Visits and Gifts...

I'm so excited!! My sister is visiting (also helping me get more organized and catch up at stampeaz.com)! We took inventory today and the numbers in the online store now actually match what I have in stock. Inventory is much easier to take with two people than it is to do alone, so I really appreciated the help!

On the way south, she and her husband stopped by to visit my brother and sister-in-law (and Cheeken and Kizzie) and they were given a gift from Cheeken to bring along with them!! Cheeken has been laying an egg nearly every single day and they are very cute -- little, brown eggs with dark brown freckles on them!! There were a couple new daffodil blooms in the front yard, so I put the eggs into a basket and took a picture with them -- it seemed a fitting image for the changing seasons.


I got a note from my sister-in-law the other day -- Cheeken took her first bath since the warmer weather began to arrive. She likes dust baths, as you might remember from last May. Well, there isn't a lot of dust at this time of year, so she ended up taking a mud bath, instead. I'm given to understand that the feathers caked with heavy, black mud did not do positive things for the freshly cleaned house (nor did they do much for her freshly cleaned and newly bedded cage). Good thing she's such a charming chicken, huh?? Also, her new favorite food is canned pears - she seems to get intense cravings for specific foods when she's in egg production mode! One day she demands tomatoes and the next it's canned pears.

An Overdue Chicken Update...

This is one very lucky chicken! She's had a full year of living the high life down on the river, contributing the occasional egg, keeping everyone company, and providing some laughter along the way.





The chicken's usual domain is the downstairs area -- kitchen and dining areas (very washable carpet and wood floors that are easy to clean when necessary...). She had never tried to navigate the stairs to the bedrooms and living room, but she had once found her way to the laundry room and pantry area behind the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs.

Well, recently she had a bit of a scare. The people of the flock were upstairs when a shadow fell across the windows of her little safe haven and she got frightened enough (probably thinking the shadow portended death from above), to decide she wanted to be with the rest of her flock in the worst possible way!



Wait -- I have to pause in the story... Don't you just love the side-by-side anticipation in that picture?




I have to say I think the little spaniel is better at sharing than the chicken, but they have worked out a pecking order of sorts (the chicken pecks the dog, if she wants the pup out of the way).

Anyway, on with the story... The chicken actually flew up the stairs and into the living room, squawking and carrying on the whole way. When she got there, she dove behind the furniture and refused to come out! After quite a few attempts, my brother finally coaxed her out of hiding and carried her back downstairs, soothing her the whole way as she continued to make noises of distress.



She's not really in jail after her escapades -- it's just her little coop for the night. The dog probably appreciates the break and ability to have the snacks all to herself, though!!

Thanks to Graytreefrog for the recent photos to post with the story. :)

Celebrating!!

It's boggling my mind! Stampeaz.com reopened its doors three years ago today. What a wonderful journey it has been. Thank you all for making it so much fun for me -- I have had the opportunity to meet some of the nicest people on the planet, both online and in person. What could be better??


Of course, I am celebrating today -- if you need to order anything, it might be a good day to do it.... The usually random Stampeaz Surprize will be on all of today's invoices. :)


Happy anniversary to all of us!! I think I need to break out the hot cocoa!

This one's for Judy!

Judy is the adventurous soul that sent my sister the information about artisan bread and the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day cookbook. My sister sent the information to me, hoping I would figure it all out and show her the technique. Nothing easier – really!! Anyway, my sister, sister-in-law and I had a great time playing with bread (and all of us enjoyed eating it) and we almost always got a photo before the bread of the day was consumed. Almost… So, this one is for Judy, to give her some idea of what she started. I have shared this technique (and copies of the book) with the above mentioned sister and sister-in-law, along with two good friends who are off and baking. I have told co-workers about the technique and seen them hop on the bread wagon, too. It’s just too much fun not to share!!

Roasted red pepper pizza with mushrooms, herbs, and three kinds of cheese made with the basic dough.

Grissini (bread sticks) and peasant bread, made with a whole wheat enhanced version of the basic recipe.

This is the tapenade bread -- the photo is a bit blurry, but it was such a delicious bread I had to include it!! One note of caution, though. If you want any tapenade that goes into this dough left over to spread on anything, make a double batch of it.

Sun-dried tomato and Parmesan bread, made with olive oil dough.

Classic challah with poppy seeds (foreground) and dried tart cherry and toasted almond bread (background) made with the challah dough.

