Christmas at -40°F | Hunting, Baking & Homestead Life in Alaska

Welcome back guys. It is Christmas time on the homestead. We're having a little winter fun doing a few projects and cooking our favorite foods. Let's make a day out of it. Well it is really cold outside and we are going to make one of our favorite Christmas breakfasts which is just some sourdough cinnamon twists. Oh it smells really good in here. Good job. Ready for breakfast Cleen? Yeah. Putting birch syrup on this was the best idea I've had. It's like a cinnamon stick. Well that was really good. It's always nice to have a warm breakfast when it is this cold outside. It's about negative 20. We have to go out, take care of the animals, and make a kidding box. We have a doe that it's due any day now and she needs a warm place to have her babies. Then we're going to work with the horses a little bit, make some Christmas cookies, and tuck in. Frost is coming inside the cabin. I think the coldest we got down to in the past couple weeks was about negative 45. Everybody's been doing really good. We're finally turning the other way. We're gaining light. Hello. He's always trying to break into the fridge. All right these guys are taken care of. We are going to head down, do a few projects, a few more chores, then we'll come back up and check on them. I'm just going to whip up a quick kidding box for our goats here. Nothing fancy. I'm just going to rip these two sheets of plywood in half and then rip these two two-by-fours in half. Give me something to tack to and I'll leave it disassembled and then when the time comes I'll reassemble it right on the porch there and that will give them a warm place to have their kids. So brutal. This cord is definitely not cold rated. When it's this cold everything's just in slow motion. I feel like it takes me five times as long to get anything done. Two months and it will start getting better. So what I'm thinking we do is we just cut those two two-by-fours and we'll put them on two of these pieces and then we'll just tack it together like that. Just make a little box and we'll put a drop cloth in it and then some straw. We'll just get it ready to assemble in a hurry but we won't assemble it yet. Does that make sense? So I'm going to need my drill and some screws. Let's cut those two-by-fours first. I'm going to make this basic and as simple to assemble as I can. It's brisk out huh? We don't even need to run anything down the bottom you know. She's not going to bust out of it. So like that and then we'll tack two more two-by-fours to the front one and we'll add one screw to each side and then I can just when we need to get in just pull the screws out. Just very basic you know and then we can reuse this stuff for other things. Even though it's cold it's nice to be out of the cabin. Okay there we go this will do the trick. I'll leave this disassembled and when the time comes I'll assemble it quick on the front deck and we had pretty short notice here so I didn't have time to really think this out but it's going to work fine. We'll throw a drop cloth in there and keep the mess off the porch hopefully. But we're going to go inside warm up and maybe make some cookies. Well it wouldn't be Christmas without some Christmas cookies so my little chef is going to help me whip up some sourdough cookies. No? Right here? Brownie on the sourdough okay. I'll guide you. Yeah. Ready? It's a fresh egg from some from some beautiful chickens. Beautiful. And you mix the egg in. Oh that popped out. Yay I love to start with some gnocchi. Yeah we'll do that. All right we're just gonna chill this for a little bit before we cut our cookies and in the meantime I'm going to prep dinner which is going to be gnocchi with some brown butter and sage and also some of our wild mushrooms and our grouse that we got a little earlier. We are gonna do some hot cocos tonight so I made some homemade vanilla and honey marshmallows. Thank you Nina. You want it a quarter inch thick. It's one fourth of an inch. A quarter. A quarter. I love when the house smells so good. And the whole cookie is... Santa Claus. Santa Claus with his little cute boots. I'm gonna do a bear. Okay we're gonna pop these in the oven and start on dinner. All right while those cookies get going we're going to start on making some gnocchi. It's been a while since I made this so we'll see how these turn out. Boil some potatoes. It's not done. We do a lot of foraging in the summer months. One of our favorite mushrooms is this right here and I think it's gonna go great with our gnocchi and sage brown butter sauce. All right potatoes are done. I'm gonna peel them and mash them up. I'm gonna let these cool a little bit out on the porch. Maybe a couple minutes max and then I'm gonna mash them up. That didn't take long. And do real simple with just butter, salt, and thyme. This made a bunch so I'm going to freeze some of this and then we'll pop it out somewhere down the line when we want a fresh gnocchi. Okay these are ready to go in get to cooking and our spruce hen is almost done. Here you go sweetheart. Good. Buttery and delicious. I love these mushrooms. Always my favorite. Spruce hen's good. Butter and thyme. These hard negatives can really take a toll so cooking and doing things in the cabin is a great way to deal with it. We are gonna clean up and then go check on the horses, check on the goats, see how everybody's doing. Make sure they all got plenty of hay and water. I think it's resting somewhere around negative 40 right now. Luckily we don't have that much wind. The wind is really the killer. It can be negative 13 but if you have a strong wind it feels much much colder. It is insultingly cold out. This isn't going to be too much fun. It's like opening a vault. You know what's really cool about when none of the dogs get up and come out with us. The goats look okay. These guys look really good. We'll check on Copper. Samford and Drum are pretty impervious. Like all of us the horses get a little grouchy when it's this cold. Like a big icicle. How are you doing Drum? That's Samford. Oh Samford. I can't tell the difference. You guys both look like snowmen. How you doing buddy? I made sure to give him lots and lots. Well they're all doing good. They got plenty of hay and I think they're gonna be fine for the night. We're gonna head back to the cabin and warm up. All right good night. Say good night guys. Well we're gonna head in. It's a good night for some hot cocoa and some cookies. Okay well Lena is so excited to decorate these cookies. We are going to frost them quickly and then make a hot cocoa and call it a night. Some white some red and some yeah really good cinnamon on top. Well it's negative 44 out so it's officially the coldest day of the year so far but we're gonna sit down with a hot cocoa and a cookie and then we're gonna call it a night. Yeah we hope you all have a really wonderful Christmas or holiday wherever you are. Stay warm, stay safe and we'll see you on the next one. You want to pick a cookie, Lena? Yeah. Go on up. Hey guys this is Amy and Dennis from Hold Fast Alaska. We are a small family living in the eastern interior building a subsistence homestead. Thank you guys so much for watching. We hope you enjoyed that video and we'll see you on the next one.