The O-Zone

Reading recipes is entertaining, in and of itself.  I’ve been doing it for years, ever since we were in the bush in Alaska and we had only the food supplies we had brought with us to last for the year.  In that particular situation, reading recipes was strictly for entertainment as I had no means of fixing them.

One group of recipes always caught my imagination – torten.  I never tried to make any of them once we returned to civilization…  until now.

Chocolate Almond Torte could just as easily be called "death by chocolate."

A simple cake in terms of ingredients:  Eggs, finely chopped almonds, finely chopped bread crumbs, pinch of salt, and grated chocolate.  Six ounces of grated chocolate.    The gluten free bread I’ve been making recently lent itself to the task of providing crumbs admirably.  Into an ungreased spring form pan the mix went, and an hour later it was done.

Yes, it is a wee bit lopsided. This was a function of slicing it horizontally and then not getting the two halves lined up properly when I flipped them around and upside down.

The cake is so delicate and tender that handling it at all was difficult.  I really wanted something that resembled a cake and not a pile of crumbs.  Once I managed to get the pieces flipped over and lined up fairly closely on the edges, I had no choice but to call it good.  Getting the cake level would have required more handling, and been a disaster.  I resisted the urge to try to achieve perfection in appearance since obviously I wasn’t going to get there.

In between the two thin slices of cake I spread a thin layer of seedless raspberry jam for the filling.  On top is a chocolate glaze icing which is made from six ounces (again!) of semi-sweet chocolate melted and then combined with a 230F sugar syrup.  The chocolate hardens almost instantly upon the addition of the syrup and so making it completely smooth on the cake was beyond my reach on this first attempt.

Nobody who ate this complained about aesthetics.  It tasted like a chocolate truffle candy and pretty much melted in our mouths.  A successful experiment.  It did make quite the mess out of my kitchen when I was making it.  So, great fun was had by all!

+4F (-16C) Typical low temperature for this time of year. Clear skies and subtle pastel colors.

The sun wasn’t very high above the horizon when I took this picture this morning.  An hour later the temperature outside hasn’t increased.   It’s going to be cold today.

The house was a little cool when we woke up this morning, and the stove is cheerfully producing heat. It won't stay cool long and sitting next to the stove is just a great spot to play on my computer.

Dan put the cast iron pot for humidifying the house on top of the stove, and we must add water to it frequently at these stove temperatures.  Yesterday Mishkin’s fur was crackling with static electricity, a sure sign that we need to put moisture into the air.

Speaking of "sparky" here he is surveying his realm and looking for somebody to wrestle with.

He’s been frisky and affectionate, both, this morning.  He always misses us if we are gone from the house for a few hours, which we were yesterday.  He’s not a typical cat as he doesn’t give us the ‘cold shoulder’ and sit with his back towards us to show us what he thought of us leaving without his permission.  He is just more attentive and clingy the next day, and won’t let us out of his sight all day until he’s sure we aren’t planning another escape.  Silly kitty.

The days are already longer, a whole minute perhaps!  It might a slight exaggeration to claim to be able to see the difference.

Clear weather has returned and our solar panels will be able to produce sufficient energy to top up the batteries, a good thing since our generator is feeling puny.  We bought it in 1986, and can’t imagine why it is acting up.  Dan will give it some oil today and see if that makes it feel better.

Ice crystals in the air catch the early morning sun and turn the air shades of rose.

I love how the higher peaks are completely white from frost.

This morning Mishkin informed Dan, upon arising, that there was a live mouse under my purse and would he please move the purse.  A well-trained servant, Dan moved the purse and Mish pounced, grabbed the mouse and then immediately released it so that it could run again.  Well, evidently we haven’t conveyed the true scope of his mouse catching duties.  He just thinks they are the coolest wind-up toy around!  “For me?????”

So Mish has been trying to herd Dan over to where the mouse is hiding next to the DVD case, all day long.  His method of herding consists of getting right in front of Dan and trying to trip him.  This could end poorly if he succeeds.

I’m going to make something new tomorrow, called a “Sachertorte” from my “Joy of Cooking” cookbook.  It’s a gigantic chocolate macaroon, basically, which is split in half and raspberry jam installed in the middle, and then covered with a chocolate glaze.  I’ve read this recipe for years and never tried it.  Should be interesting!

What do these two things have in common, you might wonder.  Well, I put them in a new Italian bread recipe that I experimented with today.

Fragrant, crunchy little loaves, fresh out of the oven.

This is a different flour mixture, based on millet flour.  It’s different too in that it uses no eggs, unlike a lot of the other gluten free bread recipes.  It’s quite different and I like it a lot; Dan isn’t so sure.  Fortunately, I’m also baking two loaves of our normal bread that he does like a lot.

