Lessons Learned in June

My monthly reflection, looking back at the month just past with an eye toward lessons learned and challenges faced.  What did I learn in June?

• Although the process of trying to go back to work and still keep up all my home duties started in May, June kept up the relentless grind of a long long To Do list and family needing me for things at the same time I had paid employment work sitting there needing to be done.  I am learning that I need to put everything in its own place, with a designated time for each, and put on blinders to what is happening outside of the designated task at hand.  I cannot worry about my laundry to fold if it's time to do school work with the kids, or worry about the kids being bored when it's time to be focusing on my church work.  Carefully balanced compartmentalization is the skill I am trying to work on.
• Simple routines are better than fancy schedules for getting my family to help.  I overshot by making a complicated chore chart, which the kids couldn't keep track of and so I was always having to check if people had done their chores.  It wasn't working, so now I'm focusing on just one chore - the after dinner dishes.  The kids each will wash the dishes two nights a week, and their dad will wash them one night a week.  Keep it Simple is my new (old) lesson to re-learn.
• Baking cannot really only be done once a week.  I had designated Mondays as "Baking Day" because it is my day off work and it seemed like it would be good to start the week off with bread and muffins, cookies and homemade granola bars.  But really we just gorged on baked goods on Monday and Tuesday, and then whatever was left went quickly stale.  So my new idea that is working out much better was to add Baking to my daily morning chores.  I get up at 6am and do: 1.  put away the dishes from the drain racks, 2. wash any dishes still dirty, 3. make coffee, 4. bake something, 5. throw a daily load of laundry in, 6. fold laundry on the drying racks, 7. hang the new wet laundry up to dry.
• We need to create more products to show what the kids are learning, I realized when I was trying to gather up samples for our end-of-year assessment through Northwest Untest.  We learned a lot, but samples to show for it were a bit weak.  The kids and I talked about it, and one idea they want to implement is to keep a daily Learning Log journal and write down what they learned at the end of each day.  That's lovely, but I think I also need to assign more reports/report-outs of some kind.
• Screen time (specifically in the form of Disney sitcoms) was creeping up to unacceptable levels.  Although I can watch those shows with my kids and think "it's no worse than what I watched as a kid", I still don't like the disrespectful way they seem to start treating me after too much exposure to that stuff.  Those shows are undermining the values that I'm trying to instill, it seems. So I re-instated the 1 Hour Limit for television/youtube/movies (not for gaming - we decided passive vs. active applied here not just whether it involves a "screen").  The limit has been really good for the kids.  They are playing with each more.  They are building things, creating, drawing, reading.  They are also demanding more of our time and attention (play this board game with me, go on a bike ride with me, etc), and I realize part of why screen time gets out of control is because I am too busy/tired and it's always easier to just let the screen hypnotize my family than it is to stay actively engaged.

Now, onto July!

Got Eggs?

So ..... I was out of town for a little more than a month.

And this happened:



Wow, I have more than a gross of eggs in my fridge!  They ran out of egg cartons and started filling tubs, and I don't know how old some of these eggs are.

Fortunately, we are taking on a "Make It All From Scratch" change to our diet.  And, also fortunately, my son is very enthusiastic about baking right now.  He made (GF) corn bread all by himself yesterday, and it was pretty good.

National Soup Month comes to an end

I had a lot of fun with soup this month.  I even bought myself a new cookbook: Soup of the Day: 365 Recipes for Every Day of the Year.  Although it is not an explicitly "eat with the seasons" book (which my other current soup cookbook, Love Soup, is), the recipes as they are arranged on the calendar pages are pretty seasonally appropriate.   And, as meat-eaters, we appreciate the meaty goodness of many (but not all) of these recipes.

However, the unfortunate circumstance of my falling at the skating rink and spraining my wrist (the family got to go to the Emergency Room and everything) left me unable to do much cooking for two weeks out of this month.  Many of the recipes I wanted to try had to wait.

So ... I'm going to claim February as a Month of Soup as well!  Or maybe this will just be a year of soup around here.  It's such good stuff, why not?

In My Kitchen: National Soup Month

My husband and I have arrived at a way of sharing the duties of cooking dinner - he cooks the dinner twice a week, always the same thing (Taco Tuesday and Spaghetti Thursday).  It's predictable, easy, and the kids like it.

