Field Trip

Here are some pictures from a field trip last week to a state park.



This is a picture of poison ivy. You can get poison ivy rashes even in the dead of winter - I had no idea! The vines just looked like sticks. These are the berries to help you identify it while it's dormant.

This owl was tame and used for a talk/demonstration. To the right is a picture of deer tracks in the mud.

Before the land was bought by the government it was an old homestead. Here is the chimney from the log cabin dating back over 100 years. The tree was already grown at the time of the log cabin - she said it was 300 years old.

As we were driving out of the park we got to watch a road runner for quite a while. It ran across the road in front of us and then stopped. We ended up leaving first - that's how long it stayed.

What's Cookin'?

I was going to take pictures of our pancakes this morning but I obviously didn't get there in time! The big plate HAD regular and the little plate HAD the banana pancakes. Here is the recipe that I got offline a few years ago and below is what I actually did.

Original Recipe:

Ingredients:

- 1-1/2 C all-purpose flour

- 3-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

- 1 teaspoon salt

- 1 tablespoon white sugar

- 1-1/4 C milk

- 1 egg

- 3 tablespoons melted butter

[my notes said: "It's a little thick. Add a bit of water to thin]

What I actually did:

- 1 cup wheat flour, 1/2 cup white.

- 3-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon rapadura sugar (it may be demerara)
- 1-1/4 C milk
- 1 egg
- 3 tablespoons melted butter

- I also added 1 tablespoon liquid oil (mine was either safflower or sunflower; I'm not sure because the label fell off a while back).

I soaked the flour and milk overnight and added the other ingredients in the morning. I happened to have some fresh eggs from a friend's chickens (yum!). It needed more water than I remembered to thin it to the proper pancake consistency but they came out really tasty. I made 1/2 the batter and then added 1 mashed banana for the rest of the batch. I didn't add it earlier because I wanted to be able to eat one - yes, purely selfish reasons!

Other cookins:

- Middle dd made blueberry muffins this evening. Mmmm.

- I HAD to have some potato chips so I made one and shared with dc (sort of). I sliced it thin and cooked in palm shortening.