" money on fast food, so I have a repertoire of easy, no-think, practically-cook-themselves dinners that I rely on for those "I don't know what to fix" or "I don't really feel like fixing anything" nights.  These dinners are also easily re-heated.  With 2 teens, and a husband whose job requires attendance at city government meetings held at night anywhere from 1 to 3 nights a week (like tonight), we seldom have everyone eating dinner at the same time anymore, so whatever I make needs to be able to hold and be reheated.

Tonight I made Pizza Pasta.  I usually make our own pizza, and inevitably I prep more toppings than we need for the pizzas.  Sliced onions and peppers go a l-o-n-g way on a pizza, as do olives, sun dried tomatoes, sausage, or whatever.  This recipe makes use of those leftover toppings (or one can make it instead of pizza if one doesn't want to mess with a pizza crust.

In a large bowl put 2 teaspoons of minced garlic, along with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 1 1/2 t of Italian seasonings, 1/2 t of balsamic vinegar, some chopped tomatoes or cut up dried tomatoes that have been soaked and drained, and any other prepared (cooked) pizza toppings you want -- either heated or room temp, you don't want them ice cold (onions, peppers, sausage, pepperoni, olives, etc) -- and mix it all up.  Meanwhile cook a pound of short pasta, drain and add the hot pasta to the bowl and mix it all up together.  Mix in 3/4 cup of parmesan cheese and 1/2 cup (or however much to your liking) of mozzarella cheese (the heat of the pasta will melt all of this).  Add pepper if needed.  After I put it in a serving bowl I topped it with some more mozzarella.  Seems like if one had particular eaters, one could have the pizza toppings as add-ins for individual servings rather than all mixed in.

Linking to Country Homemaker Blog Hop