Just had a Sharp-shinned Hawk sitting in a bush in front of the house, keeping a low profile.  It didn’t work, evidently, as all the little birds were keeping an even lower profile.  Better luck next time, Sharpie!

Speaking of low profiles, the furball is missing and being quiet, so we went to look for him.  The covers in our bed are wrinkled and there is a lump.  Evidently he decided to retire early today.  He will be well rested for mayhem this evening.

It’s been a year now since we started this blog.  Time flies, even when we aren’t doing anything particularly adventurous.  It was a nice year though; not too much remodeling and we had two visitors!

Less than two weeks remain to the Winter Solstice, and the sunset is way to the south west of our front porch.  Sunsets are almost as dramatic but hidden behind the trees and very short lived this time of year.

Bands of color are low on the horizon.

Less than a minute later the color intensified and spread across the sky.

The colors are deepest right before fading away into night.

Still very cold here.  It is supposed to be warming up and will start snowing.

"I'm an indoor kitty. The woodstove keeps me nice and cozy. Ahhhh, time for a nap."

He just looked so smug and pleased with life that I had to take a picture.  He was being a holy terror all morning while I was working.  He kept jumping on my computer mouse and trying to have boxing matches with my hand.  He adds a certain aspect of challenge to working on the computer with such behavior.

I went out on the porch to take some winter morning pictures of the mountains, and I was warm without a coat until I calculated the temperature – I wasn’t cold until I saw -22C which seems a LOT colder than merely -8F.

The pink of the sky covers the mountain tops and gives them a radiant glow.

If I had waited outside just a wee bit longer, the pink of the sky spread to the base of this mountain. But, one can sacrifice just so much warmth for the sake of art.

Winter!  We love this season.  Today I’m going to make some more Triple Ginger Tea Loaf.  Yummmm

Annoying as it may be sometimes, the weather forecasters got it right yesterday and they seem to have it right for the next few days.  We woke up to +7F for our low temperature, and tomorrow it is predicted to be around -6F.  That means our snow isn’t going to go away this time like it has been doing.  Winter appears to have arrived.

Tiny dry snowflakes accumulated yesterday, giving us a couple of inches by our house, and many more inches further up on the slopes. The ski resort must be deliriously happy today.

The snow kept knocking us offline yesterday, or the clouds.  Something was definitely wreaking havoc with our internet connection.  Today we have clear skies and once we brush off the solar panels, we will get great solar gain on our power.  There is no hurry to get outside however, as the sun won’t begin to touch the panels until around 11 am.

This light fluffy snowfall did nothing to weigh down the branches on the pine and fir trees downhill from our house. It just makes them look like flocked Christmas trees.

One creature in the woods is deliriously happy about the change in the landscape.

Snowshoe Hare blend in perfectly with virtually everything around them, now. This particular bunny was running joyously past the front deck, leaving his foot prints as a memento of his passing.

Inside the house it is business as usual.  Dan built a fire in the wood stove in the living room, and later today we’ll build one downstairs in the laundry room wood stove.  It will make the batteries happy and better able to store and retain the power from the solar panels.

"Cats don't play fetch." This is his motto, mouse evidence notwithstanding. Amazingly, he hasn't gotten tired of his game and his toy mice can be found in every room and under most pieces of furniture when I do vacuuming.

Yesterday while it was snowing, I spent hours finishing the knitting chart on my computer.  Hurray!  It’s done and everything lines up.  Any mistakes will become apparent while I’m knitting and I can adjust the chart to fix it.

This is the middle of the chart and it repeats this basic pattern for another few hundred rows.

Once the chart was done I could pull out the knitting and put lines on the chart to correspond to the markers already in place on my knitting, and then figure out where I was on the pattern.  It was confusing but I finally got my point of view sorted out, and I can start knitting again.

I've finished knitting row 250 on the chart; only 486 more rows to go before knitting the top border.

If I can manage to knit 8 rows a day, it will take me two months to finish this, assuming I have enough yarn made, which is not likely.  So I’m figuring another probably 4 months.  Having the chart on the computer makes it easy to keep track of each row while watching television in the evening.  Happiness is a knitting project.

Starting in early winter, like the beginning of December, when the air is clear and cold and the moon is full, the moonsets are beautiful.  I like it better when the whole world is white, but this will do in the meantime.

The sun is just barely peeking over the horizon to the east, and painting the far mountain peaks with the early morning light.

The sky is subtle colors like a rainbow shading from purple to pink to a faint yellow and green to blue. Our camera isn't good enough to capture these pastels.

