Share, Chicks, and fridge on the fritz

Well, this will be quite the random post. A couple weeks ago, one of the schools I travel to was incubating eggs (ha! story of my life), and 7 adorable chicks were born! I couldn't believe the beautiful colorations they ended up with:

Also, the new Fair Shares Community Shared Agriculture season began two weeks ago! We are getting some delicious things, as usual. Here is just a small sampling:

Mild Cheddar from Mountain View, MO

Companion Bakery Strawberry Poundcake from St. Louis, MO

THE BEST preserves EVER!

Black Beans and Rice

A drawer FULL of farmer's greens (including some arugula that I am in the process of turning into pesto, but I forgot to buy lemons and pine nuts today)

Fresh mint -- anyone know if mint regenerates roots if you leave it in water?

AND -- CSA inspired chicken noodle soup. This is just the stock part of the process, but if you look closely, you can see our little whole chicken from our CSA. After making the stock, I built the soup with onions, carrots, celery, leeks, the chicken, the stock, and our CSA egg noodles. I will try to take a picture of the finished product soon, but I lost the daylight by the time the soup was finished.

And that brings us to the "fridge on the fritz" part of the blog . . . Friday, upon returning home from a long day at work and then out and about . . . we discovered that everything in our freezer was becoming quite soupy, and our fridge was growing warmer by the minute. DANG! We had just gotten all these delicious meats and such at our CSA. This would have been the perfect time for someone to prank call us and ask "if our refrigerator was running," because it wasn't, and that would have ruined their joke! So, our refrigerator was headed to the appliance grave yard. Fortunately our friends who live close by were able to offer their deep freeze to us until we found a new fridge.

We headed off to Lowes and Sears. We liked the refrigerators at Sears, but they just don't have the deals like Lowes does, AND they didn't have any of the fridges we wanted in stock. So, we headed back to Lowes where they were able to offer us free delivery and haul away, 0% financing for 12 months, and a pretty good price. AND, the best part, they were able to deliver the next day!

So, here she is, in all her glory, my new pride and joy . . .

You might wonder why I didn't dress her up for her online debut, and left her with blue tape and plastic in tact. Well . . . that's because the Lowes delivery guys dropped a dolly on the freezer door on their way into our house and created a huge dent. SOOOOO they have to come back out this week and bring us a new door. PLUS, they messed up the copper water line that hooks up the ice and water spouts, so they have to come back out to fix that too. Oh well, at least we have a working fridge and freezer again! AND, it's going to be so AWESOME to have crushed ice whenever I want! I LOVE crushed ice . . . almost as much as I love an organized fridge:

We went to Costco today and bought a HUGE pack of strawberries and a huge bag of bell peppers, so I got to cut some of them up and put them in the new freezer.

I can't wait to eat some crushed ice! It's the little things in life . . . nighty night . . . off to write a STUPID report for work (my FAVORITE part of the job).