Where Has February Gone?!?

Between naps, cooking, sewing, visiting with family, snuggling Daniel, and a little trip, this month has flown by.  Dan tells a story of visiting with the man who hired him about thirty-eight years ago and having Royce, now long retired, tell him that he gets up each day with nothing to do, and by nightfall has half of it done.  I'm beginning to relate.  :-)  But I'm not complaining. 

My stash of baby bibs was down to two, and those were for girls, so I decided to go into production and replenish my stack. Here's a picture of some of the twenty-three I still have. Nine have recently gone to showers, all boys, and there's another shower, again a boy, next Saturday.

My Bruder Bear was up last Friday with his daughter Jennifer and her new little baby, Grant.  Jenny was a very intrepid new mama and flew all the way from Louisiana by herself with Grant while Greg was out of town for work, and then she and BB drove up to Mom and Dad's so they could see their little great-grandson.  Dan and I were invited, too, and had a wonderful afternoon visiting and getting to know Grant.  He's definitely a keeper!  Both Ann and Jenny lamented that Daniel and Grant weren't able to meet as Ann and Eric left that day to spend the long weekend with Eric's parents.  I think my Bruder Bear is enjoying being a grandpa.  :-)

  

Meanwhile, Dan had a meeting in Coeur d'Alene on Tuesday, so he invited me along and we enjoyed two days out of town.  I shopped Bear Paw Quilts while he attended his meeting, then we hit Costco, checked into our motel, went out for a nice dinner, and retired to a room that someone else would clean the next day.  :-)  It was a lovely get-away.  We did a little more shopping on Wednesday and headed home. 

We drove up in a raging snowstorm and we drove back home in another one.  It snowed five days last week, and three this week, and it's currently -3 outside. 

And now I wish you a warm and comfy weekend!

Of Muffins and Modern Helpers

If you've been reading my blog for very long, you know I'm a fan of soup and bread or muffins for dinner.  But I'm also a fan of muffins for breakfast.  A few simple ingredients and some time in the oven yields a simple pleasure that's timeless.  Really, I'm certain if jaded pallets, those who are the diners in four star restaurants, could just taste a simple muffin with butter and jam, they'd throw away their American Express cards and stay home and bake. 

But on to my title.  About fourteen years ago Dan and I were shopping in a nearby town and went into a little specialty store and found a stoneware muffin pan in the shape of a heart that made heart-shaped muffins.  We bought it and discovered that something about the deep wells of the pan created an even more delectable muffin.  Using a recipe that normally yielded ten regular muffins, we got six extra-yummy muffins in the stoneware.  We were hooked, and even bought two more to give to Matt and Amy and Ann and Eric. 

There was only one problem.  No matter how we labored over greasing the inside of the heart-shaped wells, it was extremely difficult to remove the muffins from the pan.  At least one ended up in several pieces.  The joy of the muffins was definitely dulled.  Amy and I still used ours, but Ann finally gave up.  Fast forward to last year and an email conversation CJ (of Created by CJ) and I had led to her telling me to try a Pam-type spray that included flour to get bundt cakes out in one piece.  I'm a little slow at times, but it finally occurred to me that the same spray could be the answer to my muffin problem--and it was.

We had heart-shaped muffins for breakfast this morning.  All it took was a slip of a table knife down the side and each muffin popped right out. 

No sticking bits left in the pan,

Perfect muffins in the basket.

With a little butter and strawberry jam, heaven!

I'm Baaack!

It's winter, it's dreary, and I'm in hibernation mode.  Happens every winter, and since our snow is long gone, it's dark and that just makes me want to sleep, eat, and read.  So, obviously not much is going on around here. 

I've been using the bread machine, making sure it doesn't freeze up again, and its been fun to make a bunch of different kinds.  My favorite recipe book is still Bread Machine Magic, the very first one I purchased, on the advice of friends Jim and Sue Gentry.  They're the ones who encouraged us to buy this machine.  We went to McCall to stay with them in their cabin and ski many long years ago (New Years '93 to be exact).  They took their bread machine down with them and we enjoyed fresh bread all weekend long.  We were hooked!

Our other kitchen "work" was new to us.  The packing plant where we've taken our elk for the last humpty jillion years has changed hands and no longer takes game.  What to do with the burger meat we had frozen?  Several weeks ago I got an email from Amazon featuring Kitchenaid accessories and I realized they had a grinder attachment.  Dan and I talked it over and decided to give one a try.  We bought locally, however, and picked one up a week or so ago.  Dan took out one of our meat packs (we freeze in long Seal-A-Meal bags) and put in the refrigerator to thaw.  Yesterday was D-day. Or would that be G-day?

We used my old mixer and set it on the table as the grinder chute and platform are quite a bit above the top of the mixer.  We ended up with about twenty pounds of burger and have bag two (of four) thawing now.