Winter Prep

One of the perks of being here is that DH can just walk right out the door to hunt 

                                                                     

which pretty much makes this hog heaven for him

                                

It'll be nice to head into winter with good meat in the deep freeze. Yesterday, DH spent some time up on the rooftop securing a few screws.

We had our first winter storm roll through here on November 7. It just lasted a few days, but mountain snows are beautiful.

I might feel differently if we had months and months of it, but this area doesn't generally get a ton of snow.

We just ended up with about 4 or 5"

The day before the storm moved in, we worked on bringing in more wood. 

We're just getting started, and hope to bring in more than we'll use so that we'll be ahead of the game for the future.

The weather made me want to bake something, but the oven's out. 😢 

We thought it was the ignitor so we ordered one and DH installed it, but still no go. DH wanted to take it in, but it's a Viking stove and it weighs a ton. We took the door off and it weighs probably 40#. I was worried about DH's back loading the whole stove and convinced him to have the repair folks come out. Alas, they were booked up solid for 3 weeks. I couldn't even bribe them with cookies since I didn't have a working oven. 😉

I considered buying one of the countertop ovens and did quite a bit of research as well as talking to friends about them. I even settled on one. Alas, I decided against it because I am pretty stingy about giving up any counter space. I've never liked having lots of things on my kitchen counters, so I'll just sweat it out.

We wanted pizza the other night so we just cooked it on the smoker - it was perfect. I even cooked egg rolls on the grill when I made stir-fry last week and Baked Apple Oatmeal for breakfast this morning

It worked great!

But I'm ready to have my oven back up and running. Thankfully, it's soup season and I don't need an oven for that!