Have you Tinkled Today?

 Dough bucketI ordered another dough bucket for the fridge, so I can keep both a sweet dough and a savory dough going at the same time.   These are wonderful, and work great for the recipes in the “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” book.  Today I started a batch of the Brioche dough (8 eggs!) and tomorrow I’ll make Jim some cinnamon rolls or sticky buns or something sweet.

Not that he needs it, I baked him peanut butter cookies last night while we were watching TV.

I’ve mentioned before we eat a lot of beans.  I’ve never been a big fan of traditional chili, but I’ve come up with one that we both really like, it’s a bit smokey and tangy.  I don’t really have a recipe, but basically I smoke a large brisket with BBQ sauce overnight and soak a pound of red kidney beans overnight as well.  In the morning, pressure cook the beans for 12 minutes, and saute up a large onion, a bunch of celery, some garlic, and 5 or 6 red chili peppers, dice or shred up half the brisket, and add chili powder and salt to taste.

Dump in 4 cans diced tomatoes, 1 or 2 bottles of black ale, even some V8 if you have it on hand.  It’s quite yummy!

Yesterday was beautiful, and Jim and I spent most of it on the motorcycles.  We really should have been working on the garden, but we just enjoyed the weekend.  I did get back on the treadmill today for an hour and did 3 miles.  Watched the stock market take another dive and have been trying to figure out where I can fit more food storage.  I sure wish we had a chicken coop built, but I guess that will have to wait until Spring.

I’m almost done with the “ugly” quilt.  Julia saved the day by suggesting I try a smaller needle, and I swapped back to a #16 and my thread breaking stopped, woohoo!  I’m positive I’ll run out of bobbin thread before I can finish though, so the quilt will be on hold until more arrives.  I am expecting a monster box of fabric today from The Fat Quarter Shop, I figure our dollars are safer in fabric than in the bank.

While we were out an about on Saturday, we stopped and looked at an F450 over in Clarksville. $59k!!!  That’s just insane.  Even with $13k off (window sticker) that’s still insane.  Not many used F450’s come on the market though.  Guess the RV will stay parked for some time.

Update on Monday, October 6, 2008 at 04:47PM by CJ

Oh I meant to post this earlier.  Jim wanted me to order one of those gadgets to make seedling pots out of newspapers with, but I ran across this little tutorial and it looks like it will work just great.