Cracking Eggs

Well, it's been a bit interesting over the past couple of days. Last night I decided to make an omelet (I'm still working on it) by cracking a few eggs.

In my house, making an omelet means I'm totally gutting an area and decluttering it, or re purposing it. Last night was re purposing. I have a pantry with pull out shelves in the top that holds my small appliances (an appliance penthouse since its on the top shelf) and my baking / cooking ingredients like spices, honey, oils, etc. That only takes up the top half of the pantry.

The bottom half was originally built to hold a portable dishwasher. Since I am the dishwasher, that space it pretty much wasted with things I had totally forgotten about. Such as the sauce pot that I tried to use for a wash pail............until I discovered the hole that was in it. Then I remembered that I used that with the hot air popcorn popper because of the hole. That went into the recycle bin!

Anyways... After I cleaned the "stuff" from that nice open space and washed it down, I decided to put my canning supplies in there. So far it's several cases of jars (pint and quart) that I have here, and will have more when I bring the cases I have at my mom's over here. I have 2 pressure canners and 2 water bath canners. I also have my food mill and various spoons and gadgets. I'm hoping to be able to add a steam juicer to the collection. I don't think I'll have room to put my dehydrator when I get it, but I'm going to try.

So that's my re purposing day.

Monday I was inspired by a post featuring Roasted Beet and Potato Salad with Fresh Goat Cheese from Gastroanthropology to try my hand a Roasted Root Vegetables. I had Idaho and Sweet Potatoes on hand and a couple of "fresh" beets. I don't normally have beets (let's just say I have never had fresh beets in my house), but I had tried to do root vegetable chips a couple of weeks ago. Suffice it to say that didn't work out but had two beets left over.

I diced the potatoes and beets, tossed them in a bit of olive oil and salt, poured them into a not-so-deep roasting pan then put them in the oven at 400 for a bit (25 - 30 minutes if I remember correctly). These turned out so much better than the veggie chips. There are some improvements needed. Next time, I'll skip the sweet potatoes which were too sweet and figure out how to cut that rutabaga without breaking my knife or breaking the counter into small pieces.

It's supposed to get down to single digits tonight with wind chills -10 to -20. I have the wood stove going and I'm thinking about canning some turkey broth that I froze at Thanksgiving. Not sure if I have time since the broth is still frozen. If I don't get to it tonight, I'll try to get an earlier start when I get home from work on Thursday. I'll probably need the extra heat from the canner to keep the furnace from coming on (it's set at 60 right now and doing ok).

The cold front is roaring through as I type. BBRRR Time to throw another log on the fire! The wind is blowing really good now. Until next time.............