3°

3°f, -16°C. Clear skies. Very light breeze, thank goodness.

Dogpile

We are back to the deep freeze after another snowy day yesterday. It is supposed to be below zero tonight, and even colder tomorrow night, but back into the low 40's by the weekend. We ended up with about 4" of new snow yesterday, which prettied things up.

So, inside work again today. I canned kidney beans yesterday and will do more of those today. Still working on the auction finds, getting everything washed up, researched, and priced. Slow but interesting work---well, the researching part anyway.  I still have a lot to work through.

Right now, breakfast is over, kitchen cleaned up and the floors swept. I can finally drink my coffee! Which had to be warmed up, by the way. This seems to happen every morning: I can't drink coffee on an empty stomach,  so I have tea first, and coffee after breakfast. But before I can settle with my cup, I do the cleanup and sometimes also get the laundry started, so my coffee gets cold.

I know some people cannot stand warmed up coffee. Are you in that camp, or are you fine with sticking it in the microwave for a minute? Preferences and tastes are a funny thing. I can't stand cilantro, for example, although I like coriander seeds---and they are the same plant! I am not a fan of anise, either, and yet I bought a bottle of anise extract because I want to try making pfefferneuse, which I tried for the first time this year, and loved.

Last night I made us a couple of small steaks. They weren't a great cut so I pounded them good and marinated overnight. I think this is the first time I have cooked beef steaks in over 30 years. It's just not something I have ever eaten very often, and usually it's too expensive for our budget anyway. Now venison steaks, yes, we have those, but not beef. I had to look up how to cook them! 

I remember the first time I cooked steaks. We never had them when I was growing up because, well, 13 children. But the second day after I got married (I was 17, and we had no honeymoon), my husband wanted steak. His mother, bless her, had bought a few groceries and stocked our kitchen with the basics, which had not even occurred to me to do. (This was at our first apartment in a complex called Fairlington, in Arlington, Virginia-- an interesting place which I wrote about in this post.)

So, he wanted the steaks cooked and I had no idea how to do it. I remember that they were chuck steak, so not a fancy cut. He had to show me how to prepare and broil them.  They came out fine, as I recall, but I wasn't crazy about them (to this day I am not a big fan of beef). We had a salad and mashed potatoes,  but no gravy as I had no idea how to make that either. I cooked at home, of course, because my mother was often ill and I was the oldest daughter. But I made things like spaghetti, goulash, and such, not big chunks of meat. 

Funny how one though leads to another, and then to a memory!

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