Sunday Do-Da-Day

Today was a do-day.  Since yesterday ended up being rather less-than-ideal for reasons I won’t go into, I wanted today to be a productive day.

It started with my alarm waking me up at 1:00 AM so that I could pick up my daughter from work.  “I’ll be done at 1:30.” she’d told me.  I got there at 1:27…and waited until 2:23. Sigh.

But my bed embraced me like a lover when I got home, and I stayed there until about 9:30. When I woke up, it was to a veritable Winter Wonderland!  Big fat beautiful snowflakes were falling slowly, making it feel as if we were in a snow globe..and it seemed they had been doing so all night!  About 6 or 7 inches I would say, and it was still coming down.

I know many places have been completely pummeled by Father Winter in the last few days, and our measly half-foot is probably laughable to a lot of people.  But we had about a centimeter on the ground before last night, so a beautiful picture to wake up to this morning!

I think workouts that aren’t an actual ‘workout’ are the best ones.  Good old fashioned hard work in the great outdoors.  Shoveling heavy snow has to be one of the best in my opinion.

Before I joined hubby outside to shovel, I put a big pot of homemade vegetable broth on the stove.  It’s my first attempt at it, and I’m proud of the outcome!  I see lots of soup in our future!

Now that I know how easy this is, my freezer will never be without lots of this stuff.  You can do so much with it!!

Everything went in – from the bunch of celery that had long ago seen it’s prime and was laying rather…um…unmanly…in the bottom of the crisper, to ends and peels from the carrots, parsnips and turnips I chopped up as part of the week’s food prep – even dried up rosemary sprigs and the stems from a bunch of parsley!  When we walked in after an hour of hauling snow, the house smelled yummy!

I’ve got about a dozen freezer bags now filled with either broth or chopped veggies ready for the slow-cooker as this week’s meals!  One of the main topics of our last family meeting was being better organized for meal-time.  We’re now deciding the meals we’ll be eating for the week ahead on the weekend, and I’m prepping as much as I can ahead of time so make things easier during the week!  Tomorrow…Beef Stew!  …and of course something vegetarian for my daughter.

Tonight it was just hubby and I for dinner, so I made us some homemade poutine with some vegetarian gravy my co-worker gave me with strict instructions to give him my absolute honest opinion.  …I’ll be asking for his recipe tomorrow!  Went a little bit rebel-child with the cheese, mixing it up with some sharp yellow Cheddar and some jalapeno Havarti.

Oh, and can’t forget my little surprise this morning when I checked oh my baby orchard!!  They are all popped!!  All nine of them!!  I’m so fricken excited!!!! 🙂  I can’t wait until they start looking like little baby trees!

So now it’s nearly 11:00 PM on Sunday night, my feet ache for being on them all day, and I don’t want to go to bed because as soon as I do the weekend is over!

Hope you all had a good weekend, and wishing everyone a good week ahead!  And for those especially in the areas that have been and are still getting hit with insane amounts of snow, please stay safe!
*** UPDATE ***

Apple trees aren’t ALL doing as well as I thought.  While 1 and 2 are doing great, already showing off their first set of real leaves, 3 seems to have popped only to die.  4 and 5 are still showing potential, while 6, 7, 8 and 9 I’m afraid might be stunted but the next couple of days will tell.