Photo Finish Friday - Last Year

Last year about this time, there was still so much snow on the ground that the deer were sneaking under the gate into the Bag Lady's hay storage area, looking for something to eat. She caught them red-hoofed one morning......


... and used the tractor to herd them toward the gate.

Photo Finish Friday is the brainchild of Leah, at the Goat's Lunch Pail.

Baggie has her Cranky Pants on Again!

The Bag Lady has a complaint. (Okay, to be honest, she has far more than just one complaint, but she'll spare you the whining about her personal problems).

Why can't they make things the way they used to? (She knows the 'good old days' weren't really all wine and roses... well, except a few times.... okay, once! And then she woke up with a hangover and the freakin' flowers died.)

She understands that in order for companies to make money, everything they make has to have a built-in "shelf life" - this includes cars, appliances, clothes, etc. - everything wears out (including the Bag Lady, but she promised not to whine about her personal problems.)

The thing that is annoying her today is that even when things are almost new, they don't perform the way she has come to expect, based on previous experiences with similar products. To be specific.... she had to buy a new dishwasher last year when her new flooring was installed and it was discovered that the old dishwasher (which she loved dearly for it's almost mystical cleaning abilities) had burned the linoleum under it. This made her sad (and it also scared the crap outta her and made her look askance at her formerly beloved dishwasher...." all this time I've been trusting you and loving the job you've been doing and you've been betraying me by trying to set my house on fire?? Wasn't I paying you enough? Was I mistreating you? Did you feel unappreciated and taken advantage of? Why didn't you say something?") but she trundled off to town to buy a new one. In her haste to purchase something, she made a bad choice the first time around. She bought a cheap model, which sprung a leak after a short time, but she had also made a good choice in where she purchased it and they took it back and refunded her the entire purchase price (bless them). The second replacement model took her a little longer to choose, and she shopped around a bit, looking for a reasonably priced model that had most of the bells and whistles that her previous model had.

Fast forward to this morning. The Bag Lady has learned that her first dishwasher was exceptional (at least, compared to this one) - she did not have to rinse her dishes and everything came out sparkling clean, regardless of the type of dishwasher detergent she used. This model has been a little different, but she has adapted. She cannot get as many dishes into this one (the racks are not as conveniently configured) and she has to rinse a lot of things that she didn't worry about before (Hello corn, and potato pots).

Yesterday, she made cinnamon buns (and regular buns. And donuts. And discovered, after she had set the buns to rise for the second time that the element in her oven was burned out. But she promised not to whine about her personal problems. Suffice it to say, she now has a greater admiration for her table top roaster oven, which she has previously only used once a year to cook her generally enormous Christmas turkey.)

She filled the dishwasher with the dishes she used for baking, plus supper dishes (and breakfast dishes, and probably the previous nights' dishes) and turned it on. This morning, she emptied the dishwasher and was dismayed to find streaks on several of her white dishes.....
Streaks of cinnamon.
Cinnamon, fer cryin' out loud!
Her dishwasher can't even handle cinnamon.
Sheesh.
She understands the built-in shelf life. She understands that not everything can be perfect but she cannot understand a dishwasher that can't even get cinnamon off her dishes.

She feels better now. Thanks.

Photo Finish Friday - Stove

The Bag Lady presents.....



The restored stove!
Along with a braided rug she made last week to complete the look.
(If anyone has suggestions on how to get the hastily put together rug to lie down properly, she would be forever grateful! Unless, of course, the suggestion involves taking the rug apart. If that is the only solution, it is going to stay crinkly.....)
Please note the "wood" floor (which is actually cement), courtesy of the Bag Lady's talented assistant curator!

Photo Finish Friday is the brainchild of Leah, at the Goat's Lunch Pail.

The Good Ol' Days

The Bag Lady and her co-conspirator have been hard at work at their unpaid, volunteer jobs as curator and assistant curator of the little museum in their community.

Along with mountains of paperwork, they have been cleaning and restoring donated items, preparing them for display.

One of the items donated is a wood-burning cookstove. If any of you ever decide you are nostalgic for the "old days", go out and find a wood-burning cookstove and clean it. The Bag Lady guarantees that will cure you of your longing for the good ol' days. (And if it doesn't, fire it up and try cooking with it, especially in the summer. That should definitely work.)

