Happy Valentine's Day Everyone & The Deep Freeze Continues

   Happy Valentine's Day all, we are still in a deep freeze here and the temps are still going lower and lower each night and day. We are now in the negatives at night for the next few evenings.

   Baking is always good when it's cold. Our home is keeping up, but there are spots in the house that are quite chilly. We have not lost electric so that is an absolute good thing as we have no back up heat source here at the lake. Before we always had our wood stoves.

  I baked up a half batch of my favorite vanilla cut out cookies that I bake up at Christmas. I dug out my heart cutters and just finished up this morning. I changed to gluten free flour, mostly keto sweeteners except for the little bit of corn syrup that is used in this recipe. I think this ingredient helps to keep the cookies softer.  I found a keto frosting that turned out really good recipe here  If you want to go dairy free just use a nut milk or even water I would think would work. 

  The sprinkles are not keto They turned out pretty. I put some in the cookie jar and froze two packages for later. They taste really good too

As I mentioned we are in a very very deep freeze that continues getting worse each day. It is so bitter, and we are still icy on our circle drive that the garbage pick up did not come last week, and we have not gone out. I need to get to the grocery store soon as we are running out of fresh foods. It will be several days yet before we begin to get out of this cold cycle.

I follow a group on Facebook that is about the doings on the west side area of the lake which is where we are. Many coves and low water areas are now totally froze in.  I grabbed a few photos. 

   You can click on the photos for larger viewing. This first one you can see the iced areas in front of the lake -- that you can see towards the back.  

     We are on a main channel, one of the reasons so much traffic in front of us during the summer but we wanted deep water. We do have ice around our dock a bit

                   

I took this photo of our neighbor to the right of us-you can see the huge ice block that the waves splashing onto his cable have caused

  When I look out our windows straight ahead, there is a cove in there-that is all iced in. Not sure what damage this will cause the docks.  I took a couple videos I will share later,  need to upload them to my you tube for better viewing.

For our 2 pm main meal I guess I have an odd combination, I found in the frezer chicken soup that I made a couple weeks ago and one more bag of shrimp so I am serving those with tossed salad and brought out a bottle of Yellow Tail Cabernet Sauvignon  Soup sounds good cause I am chilly and perfect day for shrimp.

Stay warm and safe everyone, and I love the valentine cards I received from two of my pen pals-thank you.