Category: Bread.

The day after the vet visit.

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It hasn’t been as cold as they guessed it would be but anything beneath 10C (50F) is too cold for me 🙂 Well it works with colder degrees as long as the wind doesn’t blow and it hasn’t until now, we have a biting cold eastern wind blowing and it is anything but nice.

So Malkolm went to the vet yesterday to get neutered and all went well. He has inside stitches but is still not allowed to sit down outdoors. I do try to make sure he doesn’t but of course it happens anyway. Also today my neighbour was outside bringing in firewood and both Malkolm and Alma loves my neighbours and the first thing he did was to, with the cone of shame, jump over the fence to say high 🙂 🙂 I thought it would be best to bring him back home through the normal way we all do, go through the gate but as soon as he saw me walking to the gate he jumped back over the fence again 🙂 🙂

Anyway, Alma is a pain in the a..s to walk with but she’s even worse in the car!! Even though she’s attached to the seat belt she still does her best to become a danger by trying to be everywhere at the same time, preferable between me and the steering wheel 🙂 🙂 She was however very confused when we drove back home without Malkolm, she actually laid down and slept for several minutes and after that only whining quietly. When we went back to the vet to pick him up all the vet did was to tell me how they all had fallen in love with Malkolm 🙂 After a while it felt like they wanted him to stay 🙂 🙂 I’m pretty sure they won’t say the same about Alma when it is her time 🙂 🙂 🙂

I Asked them about how much it would cost to do the same job with Alma and guess if I was surprised, it’s a third of what it would cost at my regular vet!!! They said that the nurse at the regular place must have read it all wrong and that the price she said must have been an emergency operation if the dog would have pyomatera. I know the big chains cost a lot but this is a free standing vet station and so is the one we usually go to and that was the only explanation they could give. Well it seems we now have a new vet 🙂 Today I got a parcel that I had to pick up at the grocery store in Gudhem and it is the same road as to the vet. Malkolm wasn’t happy and Alma was back to her usual self. I had to bring them because it’s only a day after the surgery and I couldn’t leave them in the cottage or dog house this soon after.

Malkolm is ok and he’ll have painkillers for four more days. He doesn’t have to have the cone all the time, just when I can’t see him all the time. So no cone while being outside walking and when he’s sleeping in the sofas as long as I can see him. Normal appetite as well but now I’ll have to reduce the amount of food he eats, they say that they usually have a bigger appetite than before and gain weight easier as well. I’ve never noticed any of that with my previous dogs but I’ll keep an eye on him and his weight. Alma had to follow us in to the vet, screaming and whining a lot. The vet said: oh she anxious being here and I said no this is how she is when we’re out walking. She just looked at me 🙂 🙂 So I said that perhaps we could drug her for a while 🙂 🙂 and she said that we can have that discussion later on if I wanted to 🙂 🙂 🙂 I do love that big stupid dog but she is a handful sometimes 🙂 🙂 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea for the day and I’ll also have one of the newly baked French rolls I baked this morning. Lots of cheese in them so they are delicious 🙂

Have a great day!

Cold again but at least sunny.

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I had to go to the supermarket this morning because since Malkolm will be neutered tomorrow I don’t want to leave him until he has healed properly. I’m not the least worried he would do anything to the area (I guess there won’t be any stitches that he can try and remove though) but I’m worried Alma won’t leave him alone 🙂 🙂 🙂

So I made sure to have enough at home to last until at least Sunday and I also went in to the big pet store beside the supermarket to buy dog shampoo. (I also bought some fish while I was there, Siamese algea eater) . He was not happy when he had to get a shower I can tell You that 🙂 I had top carry him in to the shower but he didn’t try to escape when he finally was there. He looked like I was about to ritually slaughter him 🙂 🙂 🙂 He wasn’t dirty at allot be honest but it had to be done. I thought dog shampoos smelled better, this one smelled like a bad dish washing detergent 🙂 🙂 🙂

We had a nice walk in the sunshine and even though it actually was quite cold it still didn’t feel that bad, I could even open up my winter jacket. There was no wind what so ever so we have even spent a long time in the garden today. I couldn’t do anything more than to move a pot where I had sowed Alpine aster in to the green house. I did try and move another pot but it had already frozen to the ground 🙂 🙂 🙂

I also baked some French rolls and used the millet flour instead of the Sorghum flour I usually have. They rose so nicely in the beginning but the closer it came to put them in the oven the flatter they became 🙂 🙂 I can still cut them in half like a roll though 🙂 The taste did differ a bit but the taste of nuts sort of vanished this time. So not bad at all but I’ll try something else the next time. I didn’t buy a lot of millet flour because it was anything but cheap but it is fun to try it 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea and I’ll have another one of those rolls as well. Tonight they show our Oscar gala, Guldbagge galan (The Golden Beatle award). I haven’t seen any of the nominated films but they say that this was a good year for Swedish films.

