I feel almost main stream

I don't know how I feel about that. I've been living off the beaten track for so long, it seems a little odd to suddenly be joined by more than a handful of people. What do I mean? Well, take a look at our day, and I'll explain.

For much of the morning, I was busy transplanting seedlings. There are still quite a few left to do, but they aren't big enough to transplant yet. Here is what I have so far.

The seedlings in the living room,

and the seedlings in the utility room.

The tomatoes I transplanted a couple of weeks are are doing quite well.

Now, gardening isn't all that unusual, but B. was telling me that he read there is quite a run on seeds recently due to a sudden upswing of interest in growing your own food. I've been collecting various seeds over the years, and have quite a collection now, both of seeds I have purchased and seeds I have collected from last year's plants. I am going to have a viable garden this year, with hopefully enough produce to do some canning, too. (Also something that has seen a sudden increase in interest.)

D. made bread for this morning. 

He makes six loaves at a time; this will last us about a week, depending on people's moods and how much leftovers we have from dinner. It's not the bread baking that is unusual. Plenty of people bake bread. It's the wheat grinding part of it. I've had a grain mill for well over 14 years now. It is something that I get kind of shocked reactions about, as if it is just a little too out there for most people. Well, it seems there is a run of grain mills at the moment. A friend who had been saving up for one and could finally buy one had a horrible time finding one in stock. She did, but it's not usually an item that it difficult to find.

This next bit is probably only unique to large families, so I'll remain unique here. All that food I brought home on Wednesday? Well some of it had been kicking around in the refrigerator taking up room. I needed to do something about it so it didn't get eaten or go bad before I needed it. I had eight pound of goat cheese to divide up and freeze.

It's really difficult to see, but this is two gallon size bags with smaller bags each filled with  ~8 oz. of goat cheese in them. They are now in the freezer.

Then I had ten pounds of cheddar to deal with. Well, I brought home ten pounds of cheddar. The local locusts love cheddar and have been happily having all sorts of cheese snacks and sandwiches. I grated what was left and divided it up into bags each with 16 ounces. (I used a kitchen scale.) Here are the SEVEN bags of grated cheddar ready for the freezer. Yes, that means that the locusts ate three pounds of cheese over the past couple of days. The locusts would also like it pointed out that they enjoyed it very much.

In the meantime, J. put a small turkey in the roaster. Friends gave us two turkeys that they didn't want, so they were in our freezer. I needed the freezer space for other things, so it seemed like a good idea to roast one and use it for sandwiches for the next week.

Finally, I am seeing a lot more people cooking meals from scratch. This is most likely because everyone is home all the time and it is easier to store ingredients rather than prepared meals if you are trying to avoid the grocery store. B. and I (well, more B. than me, truthfully) cooked dinner from scratch tonight as well.

One of the things I was most excited to get from the wholesaler was semolina flour. This is proven very difficult for me to find, and I'd been wanting some to make homemade pasta and for pizza. This is the real deal. The entire package is in Italian with no English translation.

Because I suddenly had an abundance of semolina, B. and I decided that making our own pasta tonight was what we should do. We used a combination of instructions from two books: The Lost Art of Real Cooking by Ken Albala (which is a fantastic book) and my new favorite Italian cookbook, The Italian Country Table by Lynne Rosetto Kaspar.

Starting to make the dough

The first few noodles

B. rolling out the dough (I was really the sous chef for this endeavor)

The final pile of noodles

We learned a few things. First, it takes a while to make homemade pasta for 14 people. And when you do, you should make several separate piles of the finished noodles because they can compact due to the sheer quantity. But never fear, it all turned out all right in the end.

They were fantastic. The sauce was a simple roasted tomato sauce from the Italian cookbook. It used canned tomatoes which was perfect because it is hardly tomato season. Plus, it is pretty simple to store canned tomatoes.

If you are interested in doing more home cooking, I highly recommend both of the books I mentioned to you. While I'll still link to them through my Amazon Associates account (meaning I get a teeny, tiny bit of money if you buy from the link), I'll encourage you to order them through your local independent bookstore instead. They can usually take orders over the phone and it will help them to stay in business while everything is closed down.