Baby, it's cold outside

  Yup, and snowy, too.  We are getting dumped on.  But oh, look at the calm before the storm sunset last Friday!  Actually, I took this a little too early because baby, it IS cold outside.  The afterglow was stupendous.

 The lake is freezing, the waves are creating some really interesting forms, the bottom of the steps down to the beach are solid ice.  The white plume looking thing beyond the ice is .... ice!  It floats in pieces till the waves bring it to shore to play with the big mass.  This was taken Saturday morning while the sun was out for oh, maybe an hour.

This was what today looked like.  Alllllllll   dayyyyyyyyy  longggggg.  But, this is Michigan and if you live here in the winter this is what you get.  It's not unusual, we get snow, we get cold (just not THIS cold) and we shovel out of it.  We get at least one blizzard a year and this is it. It's just we're a little out of practice.  The past couple of winters were unusually mild and so we got a little lazy about it. 

So, I worked on these blocks.  The centers are all different, but the leaves and baskets are all the same and I tried to show them but the pictures load sideways and I can't get them to show upright, so trust me, they're summery, simple little baskets.

 

Then I made chocolate chip cookies and took a nap so I wouldn't eat them all.

 

Actually, I was wondering about something.  I'm experimenting with coconut oil.  Apparently it's the new darling of cooking, the healthiest oil we can consume, so they say.  But the problem is in Michigan it's a solid  and thus very hard to incorporate into baking cookies if substituting it instead of butter.  The first batch I made a couple of weeks ago got turned up noses for votes because the coconut flavor is definitely there.  This time I used half butter and half coconut oil but again, I have to melt it down to use it.  This makes the dough seem oily.  So I put the dough in the fridge to solidify a little so the cookies bake upright and not like they've been stepped on.  My opinion so far is:  you have to like coconut because you can taste it. I am learning to like it. I think it's hard to work with because it IS a solid here in this chilly time of year.   I use it to fry, though.    Just curious.  Do you use and like it or no?