Kitty or Kiddie toy?

Our cats, Buddy and Ivy, received a toy for Christmas.  It's a little arm that spins in a circle underneath some fabric.  It's a really simple design and Buddy will bat at it for quite a while.  But, I'm not sure who it entertains more...

The kitties or the kiddies?

Gluten-free, Low carb Pancakes

Since going gluten-free, pancakes have been one of the harder "breads" to duplicate.  We've tried a lot of recipes over the last year, but all fell short.  They were either too soft, too coconut-y, too mushy, too bland, etc.  Today I looked in a recipe book that I've had for some time.  It called for arrowroot powder, but I recently learned you can easily substitute cornstarch.  The recipe also called for 1/4 cup agave, which we don't use so I usually substitute honey.  But, this made it really high carb (at least too high carb for our family and Samuel's diabetes).  Dan is our resident pancake maker, so he took the recipe and tweaked it.  The result: the best pancakes we've had since going GF.  They cooked/browned like a regular pancake and the inside was light and fluffy and not mushy.  It's not to say we'll stop looking, but this one is our go-to recipe for now.

2 large eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup water
1 1/2 cups almond flour
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp cornstarch


In a blender, combine the eggs, vanilla and water; process on high for about 1 minute or until smooth.  Add the almond flour, salt, baking powder, and cornstarch, and blend until combined.  We cooked our pancakes using grapeseed oil because it has a high smoke point and has a very neutral flavor (versus coconut oil).

Total carb count for the whole batch is about 19 net carbs and this recipe will make about 20 smaller pancakes (about 1 carb each) or 10 larger pancakes (about 2 carbs each).  (Comparison: your typical wheat flour pancake has about 15 carbs each).

Hope you enjoy!

Beauty sleep

Playing is sometimes so much work you just need a nap.

PSA: How to boil an egg. Seriously.

We eat a lot of hard boiled eggs - in salads, as snacks, for deviled eggs.  Heck, sometimes my dinner is just a hard boiled egg and a hunk of sharp cheddar cheese.  But I hate peeling them!  With as many as I peel, you'd think I'd be really good at it.  It doesn't seem like rocket science, but I've tried various methods in my 36 years and none have made much of a different.

Until now.

The secret?

Drum roll please.....

...

...

...

You don't boil.... you STEAM them!  Turns out it really isn't rocket science!  Here's how you do it.

1)  Place a cheapo steamer basket into a pot big enough to hold your eggs.  Fill it with water until it just reaches the bottom of the steamer basket.

2) Bring water to a boil.

3)  Place eggs in, like so...

4) Put a tight lid on, set timer for 12-15 minutes and let it go - don't lift the lid!  The water will stay at a hard boil, but it's the steam that actually cooks the eggs.  (I started with 12 minutes and they were fine, but a little soft in the middle.  If you like firmer yolks, you'll probably need to go the full 15 minutes.)

5) Put eggs in ice water immediate after the 15 minutes is up.  Use right away or transfer to fridge.

6) Commence peeling.  Here's a trick I discovered about a year ago and combined with steaming, it makes for really easy peeling.  Break the shell around the middle in three different places.  Then lay the egg on the counter and roll it around to create fine cracks all over the shell.  (Just hard enough to crack the shell, but not the egg underneath.).  Then find a starting point, get under the filmy membrane and peel away.  The shell usually comes off in two or three pieces for me, almost like a ribbon.  Like this...

 See how the shell looks like snake skin?  That's all of those little cracks you created from rolling it on the counter and thus separating the shell from the egg.

If you're not a hard boiled egg eater, you've probably moved on from this post already.  But if you are a hard-boiled egg eater, you should give this method a try next time!

Belated Christmas

We had to postpone Christmas with Dan's parents until mid-January.  Samuel and Evie thought it was so fun to have Christmas again.  Hopefully they don't expect one each month now.  Here are a few highlights from their visit.

Evie quickly caught on how to open presents (she did much better than she did just a month ago on her birthday)...

And Samuel confiscated the present shortly thereafter...

There's a present in this pic and Evie.  You just can't see Evie because she's in chameleon mode.  (Note: the wrapping paper and jammies were pure coincidence.)

Working together to figure out all of the features of their lawn mower/popper...

The kids LOVE playing with my laptop.  Now Evie has her own (which makes Mommy really happy too!)...

It's hard to see from this angle, but Samuel is unwrapping a semi with a flatbed trailer and a backhoe...

Daddy and Evie playing with her laptop...

Leaf piles

I was just going through pics and found a few I forgot I took.  These are from November just as the leaves were falling.  We had a beautiful, sunny day and had the kids outside playing in leaves.  Well, Dan was playing in the leaves.  I was supervising and taking pictures.

I'm not sure I have any pictures of Samuel and Evie looking at the camera at the same time.  Example below...

