Chit Chat: What's on your mind?
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@ladyjaneann Welcome! Glad to have you here.
@cnavarro002 January has been ok. No better, no worse than the last decade or several decades. Just one day, sometimes one minute, at a time.
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Hi, @ladyjaneann ! Welcome!
Well, old man winter finally cracked open his eyes around here. it was 17F here this morning when I got up, and the wind is blowing pretty hard driving the wind chill down below zero. We got some snow, but its hard to tell how much because it was very powdery and the wind is blowing it all over the place. However, unlike just about every other person in my sphere of acquaintance, I'm loving it! I don't mind cold weather that badly and in fact would much rather deal with cold and than extreme heat. and I like snow - and yes, I have to drive 25 miles in it one way to get to work every day, and much of that is on a 2 lane, windy road (cause I live in WV, so ALL our roads are windy! lol)0 -
@ladyjaneann : Welcome! Very nice to meet you and hope to see you on the boards!
@bmeadows380 : I too love the snow and having lived on the east my entire life, get hammered with it every winter. I love looking outside and seeing piles of snow. While I don’t like the act of shoveling, I love the workout it gives me! I always find it funny when people say I’m weird because I love the snow and all I think to myself is “that’s why I live where I do; I think it’s stranger you live where it snows so much if you hate it that badly!”
My January has been going very well; I have a very simple diet my doctor recommended: fruits, veggies, lean proteins, whole grains. Keep calories under 1500 and no salt. My husband and I make a menu every week and because I work from home, I just keep only healthy stuff here so I’m not tempted. Hope everyone is having a good week!0 -
just a comment on a slight irritation that is a problem I'm glad to have lol
Have you noticed how much more difficult it is to get into a pair of pants? I noticed yesterday - the smaller pants with the smaller waist have a much smaller hole for me to aim for when trying to get my legs into them. I remember having a much easier time before! Now when I toss out a pair of pants to put them on, I find myself missing them on the first go around.....1 -
This gave me a laugh last night:
I have 5 indoor only house cats (yes, I'm the crazy cat lady ) There is a wooded mountainside behind my house, as I live right out a very small town in a rather rural area. I've been hearing mice in the walls once in a while, as did the cats - I'd sometimes find them staring vary hard at various walls through the house.
Saturday evening, I walked into the laundry room to find 2 of my cats pawing under my vacuum cleaner, so I figured one of the mice had gotten into the house. I picked the vacuum up, but it wasn't there. I figured, however, eventually my cats would get it.
Last night, as I was walking by my bathroom, 3 of my cats were all sitting around my pedestal sink, and one was batting behind it, so I figured I knew where the mouse was. then about 2 hours later, I heard a squeaking noise from that part of the house. When I went back to investigate, I saw 4 of my cats all surrounding this box fan I have sitting in the hallway (I use the fan to try to help circulate the heat around my house as I don't have central air). Anyway, the cats scattered as I walked up to the box fan, and sure enough, pinned in the corner made by the fan and the wall was a little gray mouse.
Meanwhile, my 16 year old cat who had been snoozing on the recliner in the living room had followed me to investigate. I guess his hearing isn't as good as it used to be, because he apparently was unaware that there was a mouse in the house. He's caught them in the past, so I know he knows what to do with them, and sure enough, when I showed it to him, he immediately was interested and started sniffing and pawing at it.
I started looking for something to catch the thing in and the next thing I know, my old guy let out a squall! I turned around in time to seem him fling his paw up in the air as he danced back from the corner - and saw the mouse briefly holding onto his paw before it went flying across the room and the cat when flying up the hallway. He stopped halfway up and gave me this "what just happened?" look while the mouse just lay on the floor, stunned.
I quickly grabbed the bathroom trash can to catch it in, and then took it outside to the woods and let it go. Like my best friend, who was on the phone with me said, after being brave enough to actually bite the cat, I figured that mouse deserved a chance at life lol (Besides, I wasn't going to kill it myself, and I didn't really want to deal with the fallout of the cats killing it slowly or take the chance it would get away inside the house.)
So now I figure I probably ought to invest in a couple of mousetraps....... lol
Anyway, the look on my poor cat's face when that mouse bit him was priceless (and yes, he's up to date on all his shots, and he was fine afterwards, so I don't think the mouse even broke the skin on his paw) 2 -
I know I shouldn't say this , talk about other threads , but why oh why do I go onto the open forum in this web site ??? I said one thing in a diet soda thread , about how I don't drink it because it spikes my blood sugar and makes me ill , OMG you would thought I hurt someone LOL BUT I am not going back and reading anymore of of it , what a bunch of mean people . I will always love you guys . we need to be good to each other and not hurt each other .0
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@tammyfranks2 : don’t let it get to you. I stay out of the main threads because people can get pretty nasty and I come onto MFP to hold myself accountable with my diary and talk with people who are in a similar boat to me. While I support anyone on any stage in their weight loss journey, no matter how big or small, I find it easier to relate to people who are looking at a longer road vs. those with 3-5 pounds to lose, so I stay here. Everyone I’ve met in this group has been kind and supportive.
