Welcome Pechu!!

About 3 weeks ago we lost one of our degus, Miss Vida. Vida will be sadly missed by all, but in particular by her BFF, Baby Shiloh.

It became clear very quickly that we needed to find Shiloh a new friend. She became withdrawn and nervous in the first week of Vida’s passing. I searched high and low for a new cagemate. The only real requirements were that the new degu must be female and in good health. I checked Petfinder.com, the SPCA, Craigslist, and even phoned around to all the local pet stores that occasionally rehome animals. No luck. So with the help of my friend Chenoa (http://twitter.com/#!/0nedove), I decided to try putting an ad up on Craigslist.

SHILOH (AKA BABY)

Days went by with no responses and I was starting to lose hope. But then yesterday morning I received an email from a family that had 4 degu siblings, 3 boys and 1 girl. The girl, Pechu, was just under a year old and currently living with her 3 brothers. Prior to arriving to their loving family, they had all almost become snake food! But lucky for them (and us!) the snake wasn’t much for degus, and they were adopted into a happy family and even reunited with a long lost brother! Hoorah!

Being the only girl, Pechu, was sometimes the odd man (or shall we say woman) out. And her new family wasn’t too keen on having baby degus taking over the cage. So when her mom saw that Shiloh was in need of a friend she contacted me about her girl, Pechu.

PECHU

Pechu arrived just this morning and seems to be fitting right in! I set up her cage for her so that it was all ready for her arrival :) She explored all the levels, ate some hay and pellets, and seemed interested in smelling through to the cage below her to check out her new friend, Shiloh.

Over the next few weeks the girls will slowly be introduced. Introducing new degus can be a little tricky but we’ve had lots of success in the past. This is the method we use: http://www.degutopia.co.uk/deguintros.htm

I’ll keep you posted on their progress!

Week 1: Black Dress, Degus and Vegan Donut Making

It’s official, I’ve completed more than one week of my newly acquired shopping free lifestyle! Celebrations all around! Only 51 more weeks to get through!

I decided to hit up a couple thrift stores yesterday morning in search of a larger secondary cage for one of my degus. I have two girls, Ri Ri and Miss Vida.

Up until about a couple months ago they were best buds. They’d always groom and cuddle together. Very cute. Then…. Ri Ri went crazy. Like totally bat shit insane. And all she ever did was attack poor Miss Vida. The funny thing is Miss Vida is easily double Ri Ri’s size. So I had to put my girls in separate cages to protect Miss Vida from the fury of Ri Ri. Unfortunately, my secondary back up cage isn’t very big. I’ve been switching the girls on a daily basis so that each gets a day in the big cage and a day in the small cage. But I’d really like to find a decent larger second cage. Unfortunately, neither the Value Village or Talize I hit had much in the way of appropriate cages. I tried searching Craigslist but again, no luck. However, my failed attempt turned into two positives for me. First, when I got home yesterday I found that Ri Ri wasn’t acting so crazy. When I put her in an open area with Miss Vida there was no fighting at all! Major improvement! So perhaps I don’t need a large secondary cage after all. Hopefully, this means my girls will work it out.

The second plus for me was finding this cute little black dress. It looks barely worn! I’m a huge fan of basic black dresses that I can do up in a variety of ways. So this was an awesome find. It’s Banana Republic which I’m not a huge fan of. But that’s alright! The dress is cute, so screw the label.

When I got home yesterday I decided I needed to congratulate myself on a job well done. And what better to celebrate than home-made vegan donuts? That’s what I spent a good portion of my Saturday doing.

Working at Tim Hortons’ during my first 2 years of university definitely made me undervalue the amount of effort that goes into making a batch of yeast donuts. At Timmy’s you grabber the frozen yeast donut rings from the freezer, through them on this wire rack that held donuts, put them into the oven and then pressed the button with the picture of the yeast donut (I am not kidding, they actually have buttons with pictures on them…). When the ovens built in timer beeps you take the donuts out and place them on the cooling rack. Then from there it just comes down to decorating. And presto! Completed donuts in 15 – 20 minutes.

Making yeast donuts from scratch proved to be a much more demanding. Let me preface the process by explaining I have never made anything with dry active yeast in my life. Sure I bake a fair deal but at most it’s quick breads, cakes or muffins. That’s about it. I began with a fairly intuitive step; finding a recipe. This was actually more difficult than I had anticipated. I sorted through recipe after recipe of baked donuts, pass, whole wheat / multigrain donuts, really? PASS, and other recipes with random ingredients that I didn’t have and wasn’t entirely sure they were being including (i.e. medium firm tofu). TOFU DOES NOT HAVE TO GO INTO ALL VEG FOODS PEOPLE!

Eventually I found this recipe: http://www.chooseveg.com/display_recipe.asp?recipe=51 Which contained normal everyday ingredients and seemed easy enough. But sheesh donuts are quite the process! Make the dough. Let it rise for an hour. Roll it out. Use a donut cutter to cut your donuts. Ummmm… right a donut cutter… How about a glass! So I used a glass, cut out round donuts, then poked a hole through the center. That gave me this:



I then had to let the freshly cut donuts rise for another hour. So I took my puppy, Peaches, out with Kyle and we went for a run. By the time we got back it was time to fry the donuts! Which sounded a little scary so I had Kyle do it…. It’s kind of a two person job though as the donuts cook so quickly you have to have someone setting up the next ones to be fried and glazing and/or sugaring the freshly fried donuts. Or at least that’s the excuse I’m going to be using for needing his help….

I decided to make 4 kinds of donuts. Cinnamon Sugar, Glazed, Chocolate Dip and Sprinkle Chocolate Dip. The Cinnamon Sugar and Glazed needed to be done while the donuts were still hot.



But for the Chocolate Dip and Sprinkles you have to wait until the donuts cool or else the Chocolate kind of just melts and slides off. Thank you, Tim Hortons’, for teaching me that one! So I took the time while the donuts were cooling to look up a recipe for the Chocolate topping. The first one I found was this gem: http://www.tastebook.com/recipes/859271-Chocolate-topping-for-Donuts Let me sum up this one for you. Take chocolate and melt. Dip donuts in. WTF? That’s not a recipe! Who would need to be told that if the just wanted straight chocolate on top of their donuts?!

The issue with putting straight chocolate on top is it’s really thick and dries hard and heavy. I guess some people don’t mind this but I like the softer, shinier topping you find at most donut stores. I looked for a recipe but everything seemed a lot more time consuming then I was willing to do. So I just melted the chocolate in a pseudo double-broiler (I put a metal bowl on to of a pot of boiling water) then added vegan margarine until the mixture was of a good consistency. Not too think, not too runny. And then I dipped my donuts.



And there you have it! It was a fun donut making adventure. Now I have 2 dozen vegan donuts to eat. I should probably share those around… or not! And not to mention the aftermath the donut making left on my kitchen.



But totally worth it!