Spring is coming!

I got the Johnny's Selected Seeds catalog today! Now that I've got most of my wrapping done, I can sit and flip through it and dream of summer...

And tomorrow we get one more minute of daylight! Enough for the chickens to take another step...

But today it's still winter, and I've got panettone rising in the kitchen. I figure it's a good holiday substitute for fruitcake (which I refuse to produce) since it has raisins, candied orange and lemon peel, and candied pineapple in it. But it's really more akin to brioche -- a yeast bread liberally enriched with butter, sugar, and eggs. It's an all day project, since it rises three times before you bake it. In our old house, I used to start by stoking up the woodstove in the morning, because the house was never warm enough for the bread to rise in our lifetime.

The thing that bugs me about the panetonne is that when you knead it, the pine nuts and raisins tend to rise to the surface and pop out. It means I always have a burnt raisin on top of at least one loaf. Panetonne also makes the most killer french toast you can imagine.