Baking With Buttermilk on a cold winter day

Something about a day dusted with snow that makes me want to bake. I'm not a big baker but I do make corn bread, one of the few things Max will eat that doesn't come in a package. About a week ago I bought some low fat buttermilk with the plan to make some twice baked potatoes with buttermilk in place of butter to see if it would be good. I don't have much experience with buttermilk and it kind of weirds me out because of it's thickness. Thick milk seems wrong.

However, I made the corn bread in Deborah Madison's book "Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone" and they are a hit. I substituted the milk with buttermilk and it worked very well. They didn't rise a lot, but that may be because I substituted half the white flour for wheat flour (since that's how Max likes cornbread best). Small but good.

I also used the buttermilk for the twice baked potatoes and I hear they were good. I didn't have one myself but Philip said they were very good and I have the word of my dog Chick, who ate four of them when I wasn't looking, that they are not lacking at all in allure. Now I'm wondering what else I can use the buttermilk in. I don't make pancakes much though that would be the obvious use for it.

A totally bizarre affect of my new increased dose of Paxil is sleepiness. I went to bed early Sunday night. Then I woke up early Monday morning all fresh faced, yet by eight am I was hardly able to keep my eyes open and so fell asleep for two more hours. I woke up in time to take Max to school late which is lame because school had already been delayed by snow for two hours. I trudged him to school, came home again, and fell promptly asleep for another hour. Last night I was sleepy by five pm but hung on until 9pm at which time I fell fast asleep. That's a lot of sleep for a person who doesn't sleep well or generally much. I hope this isn't a permanent feature of an increased dose of Paxil with a decreased dose of Welbutrin. Getting some sleep is good stuff, but I hate sleeping too much, it makes me feel queer, as though time was slipping away from me and it makes me feel slightly disconnected from life in my waking hours.

I'm really hoping the change in medication will result in me shedding my inertia, not adding constant drowsiness to the table of contents. Often the side effects of phyche meds are temporary. I hope that's true here. What I desperately need is ENERGY.

Here's what I'd like to do today: make bread, make duvet covers. Somehow I cannot seem to get these kind of things done. Why? I must do it today. I must not let anything get in my way! Bread and duvet covers. New duvet covers would make me feel so happy. Most of mine are covered in Max bloody nose stains (have I mentioned recently how bad I am at doing laundry?*) or they are worn out to the point of being depressing. Not to mention not being very attractive.

Speaking of bloody noses, Max has been having them again. We did get a respite for about a month and a half. Not many of them and very mild ones now replaced by lots of bad ones. I dread having to put Max through the nasty (and expensive) nose cauterization he went through in the other side of his nose but it was effective. I don't have any bed linens without blood stains on them. I'm going to need to buy one set just for guests that must never be on the guest bed except for when guests are over. Very embarrassing to present the guest bed and have to explain that those dubious looking stains aren't from me having messy menstrual cycles but from the kid's nose. Like that's so much more comforting.

I cannot seem to get a handle on my house. On organizing it, putting it together, putting everything in a place, or on clearing things out, so I can actually clean it. My house should take between 1.5 and 2 hours to clean with the laundry only taking one day. I can barely make a dent in it in that time. I didn't come up with that time frame arbitrarily. That's how long it used to take me to clean it at my old place where everything more or less had a place to go so that I could straighten up quite easily. Now I start straightening up and three hours later I've barely made a noticeable change.

Yeah, this is why I need more energy, not LESS. Plus my brain needs to be in better shape. Not frizzy and jumping all over the place all the time.

Today is a new day. A day with buttermilk muffins and winter squash soup. Maybe today is also a day for a cup of caffeine? (We only have decaf coffee right now) Stormy, cold, grey, quiet, and I'm home. Something good's gotta happen!



*You would be proud of me Dominique for having used the Fels Naptha several times to good effect, but I cannot keep up with the blood stains around here. That would require energy that I don't have.