cornbread for a snowy day

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…actually it's lovely but much too cold to go out in, let alone drive! The cardinals and friends have been mobbing the feeder all day.

There were some mentions of cornbread on Facebook, and that made me think of the best recipe, and here it is. If you want traditional southern cornbread, that does not contain so much sugar that it tastes like cake, make it according to the "receipt" of my grandmother Willie Elvie Chumley Miller, born in the hills of northern Alabama in 1881.

You will need:

pre-heated 400° oven

8" cast iron skillet, or equivalent Pyrex dish

three mixing bowls, large, small, and tiny (or a coffee-cup)

2 cups stone-ground cornmeal

1 cup boiling water
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar (optional)
1-4 tablespoons butter

Put the butter in the skillet in the oven to melt and get sizzling hot.

Put the soda, salt, and sugar in the tiny bowl and mix them. Get all the lumps out of the soda.

Beat the egg and mix with the buttermilk in the small bowl.

Pour the boiling water on the meal and stir till it's all absorbed. There will be some meal still dry. Then rapidly stir the salt mix into the buttermilk, and immediately dump it over the damp cornmeal. Stir briefly. A few lumps are OK. You want to get it into  the oven before the bubbles of the soda and buttermilk have dissipated.

Scoop the thick batter into your sizzling butter and return to the oven for about 45 minutes. When it's done, hold the skillet upside down over a plate, and it will fall out, with the buttery bottom crust uppermost. Cut in wedges and enjoy!

winter weather!

Saturday was a splendid, cloudless, windless day in the fifties. Eddie and Stephen refilled my woodshed.






I took a walk in the west forty and photographed grasses and tracks by the pond.













Overnight it started raining. Sunday morning was a steady cold drizzle. Feline disgust.

About 11am or so it changed to heavy sleet and then snow, which came pouring down in thick huge flakes. Within half an hour the ground was covered. I refilled the bird-feeder and enjoyed watching much activity.


I think I counted nine male cardinals at once, certainly eight. The two towhees are here, and white-throats and Harris sparrows.








Early Monday morning I saw a kinglet sitting on the top of the fan housing outside the upstairs landing window, fluffed out round. What do they EAT? I put out a suet-cake, but it has been in the freezer for a very long time, and I haven’t seen anyone interested in at.

I have burned up a good deal of the guys’ work.

yep, fifth snow

From around six until perhaps midnight last Saturday, it snowed. There was a moderate northwest wind in the early evening, picking up to a real gale overnight, so the snow was tightly plastered to the north sides of trunks. A few trees, like these, ended up looking like birches.









The fruit trees were all in pretty full bloom, peach and Chickasaw plum, with the Mexican plum getting started. I was quite worried for the crop, as the temperature got down to at least 28°. These Mexican plum flowers, like many, have a hood of snow.











These are the little plum-thicket bush plums (these on the tank dam). The flowers are about half as big as those on the Mexican plum trees. The stamens are fewer, with colorful orange pollen.





At the tank gate, the wet soil had melted most of the snow as it landed. Larger white areas are snow; the little white dots are fallen plum and pear petals. The petals are often referred to poetically as covering the ground like snow, but not usually beside snow.


In the backyard the peaches were pink mists within the snow in the cloudy dawn. But to my pleased surprise, in the early afternoon when the temperature had gotten up to nearly 40° and the snow was about gone, the peach flowers were still just as pink, with no brown edges. Seems like all the pistils made it through just fine. Peach pies and plum jelly after all!


And it's been extremely interesting to experience all these different varieties of snowfall, in one weird winter. But really, enough is enough. These pictures were taken on March 21, "the first day of spring," and we had better not have a sixth snow.

Just sayin'.

yipes! more snow?

Forecast:
Tonight
Cloudy with a 50 percent chance of snow. Windy. Snow accumulation up to 1 inch. Lows in the lower 30s. Northwest winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts to around 40 mph. Wind chill readings as low as 18 to 23.
Sunday
Cloudy. A 30 percent chance of snow in the morning. Windy. Snow accumulation up to 1 inch. Total snow accumulation up to 2 inches. Highs in the mid 40s. Northwest winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts to around 40 mph. Wind chill readings as low as 19 to 24.

Just when the plums and the peaches are all in bloom. Bah, humbug!

Can only hope it will be a degree or two warmer than they say.

the fourth snow!

Many years we have no particular wintry precipitation - maybe a couple hours of sleet, or more damaging, freezing rain that coats branches and wires with a beautiful crystal coat that they can't support. But this winter it has been snow, more snow than in decades.

The Christmas Eve blizzard was mean. Fierce north wind and temperatures rapidly dropping through the twenties. But last Thursday it snowed from before dawn till after dark with very little wind, and a steady temperature of about 33°, dropping to 30° or so through the night. You could tramp in it for hours with soaked feet and not feel particularly cold.

I happened to spend it at the Ridge. I went out to feed Buddy, and managed to get the car halfway down the hill when all I meant to do was turn around. So, since I had food and fuel, and the cats were all safely inside back in town, I settled in to enjoy it. Took lots of pictures!








The lack of wind and the wetness of the snow meant that huge globs of it clung to the tiniest supports. A branched twig would accumulate a fist-sized clump, until one last flake too many would send it plunging.






The birds were really mobbing the sunflower seeds. Cardinals, towhees, Harris' sparrows, white-throats, a brown thrasher, and even a mockingbird.

Snow days can be great.

More pictures in my Facebook album.

cats meet snow

Lets see if youtube embed codes work on Blogger.



Yes!!

To make the captions legible, click the full-screen button. Now I know that the font-sizes on iMovie refer to the movie as seen full-screen, and need to be doubled for youtube.

Christmas eve "blizzard"

This is NOT normal Christmas Eve weather! The forecasters, up until almost when it happened, thought we might get a few flurries. It snowed from around 1 pm (after a gradual transition from cold rain) till about 10 pm, all the while with 30-mph winds, gusting to 40 mph, and the temperature gradually dropping from 35° to 25°. B-r-r-r-r!





Another view of those two plum trees. Visibility is actually fairly good here. I took these as I was leaving the Ridge about 3pm; by the time I got to Denton visibility was about a block.

I am eager for March, when I can see these "hung with snow" in the poetical sense, like Housman's cherries, rather than this all too literal version (not that any of it was hanging about, with that wind)!

I took some video of the birds, which I will try to get edited and on youtube. I had gotten the feeder hung from a wire between the living room eave and the shrubbery, out of reach of the coons. But I didn't allow for the effect of 40-mph gusts on the shrubbery; the nail holding the wire pulled out of the eave rafter. I rehung the feeder directly from the eave, just 18 inches from the windows. The birds didn't seem to care.

Here's a cardinal outside the kitchen window on the big rock, chowing down on sunflower seeds. Generally, I seem to have cardinals (at least six males seen simultaneously), chickadees, titmice, Harris sparrows, a fox sparrow, whitethroats (more heard than seen), and two towhees.



Christmas was lovely and sunny, up to nearly 40°, so it melted fast. This brushy area down by the lane that we hadn't gotten around to mowing was transformed on Christmas morning. By the afternoon it was back to just being brush.



This is a big plum tree (I think) in the field above the gate. The guys timed themselves clearing it -- it took about an hour to free the trunk. They simply cut the briers off and left the strands up in the canopy. Picture every gray line in the canopy continued down to the ground, and you will have a "before" picture. I think it's worth doing with all the trees in that field. There should still be plenty of briery thickets nearby to provide wildlife cover!

So that was our white Christmas -- the first I can remember here. All melted now except in the very shadiest spots.