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Adventures in Cooking

February has been a crazy month, with various events prompting me to look more into preparing various food stuffs from scratch rather than buying them from the store. I started with bread last month, finally getting to the point this month where they don’t deflate like a spent balloon in the oven. For those bread loaves less than perfect, I found a use for them as breading for home made stuffing mix. Waste not, want not, as they say. Finally satisfied with the results, I decided to move onto home made saltine crackers.

I’ve been making soup for quite some time now, but what’s soup without a few crackers? I went to the following website: https://www.servedfromscratch.com/saltines-from-scratch/. I used cake flour and since I didn’t have any vegetable oil, I substituted lard. The resulting dough was difficult to work with, especially after leaving it in the fridge overnight like the web-site suggested. Using a rolling pin just didn’t get it as flat as it looked in the pictures, never mind getting the nice, neat squares she showed. After baking them in the oven, this is what I wound up with. Those little suckers would just not compress.

Saltines-first try
My first attempt at home-made saltine crackers

Hmmm, definitely not nice flat crackers! However, they did taste like saltines, and were actually quite good, so I figured I was headed in the right direction. It’s possible the measurements given weren’t quite accurate or maybe using lard instead of oil affected it.

So, I tried a different recipe. This one is from Homemade Saltine Crackers – The Mountain Kitchen . It has fewer ingredients, uses unbleached flour instead of cake flour and doesn’t have the overnight resting time in the fridge which the previous recipe suggested. One ingredient was 7 tablespoons of water, but I found I needed to add a few extra tablespoons to make the dough more workable. The dough ball flattened out much better under the rolling pin. After cutting out roughly square shapes and using a fork to make the classic indents, I basted them with butter and added Celtic Sea salt to the tops. After baking, I achieved the result below.

second try of saltines
Results of the second try at home-make saltines

This effort was much better and had a good flavor. I may experiment with a few more variations before settling on a favorite. Since I only use crackers intermittently, I had run into the problem with store-bought crackers going stale before I used them up. Home baking allows me to make small batches as needed. I haven’t tried assessing the cost of making these but I’m sure it’s more economical than buying the store brand and ending up wasting some because I didn’t use them up quick enough.

Hope this inspires any readers to make their own stab at home cooking.

Have a safe and happy March.

Cooking stuff

Bits and Pieces of January 2025

Chilly weather is biting this month, though nowhere near as hard. The lowest nighttime temperatures I’ve seen this month have been just 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, a far cry from my childhood when 20 to 25 below zero F and even 30 below would occasionally accompany a real cold snap. The picture below dates from at least 10 years ago.

Thermometer showing below zero Fahrenheit



I only took a picture because such low temps seem to be a thing of the past (hope I’m not jinxing myself). This is one aspect of global warming I won’t complain about.

Snow has been sparse this winter. On January 19, there was about two inches or snow on the ground instead of the usual 6 to 8 inches. Additional flurries have left a dusting, maybe one time we got about three and half inches. This was dry snow, so dry that my brother was able to use a leaf blower to clear his driveway.

This is worrisome as it likely means a dry spring with the risk of brush fires. While New Hampshire is usually immune to the vast wildfires which plague the far West, smaller brush fires are not uncommon in the spring. The largest forest fire to hit New Hampshire was in April of 1941, the result of some unusually hot weather coupled with a huge amount of tinder left over from the Great Hurricane of 1938. WMUR, the state TV station, had a local color story giving an account of the event.
Only time will tell if we get any major fires this spring and summer.

Animals are stirring about. I have a plastic composter in the backyard where I collect leaves, spent flowers and weeds I yank up. Food waste also goes into it, but only after sitting in a compost bucket in the breezeway where it gets skanky enough so wild animals will turn their noses up at it. Even so, they still check the backyard composter once in a while. About a week ago, I noticed the lid was off. On checking I found a generous number of raccoon tracks around the composter. The material inside is still frozen solid, so I don’t think they found much that was palatable. I’m glad it was just raccoons rather than a bear, as bears can trash a plastic compost bin without too much trouble. That was the sad fate of one that I had many years ago, which is why I have the food waste in a ‘half-way’ house before I finally consign it to the composter. I figure even bears have their limits.

While it’s still mid-winter, I saw something this past week which is usually a sign of spring. A flock of robins came through, feeding on the neighbor’s lawn and visiting my hawthorn trees which still have berries on them. It was startling to see them and left me wondering if this meant an early spring. Previous to this, the earliest I had seen a robin was late February.

Robin in winter plumage


As mentioned in a previous post, I have begun baking bread again. Since it’s been so long, a learning curve needs to be renegotiated. So far, my loaves seem to want to deflate in the oven. I’ve gotten new yeast so the problem is likely over-kneading or possibly over-proofing. I do tend to be a little vigorous with kneading so will have to lighten up. The resulting loaves are still perfectly good for eating but not quite what I’m striving for.

One use for less than perfect loaves is to use them to make stuffing mix. A YouTube video by someone styling himself Wyyse Guy had a recipe that looked good. I made a few adjustments, leaving out the carrots and egg. There’s no need to wait for the bread go stale, you can just dry it out in the oven. As it was always my mother’s custom to add giblet meat to her stuffing mix (she used Bells Stuffing Mix for her breading), I saw a chance to use up the chicken livers I had bought at the local farmers’ market over the summer. After cooking and grinding up a few, I added them to the mix I had, along with the cooking water. Baking it all in a casserole dish produced some very pleasing results.

