Busted!

The other day, my husband informed me that the 10 year old had discovered my bread cookbook and came to the realization that I had a recipe for cinnamon rolls and had yet to make any. This was, as you can imagine, quite upsetting. Why had I been holding out, the 10 year old wanted to know. I promised that we would find a time to make them together. We made a date for today, after school.

While school was in, however, I had about 3 or 4 projects of my own to take care of. I started with making 14 pints of chicken stock, using all the chicken bones I found in the freezer (three chickens). I will can this tomorrow, right now the stock is being chilled so I can remove the fat. I also made a batch of pickled radishes, using the recipe in my book "Preserving by the Pint." Instead of using Daikon radishes, I used regular red ones as I was fairly inundated and I'm the only one, really, who eats them. When I went outside to take the picture of the radish pickles, there was an oriole in my garden!

One of the nurses at work had asked when I was going to bring in more treats so I made brownies - the kind with the chocolate chip cookie dough, oreos, dulce du leche, and brownie batter all layered in a pan. When they came out of the oven, I drizzled them with the last of the dulce du leche and sprinkled them with coarse finishing salt.  Also, I started marinating steak and venison in soy, garlic, ginger and sherry for this evening's stir fry.

Then I went to check on the bees. They were busily bringing in pollen and those younger bees were washboarding again. I have decided that, whatever washboarding is for, it is the scut of the bee world and the most junior are the ones who have to do it. Like interns. Eventually they will graduate to some other task. Anyway, I took a video of them while they were doing their little washboarding dance.

Speaking of bee dances, I peeked through the window and happened to catch a bee doing the "wiggle dance" they do to tell other bees of a good source of food. It was pretty cool to watch - she was on the edge of a comb and shaking so much she was blurry. Then she moved to a different spot and did it again. Sure enough, shortly after, there was a larger number of bees leaving the hive than previously. How cool!
After the 10 year old got home from school, we made the cinnamon rolls. I am pleased to say my kid did most of the work. Kneading was almost as much fun as sprinkling sugar and cinnamon (mostly) on the dough. Once those were done, my 13 year old made the stir fry for dinner. First the beef and venison was fried, then taken out of the wok so the Napa cabbage, scallions, and komatsuna greens could be sauteed. They were also removed, and the rice noodles were fried in the wok with a sauce of soy sauce, chicken stock, cornstarch, 5-spice powder and white pepper. They only needed to be cooked a few minutes and then everything else got added back to get coated in sauce. Dinner was really tasty - the venison was more tender than the beef, which was a nice surprise.

For dessert, we ate those cinnamon rolls!