Have a great day!

One more day before it gets cold again, yay

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Mostly grey and dull today, the sunrise that almost happened was really beautiful for a few seconds and then it was gone behind the clouds. I didn’t mind that much because it was at least over 0C (32F). We actually almost saw the sun one more time when there was a rip in the cloud cover.

Yesterday.
Today.
Lots of water yesterday
but less today.

I had to pick up a parcel today, the oat, sorghum and millet flour I ordered online this week since they didn’t order anything to the supermarket had arrived. I actually got the text message on Thursday but decided I could let it be until today. My phone has this thing of if I touch the screen in the wrong way (which I to be honest still doesn’t know how that works) the phone then put that message in the archives. I didn’t even know there was an archive for text messages. I had apparently done that with this message.

Worse in the forest though.

So there I stood in the store and couldn’t for my life remember what shipping company had been used 🙂 🙂 🙂 Thankfully no one else was there and the store owner did what she could to find the parcel anyway. It took well over 15 minutes but then she found it, it stood just by the door 🙂 🙂 🙂 I have now figured out how to find archived messages but I still need to know who the sender is, otherwise it’ll be gone for ever it seems 🙂 🙂 🙂

So I tried to use millet for the first time and I failed something spectacular 🙂 🙂 🙂 I found a recipe online, did exactly as it said but the dough was less thick that what it would be for a sponge cake?? I think, but it didn’t say so in the recipe, that this bread should have been thin but wide. I poured it in to a normal bread tin and that was so wrong. It collapsed already when I put it in the oven 🙂 🙂 🙂 It is edible though and millet has a sort of nut taste to it. I’ll either do the bread in a lower tin next time or I’ll find another recipe 🙂 🙂 I do think it’ll be really great to have now when I’ll have rice pasta and spaghetti sauce after I’m done here.

So I’ll wait with that last cup of tea for the day, I can have some after dinner instead. lots of snow has now melted away and there’s one more day before the colder weather arrives again so I hope most of what is left will melt away before it gets cold again.

Have a great day!

Finally, it is melting!

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It took its time but now we’ve finally had above 0C (32F) but the day began with mostly snow falling but also some rain. The roads have been rather bad and for once even worse in this village. My neighbour was going to take her children to pre school but had huge problems to even go up the small slope up to the village road. After that it was even worse, so she had to go back home again and can’t work tonight.

Our fox has survived the hunters so far 🙂

I walked up to my mailbox just a few minutes ago and if it doesn’t freeze too hard tonight it’ll be much better when I have to drive around noon tomorrow. I’ll go to a job interview so hold Your thumbs and cross Your fingers for good luck 🙂 Anyway, it had rained before we went out for our morning walk but it turned to snow when we were out. Instead of dry fluffy snow we now have what and slushy snow 🙂 I could get a grip when walking though so I think that was better 🙂

I can’t figure out if this is a track from a piglet or perhaps a small roe deer. I think it is a piglet.

Bot Alma and Malkolm behaved better than they have ever done I think. Well the only thing Malkolm does is to pull the leash because he wants to follow tracks as fast as he can but he does listen when I tell him to calm down, the majority of times 🙂 🙂 Alma is a different thing but today she stayed mostly quiet and also followed Malkolm to see what he thought was so interesting 🙂 So no aching shoulders on me today 🙂 Otherwise I haven’t done much. I baked some French rolls before we went out and I’ve realised that it’s the cheese that make any bread much better. I didn’t have any leftover cheese this time so the rolls sort of missed something 🙂 I also did some laundry just so I have some clean clothes tomorrow 🙂 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea for the day and I’ll have another of the rolls I baked because they’re always best the day they’re made 🙂

Have a great day!

Finally, it is getting less cold!

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It is slowly but steadily getting less cold now and that makes me smile. Thankfully we had clouds covering the sky during most parts of last night so it wasn’t as cold as they guessed it would be but to cold for me 🙂

So it almost felt warm when we went out for our morning walk today, only -11C (12,2F). No wind and a thick layer of clouds so the whole area sort of had a led grey hue to it.  The wild life had noticed the change towards less cold as well so today we saw lots of tracks in the snow. Mostly wild hogs but also deer, both Roe and red deer and also some moose tracks. The squirrels are to light to make any prints in the hard surface the snow now has (still powdery beneath the surface though) but the foxes were just enough heavy to make paw prints.

