picture – Page 2 – New England's Narrow Road

White Hair in Our Bird’s Nest

small bird's nest — Nest Made of White Hair

A few years ago, when we were renting a house in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, this little bird’s nest fell out of a tree. We found it in the backyard. The amazing thing about it was the fact that we knew what material was used to build some of it. There are white strands around the inner top part and we knew they must have come from the horse next door.

An old, pure white, horse lived just up the road and we could see him from our yard when the leaves were off the trees and some little bird used his mane or tail hair to build it’s nest. It’s just amazing that little birds can build such intricate little homes to raise their young. Each Spring they lay eggs high above the ground in swaying branches and hope to survive the strong winds and downpours to see their babies hatch. Some don’t make it, but I hope the ones in this nest did before it was flung to the ground for us to find.

Watch at Cornell University in NY – live stream of a Red-tailed hawk nest with 3 chicks.

Bread Maker Pizza Dough Recipe

: Making Bread

My bread maker died a few weeks ago and I decided I would begin to make my own bread. I try not to eat too much bread and I mostly used the bread-maker for making pizza dough on Friday nights.

I looked online and found a recipe for homemade bread that was supposedly WONDERFUL… It had to be kneaded for 10 minutes! Are you kidding me? So I made it and got a good arm workout. The bread wouldn’t rise.

Most likely because it’s winter and my house is only around 65 degrees – no where near the 80 degrees suggested for rising.

Even when I heated the oven and stuck the dough in there, it still didn’t do much.

I got a few loaves – the small ones were edible but the large ones were doughy inside. I tried this recipe once more and still didn’t have much luck so I made Bread Pudding – which no one ate either! So I gave up on that recipe.

I now have a new bread maker (West Bend)…and it has 2 paddles in the bottom of the pan, which I had never heard of, but this machine didn’t come with a pizza dough recipe!! Oh no….BUT at Amazon.com (where I purchased it) a lady had left a message about this machine saying she always made pizza dough too and used the bagel recipe instead.

I used it Friday to make pizza dough (which was a combination of the bagel recipe and my old pizza dough recipe) and it was delicious…even better than my old dough would come out.
So below is the recipe for my bread maker pizza dough. In case you like to make your own. Add ingredients in this order and use the dough setting. Mine takes an hour and a half to complete.

PIZZA DOUGH
1 cup water @ 80 degrees
1 1/2 Tbsp. Olive oil
3 Cups of Bread flour
1 1/2 tsp. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. salt.
2 tsp. active dry yeast

I used this to make one large pizza with semi-thick crust. Add some spices such as onion and/or garlic powder and oregano to give the crust a nice flavor. I also bake the crust first @ 425 for about 10 minutes, then add sauce and toppings and bake @ 425 for about 15 minutes – or until it looks cooked.

My Garden Carrots

I finally pulled up all my carrots. None of them look like “real” carrots and they are too bitter to eat. Earlier in the season I did use some of them in stew, but they never really did very well. I threw them into the compost pile where they might be of some future help to my garden soil.

I know that carrots don’t like rocky soil and although I tried to get most of the rocks out of my new garden, I do live in the Granite State (New Hampshire), so rocks abound. And even though the ones from this season were not edible I will probably try again next year because they are simple to grow and don’t take up much space. We’ll see.