Heavy Rain Now Snow!

Yesterday was rather warm and we were expecting a storm. It's been gloomy most of the week with light rain. Yesterday late afternoon the winds were kicking up a bit and we could tell the rain would soon reach us. What we didn't expect to see was SNOW which was very evident when we turned the outside flood lights on to take Honey for her final evening walk around 9:00. Out we went and the air did not feel very cold. The snow quickly turned to rain and it rained all night - at times quite hard. This morning it was in the 40s with wind and heavy rain. The water was racing down our road and the stream by our property was fast and wide. Honey did NOT want to venture out despite the fact that she needed to "go potty". So, I tried the old back door sneak - for some reason when she balks in going out in the rain by the front door she will go right out the back door. It was still dark but the back floods were on so out we went through a downpour and back in - both of us rather wet. We went out to breakfast and could see the lake was high and run off from the woods and yards cascaded down the gullys and yards pushing leaves into the road. By the time we were back home the temperature had dropped several degrees. Later this morning the rain turned to snow. The snow isn't amounting to anything - just tiny little flakes that disappear when they hit the ground. It's 34 outside (3:00 PM) and our low tonight should be in the 20s.

My main goal for the day was to make nut roll. B and I were talking about various holiday food and his mom's nut roll was part of that discussion. I had a cook book she had gotten for me that had a number of Polish recipes in it. I found one for nut roll but it called for a yeast cake. Now I know what that is but haven't seen them for sale for quite some time. After several google searches I found a conversion from yeast cake to rapid rise yeast. The recipe called for half a yeast cake so I halved the yeast not realizing that the cakes are two ounces rather than one. Well, the dough was like lead never rising. I threw it out and went back to the Internet where I found an "easy" Croatian nut role recipe that only took one rising. The filling is cooked on the stove to thicken it and then the dough made (very sticky). The filling came together well, the dough was so sticky I added flour and then followed the directions.

Half the dough was rolled out and the filling spread over it. It's been a long time since I've made a bread roll so I took a lot of pictures to refer to. I was surprised how easily this rolled out once I had the dough the right consistency.