After a quick dinner I spent tonight finishing my dad’s new website so that he could go live tomorrow. I’m now brain tired and headed to bed. Unfortunately that means you have to wait one more day for the Dark Days recap. My apologies.

If you’ve ever wondered where I write it’s in an arm chair right next to the propane stove that heats our family room and kitchen. Warmest spot in the house, even if the stove is pretty freakin’ ugly.

Replacing it with something more attractive and in keeping with the house is on the list, but way down at the bottom. Oh, and if you’re squinting right now, yes the previous owners did paint each individual brick AND the mortar in between. I often ask Mike what they were thinking - hideous is too nice of a word.

Home rendered lard and homemade butter for chorizo and potato pie crust.

Today was a mix of this and that and maybe a bit more of this. Not sure why other than it was the last day of a 4-day weekend and neither of us was motivated for much. I worked most of the day on my dad’s new website and in between I worked in the kitchen.

Succumbing to peer pressure I decided to try my hand at making butter. I started it in the jar but when we hit the whip cream stage things seemed to stall out. After skimming it all out of my quart jar and into the mixer bowl we had butter about 3 minutes later. A quick wash, some kneading with a wooden spoon and voila, butter. It’s not as good as I imagine Nita’s to be, but way better than even good store bought sticks.

Then I worked some more while pondering bread for that butter. But up first was a trip to the garden for lettuce, the barn for potatoes, the hen house for eggs (8 today!) and the garage freezer for chorizo. Then back to the kitchen to start tonight’s chorizo and potato pie, courtesy of my secret lover Nigel.

I was cooking from my UK edition of Real Food, which requires either using the computer to convert grams to ounces and cups or just a click of the button on the kitchen scale. I chose the scale (which needs to be washed) - math’s too hard on a Sunday afternoon.

We enjoyed our pie with a side of steamed homegrown peas and green beans tossed with a bit of that homemade butter and some sea salt. We finished it off with a salad of homegrown lettuce, Washington pear, Idaho blue cheese and a quick vinaigrette.

The pie was really good, better than I imagined it to be. Next time though we’ll make the effort to season some of our ground pork into an herby sausage instead of using bulk chorizo - I think it would make a more savory dish as the chorizo’s spice was just a bit out of place.

Of course, here it is 9:25 pm and I insanely have bread rising in the oven and am only halfway done with the Dark Days recap. My apologies, but the recap likely won’t make it up until late tomorrow night.

Mike and I got up early this morning and drove to meet friends for the drive up to Stevens Pass for our first day of alpine skiing this year. This photo is of Mike while we were hanging out waiting for Ron and Mia at the park and ride. It’s also about 3 minutes before he realized that he forgot his ski boots at home (40 minutes away). Bummer!

Luckily he is a wonderful husband and told me to go on my way up to the mountain while he went home for his boots. We headed up expecting him to be about 2 hours behind us. Unfortunately by the time he got to the pass all the parking lots were full and he was out of luck. Bigger bummer. We chatted via cell phone and he headed home with plans to meet up with us for dinner.

Mike’s day may not have been what he hoped for, but the three of us had a wonderful day skiing on very un-Cascade like snow. There were chest shots and knee-deep chutes and enough snow to keep us more than happy on our first day. Our faces looked like this way too often today.

I’m usually not one for resolutions, but this year I think I might be. I look back on the last couple of years and I’m amazed at how far Mike and I have come and how far we’re talking about going.

Somewhere in there though I lost track of two things that are very important to me. So my two resolutions this year are really decisions to be more conscious of my everyday joys and challenges and to pay more attention to what I’m doing with my physical self.

Why do you care? Well, they’ll affect a bit what I’m posting here and where I’m spending my free time.

First, I’m going to refocus on more than just gardening, food and cooking around here. Hence the 365 photo project. It’s likely that my photo and the story behind it will often be my post for the day. With the challenge of finding something new to shoot everyday I’m guessing that topics will be wide and varied and hopefully a bit more interesting than I feel like I’ve been in the last 6 months.

This feels a bit like the rebirth of this blog which, after 28 months and almost 500 posts was beginning to feel a bit stale. If you come only for the food, hopefully you’ll bear with me on the chickens, fence building, skiing and everything else. If you come for the chickens, well yipee! you’re likely to see a lot more of them as they usually make really good photo subjects.

The second one, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to share yet. But suffice it to say that it’s all about taking care of my body beyond worrying about the food I eat. Stay tuned, I’ll likely let you in on the secret in a month or two.

What resolutions are you making this year? Are the concrete goals or more general philosophies?

Sometimes people ask why chicken water needs to be swished and/or replaced every day. You know why?

Because birds like Sadie insist on standing on top of the waterer. And you know what they do while they’re up there? They poop in the water. That’s right, they poop in their own water. Even worse, if you don’t clean it out daily they’ll drink the poopy water. Gross.

Call today a two-fer as the photo below cracked me up. Smash a previously frozen, really squashy pumpkin in the middle of their yard and hens come running, strolling and cackling from every direction. Great fun was had by all.

Also? Much more appetizing than poopy water.

I’ve decided to try to take a photo every day this year. I got out of the photography habit a bit in 2008 and only took photos when I remembered to or there was something I really wanted to document. I’m hoping that trying to find something to photograph each day well make me appreciate my surroundings and life even more than I already do.

Here’s #001 of 365. Definitely not the best photo I’ve ever taken, but I was using our old point and shoot in low light and it was not amused.

But, but, but! That’s LETTUCE growing in our tunnels outside. Apparently the frost cloth that I threw over it at the last minute was enough to keep it from freezing during our 3 weeks of snow and ultra-cold (for Seattle) temperatures. YAY!!!!

Sure there’s a bit of frost damage here and there, but overall the lettuce emerged pretty unscathed. The same cannot be said for the chard, radishes and broccoli. But I’d so rather have lettuce than broccoli that I don’t even care.

Somewhere in my flock is a hen that has decided she likes eggs. And she’s eating at least one a day right now. Of course the only evidence ever found is a wet spot in the nest box and perhaps a bit of yolk on another egg.

I suspected earlier this fall, but then the problem seemed to stop. Now, since they’ve essentially been confined inside for more than 2 weeks (by their own choice, the door is open) the problem has escalated.

I’ll be switching things around a bit tomorrow, making the oyster shell more obvious and perhaps raising the nest boxes up off the floor further. The heat lamps will likely get turned back off later this week even though I was secretly happy to start getting 4+ eggs a day again beginning yesterday.

I’ll inspect heads and beaks tomorrow night to see if I can figure out who it is. I’m also hoping that as the snow melts it might stop again. If not, well, there’s talk of installing a hen cam around here to catch the guilty party.

What will we do if we figure out who it is? I’m thinking stewed hen.