Roasted red pepper fougasse made with olive oil dough.

Calamata olive bread made with the basic dough.

Pan d'epi served with grilled wild trout (caught by my brother) and grilled wild asparagus (gathered by my sister and brother-in-law). Yum!

Pecan rolls made with challah dough are wonderful. These have a light honey topping in lieu of the sugary topping in the book with cinnamon and sugar swirled inside. It's a less sweet version of the classic sticky bun.

So, see what you started, Judy? Isn't it grand?

First, the Chicken Update!

Yes, I’ve been back from vacation for a little while, but I am just now getting caught up with things and I’m finally ready to catch up with the blog! Since I have had so many requests for information about the world famous chicken, she’ll be first on my list.

I got to meet her, this famous fowl. For a while there, she had been laying an egg nearly every day and ruling the roost (or at least the cocker spaniel) with aplomb. Then, without any warning, she nearly died (again), when she caught some kind of nasty avian virus or other. My brother stayed up with her for two nights running, force feeding her water and trying to tempt her with tidbits of this and that to coax her back to health and making her get up and move around, even though she didn’t want to budge. He wasn’t about to lose her after nursing her through the whole frostbite episode!! Apparently, she was acting like a boneless collection of feathers on the rug. After a few days of tender loving care, she started to look less limp and showed a little interest in eating on her own again.

By the time I arrived, she was still being fussy about what she wanted to eat. Chicken feed was always popular, but she liked tomatoes and fresh bread much better than cheerios, apples or fish, which had been favorites. She would demand tomatoes and bread, even jumping to snatch pieces from unsuspecting hands.

She finally has a name. Evidently, when my sister-in-law and her younger brother were small, they referred to these feathered farmyard creatures as ‘Cheekens’, with long emphasis on the double ‘e’. So, in honor of childhood antics, she has been dubbed Cheeken. She does exhibit a bit of cheeky behavior, so it’s not entirely out of character!! The poor cocker spaniel gets summarily pecked for straying into Cheeken’s food arena. She may have been particularly ornery because she was still feeling a little under the weather. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. So, they stay on opposite sides of whoever is handing out the snacks at the moment. And I am amazed by how much a chicken can eat!

Cheeken is also very sociable, at least with humans. She follows people around and talks to them constantly. She asks to be let out or in and waits with varying degrees of patience for someone to open a door for her.

She takes her decorative duties very seriously, taking frequent dust baths to keep her feathers shining, preening vigorously and finding particularly picturesque places to pose for general admiration. In short, she is a very entertaining little chicken.

Just as I was getting ready to hop in the car and head home, Cheeken went to her little nest box to try and lay an egg. By the time I made it back to Missouri, I heard that her first efforts since the great illness were shaped badly and had thin shells, but she’s doing fine now and is back to laying an egg nearly every day.

Vacation time again!!

This little gray squirrel was lying in a patch of sunshine on the porch railing yesterday. She just seemed like the perfect illustration for announcing my absence from the helm of Stampeaz for a little while. It is hard to believe it's mid-May already!!

I am off to visit my family. We'll be doing a lot of wandering around in the woods, hunting for morel mushrooms, wildflowers, turkeys, fawns and whatever other wonders may come our way. Not only that, I get to meet the chicken!! You can be sure that there will be pictures and more updates to the chicken story when I return!

I apologize for any inconvenience my temporary absence may cause to PZ Kut addicts – I’ll be back soon, I promise! And I also promise to get working on the things that are still wonky about the new Stampeaz Web site. There are still a few glitches in the code for displaying certain things and the color scheme is in need of some major adjustment. In the meantime, everything that really has to work, does work. Phew!!

See you after Memorial Day!

Technical Difficulties...

Yes, that's me crying in frustration through the computer! As you have probably noticed, Stampeaz has been suffering from technical difficulties. The service provider that has been hosting the site has had a major meltdown and stampeaz.com has been down for days. I can't get to my files to move them, so I have to rebuild them. To top that off, apparently he has brought up the public part of the site so that people can order things, but I can't see what they've ordered! I can't get to my Stampeaz e-mail and I have been unable to reach anyone on the support team. So, I am in the process of rebuilding and moving the site to a shiny, new location and I hope that it will all be up and running again within a few days.

I apologize for the inconvenience! I know it's frustrating -- it certainly is for me (hence the cries wafting through the ethers)! And I hope you will all bear with me as I get this sorted out.