We also have a regular weekly family dinner at my in-law's, which is also predictable, tasty, and my kids like it.

So I'm left with only four dinners a week to figure out (and breakfast is when I use processed foods - cereal and toast - and lunch is usually left over dinners), which feels like a big reduction in my food planning job.  And yet, I get easily bored with the same food over and over again, so I still need to work out a varied plan of different foods.

This month I hit upon a theme, and so far having a theme is making the whole dinner thing even more fun.  January is National Soup Month, so my theme is just that - Soup! My goal is to cook a different soup recipe for each of my dinners.  So far I've done Rustic Potato Leek (from here), turkey (I made that one up and used our own turkey we raised), Squash and Apple (I had that recipe in an old magazine), and slowcooker Hungarian Beef Stew (from here).

It makes cooking dinner a project, and an experiment, and maybe we love some of the recipes and don't like some of the others, but we just move on to the next one and I don't need to stress any one dinner too much.  I like this.

But February isn't looking as easy.  National Canned Food month?  Or Cherry month?  Or Grapefruit month?  Obviously we can't eat cherries or grapefruit for dinner all month.  And Canned Food all month sounds gross.  So .... ideas for a dinner theme in February?

In the Kitchen This Week: Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

Eating seasonally sometimes means that certain treats only come around once a year.

After this:

 

We were left with this:



So I boiled the seeds in salt water and toasted them with some olive oil and cumin, and got a delicious snack the whole family is happy to eat this week.  (I added the cumin to it, but otherwise it's this recipe)

In my Kitchen this week

As we continue to eat seasonally, this week has been busy with making dehydrated apple chips from the apples I harvested (we don't really know all the varieties we have).  I was gifted a very nice dehydrator for Christmas last year, but this is really the first crop I've had enough to dry some of it.



I have about 6 of these that I grew this year, and then I was also handed a bag of already peeled and chopped sugar pumpkin that was left-over from a church dinner.  So, it's time to bake with pumpkin!



My kids requested pumpkin muffins with cream cheese filling, and so I made a double batch this weekend, and then froze half of the muffins for later.  I had enough left-over pumpkin puree to end up freezing some of it too, so there is plenty more pumpkin in our dietary near future.

Going with the seasons and mostly cooking what needs using up right now. :)

In My Kitchen Right Now

Homemade yogurt from milk we got from our next door neighbor's goats.  Sadly, it turns out I am the only one in the family who likes the taste of it, so I'm eating homemade yogurt with granola and homemade strawberry syrup for breakfast every day for a while, I guess.




Pears I harvested from a tree that was completely hidden by the blackberry bramble in the back field.  I worked hard to cut back blackberries, harvest the pears, and now I'm not sure what to do with them.  The kids don't like the taste of them as a raw snack .... Thinking we might make pear cider or maybe I'll make a pear crisp.

Making Use of the Blackberries

I may have missed the main blackberry harvest this year, but I still got a few.



We are trying to make wine.  It's something new, so we'll see how it goes!



And jam, of course.

Weekly Book Post: Flight Behavior and Cooked

Both Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan are on my short list of favorite authors.  In fact, if I was going to have a fantasy dinner party, these two would be some of the guests.  (Who else?  Wendell Berry, Wangari Maathai, Desmond Tutu).  So taking these books on family vacation with me was an obvious choice.

Flight Behavior is Kingsolver's latest novel.  I was first introduced to Kingsolver with The Poisonwood Bible, and I still consider that her greatest work.  This latest book is not as good, but it's still a lovely and well-written book.  Set in the mountain country of Tennessee, this is a tale of global climate-change, told from the point of view of a compelling main-character who combines natural curiosity and intelligence with stifling poverty and lack-of-education.  Many parts of the novel seem to have been written as a thought experiment - a way to create a conversation between the rural "reds" and the urban educated "blues" of our increasingly polarized society - but even if the conversations seem contrived they are still really good.  So the work feels a bit like the story took back seat to the political agenda, but I still enjoyed it.

