Muffins and The Coop!

Update on the Coop. Building continues. Look - walls!! The day started cold and with earflaps down, Michael got walls up!! No work now until next week. This weekend: the fishing derby, the fire department banquet, and I leave Sunday morning for the National Fire Academy in Emmitsberg!! Phew!

I have a wonderful recipe to share now that you've looked at the new coop pictures. Feeling the mood to bake, I pulled this recipe off the internet from Allrecipes , and what do you know, at last, a muffin recipe worth making. I highly recommend this one. Yummy! Enjoy. I'll try to do a post from Maryland!

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Throw dry ingrediants together: 1 1/2c. flour, 3/4 c. sugar, 1/2 t. salt, 2 t. baking powder.

Now mix up wet ingrediants (this is kind of a clever method). Put 1/3c oil in a 1 cup measuring cup. Throw in an egg and then top off with whipping cream (or milk, that's all I had), put in a bowl and make sure wets are all mixed.

Make topping by throwing 1/2 c. sugar, 1/3 c. flour, 1/4 c. butter (yup, that' a half of a stick baby!) and 1 - 2 t. cinnamon. I spun it around in my little chopper thing.

Now, throw wet with dry, don't stir too much, throw in 1 c. fresh blueberries.

Take this rather thick dough, and put in lined muffin tins. Then put a big spoonfull of the topping on top of each muffin. Bake 20-25 minutes (it was more toward the 25 minutes at this elevation).

I'm telling you, these are GOOD!! And look, they call for an EGG!! Ha! We come full circle!

Recipe comes from Allrecipes off the internet.

Trial and error. I have spent WAY too much time fiddling with this today!!



Okay folks, you should see a slideshow on the progress of the chicken coop. I can't seem to get it to play all the pictures, on the blog site, but I think if you double click on the image you should get to a slide show icon, upper right corner. Michael has been delayed by the rain, but the weather is good now! He's planning and designing and thinking all about this coop.

Meanwhile, check out this lovely fava bean salad I made for tonight's "Inspector's Meeting". Found these dried fava beans in the Mexican food sections of Smiths. Soaked them a few hours, cooked them until they were just done (too much and they would have turned to mush), added some great midwestern sweet/sour juice, some red peppers, kalamata olives, basil, grape tomatoes, sliced red onions and salt and pepper. Oh, and I'll be bringing a bottle of chainti too! Ha!!

Check It Out, People!!

You've got to try this; I think it might actually work!! If you click on this, it should take you to a slide show of the building of the chicken coop. The rain slowed things down, but you will see, progress is being made. Michael is a wonderful carpenter to watch work. I just get out of the way!! Meanwhile, I've come up with some new ways to make this site more interesting!

Meanwhile, look what I made to take along to "The Inspector's Dinner" tonight!! I found dried fava beans in the Mexican foods section of Smiths. Soaked them a couple of hours, cooked until just tender (could really fall apart if cooked too much), then added a sweet sour base (1 c. sugar, 1 1/2 c. red wine vinegar, 1 c. water and boil with whole allspice and cloves). Also in this cold salad; kalamata olives, grape tomatoes, red onions, red peppers, basil, salt and pepper. I'm brining chianti too!! Ha!

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Who knows what will show up in future posts???

The building of the chicken coop!

The run is placed
Originally uploaded by The Ex-Photographer

Thank goodness it quit raining. Work is getting done.

The building of the coop, continued!

The run is placed
Originally uploaded by The Ex-Photographer

This should take you into Flickr to see a series of coop building projects! Nice that it quit raining; getting some work done now!

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Crazy Busy!

Okay, I have been crazy busy since my last post. I fear I may have lost you followers; please forgive me. Some really cool things have happened; last Friday a great several hour Civil Patrol training with the culmination spent in the air circling over a recent plane crash on the Continental Divide Pass of theTogwotee Mountains and the great success of finding the plane from the air. Now you need to know, the folks had gotten out of the plane successfully and without injury about two weeks ago, but we were the first to spot the plane from the air. Kind of a nice little badge on my CAP uniform, so to speak.

Then I got the wild hair to hike, by snowshoes, into the plane crash landing site. Michael and I donned borrowed snow shoes and commenced our search. With GPS in hand, we learned we knew very little about our GPS. After some cursing and playing, we found the needle in the haystack! I'd really like to send you pictures, but you're going to have to send me an email to get the specific ones. I'd hate to lose my respect and position in the Civil Air Patrol!!

Then it was back to a busy work week. Tomorrow I will be finishing a ICS 400 class taken up in the beautiful Grand Teton National Park. There are still rumors that the National Fire Academy may cancel my arson class due to the HINI virus.....we'll see sometime next week, I suppose!!

There WILL be a post next week updating you on the chicken coop. Landscaping efforts have begun, but have been hampered thanks to the incredibly lousy weather.

Don't know about anyone else, but I sure am looking forward to the weekend!!