Cold snap

It's been clear and bitterly cold the last couple of days.

This morning it dropped to -8F.

Brrr!

The rising sun made shafts of light through the woods...

...and shone gold on the silvery-blue snow.

I tried to photograph the frost on this little boy's whiskers, but he kept moving and my camera was sluggish with the cold and wouldn't focus.

It's important to feed cows abundantly during extreme cold. Digestion is a significant factor in keeping ruminants warm.

On such clear, cold days, the livestock bask sideways to the sun, absorbing what heat they can. This is actually surprisingly effective.

Needless to say, the chicken waterers were frozen solid. I took them in the house, ran them under hot water until they were de-iced, and filled them with lukewarm water. We'll repeat this at least twice more during the day.

We recently got one heated chicken waterer. Just one. Why one? Because the rest were sold out.

The chickens do surprisingly well in these temps (there's no heat in their coop). We keep hay on the floor of their coop to keep their tootsies warm. Tough little birdies.

There were four eggs in the coop, frozen solid.

Frozen eggs burst their shells, sometimes with weird freaky results.

I give you the irony of a dog with four-inch fur who loves nothing more than to park herself by the cookstove.

The one advantage of such clear, cold days is sunset can be pretty...

...and dusk can be glorious.

If we just hang in there, we're supposed to get above freezing by Sunday. Go figure.

Winter wonderland

Older Daughter and I bundled up, took snowshoes and the dog, and went walking in the snow on Sunday.

At first Lydia was wading through chest-deep snow. It was hard going for her -- she's no longer a spring chicken ...

... but after awhile we came across tracks from someone's ATV and the going was much easier on her.

Older Daughter has learned she prefers winters in Idaho over winters in New Jersey since conifers hold snow so much more beautifully than deciduous trees.

We stopped at the viewpoint we call "the overlook," and she plopped down in the snow to contemplate the vista overlooking the canyon...

...which, I'll admit, is a lovely view.

She wanted to get to a point on the trail where a branch bends over the path, so we trekked onward.

There's no question we were in a winter wonderland.

Then we came out of the woods and back onto the prairie.

We stopped on the road to remove our snowshoes, and Lydia was so tired she laid down right there.

Sadly, the next day I had to drop Older Daughter at the airport. (Due to delays, she didn't arrive back in New Jersey until 2 am Tuesday morning.)

After dropping her at the airport, I swung back into Coeur d'Alene to pick up Younger Daughter from her job. The downtown was beautifully lit up with Christmas lights.

It's hard to say goodbye to the holidays and to Older Daughter.

Happy birthday, Tolkien!

This is Older Daughter's Christmas gift to Don: a magnificent copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings."

It weights a hefty 5.25 pounds, and she lugged it in her suitcase all the way from New Jersey.

Tolkien, it hardly needs saying, is regarded with near-awe in the Lewis household. And today is his 125th birthday. Or, as Don put it, his "twelve-ity-fifth" birthday.

Happy birthday, Mr. Tolkien! And thank you for the reading pleasure you've given generations of fans.

Tomato sauce -- done at last

I've finally -- finally! -- finished the tomato sauce.

This was a long journey that began in June when we planted 16 tomato plants.

We harvested a few tomatoes here and there, and as I harvested them I used the food strainer to purée them, then froze the purée.

After ripening all the green tomatoes...

...and puréeing them, the freezer was stuffed with purée.

I didn't want to start cooking down the purée into tomato sauce until two things happened: One, all the green tomatoes had ripened; and two, the cookstove was in constant use (as opposed to letting it go out during the day). As December's temperatures dropped and the cookstove was always hot, I started processing the purée.

I defrosted four bags at a time.

By letting the frozen bags defrost overnight, some of the watery portions leaked out of the bag and into the bowl. Just that much less to cook down.

Then it was time to pour it into a large stock pot.

I nested two pots double-boiler style and parked them on the stove. About three times a day, I topped off the water in the lower pot so it wouldn't boil dry. I didn't use a lid, since I wanted the liquid to cook down.

I stirred the purée a few times a day. After one night of cooking, you can see how far down it reduced.

It took about three days for each pot of purée to reduce to sauce consistency.

And while it made the house smell rich and tomato-y during this process, I had to repeat it three times to use up all the purée in the freezer. Nine days of smelling cooking tomatoes got to be a bit much. You can also understand why I wanted to use the passive heat from the cookstove to make the sauce. Nine days of cooking the sauce on our propane stove would have used a lot of propane.

I re-froze the first batch of tomato sauce, figuring I'd defrost and can all the sauce at once; but that was the wrong thing to do since I had to re-defrost the sauce and heat it thoroughly (tomato sauce should be hot-packed), plus I could only process so many jars at a time. So from then on I just canned each batch of sauce after it cooked down and while it was still hot, and this worked out far better.

Tomatoes can be water-bath canned (unless there are additives like onions or bell peppers). I never flavor my tomato sauce because I like it to be "generic." That way I can take a jar and flavor it however I like, such as Mexican or Italian or whatever.

Because the acid content of tomatoes, even heirloom varieties, is never assured, it's necessary to add an acidifier.

In this case, I added a quarter-teaspoon of citric acid to each pint. (I also added a half-teaspoon of salt to each jar.)

Scalding my Tattler lids.

Into the water bath for 30 minutes (actually, about 35 minutes adjusted for our elevation).

First batch, done.

Second batch, processing

By the time the third and final batch was cooked down and canned up, I was thoroughly sick of tomatoes.

Fortunately that feeling is tempered by the utter satisfaction that comes from concluding a project which was home-grown, from beginning to end, on our farm.

One of the many reasons I love canning.