Cooked is Pollan's latest book about food.  Here, he delves deeply and romantically/sentimentally into four types of cooking: cooking meat on a fire, cooking slowly in water, baking bread, and fermenting things.  Along the way, he coaxes, exhorts, begs, cajoles, and generally just tries to convince us all that we should be doing more cooking from scratch and rely less on industrial-processed foods/food-like-substances.  Although I agree with his point, and I found many parts of the book excellent, I also found myself laughing at some of his hyperbole (particularly in the section about BBQ, which he compares to ancient animal sacrifice to the gods and goes on a very poetic bent about man's control of fire).  But really, some giggles and quibbles aside, Pollan has once again delivered an important piece of the argument about how we should eat, and what is wrong with our modern consumer society.  And the arguments that this book is anti-woman are ridiculous to me - he goes out of his way to point out that preparing food for us is a human task, not a woman's task, and that the industrial system dismantled home cooking, not the woman's movement.  But I have my issues with the whole domesticity/feminism dichotomy, anyway.

I'd recommend both books, while not claiming them to be the best works of either author.  But when you this awesome, even your lesser works are worthy of our time to read. :)

The Pickling

Another year's pickles!  I made 25 jars, so we can eat about two jars a month. :)

Our Own Pigs

This year we decided to try raising our own winter pigs.  My brother did this last year, and we were inspired by his example, so when he was buying piglets from a friend, we bought two as well.

We're not vegetarians, you know.  Nothing against being vegetarian - my husband's parents are both vegetarian and he grew up on a vegetarian diet, and I was a vegetarian for one year in college.  But now he has no interest in being a vegetarian, and I have discovered that with my elliptocytic anemia (a rare genetic blood disorder which involves making blood cells that are the wrong shape and are inefficient oxygen carriers) my physiology makes vegetarianism feel bad.

Lots of people are not vegetarians, and they apparently have no trouble going to the grocery store and buying cuts of meat that they bring home and cook.  Even knowing what so many of us know about factory farming models, people continue to buy meat that comes from animals raised that way.

So it is confusing to me that people who can be comfortable doing that are uncomfortable with the notion of eating an animal that you raised yourself.  Our pigs have lived a good life, with lots of room to run around, sunshine, belly scratches, good healthy food, etc.

Yes, we're all a bit sad that on Saturday the butcher is coming.  We've opted for a home visit, so they don't have to travel, get stressed out, or really know what's coming.  They'll go quick and painless.  Then we will have well-stocked freezers, which we hope will keep us supplied for almost two years (we only eat meat once or twice a week).  We do not plan to raise pigs again next year, but will instead do turkeys.  It's possible that in the future it will be every other year alternating pigs and turkeys.

And we'll get more than just the meat - the area they've been enclosed in is now completely fertilized and rooted up.  We'll plant it with a cover crop (which our chickens will then get to free-range over and will enjoy immensely) then next year when it's not so "hot" we plan to plant a blueberry patch there.

If you are going to eat meat, it came from animals.  I think it's important that my children see that.  I think it's important that we all see that.  Maybe it's the fact that everyone wants this to be "out of sight out of mind" that lets us ignore conditions that we should never be willing to see any creature live in.

I hope I'm not upsetting anyone, but this is reality.  For the last six months I've felt more than a bit judged, even a bit ashamed.  In front of many people, we can't talk about having the pigs.  Right now, as we are all thinking about the end, this doesn't feel right to me.  No one I know feels like they can't talk about getting the occasional hamburger.  OK - I do know a lot of vegetarians and for them they wouldn't talk about getting a hamburger.  But I've felt like even the meat-eaters are saying that raising our own is a step too far.  It's not a step too far - it's the step that needs to be inseparable from eating meat at all.  (Not that everyone has to raise it - just that everyone has to realize where it came from and care about the life of the animals).

Cooking Days

I've just been over to a friend's house, to do a load of cooking together and then each tuck all that goodness away into our freezers.  This is our second month of doing this (we're taking turns on whose kitchen gets clobbered and who gets left with all those dirty dishes), and I am a huge fan of how it's working out.

With a bit of proactive work (planning, shopping, setting a time, spending a morning in the kitchen), I get a benefit of healthy, affordable meals in the freezer, ready for the days when I want them.  By cooking with a friend, the chore becomes a time to visit and is almost fun or recreational, so the time investment really isn't that big a deal.

