...1.31...Over the Weekend...

...I'm very sorry to say that...over the weekend...our dryer broke...and I thought it would ruin our movie night...but...I checked and found a fuse blown...a simple fix...or so I thought...ordered one from Amazon...and we were surprised to see that it would be delivered "tonight by 9 PM"...ok...I seriously was not expecting that...but what a service...right?...

...this is the culprit...

...and here's the new guy...I just popped it into place...and we were back in business...clothes drying...movie watched...haha...

...and then...for the third week in a row...we woke up Saturday morning to snow...

...not a lot...but it's still pretty...

...I picked up the InstaCart...

...absolutely nothing of note...we are so boring...haha...

...and then we were sweet-less...so I jotted down a lemon cake recipe from the interwebs...and whipped that up quickly...

...and y'all know that I think the crust is the best part of any baked thing...so I made them in my cast iron muffin pan...

...which fits neatly in my toaster oven

...I don't use it a lot because I often put multiple things into the big oven at once...and in the winter time it warms the kitchen up nicely...

...see what I mean about the crust...seriously the best part...

...these were good...more like a muffin than a cake...so they'll be good for breakfast too...

...and then since I was out of my little hockey pucks...(frozen cornbread muffins)...I made a pan of those as well...

...and again...the crust is the best part...

...I needed some for the leftover potato soup that we had for lunch...because snow = potato soup...haha...

...I mixed up my homemade "Sleepy-Time Tea"...

...I mix the chamomile that I buy in bulk...I also use it for Bee-Free Honee...with peppermint tea and lemongrass tea and nettle leaf tea...then I pulse it a few times in the spice grinder...

...it makes a lovely calming evening tea...and I store it in an old tea tin...

...later in the afternoon I got out a couple more small appliances...

...and made another half loaf of delicious bread...

...and then last night...the Man had said he had a split pea soup recipe he wanted to try...so I got out Grandma's Veg-O-Matic...and chopped some veg for that...

...I love using it...it's so quick...

...and all of the veg is so uniform...

...everything is ready for the Insta-Pot...

...and the Veg-O-Matic cleanup is just a quick rinse...I spray the little teeth with the sprayer to dislodge any bits that got stuck there...

...and the pea soup with a hunk of homemade bread was a perfect supper...it's really soup weather here with temps dipping into the teens...

...and then...sadly...the dryer was not fixed...and since I had continued washing clothes...and it's too cold to hang them outside...I just put them on hangers and hung them up in the laundry room...

...the fuse had blown again...and the heating element would stay on even when the dryer was not running...and the Man said..."I was afraid of that"...haha...

...but I insisted that I was going to fix it myself...and started searching the interwebs again...

...and apparently the problem is the heating element itself...but testing it with the meter did not show any problem...and again...I ordered one from Amazon...and it came the very next day...

...that's the old one on the right...and the new one came with 'everything'...I replaced all of the other fuses and the temperature gauge along with the heating element...so basically we have a new dryer...haha...

...and this is just funny and interesting...this is what I found when I took the dryer apart...which is not as difficult as you might think...I definitely suggest that you try to fix your dryer instead of replacing it...

...and I'm even a couple of dollars richer now...haha...but no idea at all what that little key belongs to...

~Wishing you a lovely start to your week!