La Madeleine’s, homemade yogurt, escapees

Yesterday at work was an unusually busy day. That was a good thing. It is always best to be busy – at least it is for me. Next week I have three back to back classes to teach. Those classes will all be local. The week after that I have two back to back classes to teach. Those two classes will be on the road. I have to drive from the first about three hours to get to the second class, so it will be a busy couple days. Following those two weeks I have a two-week break before I have three back to back classes to teach – all on the road. Fortunately, all those classes are part of a workshop offered at the same training facility. My plans to be fulltime in our other business have been set back significantly. It is a good thing I was not trying to live financially off that timetable. For now, I have a good job that supports us as we struggle to get our personal business started. I can live with that.

Mama and I went to an upscale café called, La Madeleine’s for dinner last night. It is good food. A little fancy for me, but still good. Mama really likes the place. You order at a counter, like any other fast food place, but the food is prepared as ordered to order. I got a chicken filled crepe with a pesto sauce. Mama got beef tips and gravy on a bed of mashed potatoes. Both dishes were excellent. As a bonus, the café offers a selection of sliced homemade breads, butter and their signature jellies. Strawberry rhubarb, my favorite and blueberry. I purposely limited myself to two slices of bread before our dinners come out. Last time I went there with Mama, I got too full on bread and jelly and regretted it later. This time I just ate the jelly without the bread. I did not want it to go to waste. Mama was uncomfortably full all evening. I had a bit of an upset stomach much later, but that is normal for me when I eat such rich food. As I get older, it is more and more difficult for me to eat outside of my “normal” boundaries. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I really need to learn to eat to live.

We left for the café almost as soon as I got home. Mama wanted to get back to the house so she could put the yogurt she and Stacy O’Conner had made into jars. For the past several weeks the O’Conner’s have been bringing Mama yogurt they have made in their Instant Pot. Our model of the Instant Pot does not have the “Yogurt” setting like theirs does. Since Mama was very interested in making yogurt and we have the pressure cooker, I looked up recipes that would work in our Instant Pot. Sure enough there were several variations of the same recipe available. Mama and Stacy got together to try the recipe out. So, we “hurried” through Costco and Aldi after we finished dinner so we could get home near the time the incubation period expired on the yogurt. We were thirty minutes late, but Mama was pleased with the yogurt. I will not get to taste the final product until tonight, but I ate what she skimmed off the top before putting it into clean quart jars to chill. It was very good. The skimming’s were like what you would get when you cook pudding. That rubbery cap that forms on top when the pudding cools. I always liked that as well.

Just as we were pulling into the garage, Mama noticed that we had an escapee. One of the chicks had managed to hop out of the tote Mama was housing them in. Our garage does not have a lot of stuff in it but it has enough that it can be challenging to catch a fleeing baby chick. They are a lot closer to the floor than my hands typically are, so any obstacle in getting bent to match that distance presents a challenge. However, last night the chick ran straight into my hand. Because that was not the first successful escape, I was immediately tasked with getting some wire to cover the totes in order to limit the chances of the chicks getting out of their assigned habitat. That was easily done. I have scraps of wire mesh I use for several projects around the farm. The real challenge is going to be when I devise something to keep the snakes from getting into the cage set up in the coop where we will soon be placing the chicks. The chicks will be too large to keep in the totes in another week. They grow very quickly. Even though Mama and I have done this multiple times, it still amazes me how quickly the chicks grow.

When I stop to marvel at how incredible this present sin-cursed world is, I cannot help but wonder what must Heaven be like?