We did hear a few smaller birds tweeting close to the village but that was it, no Jays or Ravens made any sounds. A squirrel ran down a pine trunk on the back side of the tree but we could hear it and just had to follow the snow that fell from the surface while the squirrel ran downwards. It felt like walking in a world where only the vegetation was left. Well the whining from Alma sort of destroyed that feeling a bit but she was actually much more quiet than she normally is.

Tomorrow I’ll brush off all snow from the car and go to the supermarket. I really don’t have much left in the larder or the fridge 🙂 I also need seeds for the birds, some birds just don’t like peanuts, especially not those who only comes to the feeders when it’s too hard to find food in the forest like the Bullfinches. To be honest they are rare then to but it looks like both the House sparrow and the field sparrow prefers seeds before peanuts. 

It is time for that last cup of tea for the day. If I hadn’t had dinner just an hour ago I woukld have made a couple of sandwiches because I made some French rolls yesterday that almost tasted like normal ones and as always I’ll never recreate them since I just mixed together what ever kind of flour I had. Perhaps one day I should write it all down 🙂 🙂

Have a great day!

This must be the most sad looking Thuja in the world. The ground is dry and it never get any sunshine 🙂

I guess it’s ok during Christmas :-)

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They said the chance/ risk, depending on how one look at it, that we in southern Sweden would get a white christmas was slim to none, so I wasn’t especially surprised when I let the dogs out this morning that we had snow on the ground  🙂 🙂 🙂 Also it continued to snow for quite some time and the temperature has dropped so we will have a white Christmas here this year.

I had a parcel waiting for me at the grocery store in Gudhem so I decided that it was best to pick it up before we went out on our morning walk. I had ordered an aquarium book from 1942 so that I would have something to read this christmas plus the fact it is so old that I would be able to read about cold water fish people since long has forgotten about 🙂 I had hoped to find shredded coconut as well because I had forgotten to buy some when I went to the store yesterday. There’s nothing mice seems to like more than shredded coconut. Unfortunately they didn’t have any but it did remind me of potatoes when I saw the last two bags they had 🙂

A sort of a second flowering 🙂

It is actually quite hard to see these huge animals as long as they stand totally still.

This morning the box had trapped three mice! This time a definitely recognised one of them. Some time in its life it had lost a part of its tail so it was easily recognisable. I went out with them before I drove to the store. We went out on our morning walk as soon as I came home and walked much the same way as when I released the mice. We passed the last little field before entering the forest and something caught my attention. I didn’t see them at first but then I saw them, three moose! One big cow, one calf and the third too small to be an adult moose but still too big to be a calf. I’ve seen them before a couple of times and felt happy that they’ve survived the hunting season so far.

The dogs didn’t see them but they understood they were somewhere near 🙂 I must say that Alma has come a long way, just a few months earlier and she would have gone berserk 🙂 🙂 For once she actually started to follow the scents on the ground instead of screaming like obsessed and whining like she has gone crazy 🙂 🙂 We didn’t see any more big animals but both Alma and Malkolm kept their noses to the ground for the entire walk 🙂

I have actually been rather active today because when we came home again the first thing I saw when I went down in the cool cellar was that the trap had another prisoner. Well if that mouse with the short tail come here again I just as well get a cage and have it as a pet 🙂 🙂 🙂 It wasn’t the least stressed to see me, rather the opposite to be honest 🙂 🙂 It had taken it slightly more than two hours to find its way home again 🙂 🙂 🙂 So I just took the trap and walked even further away before I released it again 🙂 🙂 🙂 I was worried for a while that I for some reason had all forest mice and yellow necked mice in the entire area but I think I’ve just caught the same ones all the time 🙂 🙂 🙂

After that I made the gingerbread dough. The recipe said that I should have agave syrup and coconut fat but since I’m not a millionaire I used normal syrup and butter. The dough will rest until tomorrow morning before I make the cookies. I will however not be without anything nice to eat today because my neighbours daughters (six and three years old I think) wanted me to have something as a christmas gift, so they made me some fudge and butterscotch to have during christmas, well it won’t last that long because it was delicious 🙂

After that I baked two loafs of Vörtbröd, they came out rather nice, I and the dogs have already tried a couple of slices with a christmas cheese 🙂 So tomorrow I’ll bake the gingerbreads and also grill the christmas ham. I bought a small already cooked one because now days we really don’t use the water it was cooked in as they did back in the days when every calorie one could get was important. They used to heat it up and dip stale bread in it the get up all the fat still in the rather salty water. It has never been a favourite of mine so I buy ready cooked instead.

