Category Archives: Family

2025, Family, Food, holidays, Kids, Uncategorized

Easter Dinner

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I believe I wrote that we were so busy at church over Easter weekend that we had Easter dinner the weekend before Easter, and we weren’t going to cook Easter weekend. Well, as usual, that was not what happened. I made the header photo, Pizza Rustica, on Good Friday. It is a southern Italian deep dish pie with ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan, hot Italian sausage, mortadella, sun dried tomatoes, salami, and seven eggs, encased in a lovely crust. My pie looked just like the header photo. It was absolutely delicious. I highly recommend it.

We are traveling this week (more to come on that). The Grade 12 son of one of my coworkers is going to water the tomato seedlings, bring in the mail, and tend to the cat. He and his mom came on Saturday so we could show him what he needed to do. He intends to go to culinary school, so Husband showed him our cookbook library and I showed him the Pizza Rustica recipe. We loaned him several cookbooks and our pasta maker, since he expressed an interest in making homemade pasta and had used a pasta maker just like ours in school. It is one with a crank handle that is clamped to the counter. Husband calls this part of our “Radical Food Ministry “, getting people to cook from scratch. Husband told him he can borrow any of our cookbooks.

What is your favorite Easter dinner? Who mentored you? Who have you mentored?

2025, animals, Family, Music, Nature, Uncategorized

Animal Sounds

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I have always loved the music of Sibelius, and was tickled to hear that he described the third movement of his violin concerto as “a polonaise for polar bears”. What a visual! It is a sort of lumbering piece. I also love the pieces he has done that are inspired by swans.

Carnival of the Animals and Peter and the Wolf are family favorites. Many composers were inspired by animals, like Delius On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and Vaughan Williams Lark Ascending. Satie wrote about a dreamy fish, and Scarlatti wrote a keyboard sonata called the Cat Sonata. Vivaldi wrote about the goldfinch. Then, of course, there is Gershwin:

What are your favorite animal-inspired musical pieces or songs?

2025, animals, Family, pets, Uncategorized

The Fashion In Facial Hair

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Yesterday was Kyrill’s grooming appointment. He gets groomed every 6 weeks or so. Cesky Terriers don’t shed. Their coats just gets thicker and longer. It is also curly and needs regular brushing out. This is him, exhausted, after his appointment yesterday.

As you can see from the photo, Cesky Terriers have a very distinctive grooming pattern for their faces. They have the traditional terrier beard along with a hank of hair that extends from the eyebrow to the nose. This is presumably to protect their eyes as they rout vermin out of their holes and chivy wild swine from their dens so hunters can shoot them. Kyrill can see very well through all that hair. I make a point of trimming the hair from the outside of his eye sockets so he has good peripheral vision.

My father and grandfathers never had beards. Neither Husband or son has a beard currently. Son will occasionally grow one for a special contest at the college where he works. Husband had a beard decades ago, but his hair is curly and his beard had the texture of a scrub brush, so he hasn’t had a beard for more than 40 years.

I don’t find the current trend of excessive human male facial hair particularly attractive. I suppose it is less expensive than shaving every day. We are traveling to Montreal next week, and Son wants us to get him some fancy shaving things at a store he likes there, at our expense, of course!

Male Baboons, do you have, or ever have had, a beard? Female Baboons, ever had a significant other with a beard? What are your favorite or least favorite dog grooming standards?

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2025, Family, Food, Media, Uncategorized

Garlic Soup

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Husband found a soup recipe the other day that called for 40 cloves of garlic. We had just been to Costco where he had purchased a bag of garlic bulbs, so he felt well equipped to make the soup.

The recipe only made 1.5 quarts of soup. It was a creamy style soup with chicken broth and pureed potatoes. The garlic cloves were sautéed and the pureed, too. We also added some white beans. It was really good and wasn’t all that garlicky.

I suppose some people might find that many garlic cloves in one dish kind of off-putting. Just for fun I looked up weird foods on the internet, and my, were there some doozies. Chocolate covered bacon caught my eye, as did fried caterpillars with guacamole. The recipes for these dishes were included, and people had actually made them and liked them. I don’t think we’ll be making either of those in the near future, though.

What is the oddest food you ever ate or prepared? Come up with some interesting food ideas.

2025, Art, books, Family, Kids, Nature, Poems, Uncategorized

Flower Fairies

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I got a text from our daughter the other day asking if we still had the Flower Fairy books. I told her we had taken them with all the children’s books to our grandson in Brookings. I also told her I would order her another set, and did so.

I don’t know how many Baboons are familiar with these lovely books by British author and artist Cicely Mary Barker, but they have been family favorites since our son was born. Barker wrote and illustrated the books from 1923 to 1948. There about eight of them that feature seasonal flowers and flowers in different settings. The flower illustrations are quite accurate, and each flower is set with a fairy figure whose clothing corresponds to the flower in the illustration, along with a short poem. Barker used children from her sister’s Kindergarten as models for the fairies. Most of the poems were written by her sister.

