Something that hadn't occurred to me for a long time, casting about in my mind for something different to bake for tonight's dessert. And so I turned to Irving and said how about an apple strudel? Apple anything is fine with him, but strudel, next to apple pie is one of his many favourites and we haven't had one in ages. So strudel it would be. 

The fly in that ointment so to speak was that I started late because we stayed abed late this morning, on a -21C morning. Jackie and Jillie don't mind; they'd just snuggle in for as long as it takes, happy to share the comfort of warmth and put off having to go out to the backyard. Once we stir, though, Jillie begins her little staccato barks delivering her inimitable 'wake-up!' message.

 

Our little rabbit neighbour now comes over regularly to visit, at any time of day and into the night. He's shy of sounds and movement from the house interior, so we try to keep Jackie and Jillie otherwise entertained when the little fellow is around, to give him the chance to take possession of the carrots Irving puts out for him, and to relax on the porch nibbling peanuts when the mood strikes him. 'Him', I'm assuming a lot; he hasn't told us yet his name is Peter.

 

Anyway, I put together the dough for the strudel and set it aside to rest. It needs about an hour to ripen and prepare itself for being elastically rolled out and filled with fruit. The idea, of course, is to roll it out as thinly as possible, so it's semi-transparent. While it was resting, I wasn't. I kneaded up a bread dough, put on a chicken soup, marinated deboned, skinned chicken thighs, and prepared the strudel filling. I decided to use some snipped candied ginger and glace dried fruit to mix in with the apples for a little extra colour and taste bite.

 

When the strudel was finally baked, we were free and clear to go out to the ravine with Jackie and Jillie, on this sunny, windy, and quite cold winter day. The temperature had edged up to -14C and it wasn't going to get any warmer today, so what we had was what we got. Irving had cut the tips of several of his fingers when he was inserting new blades in his glass cutter. So it makes it difficult for him to put the rubber boots on Jackie and Jillie.

 

My fingers lack the strength to pull the booties sufficiently wide to slip the puppies' tiny feet into them. So that was awkward and time-consuming. We put extra layers ourselves on under our down jackets. Even so, once we were out in the ravine where the temperature tends to be colder than at street level, we could feel the fingers of icy wind probing deeply enough so we could feel the cold beneath the layers.

 

In other words we had no reason whatever to linger and dawdle on the trails, and every reason to walk as briskly as possible as we hiked through newly-snow-dusted trails. A surprising number of other people from the community the ravine ambles through were also out with their dogs, and a good number of those dogs are familiar with Irving, enough so that they rush over and anxiously await his fumbling into the pouch he carries full of dog cookies.