Another chicken update

Scratching up bugs.

With temps in the 50's yesterday and overnight, the 12 inches snow that had acumulated over the past couple of weeks vanished, much to the delight of my little flock of hens. Today they spent the day outside, running around, eating grass and digging up bugs. They spent hours at this place in the yard where a fire wood pile recently stood. Must have been lots of grubs and bugs in the remnants of bark!

The hens look so happy when they are outside. I hate to have to keep them cooped up most of the time, but at least they have plenty of room to move in the coop. I feel so sorry for comercial egg laying hens who never get to go outside and live in cramped conditions. That is just cruel.

As of Christmas day, I know that all my hens are laying! My christmas present from the hens was 7 perfect eggs---one from each of them. That is the only time I have gotten 7 eggs. The average lately has been 4-5 each day. I think I need to learn how to make angel food cake from scratch so that I have a way to eat all these eggs!

Sugary, Buttery Christmas Goodness

I have a very strict rule that I make these cookies only at Christmas time (though I will occasionally break that rule for special once in a life time events, like my wedding). These are the most fabulous cookies-and they get inhaled once are made. They have way too much butter and way too much sugar in them--but so what? Christmas only comes once a year!

Pecan Toffee Bars

Crust:
1 cup butter
1 cup light brown sugar
1 large egg yolk
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon vanilla

Topping:
1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup chopped chopped pecans
12 ounces milk chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350.
Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Mix in egg yolk and vanilla.
Add flour gradually stirring only to blend.
Spread into buttered cookie pan and bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Boil butter and sugar for topping together for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Add chopped pecans.
Pour over baked crust and bake for 4 minutes at 400.

Let cool for a couple of minutes, then sprinkle with chocolate chips. Once the chips soften spread them with a spatula.

Let cool for 15-20 minutes, cut into small squares. Don't try to take the bars out of the pan until they have completely cooled.

More nativity scenes

Time for some new nativity scenes. I love this hand carved folk art scene.

Up close...In honor of my native American heritage...we have this native American nativity scene. Okay, I'm not really native American, but my name is. I am actually mostly Irish. But my name, Kateri Tekawitha is very distinctly native American. Yes, my middle name is Tekawitha. (My last name is most definitely Irish.) I am named after one of first Christian native American women, the Indian princess, Blessed Kateri Tekawitha.

I decided that it is time to give this blog a new winter look. I wild crafted the basket from cattails, weeping willow, and grapevine last winter.

Overwintering Rosemary

My rosemary bush in the sink after its weekly shower.

I may be able to grow plants outdoors, but when it comes to house plants I am a disaster. Every houseplant I have ever tried to grow has died a slow, agonizing death. Or, if it didn't die fast enough, it would end up in the compost pile in an effort to put it out of its misery. So it is something of a miracle that I have been able to keep a rosemary plant alive three winters in a row on my kitchen windowsill. Mind you, it never looks happy after it has been on the window sill a couple of months. If winter were any longer, I'm sure the plant would die in protest. I put it back out in the garden in May, and it always takes a while to perk back up, but so far it always has.

I've read that overwintering rosemary can be tricky, even for those gardeners with a green thumb for indoor plants. Ideally you would overwinter it in a cool room (less then 60 degrees) with good air circulation and lots of light. I don't have room that fits this description. So my rosemary gets to sit in my hot kitchen on an east facing window sill. I think the real trick with rosemary is getting the watering down right. The roots will rot and the plant will die if you over water. The foliage will dry out and fall off and the plant will die if you under water.

I'm guessing that I have somehow managed to come up with the right schedule for watering. Once a week I put the potted plant in the sink and spray the whole plant down with water for several minutes. Then I let it sit in the sink for an hour or so and make sure all the excess water has drained out of the pot. Rosemary really hates wet feet. I've read that using a clay pot will lessen the chance of root rot.

The other major problem I have experienced with rosemary is that when it is brought inside, it gets covered with fluffy white mildew. Many sources recommend using an insecticidal soap on the plant on a regular basis. I've never done that, but when the mildew starts growing, I put in the sink and wash the mildew off with plain water. This seems to work, but has to be done on at least a weekly basis.

I have heard that it is easiest to overwinter young rosemary plants. The older they get the harder they are to keep alive indoors. We will see how my rosemary bush tolerates its fourth winter in my kitchen.

Christmas is in the air...

I don't normally decorate for Christmas until the the week of Christmas, in keeping with a family tradition. On Christmas Eve we would clean the house until it sparkled, then go out as a family and cut the Christmas tree, and then as family decorate the tree and house. It was one of my favorite days of the year.

This year though, I am working the entire Christmas week, including Christmas eve, Christmas day and the long weekend after. It makes me tired just thinking about it. If we are going to have any kind of a Christmas, I thought I'd better start early. And what better day to start than St. Nicholas' Day, especially since it is a cold blustery day full of snow swirls. The weather looks and feels like Christmas. St Nicholas day is another day that is full of warm memories. Like in Holland, when I was a child we would line up our boots by the wood stove before going to bed and in the morning they would be filled with treats and little gifts from St. Nicholas. As a little girl I never dreamed it was my parents doing. I remember as an eight year old earnestly explaining to another little girl that Santa was a made up person, but Saint Nicolas was a real person and he was the one who really left the gifts. (I don't think she was convinced.) Actually to this day, I am amazed none of my siblings ever caught my parents filling up our boots. We were always so excited we could hardly sleep. With 11 brothers and sisters, you'd think someone would be awake at some point! But somehow my parents managed to get those boots filled without any one noticing.

I spent the day going though my many Nativity Scenes and trying to decide which ones to set up. I love Nativity scenes and have somehow managed to collect a dozen in the last 7 years. A few of them where given to me, but most caught my eye while shopping in second hand stores. In the past I've sent up two or three--the one that Terry and I bought together the Christmas of the year we first met, and then one or two other sets. This year, since I'm starting early, I've decided to rotate through some of the ones I don't usually display. I'm starting with this one depicting the characters as little black children, in honor of our first black president elect. This is being displayed on the window above the kitchen sink.

I am going to put up a Christmas tree at some point, but in the meantime, I've decorated my Rosemary bush with tiny glass bulbs. This rosemary bush has survived three winters indoors. This is its fourth winter and hopefully it will survive this one. It gets to spend its summers outside in my herb garden recovering from having to spend the winter in my kitchen.