Catching up

Mark has been home for days and Rod and I have both been home-at-the-same-time for almost a week. It's been glorious!

I thought I'd be blogging a lot more once we were both home, but it gradually dawned on me why I hadn't been. Turns out that I have been a lot more interested in "doing" than in talking about it for a while.

Doing, we have been, though.

We have been baking and cooking, and cleaning and just generally nesting. It's been wonderful!

Jack and I have experimented with baking apple pies as a change from my endless fruit crisps. I don't have a lot of luck with pastry, so Rod is working on his pastry skills.

I have also been whipping up experimental biscuits, because they're tasty, easy, and can be whipped up very quickly when we want bread and haven't got any. Some of them have been stellar, some not so much, but all have been edible.

Between baked goods and soups, we've been cooking quite a bit and feeling content.

Slowly, slowly the house is coming together again, with the laundry nearly caught up and the tidying back to a reasonable state.

We even found the time to clean out both freezers. When we were done, we found that we actually have plenty of room to consider adding freezing to our "putting food by" projects. The side-by-side is pretty well stocked with the day-to-day food but other than a treasure trove of frozen cranberries and enough bones to keep us in broth for months, it' pretty much empty.

Our thought is to add berries and other fruit to out agenda next fall and then freeze them for later, but we're also looking for other things.

We've tried "cooking ahead" and that has gone very poorly. We haven't had a lot of luck with the texture of the food and so it ends up not being eaten so we're not entirely sure what to add.

Ahh well, I'm sure it'll come to us eventually.