Brrr! It’s cold out there!!!

We’re in a polar vortex this week, and it’s not going to be above 15 or so. Time to stay warm, and hope the heat keeps up. Waking up Sunday morning, at 6:30 am, it was -9, with a wind chill of -23. Bundled up under 2 down comforters, I could still feel the chill coming through. Woo! What a way to wake up!

It was a baking kind of week. Tuesday evening, Little Man helped me mix up some delicious brownies from Off Kilter Brownies. OMG, they are sooo good. We have been enjoying them topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Saturday morning, Little Man helped me make some Jiffy Blueberry muffins. He got to pour the mix into the bowl, put the muffin liners in the tin, and mix as best he could. He even proceeded to eat 9 of the 12 muffins we made! Silly kiddo. Sunday morning, we made Amish Cinnamon Flop Cake, from Amy at A Farmish Kind of Life. It smelled so good while it was baking, and is so light when you eat it; absolutely delicious. I’ve got some plans to play around with it, doing different toppings, like apples, cherries, nuts, etc.

Little Man is really loving to help out in the kitchen however he can. Mostly, that involves mixing, but that’s how you teach them. Give them the easy jobs to start out with, and they can slowly move on to more difficult steps as they mature and master the easier ones. Some of my memories with my Gramma are from when we would be baking in her kitchen. She always kept just a little of any batter on the spatula for me to lick off; the woman never left a scrap in a bowl when pouring it into pans. She taught me my love of baking; one of the first tasks I got was kneading the dough for her dinner rolls. I had a much easier time with that than cracking eggs…we had a lot of eggshells in the first few cakes we made until we realized I should crack the egg into a smaller bowl first, then fish out the shells, before we put them into the mixing bowl.

But that’s what I will do with Little Man. As he gets older, he will get progressively difficult tasks in the kitchen, until he’s able to do it all on his own! One of his favourite tasks is to help make his lunch. He goes to the pantry and brings me the “pudda budda” while I get the jam out of the fridge. Once the “pudda budda” is on the counter, I give him the jar of jam, and he puts it up next to the “pudda budda.” He can help fill cups and bottles with water from the fridge, but he is not allowed to do it by himself; that’s still a good 6 months to a year away, because he doesn’t understand how to judge when it’s about to spill or not. Sometimes he will even climb up on his stool and get to spread the pb&j on the bread, but that’s not a regular event yet.

Anyway, while it is so cold outside, I keep looking with pride at my little garden! My herbs are growing well, and the roots are starting to creep out of the peat pods, so I ran to Home Depot Saturday to pick up a large planter and potting soil. I came home with the larger planter, a small planter, and an aloe plant. Yup…I forgot the potting soil. But it’s too cold to run out, so I’ll try another time to get out and pick it up. The salads I had from the AeroGarden last week were DELICIOUS, and so crisp and fresh. Much better than the bags of salad my mother opened from Costco.

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