The big excitement for me this month was the delivery of a gasoline-powered log splitter. When you heat your house with wood and you're pressing 70 years of age, this is as much a necessary tool as a chainsaw. Every year one or more trees succumb to age, disease, or weather. I am using my sawmill to make lumber out of the useful wood but the rest goes into heating my home. I can pull this one to the site of the fallen tree and split as I cut. This saves me having to load and unload the wood more than once.
Now that I have all that spare time saved by the log splitter, I am learning how to make bread. I started with a very simple no-knead recipe from the King Arthur website. This recipe was inspired by the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Nothing that tastes this good could be simpler. You make a big batch of dough that will keep in the fridge for a week. When you want fresh bread, you just grab a handful, shape it or throw it in a loaf pan, let it come back to room temperature (an hour or so), then bake it for 30 or 40 minutes.
Also, I've been expanding my repertoire of vegan dishes. This first one is actually some oyster mushroom I found growing on a hickory log in front of the shop. You wouldnt expect to be eating fresh-picked local fruits at this time of year but there they were. The second dish is a squash chili made with a butternut squash that was trying its best to start a garden inside itself. Nearly all of the seeds had sprouted and a couple of them actually had green first leaves! Both dishes were phenomenal! And on the good news front, my bad cholesterol has dropped 42% in only 9 months.
After 5 years of service, the little air pump used to bubble ozone into my water finally gave up the ghost. I tried a couple of times to repair it but some things just cant be fixed. So, I ordered a replacement and installed it using some little vibration damping pads I made by cutting slices from a tube of silicone calk that had set up. Water service back on line.