Barn kitties get to play in the leaves too.  You just have to be careful not to squish them.

Samuel and Evie required the leaf pile to be "fluffed" regularly...

So Samuel could dive in...

Evie got a diaper full of leaves that had to be taken care of...

And then she dove in too.  Although she never made it very far into the pile...

Plate Lickin' Good

Ah, the things you can get away with when you're two...

How can someone so mischievous and messy be so adorable... ?

Evie Turns Two

Here are few pics from Evie's birthday party.  Snow and icy weather kept distant family away, but our neighbors were here to help us celebrate:

If you look closely, you can see a tear on Evie's cheek. She was upset because she didn't exactly know how to eat her cupcake.  As soon as I cut it into smaller pieces, she was a happy camper!  Samuel on the other hand had no problems and was cramming cupcake into his mouth as quick as he could.  Their friend Gideon (on the right) ate his cupcake like a normal child.

Evie's first barbie doll, Ariel from the Little Mermaid...

How many people does it take to help a 2-year old open presents?...

Evie seemed a little embarrassed by all of the attention.  This face sums it up...

Christmas 2013

Yes, we're still alive.  Yes, I realize I've not posted anything for three months.  I told myself that I was just going to let the blog go, but I've thought more about it and decided against it.  However, my posts will likely be simpler and shorter.  I have to remind myself that Samuel and Evie won't be  all-consuming two and three year-old's forever and someday we'll be out of the trenches and able to resume normal life - which will include time for more in-depth blog posts. 

Someday. 

I hope.

For now, here are some pics of our Christmas.

 The train set/table was Samuel and Evie's big present:

A little over excited...

Evie got lots of board books that she (hopefully) can't rip...

Evie helping me make Christmas cookies...

Danny, Courtney and Brian arrived in the afternoon.  After dinner we had Christmas round 2...

Who doesn't love Curious George?...

Hard, double yolk

Have you ever cracked open an egg to find it had a double yolk?  It happens to me pretty often.  However, it never occurred to me that I'd never hard boiled one....

until now........





Note: the egg was a little "weird" (notice how it's grey at the top), so I decided against eating it.

Sandbox play

Not really a lot of back story to this post.  It's been such a long time, I just wanted to get a few updated pictures posted.  So here is some summertime fun...

 

Brother, can you spare some screws? Part 4

Step 6: Screwing down the deck boards.

It's been almost three weeks since my last post, and this is what I have to show for it:

As I mentioned last time, you're looking at 82 deck boards and 2,460 screws (give or take.  Several were inadvertently dropped under the deck, never to be seen again.)  The three weeks in between the first board and the last included a lot of work at my real job, quite a bit of rain, several trips to Lowe's for extra supplies and some replacement deck boards, several other projects around the house, several barbeques on the unfinished but still usable deck, and a whole lot of thinking about the next phase of this project: the railings, which I'll get to in a moment.  First, please note the rather ragged looking edge of the deck on the right hand side.  Tomorrow I will snap a nice straight chalk-line about 3 inches in and then run my circular saw all the way down the length of the deck, leaving a nice straight edge.

Step 7: The Railing.

The main reason I wasn't in a huge hurry to finish putting down the deck boards (other than the ache in my back and knees after about the fifth board each session) was that we didn't really know how we wanted to do the hand railings.  Well, Google Images to the rescue!  I could post a picture of the design we decided on, but that would ruin the surprise, wouldn't it?  

The downsides to our choice of handrails are it's complexity and cost.  I'm not concerned about the complexity, but this project is already over budget, and this would put us WAY over budget.  But there is a solution, and the main cost will be time.

Enter the sawmill.

In an earlier post I mentioned that I used our sawmill to make the posts that are holding the deck up off the ground.  Now I'll show you how I used the sawmill to make the lumber for the handrails.  It began with logs:

The three smaller logs are white oak, a fairly decay-resistant wood that is frequently used in outdoor projects.  The bigger log is red oak and won't be used for the deck.  There's a fourth white oak log already on the sawmill.  All of the white oak logs were cut down about 3 years ago.  The good news is that they're very dry and ready to use (checked with a moisture meter).  The bad news is that they're much harder to saw than they would have been when still green.

Here's that fourth log being squared up into a usable timber:

 

Here's a closeup:

 

After each slice is removed during these squaring cuts, the timber gets rotated:

Once all the bark and any defects are removed, we can start sawing out boards.  In this case 2x6s, 2x4s, and 4x4s:

And here's a completed 2x6, 14 feet long.  Oak is heavy!

The wood is not quite ready to use at this point.  It comes out of the sawmill rough, so I'll run it through my surface planer both to smooth it up and to bring it down to the same dimensions as the lumber we would buy from the home center.

Total cost for the wood for our handrails?  About half a gallon of gas, a pair of disposable earplugs, and a kilowatt-hour or two to run the planer.  White cedar from Lowe's would have cost almost $800 for the same amount of wood.

