bread and snow

The snow is really piling up on the picninc table.  Having the garden in the foreground reminds me about the book link I posted yesterday, where I had just gotten to the chapter on gardening.  I am starting to get excited about next year's garden.  In fact, I fell asleep wondering if we could build a new carport next to the house and tear down the garage--which is sitting on some of our prime sunny land.  (We don't have full sun anywhere in this yard, but there's a good half to two thirds sun in that part of the yard.)  Needless to say, for our gardening abilities, that would be ridiculous, but...

I really have to catch the children doing something else, but here's a photo of them 'as they were' yesterday afternoon, anyway.

I made Elizabeth's bread recipe yesterday.  (Don't you like the morph on the table from bread to paperwork/financials to sewing?)  It rose in the bowl just fine (sitting on our radiators), but was not quite as happy rising in the muffin tins.  Apparently I need more bread pans.  The cookie sheets were all in use at the critical shaping moment baking wheat crackers, and my one bread pan (which makes the food taste like pan if you leave it in at all after baking) was sticky on the bottom.  I still had all of Erika's muffin tins in my mudroom, so gave the individual breadettes idea a whirl.  I let them bake much (much!) longer than the recipe said, as they were not sounding done.  When I finally pulled them out, the insides were cooked, but the outsides were extremely crusty.  Not so crusty that you couldn't get your teeth through it, but you would get a shower of crumbs with every bite.  We put all of them in ziplocs overnight to see if they might soften up a little.  The crustiness was actually pretty good, but not so much the crumb shower.