168 - An Indoor Day

Lunch. I love salad. It's got the perfect blend of veggies, goodie, and dressing. I will never go back to using packets of ranch, the homemade stuff is so much better. And once I get the herb garden going it will be so easy peasy. With chickens it will be easy peasier because I can make my own mayo from the eggs. And with a cow it would be the easy peasiest because I'd have milk and buttermilk and sour cream. All I'd need to buy is Worchestershire, vinegar, and lemons (for the mayo). But we'll take this in stages - I'd be happy with the herb garden.

So today I went to the kitchen to finish up a few projects I've been putting off. Namely the juicing. I love my juicer, but the pulp means it's a pretty tedious process because I have to clean the reservoir out. It takes quite a few lemons or grapefruit to make enough juice worth celebrating. Not sure it's cost effective either as far as grapefruit go, so we may just buy grapefruit juice from now on. Lemons are fine, we can keep buying those, although I eventually want a lemon tree.

The juicer does a good job though. You can't get much more juice out of a lemon than this.

Last night I finally got around to shelling the peanuts so that I could make homemade peanut butter.

I started it out in the blender. My Blendtec is a powerful machine and I thought it would work. I love it and over the past year I have appreciated its capabilities. So glad I bought it before I quit my job... I miss having money.

Unfortunately, the Blendtec was not cut out for peanut butter. It finally occurred to me that the recipe I found used a food processor, and maybe the extra girth of a food processor helped keep things moving rather than forming a big clump around the edges.

So I decided to give it a try and found that was indeed the case.

Voila! Homemade peanut butter using roasted peanuts, honey and a dash of salt.

I have to say, the taste is far superior to what you get from the store. The texture... in your mouth it's like silk, but it's still a little powdery so I'm not sure how it would hold up to a sandwich. It could be that I didn't let it go long enough, but there was smoke coming from my food processor so I decided enough was enough.

And in today's wildlife encounter... turkeys! In the front yard! Shut the front door! I love this place!