The Bag Lady took a few pictures of the process to share with you. They removed the top pieces of the stove after scrubbing them (with rust remover, wire brushes, steel wool pads and elbow grease). Then they shovelled ashes out of the fire box, and scraped and vacuumed soot, ash and grease from every interior surface.


With the top burners removed, you can see the firebox (foreground), the top of the oven and the opening for the water reservoir. Everything was coated with ash, soot, carbon and grease. The stove had been in a storage shed for many years and the water reservoir was full of leaves, dirt and the jawbone of a small creature!

The interior of the oven after a layer of soot and grease was removed to reveal a speckled enamel surface:

The Bag Lady painted the burners and top surface of the stove with a special paint for heated surfaces.


Here is the re-assembled stove, all shiny and clean. All that remains to be done is a light coat of wax on the cooking surface.


(The stove is a McClary Royal Jubliee, and the Bag Lady is in the process of researching to try to find out when it was manufactured.... which is part of her job as curator.)

Bibbity Bobbity..... BUBBAT

It's been two weeks since the Bag Lady posted anything?? What a slacker!

Actually, it's because she hasn't had anything very interesting going on in her life. It's been an endless round of laundry, "NCIS", housework, "Criminal Minds", ranch work, "The Mentalist", cooking "Person of Interest", and baking. Chopping wood, feeding the woodstove, taking care of cows and horses and dog and cat and husband.... (Did you know that you can spend almost the entire day, every day, watching re-runs of your favourite shows just by flipping back and forth between Showcase (East and West), Showcase Diva and A&E? For someone who hadn't watch TV for the last 10 or so years, the Bag Lady has quickly become addicted!)... paperwork and taxes and working at the fledgling museum in her little community (did she tell you she volunteered to be the curator? She has since stopped drinking.).

Did she mention baking? A (slightly older) neighbour was rhapsodizing a month or so ago about something his mother used to make when he was young. His heritage was German Mennonite, and his mother was apparently a fabulous cook. He mentioned many dishes she used to make, but the one he missed the most and loved the best was something called Bubbat.

The Bag Lady was intrigued by his description of this dish, so she did some research on the internet and found several recipes. None of them were exactly as he described, but she decided to adapt one of them to his description. She wanted to do a test-run before making the dish for her neighbour, so the Rancher came home from work the other day to this:




Which, when sliced open, revealed this:

The Bag Lady has a special fondness for things with little surprises in them (thanks, Mom! Did anyone else's mother ever bake birthday cakes with pennies in them?) Her neighbour described Bubbat as a cakey bread with a sausage laid in it so that when it was sliced, everyone got a piece of sausage. She served it with Borscht and he and his siblings would drink a gallon or so of milk with it. The Bag Lady didn't have any Borscht, but she did have homemade split pea soup, which worked well.

She found the recipe here, and encourages you to go check it out - there are some fabulous recipes on this blog!

Fly Like an Eagle

The Bag Lady has been keeping herself busy of late. If watching hours of television counts as busy. Ahem.

She did leave the ranch the other day and when she reached the highway, she saw this incredible sight.....
Not one but two bald eagles, sitting side by side in the trees on the edge of the highway. Fortunately, there was no other traffic, so the Bag Lady was able to scramble around in her briefcase and find her camera. Just as she snapped the picture, one of the eagles decided not to hang around for the photo op., but the Bag Lady caught him anyway. If you click on the photo and enlarge it, you can see that the other eagle is watching his buddy depart. He was perhaps a little more confident that the Bag Lady wasn't a threat because he stayed where he was long enough for another photo. Sadly, it turned out to be quite blurry, but the Bag Lady was happy to have taken the first picture.

Photo Finish Friday - The Good Old Days

The Bag Lady has been immersed in the past for much of the new year. She is the volunteer (aka unpaid with absolutely no experience) curator of the newly minted museum in her little community, and she and another volunteer have been working hard to accession the donations received so far from community members.

The Bag Lady has also been wasting spending time on Ancestry.com.



She has had this photo for many years, but has really had not very much information to go along with it. Angus was her great-grandmother's brother, and he moved his family away from Nebraska (where much of the rest of the family was residing at the time) in the late 1800's and contact with him was lost.
Thanks to Ancestry.com, the Bag Lady now has more information on that branch of the family!
(At least, she hopes there isn't another, completely unrelated family out there using this picture on their family tree!)

PFF is the brainchild of Leah at the Goat's Lunch Pail. Go check out her photo for today!