Another loaf of cinnamon raisin bread

Here's the loaf of cinnamon raisin bread I made again, last night, in the new bread machine. I don't know why the raisins aren't getting evenly distributed even though I'm pristinely folowing the directions! I even hand kneaded the heavy dough a bit while it was in the machine and still wound up with way too many raisins at the bottom of the loaf. 

This new snowfall is certainly bringing even more birds to our feeding station. This morning we had 8 pairs of cardinals. That's 3 more pairs than we've ever seen at one time. I think the word has gotten out! The red bellied woodpecker was also here as well as all our regulars. I'm probably going to give them several feedings again today. It must be so hard on these little guys to maintain body temperature in this crazy weather; and I'm hoping all the extra rations and suet are helping a bit.

After feeding our domestic and wild critters, we enjoyed the cinnamon raisin toast for breakfast. After breakfast I perused a sour dough bread machine cookbook that I got through inter library loan and decided it was worth buying. I found a copy for around four dollars on ebay. That was ten dollars less than the cheapest one on Amazon.com. It does pay to shop around.

We're still working on our leftovers, so tonight I think I'll make some potatoes au gratin to go with the leftover meatloaf. The rest of the afternoon will be spent going through more seed catalogs and watching the winter Olympics and a few more outings with Bodhi before dinner.

Jim's healing is going slowly, but he is making progress. He's completely off the pain killers now and is sleeping well in the recliner now that he can move the recliner back a bit more. He's getting up and around more but I'm acting a bit like a tough  staff sergeant when he attempts to do too much.