Our unlikely little pond has surprised us once again by becoming a perfect outdoor skating pond. The dry winter so far has allowed great ice to form without much snow-clearing required. We're not really a big skating family, but this is a pretty great way to spend a sunny winter afternoon.
It's a very windy day, which makes it feel much colder than it is. Our neighbour has gone over all the trails with his snowmobile, which makes walking very easy, though we still haven't had all that much snow.
I'm really excited about my new KoMo Fidibus Medium grain mill. KoMo is a German/Austrian company which manufactures synthetic stone mills and flakers. This mill is obviously designed to last for decades. Not only does it grind stuff really well, but it's a very handsome object.
I used a Family Grain Mill attachment for my KitchenAid mixer for years, which certainly does a decent job, but makes a lot of noise and a certain amount of mess in the process. Also, it wreaks havoc on mixer gears, which makes it kind of pricey to operate over time.
But back to the Fidubus... I've had it for almost a week now and I've milled quite a lot of wheat and some oats. The mill is capable of grinding from a very fine to very coarse texture. I baked muffins, bread and cornbread, and cooked cracked oat porridge. Everything turned out wonderfully except for my easiest, tastiest, 100% whole wheat, no knead bread ever recipe. Several loaves of that came out as complete bricks. I made some basic whole wheat bread from the Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book to check that my wheat wasn't the problem and it turned out perfectly. I did observe that the dough made from freshly ground wheat seemed to ferment way more than the commercial flour did. It was more like a sourdough starter than bread dough. My theory is that the flour from the mill is so fresh and contains all of the germ and bran as well as no additional conditioners, so it is just a little too lively to let to its own devices overnight. The resulting loaves were tasty but dense (I think I detected a small gravitational pull from one). I am not blaming the Fidibus, nor have I completely given up experimenting with the recipe.
Today is the shortest day once again. I don't have any dramatic sunrise photographs like last year, or even the great sense of relief at reaching the darkest day I've expressed in previous years. It's not that I'm insensitive to the light this year, but things just didn't seem quite so dark this fall. And it's not that this fall has been less stressful than usual - quite the contrary. Perhaps it's my St. John's Wort tincture, or maybe it's the daily forest bathing. I've been deliberate about appreciating my moments and trying not to worry about the zillions of things that aren't going the way I'd like. Somehow, life just seems a little brighter than other years at this dark time, even though the days are still ridiculously short (8 hours, 42 minutes and 50 seconds).
I sort of managed to see the lunar eclipse this morning. It was one of those quite bright nights because of light reflecting off the snow and thin overcast and you could see the red glow of the moon behind the cloud, but not the moon itself. An hour or so later, there was a very spooky blackness - almost like a fog - that contrasted with the previous brightness. It creeped me out, so I went back to bed rather than watch anymore.
This close to the solstice, it gets dark pretty early in our part of the world. At late afternoon on an overcast day in late December, it's not very bright outside.
This photo is a bit of a cheat because it was taken Sunday, as I won't be home on Monday to take the picture. We've had freezing rain and rain, but still not a lot of snow. I did manage to capture Meg's butt this week.
A couple of days ago I saw an area of melted snow on the trail, which looked a little out of place. When I looked closer, it was apparent that a deer had bedded down for the night here, and its body heat had melted the snow. I don't know why she would have chosen this particular spot, rather than a more sheltered spot under the trees, but she did, and I'm glad I noticed it.
Somehow, we've still not had very much snow, in contrast to areas to the west and east and south of us, which are buried under the stuff. It's still easy to wander on the trails and now that everything is frozen, it's even possible to walk in the swampy area at the back of our property which is normally quite impassable.
