From Lutefisk to Pierogies!

Last weekend we had friends, J & H, visit us from Bloomington (MN).  We've know them for almost 20 years and now they enjoy coming up here--J likes to trim brush and apple trees up in the meadow (really!) and H likes to read, relax and be on vacation.  Both choices work for us!

But this time H brought along the ingredients to create and share some food specialities from her Polish background.  Pierogies!  Pierogies are little half-circle shaped dumplings stuffed with various fillings--hers were filled with a cheese mixture.

She began by making the cheese mixture and chilling that overnight.  Next came the mixture for the dough for the dumplings.  It took a few tries to get the optimal circle size to fit her crimper without having extra dough squeeze out the sides.

Next came deciding how much filling goes onto the dough circle.  She makes these about once a year but usually they do multiple batches and there is a whole assembly line of people for each step.  After that many, they all become experts at their step in the assembly line.  However, this time she was doing it all and every step started as an experiment.

Squeeze the crimper and then try to get it to release with the pierogi intact!

The first few are completed.

Then out to the rocker on the front porch to chill until dinner time.  Temps outside were perfect for chilling!

When it's time to prepare them for dinner, H & J (J came in from the woods!) began by boiling them for about 10 minutes until they floated in the pot.  Then they put them in the frying pan to give them a nice brown finish.  Add in some fried onions, sour cream and some Polish sausage from Kramarczuk's in Minneapolis and we had a great meal!  Thanks J & H!

I wanted to add a picture of The Lake today.  It was a deep, deep blue color with some pretty good wave action going on.  The wind was coming in strong from the north so I wasn't out taking pictures for long!

And back on the slough backwaters, a few guys braved the possibly-thin ice with their ATVs and set up an ice fishing site.  I'd be curious to know how thick the ice is there, but I guess they were pretty close to the edge of shore.  I don't think I've ever seen people ice fishing like that there.  The other river close by where people often fish, Flagg River, has open water now.  

Another weekend begins tomorrow and another month begins on Sunday.  Time to get going on more of my winter projects!

Finding our thrill on Blueberry [Hill]

The word is out.  The blueberries are ready to pick.  Now we just have to find the secret blueberry patch!  We heard from friends, who heard from friends, about a new blueberry patch, so we all went looking for it this morning.  Here are the blueberry pickers, a scene repeated all over the backroads in the area.

Cue the mosquitoes, although they weren't too bad today.  And no bears.

Here is an small area of the patch with the little purple bits of blueberry goodness:

And in the middle of the blueberries was this little patch of lichen that Leann called British Soldiers and John called Matchstick Lichen.  John also found some wintergreen leaves and he picked some fronds from a fern that had a distinctive aroma.

And then we left the first patch to go home, but found another patch with even more berries.  They aren't visible in this picture, but it was a mass of blueberries!

And here they are, ready for the freezer and future muffins and pies!

And then we helped John celebrate his July 22nd birthday at the Pizza Parlor in Iron River.

 What a great day!

It's a dreary day, so let's talk composting!

The only thing that could make this view any more dreary would be if there was still ice in the water!  But there isn't, so we'll just have to accept it as a chilly, wavy, foggy May day on Lake Superior.

Something that helped clear the dreariness was being invited to friends this afternoon to try out their Hawaiian sweet bread made in their new bread machine.  I've always seen the HSB in stores but never tried it.  Now, however, I think I might also need a bread machine.  The sad part is that I've had two in my past--one mine, one my mother's--and they both went in yard sales at some point in time.  I'm justifying my possible purchase with the thought that they have improved them since my mid-1990's version.  The bread was made even better with two kinds of jellies - one was strawberry (I think) and the other was made from some kind of peppers, so it had a kind of salsa feel to it, but sweet.  Thanks for sharing!