We found these poems and illustrations wonderful for bedtime reading, as well as a great way to teach our children the names of flowers. We still recite “Scilla, scilla, tell me true, why are you so very blue?” when they pop up under the bay window in the spring.

What were your favorite childhood stories and poems? How did you learn about flowers and plants?

2025, Family, Food, Uncategorized

The Last Rye Bread

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When Husband moved to Winnipeg for graduate school in 1978 he was immediately captivated by the rye bread from the City Bakery, a venerable institution that made wonderful baked goods. City Bakery rye had just the right texture for Husband, neither mushy nor hard, with an open but fine grain. He has spent the last 47 years trying to replicate it.

For all the years of our courtship and marriage I have watched him try scores of different rye bread recipes. Some sour dough, some not, some with dried yeast, some with fresh yeast, some with caraway, some with no herbs, some successful, some true disasters. They have been baked in a variety of pans. Last weekend he declared that he had finally found the last rye bread recipe, which he made yesterday. He also declared that he would throw out seven rye bread recipes and keep seven rye bread recipes.

We shall see how long this lasts, and when I shall have to see him fuss over some new rye recipe. It is hard to be a perfectionist.

What is your favorite bread? What have you tried to emulate or perfect?

2025, animals, Family, Farming Update, home, Mysteries, Seasons, Uncategorized

What’s the Point?

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

Another Wednesday, another blizzard warning and snow day.

For good measure, the three of us took Thursday off as a snow day as well. Wanted to make sure we gave the roads time to improve. And really, on the north side of Rochester we only had about 2 inches maybe, and most of our driveway didn’t have any snow on it. Credit to my dad for having the road built up like he did 50 years ago. I remember maybe 30 years ago there was a snow storm every Thursday for about a month. I would plow the driveway before milking in the morning, Kelly would take the kids in and go to work, and then before they came home, I’d clear the driveway and again wait for them out at the highway. Must’ve been before cell phones, and in one of those odd little memories that sticks with you, I remember sitting in the tractor with the door open while one of the sheriff deputies that we were friends with, stood outside and we talked for half an hour. I remember watching his ears get more and more red and thinking “I’m sure glad I’m in this tractor cab.“, and “why doesn’t he end this conversation and get back in the car already??” Maybe Kelly finally came home, I don’t remember. Maybe he wasn’t cold. Maybe I should have had him get in the cab out of the wind at least. Don’t know.

Daughter and I have the place to ourselves this weekend as Kelly flew out to Boston to staff a booth for some work-related event. Flew out Saturday, works Sunday, back on Monday. I don’t think you can even call that a working vacation. Sounds like just plain ‘work’ to me.

I think I have finally finished farm bookwork and can get our taxes done now. The software I use generates a Year End report that will be 31 pages this year. About half of it being farm related expenses, and the other half being household expenses. There’s no profit on the farm this year and that’s primarily expenses related to the farm shop. I always enjoy looking at the final tally of these expenses. The dogs cost us $3000: Half is vet expenses, the other half are dog treats, joint medications, and frisbees. Pretty astounding how much we’ve spent on groceries.

I have finally, I think, finished all the construction in the shop. In fact, I moved the miter saw and table saw off to storage corners. I started moving bolts to the new bolt shelves and placed another order for more storage bins and dividers. I am throwing out a lot! A lot of not only old, rusty, bent, things, but just bolts that I’ll never use. For example, a box of nuts and bolts from my father-in-law when he had a grain bin taken down. There’s just not a chance I’m gonna use 1000 round headed, 1 inch bolts, that have a glob of tar on them. I also threw out a box of 3/8 inch flat headed plow bolts. Again, it’s just not something I’m gonna use. I use plow bolts, but they’re ½” diameter and 2 inches long.

I have two boxes of stuff I’m saving for my crafty sister. Just weird little odds and ends that she always appreciates. Although in this case, I’m not sure what she’s gonna do with all this metal stuff without a welder. Maybe I should buy her a tube of JB weld to go with this junk. I mean “these supplies”.  

One of the boxes of dad‘s odds and ends and bits of doo-dads, contained eight sets of ignition points and three condensers. I have no idea if they’re from tractors or cars and it sort of boggles my mind that if he replaced a set because it wasn’t running well, why did he not just throw it right away in the first place??

I saved those for my sister.
Some of you might know what those are. Electronic ignition and everything these days has eliminated the need for these things, but these were a pretty remarkable creation in the history of the automobile and kudos to whoever invented them.

(OK, I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, Charles Franklin Kettering, founder of Delco, and worked for GM, is credited with creating this ignition system. It was first used on the 1912 Cadilac. Huh!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delco_ignition_system

The online auction in Plainview finished on Tuesday. I had taken a small, 4 drawer toolbox that I got for free, a large 5 drawer ‘document’ cabinet that had large, shallow drawers, and the anhydrous applicator toolbar. There were two other, much nicer anhydrous applicators than mine on the auction. I got $200 for that item. A lot less than I paid for it ten or fifteen years ago. I also got $40 for the small free toolbox. So at least all that stuff is out of my hair.

