Baby, It's Cold Outside

I sent Max off to do Klondike days with the Boy Scouts today. He definitely has mixed feelings about it. He feels it's a test of all of their boy scout skills--and he doesn't have many boy scout skills because the Tuesday evening scout meetings seem to conflict frequently with sport activities.

So we're hoping . . . that he has a good time anyway. There's sledding involved. Hopefully there is snow involved.

It's 25 degrees right now with a forecast high of 28--and a "real feel" of 9F. It's really windy today. Chris is racing RC cars with his friends today, so the twins and I are here by ourselves (I'm trying to get some work done. I really should be cleaning the kitchen and living room, but I'll have to get to those later.) and mostly we're hiding out downstairs near the pellet stove. It's cold, even with plastic on all of the windows, upstairs.

Maybe I should do a quiche for dinner so that I have an excuse to let the oven heat up the upstairs a bit. Max got me The Amish Cook: Recollections and Recipes from an Old Order Amish Family for Christmas and I used it for the first time last night to make Winter's Day Chili Soup. My favorite part was that it assumed that I had on hand two quarts of home-canned tomato juice. And of course, I do. I made that with four loaves of sandwich bread and four loaves of french bread. We ate half the french bread with the soup and are using the rest of it up today (it doesn't keep well) in sandwiches. The soup turned out well though I thought it wasn't spicey enough (so I added some cayenne pepper and doubled the chili powder). The kids weren't sure what to make of it, but they enjoyed dipping their bread in it and eating that. The recipe as written serves 15, so there were plenty of leftovers for Chris and I to eat for lunches this coming week.

Anyway, I was reminded of that with the quiche, since she has a recipe for "Never Fail Pie-Crust" and since pie crust is one of those things I haven't quite mastered, I'm going to try it with the quiche.