And for one last quest for color we drove by the big daffodil fields here in Port Wing.  It looks like there is one long row already blooming but soon this whole field will be yellow and white with daffodils.  I've heard the story from time to time about how this field of flowers came to be, but maybe I'll get it nailed down by the time I post the next picture with more in bloom.

And now for composting.  We started composting in a semi-serious way in Minneapolis about 10 years ago.  The students in Leann's school were studying composting, and Leann, as their media specialist and resource person, got involved in helping them by acquiring red wigglers from one of her science supply sources. (Who ever said librarians just read books!) And then she got a bagful of red wigglers for us and our new recycling container we bought through Hennepin County and had just started using. (I'm only posting the link to show that you can even get red wigglers from Amazon!  The pictures are a little much.) 

She also brought home a big poster, carefully printed in first grade words by one of their first grade teachers showing what can and can't be posted.  Perhaps that poster is still hanging in the garage of our Minneapolis house...that we moved out of two years ago.  Or perhaps not.

We liked this compost container because we could layer the compostable items from the top, add the red wigglers sometime in the summer to go to work on the compost, and "Black Gold" (as Leann called it back then) could be dug out of slats at the bottom of the container.  And the covers on the top kept the raccoons out!  

So today I saw this cool infographic posted by Lifehacker on Facebook.  I like Lifehacker because they have "hacks" or helpful hints on all kinds of topics.  Today one of their posts was this composting infographic.  I'm only posting a portion of it here but you can click the link to see the whole thing.  

Some things surprised me - fireplace ashes okay but coal/charcoal ash not okay, egg shells are good but eggs are not good, and I just dumped a container of old/hidden Greek yogurt in our compost bin.  Dairy - not good!  Up here I think we have wildlife that also help themselves to our compost offerings, but it's far away from the house so we don't care who comes.

And if you click on the link to see the whole graphic, you'll see that they also call it "Mining Black Gold," so I guess Leann wasn't the only one with the good idea!

Happy composting!

Gifts for the blog, and a new distraction

This afternoon I attended a small weekly gathering of people at church.  In our intro session, one member of the group, (and a friend of mine, as well as one of my faithful blog readers,) said he had to go get something for "show-and-tell."  What he brought in was something for me that he found while working at a recent estate sale and here it is:

It's a new snow-measuring stick!  I can't wait for it to snow again!  (Just kidding, no "hate" comments please!)  This one has an additional 6 inches on the bottom so I can stick it down into the ground early in the snow season.  I had to promise them that I wouldn't put it out until at least next December though.  Can do!  Thanks, J & J!  I'll use it well!

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Back in December a few days before Christmas, we had a group of people here at our house to get together and sing Christmas carols.  I played one-handed piano (the right hand, of course) and another friend played her guitar.  We sang through all of the usual Christmas carols, had some good snacks and beverages, and the singing went quite well.  But, our piano was VERY out of tune, not surprisingly since it hadn't been tuned for almost 20 years since the daughters got older and moved on to other activities.

Sometime in February I called a man here in town, Tom Denker, who specializes in piano tuning, piano repairs, and all things piano.  He came and tuned the piano, and that was that...

...until a couple Sundays ago when I was talking to a woman before church who mentioned that Tom had been giving piano lessons to a young student she knew.  And I started thinking, (all during the church service), "Piano lessons.  I never thought about Tom giving lessons.  I used to take lessons.  I could start up with lessons again, because, really, what else do I have to do?  I'm going to ask him after church," because he was the accompanist that day in church.

So, after church I asked if he would take me on as a student, and I had my first lesson the next day!  I've taken lessons at various times in my life, and the last time was 1995 when I had an unfortunate, but memorable, experience at a piano recital I agreed to be in.  But that's another story for another day!

The main thing that I've found by starting again after 20 years is that now my left hand doesn't always sync very well with my right hand.  Couldn't be age, could it?  The other thing I've figured out now just two weeks into this project is that it's okay to "play outside the box."  And that's something I could take to heart in all kinds of aspects of my life!

What will be next?