It is time to have that last cup of tea for the day and of course some of the christmas candy my neighbours gave me 🙂 Tomorrow is our big day of christmas and if I get some time over I’ll write something here 🙂

Have a great day!

A new morning routine :-)

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We’ve had two really grey and dark days but today the sun suddenly appeared again (of course not while we were out walking) and it felt really strange 🙂 It didn’t give any heat away though so I guess it appeared just for show 🙂 Still we were in the garden enjoying it as much as we could. It is and has been very windy as well but no wind could reach us here in the garden.

Well I guess it’s a bit wrong to call it logs, they’ll grind it down and make pellets of them. So this is the place I let the mice free.

It was so dark for a while yesterday so I switched to black and white for a short while.

I’ve sort of started a new routine. Wake up and let the dogs out to the garden and when they’ve come in I go down to the cool cellar and check what the box trap has caught during the night. When it gets brighter outside I take the mouse/mice out to the forest in the travel box and let them out just beside a big pile of logs they haven’t removed yet and walk hone.

The clouds thinned out so I turned back to cooler again 🙂

When I come home I leash the dogs and out we go on our morning walk. They are really interested in the smells at that pile of logs 🙂 Alma seems to have understood that if she is quiet we will see bigger animals and two days ago we saw a big moose. Unfortunately just as it vanished in to the forest so I didn’t get a chance to take a photo. Lately I’ve driven to the different places where I can pick up parcels so we might have our walk after that instead, it’s usually brighter outside if we do it that way.

Thankfully I don’t have any more parcels waiting to be picked up so I hope I don’t have to go anywhere until Monday when I’ll visit my old work friends again and also do that last christmas food shopping. I need a small ham and mustard and I’ll also check what I need for making gingerbreads. It’s always nice to have some gingerbreads at christmas but the gluten free we can but are an abomination to the world but I’ve made this kind before and they are delicious but perhaps a bit strong spice-wise 🙂

It is time for that last cup of tea and most likely a slice or two of the just a few hours old Vörtbröd I baked today 🙂

Have a great day!

Mice and Christmas bread.Mice.

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Sorry about the quality on the photos. None of them came out especially well.

 

Nothing much have happened here today. I noticed the other day that the monsterkitten has been a bit sloppy when it comes to hunting mice because I found mouse poop in the cool cellar. So I put up a box trap and filled it with coconut flakes. Our mice love coconut and I think it’s the best thing to load traps with, at least when it comes to box traps. It took a bit longer than I thought but today when I went down to the cellar I found two mice in it! Last time I had to use the box trap I only caught house mice but this time it was two Yellow-necked wood mice. I waited until we had daylight and then I carried the box to the forest. I always leave them at the same place, at a piece of tree trunk which is hollow. I poured down a handful of peanuts so they have a full stomach before finding a new home.

They were so fast when running out of the trap that I didn’t have a chance to take any photo of them, the house mice I’ve caught are always a bit slower so I have photos of them in an old computer. I have also baked a traditional christmas bread today. We call it Vörtbröd and the only English name I found for it is a Swedish word, Limpa which means loaf 🙂 🙂 It is normally a rye bread but since I can’t eat that I used my normal mix of Sorghum flour, rice flour and normally corn starch but I forgot to buy that so I used corn flour. There are a lot of spices in it as well, malt extract, salt, cloves, bitter orange peel, anise, fennel and cardamom plus one should use a dark beer like Porter or why not a Guinness. For us who can’t have that a Swedish Julmust (it isn’t far from beer tasting)  works good as well 🙂 The two loafs I made taste just yummy 🙂

 

Vörtbröd. The colours are a bit off here, it’s much more dark brown and not at all towards the orangey brown as it looks here.

Also one can have raisins in the bread (half of us love it half hate it 🙂 ) and I did of course forget to buy any so instead I cut down dried apricots instead, not the same but surprisingly well working. I’ll make more loafs closer to christmas. I’ve had a couple of slices while they were warm so when warm it’s cheese on but as cold why not have christmas ham and beetroot salad (not the American kind but our mayo and pickled beetroot based one) and of course meatballs or perhaps wiener sausages as well 🙂 Pickled cucumber is almost a must 🙂 It is time for that last cup of tea and also I’ve just realised that I have forgotten to give the animals something to eat. I will of course have a couple of sandwiches with christmas ham and pickled cucumbers 🙂

Have a great day!