2.24.23 Empowering Cooking

Cabin fever is real. Even with all the modern conveniences and busyness of life the monotony of winter days is real. Or maybe it's just me? These past few weeks have ebbed and flow with lots of requirements and motion and long stretches of just the same dishes to wash, laundry to clean, and crying crabby needy kids to endure. These are not strong get out of bed and face the day elements. 

On Monday Greg informed me he had bought 17 doz eggs from a friend. I'm getting around 28 eggs every two days from our own flock. We are swamped in eggs. This is a blessing as eggs are $3.00-$6.00 a dozen depending on sale and store location right now. 

As did the normal clutter clean up I wondered what to do with the eggs. Obviously angel food cake is a possibility, but my last few have been way short of correct.  Yes they tasted good, so kids didn't complain, but they looked more like pound cake than fluffy angel food. 

Years ago I had watched an enterprising youtube cook show how she made a years worth of noodles and dried them when she had lots of eggs. I looked her up and watched again. She used more rolling of the dough than I ever had and discussed the importance of resting the dough. She also said "Cooking is empowering when you understand what the food is supposed to be like then you can adjust your recipe as needed and it still works out." Or something close to that. I was struck with cooking is empowering. Feeding my family has been really hard these last few weeks. Sure we eat all the time there's piles of dishes to prove that. But it hasn't tasted much better than sawdust to me. I honestly haven't cared if we ate spaghetti 3x a week. Usually I can stand it 2x a month. Whatever would get the job done with minimal complaining was the objective. 

Fact: kids have 2 stomachs. One is the meal stomach. It's about the size of a pea. This is why children cannot consume a full breakfast, lunch, dinner. The second stomach is the snack stomach. This stomach stretches and has infinite amount of space.

This has been the case at my house for years it drives me crazy!! And thus with so many other concerns, I don't care!! I make food. If they like it I don't have enough for the workers, and if they don't there's plenty for Greg, Mark, and John to endure. The kids are plenty happy to eat apples, oranges and bananas and whatever sugar thing they can find like mar

Thus with eggs a plenty I decided to try some noodle making. I also had bread started. As I was making a kitchen mess and trying to use some eggs there was a sense of can-do. When the kids got home Millie became my helper rolling and rolling the pasta machine. We were pretty impressed with the process.

We rolled out our rested dough balls with the rolling pin first. Lots of flour was the key we found. Then we sliced the rolls into sections with a pizza cutter folded those in half and ran them through the roller 3 times at a 1 until the dough popped. We did all the sections then adjusted the thickness to 3, then 5, then 6. The dough got longer and thinner with each dial up. Some pieces we made into lasagna, others into fettucine, and a lot into spaghetti. Resting the longest sections and dusting with more flour allowed for the spaghetti noodles to be free when they excited the cutter. 

Space is always the issue so we tried drying on the cookie sheets with parchment underneath. Those are taking a while to dry. We also tried hanging the noodles that worked ok but they are so dump prone. 

The dehydrator was an obvious option. Andrea loved climbing and standing on top and unplugging it. She made this difficult but I think the noodles dried fastest this way.

And dinner. I wasn't sure how much we would need but we needed all this for just Greg, Mark, and John. This much and some more for the rest of the group. The guys were excited for the pasta as they are all about bulking right now. That's roughly half of a 7 egg batch. The last batch I added some whole wheat flour to the mix. Seemed no different that the previous batches. 

Bread and cinnamon rolls were also made in concert with this project. And dinner. There was something good about creating in my kitchen again. I read to the girls while they rolled the last batch and did dishes. It was good to see them master the process and experience success. And nicer yet to have breakfast mostly done for the next day. No upset people that breakfast was scant or late or whatever the early morning grumble could be. 

Lia enjoyed a cinnamon roll and decorating her horses. 

So life is good it is not just to be endured but wrestled into experience and success as well. We are blessed and going to work on some more egg cooking today after I do the next pile of dishes and figure out how to put up these noodles. That is one conundrum, they are semi fragile, but tasted good. I also really want to try the jar packing method where you put eggs in a jar and cover with a lime water that makes them shelf stable for a year.  It doesn't change the egg at all just makes it preserved.  And I'm saving milk jugs to try some winter sewing of flowers, lettuce, and wheat for the chickens. Ideas and activity and why not it's better than continual fighting about picking up the mess. If you can't beat em' join em'.