In The Kitchen

I know I didn't spend ALL day in the kitchen, but it sure felt like it. I made bread for some people, and soup for a friend of mine who just had a baby and is laid up (Hi Siobhan!). This morning Jonas and I were out of muffins so I made more this morning. I tried a new recipe which I found on the back of the ground flax bag. It is the mother of all muffins. Here's the recipe:

1 1/2 cups unbleached white flour
3/4 Cup flax seed meal
3/4 Cup Oat Bran (I used wheat bran)
1 cup brown sugar
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powser
2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 Cups shredded carrots (I used juicer pulp)
2 apples peeled, cored and shredded (again, juicer pulp)
1/2 Cup raisins (I used craisins, since we have a giant bag of them)
1 Cup nuts, chopped (I left this out since Jonas would be eating them)
3/4 Cup milk (I used a full cup since I used juicer pulp which is a little dry-ish)
2 eggs beaten (From Ingrid's chickens, Hi Ingrid!)
1 tsp vanilla

Basically mix dry ingredients, add apples and carrots, mix, add everything else, mix, but not too much. Bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes. The recipe says it will make 15 muffins (which is weird, who has a fifteen-muffin tin?) But it made 24, and I didn't even add nuts! They were pretty good, the cinnamon/vanilla combo was a little strange but not bad.
Jonas could not get enough of these muffins. He would wail whenever his little highchair tray sat empty for longer than 2 seconds. When I finally thought he was done (because he had started throwing things on the ground) I put him down to play in the living room, he crawled right back to where his highchair was and ate the muffin pieces he had thrown earlier. He ate all of them and I didn't stop him. Saves me vaccuming. Builds his immune system. Everyone wins.
The muffins are great, and packed with goodness. You can't beat that. Also they look more like regular muffins, unlike the carrot/ginger ones. Here's the proof.


As for juice, I left some of the more adventurous ingredients out of Jonas's portion, hoping that he would drink it today. No good. He had carrot, apple, cantaloupe and wouldn't drink it. Perhaps he was too smitten with the muffins to be bothered. My juice on the other hand contained Apple, Carrot, Cantaloupe (rind on, not bad) celery, three big red chard leaves, and cucumber. It was delicious, though the cantaloupe leaves an after taste I can't say I care for. The juice was also a very pretty color. See?


After breakfast we went out into the garden, per the usual. The spinach starts have taken off already. Impressive. I meant to sow a bunch of things including, borage, lovage, parsley, spinach and chard, but Jonas got cranky before I could get to it. I did however get half of the compost sifted, no small feat. Our compost pile is a beast, one thing I don't like about winter gardening: the compost seems to take years to break down. There was a lovely wind scorpion nest in the middle of the pile, can't get enough of that. Hey, it's better than them hiding in our bath towels, sheesh! That was fun.
Something, probably a raccoon, the same raccoon that broke into our neighbor's liquor cabinet after sneaking in the doggy door, keeps pulling the same nasty potato from the compost and nibbling at it. Every morning I find it on the brick pathway and put it back in the pile, next morning it's back on the pathway again. I get a kick out of it. There are so many tastier things available in the pile, but it, whatever it is, is attached to that sprouting potato. I finally buried it deep in the pile today when I was sifting and moving the compost to it's new location. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to sift and move the second half tomorrow, and also have time for planting seeds, and picking lemons, and juicing lemons, and spraying the lemon tree for white fly, and spreading the manure in the berry plot and starting more wheatgrass, and thinning the lettuce, and watering, and weeding. Where does it end? It's a good thing Jonas usually likes being outside. I could live without him eating snails though. Little weirdo.