Pizza and Margarita night

This is the first pizza I've made in a couple of months. This one has my home made sauce, mozzarella cheese with a sprinkling of fresh grated pecorino romano on top of the mozzarella before baking and a light sprinkling after the bake. It also has thin sliced fresh mushrooms, rings of fresh, golden bell peppers, a sprinkling of pepperonici dried pepper flakes and a light drizzling of olive oil.

We had a few hard freezes  for a couple of nights and have had a couple of mornings with freezing fog. The sun came out this afternoon and if I didn't have a prior commitment, I would have gotten out front and planted the remaining small bag of Siberian irises. Maybe I can do that tomorrow if weather permits. The small area for them is already prepared so planting won't take long as long as the soil isn't frozen.

All my Christmas decorations are up, other than a fresh evergreen arrangement for the living room table, which I should get to this week. Our local garden center says that they now have fresh greens for sale, so I'll be getting some in the next day or so and be making the arrangement over the weekend.

I'm not going to be baking regular Christmas cookies this year; but  if my back is OK, I might mae some Chruschiki which are part of my family's Christmas tradition. These, at least how my family made them, are not commercially available, so if I want some I will have to make them. A few years ago I saw a video on you tube of some ladies using a hand operated pasta machine  to roll out the dough, and since ever then I;ve been doing the same thing which make the process a lot less stressful as well as faster on this old body. I'll be 79 in about two weeks and it was getting harder every year to roll out that hard dough for a few hours.

Well, time for a Christmas movie, a bit of yoga, meditation and lights out.

Fires are out and the rains have arrived along with my new bread machine

Hope everyone who celebrates the holiday, yesterday, had a lovely Thanksgiving. My family was up for the week and I joined them and friends for dinner at their river ranch. The cold, rainy day, seemed perfect weather to stay indoor and take in all the wonderful aromas coming from the kitchen.

Between the horrible fires and dangerous air, it took forever to get around to planting some of my Siberian and other Irises and a couple of package of daffodil bulbs. As soon as there's a let up in the rain I will have to get out and pull the last of the veggies and tomato cages and other supports.

I treated myself to an early birthday and Christmas present and bought this new Zojirushi BB-PDC20BA bread machine. It's like the Roll Royce model and makes great bread. I had an older model of this that I gave away early in the year when I thought I was gluten intolerant and missed it. Turns out I wasn't gluten intolerant but had another digestive problem. About two weeks ago I found a used Oster bread machine at a local thrift store, and it worked well. In fact, for the price new, I think it's a good deal. I only paid $18 for the used one but it looks like it was rarely used. So I'll be giving that one to my grandson who just moved into his first apartment.

This afternoon I made my first loaf in this new machine and it came out great. Their new cookbook that comes with the unit didn't have a recipe with part white flour and part whole wheat; but I did find a honey wheat recipe on line that the poster said worked on this machine, so I thought I'd give it a try. The bread is tasty, light, rose well and will be my every day bread for toast and sandwiches. The right side of the loaf is a bit lower, so I'll have to check the book to see what caused it. Normally with this machine, which has the same two mixers as the last one I had, I remove the dough after it finished mixing and removed those mixers, and they straighten up the dough before putting it back in the machine for the rise and baking parts of the process.

I'm still getting settled after a year because so much of my time has been spent building a garden from almost scratch. The front and back yard are 100% better but there's still a lot of work to do to get it the way I want; but most of that work will have to wait till spring.

I was going to make soup today from the turkey carcass I brought home yesterday, but had too many other things to deal with so I will be making that tomorrow. Now I just have to hope I can find enough room in the garage fridge freezer for the soup because the freezer in the house is stuffed to the max!

It's been a bad summer - heat and fires non stop

It's been a bad summer here in the Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon. Tonight we got the first rain we've have in months and the constant fires here in Oregon and Northern California have made it dangerous to spend much time outdoors.

So the garden has suffered as well as we humans and the wildlife. Hopefully next year will be better.

It was in the mid 90's yesterday and the 70's today. So I took advantage of the cooler weather and spent some time in the garden spraying fungicide on my newly planted (this summer,) small, magnolia tree and the roses. I also removed three more of my tomato cages and transplanted a few cauliflower starts that I think I waited too long to plant; but I'm hoping they might actually do something.

My beans and tomatoes did well, but several plantings of lettuce bolted fast in this summer's heat and smoke, and the zucchinis and other squash and melons were a bust because of lack of pollination. I think the smoke kept the pollinators away, even if they were able to survive the endless heat and dangerous levels of smoke the last few months.

I hope everyone else's garden did better than mine this summer. I'm definitely looking forward to putting this garden to bed and getting on with my winter projects.

I canceled my morning paper and decided to learn how to read Tarot cards as my mental exercise instead of the morning crossword. The only reason I bought the local, mediocre paper, was for the crossword and it was over $300 a year, so I thought the money would be better spent buying some Tarot card decks and books. If I want to do a crossword there are free, printable crossword puzzles on line, I have found.

Well, that's it for the late September garden report.