Ice Out on Gooderham Lake 2013

We decided to declare Saturday, April 27th, 2013, as the day the ice left the lake. That is not entirely true as there were still some big sheets of ice in the south/west end of the lake, but around our place it was open. It was a good day for the dogs as, for the first time in a long time, they were able to run around off-leash without us worrying about them going through thin ice. This ice out is a little more than a month later than it occurred in the spring of 2012.

Getting ready for the Smoking Season

We really like smoked meat (and cheese, lets not forget that). In past we used an inexpensive offset smoker but found that to require too much attention and difficult to control either the temperature or smoke well.

So, we just upgraded to a Bradley Smoker.

It is a nice compact, electrical unit.

The smoking chamber is insulated and the temperature and smoking is digitally controlled.

You can set the number of hours of smoke you want and the wood disks are fed automatically. You set the temperature and time separately and you can choose to only use the smoker (think cheese).

It has 4 racks. While there is a 6 rack unit, the smaller unit might be better at heating with just a limited electrical heater.

Here is a picture of the insides. I likely will not look this good again but wow is it shiny now.

You can see the ramp that the wood disks are pushed into the chamber along at the bottom. It has its own heater in the last segment to cause them to smoke and, when they are done, the next disk pushes the remains into the water bowl beneath it.

You can see that the racks are actually bowl shaped as are the jerky racks so you can invert the jerky racks and end up with two at each level when you are doing thin strips.

Wish us luck.

First Snow - November 2nd, 2012

Too early! What happened to Indian Summer? Luckily, this didn't last.

View from the Kitchen Window

View from the Kitchen Window, originally uploaded by mikemilton.

It was a great fall for leaves this year. They were colourful and have lasted well.

Making Crusty Bread

I was inspired to try this bread by reading how easy it was to make in another cook's blog post. She was right...this bread is as basic as it gets (flour, salt, yeast, water), simple to prepare and bake, and the texture and taste is amazing! Most of the credit has to to to the Le Creuset pot, though. Think I'd better stock up on flour ;-)

Ice Out on Gooderham Lake 2012

Went to bed last night with the lake still 75% covered with ice, but when we woke up this morning (March 24th, 2012) the ice was GONE! This is almost a month earlier than last year, and is a record as far as I can recall.

Otter

Otter, originally uploaded by mikemilton.

Each fall and spring we see Otters passing by and enjoying some fishing.

This fellow was using holes left from ice fishing