And great job with not drinking diet soda. I used to drink a 12 pack a day and one day I ran out and the headache that followed was excruciating. I cold turkey quit that day, realizing my addiction to it. It will be 2 years since I had any, but I do occasionally miss it. For me, it was something that seemed like a good choice to help me in getting healthier, but we are all so different and what works for one person may not work for another. I personally have not given up my diet lemon iced tea. It is the only caffeine I allow myself and I only drink about 1/3 a bottle a day and water the rest of the day, but it’s definitely a vice for me all the same 1 -
So I've been hearing all about the wonders of old fashioned "real" buttermilk - the kind that is the leftovers after making butter - but I figured making butter was hard work, and I needed a churn (cause I have seen instructions to make it with a mason jar and shaking it for a long time until the butter is rendered, but I don't have the arm capacity to shake that jar that long!)
But curiosity won out, and since you can find pretty much anything online these days, I looked up how to make butter and buttermilk and learned 1) there are differences in butter beyond just salted and unsalted 2) there are differences in buttermilk, too! 3) butter is actually extremely easy to make!
The hardest part was finding heavy cream that wasn't ultra-high pasteurized, but my local grocery store did have one brand that wasn't. Expensive, but not really that much more for a quart than what I paid for a pound of store brand butter, and I ended up with roughly the same amount of butter at the end. I live in a rural area, so I'll just make a trip to the local farmer's market when I get time one weekend and see if I can't find a local source that's a little cheaper.
Anywho, I found that I can render my own butter using nothing more than the heavy cream and my food processor! Pour the cream into the food processor, then turn it on and let it run until the butter is separated out, which took maybe 4 to 5 minutes? One thing I did learn, however - only fill the container about half full of cream because it WILL make a mess! The instructions I had said to only go to the fill line, which I did, but it still made a mess, so I took back out half the cream and just rendered it in two separate batches. Then you just pour the whole thing into a sieve which separates the buttermilk from the butter, wash your butter while kneading it with a wooden spoon through several bowls of water, and in approximately 30 minutes, I had around a pound of fresh, homemade butter - and about 2 cups of fresh, homemade sweet buttermilk!
Now to just find a recipe that uses the sweet buttermilk and not the cultured......
I also found recipes that indicated how to make your own cultured buttermilk (the kind with the tang). I know the old fashioned way would be to leave the milk sitting out until it starts to curdle, but since that would depend on wild yeasts in the air, I went with the safer route and used a starter from commercially made buttermilk to get the right yeasts - I poured 1 1/2 cups into a pitcher, added 1 quart of whole milk (again, avoiding the ultra pasteurized), stirred them together, covered the pitcher with a cloth, and left it sitting on top of my fridge. I'll be checking that this evening to see how it did. If that works, I can then hold back part of the mix and use it to make more, sort of like sour dough bread or amish bread starter. If the new milk turns out good, I'm making buttermilk biscuits tonight with my fresh butter and buttermilk! Though I know I'd better share those things, or I'll find myself needing to fast all day again tomorrow..... lol0 -
@bmeadows380 wow - what a process!! Can’t wait to hear how it turned out.0
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the butter is fabulous! My mom wanted me to make her an apple pie, so I used the butter instead of shortening in the crust.....and I had to re-adjust my dinner plans because I ended up eating a hunk of the dough enough for a piece of pie
The buttermilk was wonderful as well - mom made biscuits with it and loved it, and I made cornbread tonight using the butter and the buttermilk and lets just say that I did stay under my calorie limit because I ate cornbread for supper and even gave up dessert so I could have a second slice 0 -
butter yet, while I did pay $6.79 for that quart of cream that it took to make my butter, I ended up with a pound of butter in the end, not to mention the 2 cups of whey left over. I was paying $3.19 buying a pound of the store brand unsalted butter. However, I just found out that if I return the glass bottle that the cream came in, I can get reimbursed $2.00, meaning it only cost me $4.79 to make that butter. While that's still more than the store brand butter, its less than the other, better brands like Land O Lakes or Horizon. So I consider it to be cost effective - especially since while I didn't actually milk the cow, I know the cream came from a family run dairy that minimally processes the cream, and since I made it myself, I know that there is nothing else added to it as fillers.
And I will definitely be making the buttermilk again, though I think I may need to buy 2 quarts next time because mom's going to want a whole quart to herself lol0