I’ve got 1 chicken laying eggs in the garage.

I’ve chased her out of the garage a couple times recently, so I was keeping an eye out for eggs. Every now and then I get a chicken laying eggs in the garage for some reason. Once they were nesting up on a shelf behind a box of sidewalk chalk. This time she’s on the ground, behind a shovel. I figure that out one day when the shovel was tipped over. Chickens are so weird.

Hey- check out this ‘egg fetcher’ tool I use when the eggs are in the corner underneath the nest boxes:

WHAT IS THE MOST COMMON THING IN YOUR JUNK DRAWER?  DID YOU GO LOOK OR DID YOU JUST KNOW?  WHY DO YOU HAVE THAT MANY OF THAT THING?

2025, Family, Uncategorized, work

False Alarm

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On Tuesday, one of my coworkers posted on Facebook that her husband’s old, beat up pickup had been stolen from in front of their house. He works in the oil field and leaves for work every morning at 4:00 am. He is always picked up by someone driving a company truck, and a whole group of workers drives up together.

I didn’t see any updates after the initial post. My coworker’s husband has had a rough 6 months, getting jumped at the bowling alley and beat up in October by a couple of guys from Colorado. The pickup is real old and doesn’t have a tailgate. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would steal it.

Yesterday, I was at work and saw my colleague and she told me that for some reason, on Tuesday her husband decided to drive himself to work in his pickup but didn’t tell her. She gets up well after he leaves for work, and the first thing she assumed was that the truck had been stolen. He is out of phone service in the oil field, so she couldn’t contact him. It wasn’t until he got home that she realized she had jumped to conclusions. The police thought the whole incident was pretty amusing, and suggested that her husband communicate better with her. I suggested that perhaps she shouldn’t jump to conclusions. She agreed, but said the one time she didn’t call the police about something like this, it would turn out to be the real thing.

When have you jumped to conclusions? Ever had a vehicle stolen?

2025, Family, Food, Mysteries, Uncategorized

Chopsticks

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I looked up at the television yesterday to see a bit of a cooking show in which famous folks (mostly chefs) weigh in on their favorites.  This particular dish was some kind of dumpling and there was a close up shot of somebody’s hand using chopsticks to pick up the dumpling.   I know enough about this kind of stuff to know that the chances that it was the hand of the particular chef were nil.  Most likely a hand model.  Yes, there are such things although I’m wondering if there is a subgenre of the hand modeling subgenre for chopsticks use.

When I was in college, my freshman year roommate was from Japan – Yoshiko.  We had a pretty good year.  She bought a wonderful stereo half way through and she also taught me to use chopsticks and food that you eat with chopsticks.  There was no Chinese/Korean/Thai/Japanese food in my house growing up.  In fact, the first time I had any Chinse food in my life was that year in college.

These days, we have a ton of chopsticks at our house.  For many years, every time I found chopsticks on sale or that were interesting, I’d pick them up.  At last count, there are about 70.  And the sad thing is that I’m the only one who uses them.  When YA was little, I bought a set of cheater chopsticks but she wasn’t very interested and as she got older, she absolutely refused.  Occasionally if I serve Chinese, a guest may attempt them but usually they eventually fall back onto forks and spoons.

I’m not sure why I like chopsticks so much – I use them sometimes even if it’s a food you wouldn’t associate with them. 

Do you own chopsticks?  Do you have a favorite dish to go with them?

2025, Family, Food, Health, home, Mysteries

Carb Fest

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Over the years I’ve tried a lot of different food plans.  Whenever I hear of someone talking about how good they feel on some particular diet, I get curious.  I’ve even tried raw a couple of times; the second time I lasted the longest – four days.  Tried the zone for a bit.  The Mediterranean is pretty close to our regular habit, although as vegetarians, we pass on the occasional fish/meat.

 The keto diet was the one that I toyed with for quite some time before giving it a shot.  I have two good friends who swear by it.  I loaded up on a few keto carb substitutes and I made it three weeks.  But I didn’t feel better.  In fact if you factor in how much I was thinking about carbs, dreaming about carbs, crying about carbs, I was much worse.

So it probably won’t surprise anybody that every now and then I let my delight in carbs get the better of me.  Every month or so YA asks if Great Harvest is making Derby Cookies; they are her favorites.  She is also very fond of the various cheese breads that Great Harvest makes.  When she looked at the March newsletter, she was happy that the Derby cookies were on the docket as well as the gouda garlic bread.  Since she was traveling and I was in party prep, I made the bakery run on Saturday (that’s when they do the gouda bread).  I thought that ordering ahead would help, but it didn’t.  In addition to YA’s bread and cookies, I left the bakery with a White Cinnamon Chip loaf and an Apple Caramel loaf (mostly apple, not much caramel – a perfect ration for me).

This is a lot of bread, even for me.  YA will take care of the gouda and probably most of the cookies.  Guess I’ll just have to suffer through my two loaves.  Sigh. 

Anything that occasionally just makes you lose control?