Yummm...

Beans rinsing, muffins cooling, and bread dough resting. I have been using this nice prepackaged Bob's Red Mill bean mixture to make a thick soup with curry spices and some amaranth thrown in. I top it with raisins, raw pumpkin seeds, and sunflower seeds. SO GOOD. The muffins are whole wheat, bran, raisins, and coconut sweetened with sucanat. The bread is a whole wheat "kneadless" variety which has to rest for at least 8 hours. The recipe is from Mother Earth News/New York Times. Apparently time does the work that kneading would otherwise. I have had ZERO luck with baking bread in the past. I am an anxious sort of person who over-kneads, and ends up with a nice whole wheat doorstop. Maybe not this time -we'll see.

This week has been pretty good. The baby has a cold. It's warmer, and meltier around here which is encouraging. Right now, though, it's flurrying as I watch huge, fat adirondack crows pick at my frozen compost heap. It's really just a big pile of kitchen veggie scraps, because I rarely remember to turn it. A neat thing happened when I dug some soil out of it in the fall for a baby spider plant I had going. A tomato plant sprang right up out of nowhere -it's a foot tall now. That soil is always full of worms too, so it must be pretty good though perhaps neglected.

I am enjoying the time I now have for such things. They are most agreeable pursuits, and the stuff of life -as I see it.