Well, that’s all for now. Have a good February.

Valentine's Day Heart

February Holidays

At the beginning of each month I use Open Office to create a calendar day for that month which gets stuck on the fridge. The Drawing program is the best one for building a month. I insert a picture, usually a humorous one, near the top, then using the Insert Table function, I create a table for putting in the days and weeks of the month.

Calendar page for January

I then mark in some holidays of the month while leaving other days open so I can note appointments and other events on them.

For February, there’s Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day. Groundhog’s Day (February 2nd) is an odd holiday which we inherited from the Pennsylvania Germans who emigrated here back in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The notion was that if the groundhog (we call them woodchucks here on the US east coast) comes out of his burrow and spots his shadow on this day he will return to his hole to hibernate another six weeks, while no shadow meant an early spring. The fact that there are precisely six weeks between February 2 and the Spring Equinox, irregardless of whether or not the weather is clear doesn’t seem to matter. That is apparently beside the point. It’s an excuse for a small group of men to dress up in formal wear and drag out some poor woodchuck and hold him up the waiting cameras.

Groundhog Day

February 2nd is also known as Candlemas, a Christian feast day celebrating the presentation of Jesus at the Temple purportedly 40 days after his birth. It is also called Imbolc or Saint Bridget’s Day although traditionally that is actually celebrated the day before. The origins of Imbolc are a little more uncertain than Candlemas but it seems to go back to early Medieval times.

February 14th is Valentine’s Day, also a Christian holiday commemorating the martyrdom of Saint Valentine. There were apparently several men named Valentine, dating back to late Roman times. The custom of giving flowers, sweets and other gifts seems to have originated in Britain. In Slovenia Saint Valentine was the patron of spring, good health as well as of beekeepers and pilgrims. This sounds far more benign than the current commercialized bacchanalia of chocolates that cram store shelves around this time, soon to be displaced by the avalanche of sugar poured out in celebration of Easter and Mother’s Day. Small wonder we’re all turning into diabetics.

Valentine's Day Heart

There are a few lesser holidays such as President’s Day, celebrated on the third Monday of the month. If you do a Google seach, you’ll discover a plethora of holidays for each day of February: Carrot Cake Day, National Homemade Soup Day, National Peppermint Patty Day and so forth. Who comes up with these and more importantly why?

I prefer to keep it simple. Celebrate the birth of Saint Bridget, light a candle to her. Celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day the Slovenic way with perhaps little displays honoring good health, the spring to come and yes even beekeepers everywhere. Don’t forget to eat a bit of chocolate in their honor.

Happy Curmudgeon’s Day!

Great grandmother Labonte

New Years Eve 2023

Well, another year has come and nearly gone. When I look out into the front yard this is the view I have.

View of front yard December 30 2023

The total lack of snow is quite notable. While we have had snowless Christmas’s before, they were few and far between back when I was young. It was more customary to have at least five inches of snow on the ground, if not more, by the beginning of the New Year. Now it seems to be more like every other year. Thanks to climate warming, this is the new norm.

The implications for gardening are hard to measure. With insufficient snow pack, some plants cannot make it through the winter should there be a sudden severe cold snap. Weed and insect pests which might have died from the cold can now make it through to spring. All this requires adjustment on my part when planning a garden. What will do best come summer? What soil amendments will be needed? How heavy or light will the rain be? This past year was quite wet, a change from the semi-drought conditions of the past decade. But these are questions that have always come up no matter what climate change has done or not done.

Many months lie between now and spring allowing me to peruse the latest batch of seed catalogs and mull over what to try in 2024.

Have a happy New Years!

New Year's Eve

The Remains of the Season

Fall foliage is past peak and either turned brown or fallen. The first few snow flakes of the coming winter got spat out of a dreary raw rainy sky yesterday along with a few pellets of sleet. Halloween and November are on the doorstep. Plenty of seasonal lawn ornaments, some cute, some ghoulish.

Halloween lawn decoration, giant skeleton

Outdoor Halloween decoration

Already plenty of leaves to be raked up with more to come.

Fallen leaves in driveway

While there’s been no frost or freeze yet, the weather has been raw enough so that growing season has pretty much ended, except for the occasional fungi bursting out of the ground.

Fall mushrooms

I find it hard to think of it as still fall, with the first day of winter still over a month away. Rather it seems more a curious pause between fall and winter. The brilliant colors of autumn have vanished but the snows of winter have yet to collect on the ground. This little segment of the year ought to have a name of its own. Possibly Ember Days, which in Christian calenders marked a period of time following the change of the seasons (spring, summer, fall, winter) when fasting and prayer were done. There are a number of different types of celebrations done at this time of year, honoring the summer and the bountiful crops (if any) it produced, allowing food to be put up for the winter to come.

Given what a short period of time it is (roughly end of October to Thanksgiving, or whenever the snow begins falling in earnest) perhaps it might best be named the Quiet Time. A time for taking stock of the past year and begin preparing for the year yet to come. A time for peacefully appreciating what we have, rather than going berserk in the wild consumer bacchanalias that Thanksgiving and Christmas have been turned into.

medieval family

Whatever it may be called, enjoy and have a happy season.