We adjusted the angle on the solar panels to much steeper as the sun isn’t very high above the horizon in mid day and we want to capture every bit of energy it has to give.  It’s a cold morning, +10F for the low and up to a balmy +15F at mid day.  Dan is starting a fire in the new wood stove in the basement to warm up our batteries, the better for them to accept the energy from the sun.  It an interesting thing indeed.  The colder the solar panels are, the more effective they become, while the opposite applies in terms of heat.  And the warmer the batteries are, the more effective they are, while the opposite applies to them as well.

At sunset today, the clouds were just cool.

Subtle intense colors, and very fast moving clouds coming straight out of the north.

Snowshoe Hares are pretty much snow white this time of year, because the landscape is snow white, right?  This particular bunny lives next to the woodshed and we see him frequently when we walk around the side of the garage.

"I'm invisible."

Normally this little bunny would be able to sit in plain sight, and completely blend into the background.  Fortunately, they aren’t very smart little guys, or they would be very upset by this turn of events.

He's a bit confused, besides being totally visible. He's munching a mouthful of needles. That is what Spruce Grouse eat, and last time we looked, he isn't one of those. Perhaps he's confused more than usual.

Munch, munch, munch. Happy invisible bunny.

"Why is he looking at me? He can't see me... can he?" One can almost see the two brain cells connecting.

While subtle evidence of global warming is lurking in the front yard, inside our house another drama was played out.  This morning when we woke up, Mishkin swore up one side and down the other that there was a mouse in the shoes by the front door.  Dan moved shoes around and shook them, and no mouse appeared.  So we disputed Mishkin’s claims of a mouse.

An hour later, he was still insisting a mouse was lurking.  He kept trying to climb into Dan’s boot but he didn’t fit.  I picked up the boot and without thinking about it too hard….   In my defense, I assumed Mish was wrong about a mouse.  My fingertips encountered a warm furry thing that squeaked, and I didn’t drop the boot!  I did set it down quickly, complimented Mish on the accuracy of his report, and then handed the boot to Dan for mouse removal.  It was his boot, after all!  He took it outside and whacked it several times on the deck, and out flew a mouse.

All is well that ends well, right?  Depends on your point of view.  Mish was most annoyed that the mouse got away.  But he did his job, the mouse is out of the house, and I didn’t get bit.

The evening sky was interesting as the sun was setting today; high overcast and no visible sun, except that the clouds were painting the world in a rosy purple glow.  It was just amazing looking during the brief time it lasts.

It does this every now and then, and each time it is surprising.

It was a little dark to be trying to take a picture and everything is a bit out of focus.  But the worst thing of all, from a bunny perspective, is that they are still every bit as visible against a rose background as they are against a brown background.

All day I’ve been working on getting my lace knitting program onto my computer, and it slow going.  I THINK I’ve gotten the bottom border done properly, but I may be wrong and I’m a bit too cross-eyed to look at it more today.  It will be very cool when it is on my computer, hopefully before the end of the year.

Bottom border, and the right side border are completed up to about row 685. The top border will mirror the bottom border, and that's my next part of the pattern to work on completing.

For my next project, I’m going to finish an old project.  This assumes I can figure out where I was on the pattern when I stopped, which so far is eluding me.

I may be around row 245, but that's just an approximation. This particular pattern is 736 rows for the body of the scarf.

This style of knitting traditionally uses a handspun yarn, two ply, cashmere for one thread and pure silk thread for the second.  There are no yarns available commercially that begin to come close to the thin yarns produced by hand, so I am spinning my own yarn for this project.  I may have spun half the yarn that I need to complete this project, which means after I get the pattern transferred to my computer, so I can knit while watching television, I will have to find the little bag of cashmere fluff that I have used so far.  I want to have some continuity in color, even with a natural colored yarn.

This shows the scale of the yarn very well. This is a normal grain of dry white rice laying next to my hand spun yarn. The sheen of the silk thread is visible.

The silk I use is a commercial yarn from Treenway Silks, out of Canada, a two-ply silk yarn which is slightly heavier than sewing thread.  I have lots of yardage for the white silk left, but in my mind I have another project.  I have a lot of bags of Qiviut, the fiber from Muskox; it’s even softer and warmer than cashmere.  It is not cream or white, and so I will have to get a custom dyed silk thread made to match the warm rusty brown of the Qiviut.  First things first, and that means finishing this project at long last.

When I figure out where I am.  I’m very lost right now and I don’t remember what I did to figure out the pattern in the first place, which isn’t helping matters one bit.  Good thing I like challenges.