Next time: Building and installing the handrails.  Or the steps.  Or maybe both.  Stay tuned!

It's a Wonderful Deck, Part 3

Last Saturday morning dawned bright and beautiful, a perfect day to work outside in the fresh air.  The following pictures capture the work that took place on the deck.

Step four, continued: Setting the posts.

This picture shows the purpose of all those strings and poles in the earlier posts; they're there to make sure all the support posts line up perfectly.  This picture also help to show how all the time spent earlier paid off now, as this post lined up perfectly.  (They all did, thank goodness!)

This picture shows the bright red color of freshly cut heart cedar.  It smells awesome too!  Sadly, the wood  turns brown after being exposed to the sun for a few hours.  (Sharp-eyed viewers will notice that the string does not line up with the post.  That's because I was leaning against it while taking the picture.)

Step 5: Framing the deck.

For a while on Saturday I had a helper.  Our neighbors came over to use our chicken processing equipment to butcher some chickens for their family.  The neighbor's dad wandered up to see what I was working on and ended up lending a helping hand during a break in the chicken operation.  It was nice having some help lifting those 2x12 ledger boards!  He ended up staying even after the chicken processing was done, and finally called it a day when it started raining around 3pm.  In this picture the perimeter is complete and we are starting to hang the interior joists.

After the rain stopped the sun came back out, so I went back to work, solo.  I couldn't resist laying down a few deck boards just to get the feel of the thing, even though I wasn't ready to screw them down yet.

 

 In this picture you can see the rubber waterproofing membrane installed on top of some of the joists.  It's purpose is to prevent the joists from rotting due to water sitting on them.  It's cheap insurance and should extend the life of the deck for many years.  At the top right of the picture you might notice that there are two more center posts to be installed.  In the bottom of the picture you can see that I've started screwing down some of the deck boards.  Here's a little math: 30 screws per deck board times 82 deck boards equals 2,460 screws that need to be driven into the top of this deck.  Yikes. 

Next time: Installing 2,460 deck screws!

Building our deck, Part 2

When we left off last time, our footing forms were being lined up and leveled.  Now it's time to fill 'em up with concrete.
There are several ways to get concrete.  You can order a truck load.  You can buy concrete mix in bags to which you just add water and stir.  Or you can get some sand, gravel, and cement and make it from scratch.  This is the route we're taking.  A big thanks to my dad for his generous donation of his old cement-mixer!  There's no way I was going to mix 18 double batches of concrete by hand!

Step one: Making concrete.
 Concrete starts with sand, gravel, and portland cement: the standard recipe is three parts gravel and two parts sand to one part cement.  This mixer holds enough for two batches at a time, so here I'm tossing in 6 shovels of gravel and 4 of sand.

 
 Next comes the cement.  Two shovels full.

Now we add water.  Exactly how much water will depend on many factors, such as the temperature and the humidity.  You want just enough water to saturate the mix and make it easy to work with.  Too much water will weaken the concrete, so take it easy!

 Success!  This batch looks just right. 

Step two: Filling the forms.
This first round they will only be filled half-way to allow faster curing.

 I inserted three, 3-foot long pieces of rebar per form.   The rebar is needed to strengthen the footings  and reduce the chances of them cracking.  Once the forms were filled half way I drove the rebar into the wet concrete, also half way.

After I finished filling the forms halfway I put some buckets upside down over the forms to keep rain out.  It ended up raining off and on for the next two days, putting a temporary halt on further progress.  When the weather cleared I spent an evening after work filling the forms the rest of the way, and installing J-bolts at the top.  Here's the finished product:

And here's one of the bases that will support the post.  The purpose of this base will be to keep the bottom of the post off the top of the footing, which will reduce the chance of rot.   Not shown in this picture is the rubber membrane that will go over the top of the footing under the base.  The purpose of the membrane is to prevent water from seeping down into the concrete in the winter, freezing, and causing tiny cracks to become large cracks.

Step three: Ledger boards.
The ledger boards are bolted directly to the house, and are considered the backbone for the deck.

The ledger boards are attached with these special fasteners.  Unlike lag bolts, these require no pre-drilling and have a coating that is guaranteed for life against corrosion.  And if that's not enough, they are also cheaper than lag bolts, stronger than lag bolts, and they're made in the USA!

 I used a cordless impact driver to zip them in, one every 12 inches, and staggered top and bottom of the board.  Also, according to the instructions, it's important to not counter-sink the heads.

Step four:  The support posts.
I only had time on this particular day to get one post cut and installed, so the rest will have to wait until the next post.  (Ha-ha, the next post, get it?!  It's a pun!)

I cut the posts on our sawmill from red cedar trees grown on our and our neighbor's land.  The posts were cut only from the heartwood, so they should last just short of forever.