Baking and raking season

A good start

The Fall season has been mild so far. We have had a frost in most places, but with the clear skies has come generally warm afternoons under October sun. This has kept the leaves on the trees a bit longer than usual and I think has limited the Fall color a bit. We had enough leaves to rake so we did our first batch earlier this week. Limiting the amount of leaves this year was the leaf mold that attacked the Norway maples. Wet weather in the first half of the summer allowed the mold to spread through the area including the trees along the park fence at the north end of the property. These maples make up a good percentage of our trees and they dropped their leaves early which ended just getting mulched up by the mower. The rest of our trees, a silver maple, some sugar maples, linden and a hickory were unaffected by the mold and seem to be holding on to their leaves longer than usual.

First fire of the season

One night did get cold enough for our first fire of the season. The fire drafted well and it was a nice hot fire, almost too hot and we ended up sleeping with the fan on that night. I did get the chimney inspected and the report was mixed. The chimney is fine, and safe to be used, but an odd 90 angle in the flue makes it impossible to clean properly. Any debris that falls down from the top is inaccessible from the bottom due to the right angle run of the flue. The chimney guy suggests that next year we install a clean out on the outside of the chimney so they can access the entire flue. Also, he did say there was some loose brick and mortar which may need to be repaired at the same time. Stay tuned.

One batch of cinnamon buns. We made two batches. 

As mentioned in the subject, it is indeed baking season and we did two large batches of cinnamon buns. It's actually pretty easy to do. We use a recipe that came with our first KitchenAid mixer many years ago. All the mixing and kneading is done by the mixer, so we just have to roll out the dough, put down the filling, and roll it back up. We do doctor up the drizzle coating and filling a bit to give it our own stamp on them. They came out real nice.

Next on the baking list is our Christmas bread. We follow and old white bread recipe from the church cook book to make large round loaves. This is more work for me since the amount of dough overwhelms the mixer so that I have to hand knead the bread. It's kind of messy and back braking since the kitchen table is just too low for me. Another problem is our overstuffed freezer. We just don't have enough room to store the bread after we bake it so we're going to have to work on that.

Fall decorations are up. Note the empty flower containers in
front of the porch. They're filled with rocks and dirt and I'm
too damn lazy to move them.  

Cindy had the idea that corn stalks would be nice to have at the front of the house so we went out to look for them. I was shocked at how much money they wanted for those things. There are vast fields filled with them awaiting to be ground up for silage so they really should not be all that expensive. Anyway, we ended up getting three nice bundles at a local farm market for $15 bucks. I tied them to the columns at the sides of the porch and in the center. I really like the looks of them and they are appropriate right through Thanksgiving. I intend to get my money's worth out of them!