Doughnuts, little girls, and spring!

My granddaughter stayed at our house this weekend. We have her there frequently since we are only a few miles away. We are planning to make doughnuts and she gets to be at the glaze & sugaring end of the process. Just the thought of it makes me think of the times my daughters were growing up when I would fill the top of our 10-seater kitchen table with row upon row of doughnuts to be put into the freezer--those that survived the immediate onslaught of ravenous doughnut lovers. My girls were outside more than they were in and, since our deep freeze was in the corner of a garage, they would simply open the freezer, take out a bag of doughnuts and go on down the creek with breakfast, lunch and, quite possibly, fish bait (we've all used doughballs for bait, haven't we?). Anyway, it got me to thinking about how great it was to have little girls that played in the creek and brought back crawdads (crayfish for all of you city folks) for me to make 'lobster' bisque. I remember one day when we lived in the log house right on the creek bank that I heard Kristina yelling up towards the house "Mom, bring a bucket" I, of course, could not figure out why she would want a bucket at the creek ('crick' is actually what we say, but 'creek' for some of you). I grabbed a bucket and ran down to the sand bar and there she was -- trying to land a very active 2 lb bass. She hadn't brought a net and she thought it would just be easier to yell for me to bring the bucket. That little girl will be 35 this year and she is still fishing and hunting and cutting wood. She always gets her deer the first day of season. She became a carpenter but, like many in our area, she is now unemployed. Of course, being unemployed to her is not like everyone else. She has animal, carpentry, computer, etc. skills that she uses to get by. The same kid with a fishing pole and doughnuts in her mouth. As luck would have it, while I was writing this, Kristina called and when I told her what I was writing about, she reminded me that she had once eaten many, many of my doughnuts and washed them down with our home-canned grape juice and when she got very sick it was not a pretty sight. So much for memory lane.

We started some of our cole crop seeds in the house this past week. Cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli. We'll plant some more of those for three weeks and then begin the seedlings for the warm weather vegetables. Very chilly outside, but spring is coming and with it the farmer's market and we have to be ready to sell. Time for me to make noodles and put them in the freezer and a few more batches of soap so that it has time to age. We sell that, too. (darn, this job thing keeps interfering with my other plans!) I keep chanting to the chickens, 'spring is coming, spring is coming'. Thank goodness for seeds and seed catalogs so that we can dream of spring!