In The Refiner's Fire

No current food photos here - just a beautiful sunrise! Such a pretty pink. We are sitting under a record snowfall here - we broke the snowfall record for the month of February last week.  We live in Minnesota, so we love snow, though our son (and the rest of us) were wishing it would have spaced itself out a bit.  Our son loves to shovel snow and has done a lot of it these past few weeks.  This week should give us a bit of break, thankfully.  If you look close in the photo above, you can see the edge of the ice dam our neighbors have on their roof under the snow.  I am very grateful for our attic insulation and no ice dams on our roof! All 5 immediate neighbors have at least 2 large ones!  If not cleared, ice dams can cause damage both outside and inside the house.  We have spent the last few weeks filling our freezer with bargain meat while grocery shopping.  Sunday this week I cooked a ham in the crock pot while we were at church ...

   Another beautiful sunrise!  We have been so blessed by these this winter. Wow, has it been a busy two weeks.  Snow, snow and more snow and more snow again - we are about 2 inches below the historical record for snowfall this February and we are only halfway through the month!  We had very little snow before this, just brutal cold, so it has felt like a bit much.  Driving has been particularly harrowing and I feel as if I have spent most of the last two weeks in my car.  We have a short reprieve with more snow arriving on Wednesday of this week.  I am grateful.   At least our farmers will have plenty of moisture for spring planting this year. Here are some things we have done the first part of February that may count as frugal: * We ate the majority of our meals at home.  We made several types of soup, baked bread, and roasted both chicken and a salmon fillet.  I made pancakes for Va...

Finnish Ribbon Cookies - short bread with jam.  Delicious!  Our son made these for a fundraiser at church.  We got to eat the leftovers and the overcooked edges.  Yum! We were able to visit with my cousin and her family this weekend.  Their son is the same age as our children and the three of them get along super well.  They are all growing into fine young people and it was such a pleasure to spend time together.  I am grateful! We are also expecting more snow this week (sigh) but temperatures are at least warmer.  The curse of air temperature between 0 and 32F (-17.7 and 0C) is that we typically end up with more snow.  I am okay with that as the snow does a good job of supplying water for the ground (and thus summer crops!) and insulates the perennial plants.  Winter does seem terribly long this year but I was reminded that I often feel that way in February.  We typically start to feel like spring in April and I am...

Bread dough!  I love the way my home smells after making homemade bread.  The first full week of February - how did that happen?   My mental schedule is so off right now, after cancellations last week with the super cold weather we had.  I spent Thursday through Saturday feeling like it should have been Sunday already!  I started the year a little off too - for some reason I felt like my entire week should be shifted by one day (i.e. New Year's Day felt like it should have been a Monday or Wednesday rather than a Tuesday).  Maybe this week I will get back on track! We are still eating from the pantry and freezer.  There were several canned goods on sale this past week as well as some traditional Super Bowl items so I stocked up on diced tomatoes, corn and tuna fish (all in cans) and purchased a few avocados and mangoes to eat fresh this week.  Both the avocados and mangoes are quite expensive typically, so I will freeze mango for later...

    Once upon a time, I did a regular job of listing the blessings for the previous month here on the blog.  One of my goals for 2019 is to get back to it!  More for my record and memory than anything else, but blessings are always good to share. At least I think so!   Here we go: Blessings for January 2019   New Year's Day 2019!  A brand new year.   John's 45th Birthday - celebrated with pizza from a new favorite pizza place and a handful of gifts.  The day even started with the beautiful sunrise above!  I am so blessed to be his wife!   Lots of basketball games - free entertainment and exercise for the children.    Workshops for work for John and I - well worthwhile and delicious free meals too!   Cleaning out the closets - seriously, why do we hang on to so much stuff?  We donated the bulk of it in hopes of blessing others.   Brunch at a friend's house after church one S...

    I'm living vicariously through my parents - Gerbera Daisies are some of my favorite flowers and they do not grow well in Minnesota.  We tend to be too cold - right now we are coming out of the Arctic Freeze and it is definitely too cold for flowers outdoors!  My parents live in a the southern part of the US and had a very rare hard freeze this week.  My Dad sent me this photo to show that their Gerbera Daisies survived!  They thought they surely would not.  Either way, they sure are pretty!!  It is easy to have a low-spend week when many things are closed due to the weather.   In all, we only had one day where no one went anywhere - Wednesday.  The other days we spent minimal time outside but did attend to things we needed to.  We lived in Grand Forks, North Dakota for several years and have very warm clothes, coats, hats, boots, mittens (gloves are too cold in this weather) and keep our cars well serviced and ...