On Saturday we discovered that our oven stopped working. That was unfortunate because I had a bunch of batter sitting there ready too cook. I’ll get to that later.

Monday morning I phone up Ron’s Appliance Services after I was referred to them by another local shop with a good rep. They referred me to Ron’s because they didn’t work on my particular brand. Phoned them at 10:00am and around 1:30pm he was there and had it fixed in short order. Nice. I’d use them again.

Now, why did I have a bunch of batter sitting there on Saturday? I figured I should learn how to bake. I’ve taken up a fair amount of the cooking around here because it turns out I actually like it. It’s not uncommon for Theresa to come home to a ready meal these days, or at least something that’s 90% done.

So, back to Saturday. Theresa went to work and I went shopping. I came home ready to make some cornbread (the right way) and some lemon poppy-seed muffins. I always loved those things.

First, we need to see Steve Graham’s cornbread recipe:

2 cups self-rising WHITE WHITE WHITE cornmeal – I like Martha White.
1 1/2 cups milk or buttermilk
1 egg
1/4 cup bacon grease – Lard is not as good.
1 tbsp. sugar

Okay, bacon grease isn’t something you just buy off the shelf. I didn’t feel like actually cooking bacon that day so I snagged some salted pork. I could see the fat on it and figured it’d be easy to melt. I came home and sliced off a thick hunk of fat and threw it on my George Foreman rip-off grill with the grease catcher on it.

Not a good idea. The grill seared the fat and left me with a steak-like thing. I cut the thing into pieces, threw it into a measuring cup, and tossed it into the microwave. That worked much better, but I warped the plastic measuring cup. Whoops. I got my grease though. As an added bonus I ended up with bits left over that tasted a lot like really greasy pork rinds. I fed them to the dog as treats. He loves me more than ever before.

So, the cornbread turned out OK. A bit dense, but it’s what I like in cornbread. Theresa informed me that I’m no longer allowed to cook with bacon fat (something about our health) so I did a different batch this evening using butter instead and tossed in an extra egg to fluff it up a bit. She likes that a bit more. I’m not sure I actually made it any healthier.

For the muffins I ran with this recipe but changed out the lemon zest for 1.5 teaspoons of lemon extract, skipped the salt, and used salted butter instead of unsalted. I also threw in 1 teaspoon of mint extract because in my mind lemon and mint go together. I made 18 (left 9 with my parents) and only 3 existed as of today. Somebody must have liked them. I know I did!

After dinner tonight I ran with this recipe for whole-wheat flaxseed muffins but added half a teaspoon of cinnamon because that shit goes well with apples. I threw the whole thing into a breadpan and gave it 35 minutes in a 400 degree oven. It seems to have worked out well. It’s a bit crumbly though. I might try nixing the whole-wheat flour and just doubling the white flour to fix that. The only reason I made them is for the Omega 3 oils in the flaxseed, and so long as I keep that I figure I’m doing OK. My brother that lifts weights with me takes flaxseed Omega 3 oil supplements and I’m thinking he might find them a handy snack. We’ll see.

I figure for the next month or two I’ll make it a regular thing to take some baked goods into the office when I actually head in because there’s no way we can actually eat all the stuff I’m baking here.

I awoke this morning to Theresa’a calls and Chuck Norris pitching a fit. Seems the neighbor’s chickens escaped their back yard and were running about in the field behind our house.

They’re nice folk. Last winter they pulled my brother out of my driveway when he got stuck trying to plow it.

So, Theresa looked up their number (I know their last name) and called. No answer, so she left a message. It’s about 10:00am on Easter Sunday so I figured they were at church.

So, I figured I’d be a nice guy and keep ‘em from running away. Plus I didn’t want them to wander into my yard because then we can’t let Chuck Norris out for fear that’d he’d kill one of them. My first thought was to round them up and stick ‘em in my dog kennel for safe keeping until they returned home. When I arrived on scene I figured it’d be better if I just herded them up and tried driving them back into the yard. I could see that the fence was broken, but chickens are pretty stupid and once they were in probably wouldn’t venture back out for a while.

I decided pretty quickly that I didn’t want to try picking them up. I’ve done that a couple thousand times in my life and the chickens don’t like it. They’ll fight, might even hurt themselves in the process, and they’ll shit on you 10% of the time.

About five minutes into me playing retarded chicken herder the neighbor lady came out and let me know it was fine. They knew they was a hole in the fence but they always come back.

Oke-dokee. Fine by me, but may God help them if they wander into the yard when the dog is out.

In related news I’m not sure why you’d fence in your entire backyard only to leave a hole big enough for anything smaller than a horse to get through. Seems kind of pointless.