We're even managing to balance some different dietary needs: my friend's family is vegetarian and she currently can't eat dairy, and my family is gluten free!  But it's working so far. :)

I plan to buy some larger pots, so next month will be even easier!

Make-Ahead and Freeze

I've been waiting to get this cookbook from the library and try it out.  When I had my daughter, some kind and forward thinking soul gave me Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook as a baby gift.  That book has been a huge help to me in balancing my need to feed my family with my need to sometimes be doing something other than cooking at 4pm on an afternoon.

Not Your Mother's Make-Ahead and Freeze Cookbook  seems to be equally useful.  On Saturday I got together with a friend and we cooked up double-batches of the Lentil Dal, Multi-Bean Chili, Butternut Squash Soup, Quiche, Enchiladas, and the Nacho Cheese Bake.



A fun way to fill the freezer with good food for my family this month.  Doing this about once a month would be a great idea, if I can keep it up.

Turkey for dinner for weeks ...

I find this little parody very cute.

I missed the turkey Thanksgiving this year (shrimp feast in Mexico instead), so I was glad when my mom offered me a turkey for our early Yule/Christmas gathering a couple weeks ago.  She raises her own turkeys, and this fellow was about 30 lbs.

Those 30 lbs of bird have become:

1. Roast turkey served at a holiday dinner for nine.
2. Eight turkey sandwiches.
3. 10 quarts of turkey broth.
4. A giant pot of turkey soup that has been enough for six meals.
5. Turkey pot pie, enough for two meals.
6. Turkey tomato rice (I cooked the rice in turkey broth, added chopped up turkey, a jar of home canned stewed tomatoes, some frozen swiss chard I froze this summer, and a few marinated artichoke hearts, with plenty of dried oregano, salt, and pepper).

We're almost out of turkey, but I think two + weeks of meals from one bird is pretty awesome.  We eat one or two turkeys a year, and I'm always thrilled at how far they go.  

Day 23 of Gratitude: Food

We spent Thanksgiving here with my in-laws, for a very different food-culture for Thanksgiving.  It was a bit of a sad thing for me, because we have always been with my family for this holiday before.

More than in any other area of life, I notice the family-tradition that goes with our Food Culture.  It is about where you live, yes, but it is also about where your family has come from.  Here, we ate a local feast, but still brought along our can of cranberry sauce and made a pumpkin pie.

Food and Family.  Happy Thanksgiving!

The best thing I can do for my family is ....

Cook dinner.  We've run up against the reality of budgets and increased health insurance costs, and I had to do a little audit of my spending.

Places we could cut:

1. Charity Giving
2.  Educational Expenses and the Kids' classes/lessons
3.  Gift Giving/Helping Our Families Out
4.  Eating Out
5. Draconian slashes to all the little budgets in the hopes they would add up
6.  Difficult to implement things like selling a car to get rid of a payment

Well, it's a no-brainer, really.  I'm not going to stop giving to charity, cut my childrens' swim lessons, or stop helping my mother pay for much-needed health insurance.  And the last two options are the hard ones, which we would come to if things got worse but not just yet.  So, no more eating out it is.

As my husband said, he couldn't make this decision because it primarily affected me.  I'm the one who is the primary Domestic One in our family, and I'm the one that will be planning meals, running home from work, cooking the meals, and then often running back to work in the evening.  But, seeing my choices at the moment, I'm up for it.

We've said No to eating out except on special occasions, and I'm working on cooking every dinner and having enough left-overs to pack and carry for every lunch.  So far, we've been pretty good about it for two weeks and counting.

I know a lot of folks don't eat out often.  This probably seems simple to many people - but it was one of the only things I was doing to ease up on my own juggling act of full-time work/full-time homeschooling mom.  So, please, wish me luck!

weeds

How is it that a plant we spend most of the year trying to get rid of then gives us such sweetness for a few months of the late summer?

A weed is just a highly successful plant that does not conform to our expectations.

Pickling Season

The Reading Life

On my reading pile right now:

Goat Song, a memoir about keeping goats and living seasonally and intentionally.  This was a Christmas gift that I'm just getting around to reading.

The Northwest Nature Guide is a fantastic resource.  Organized by the months of the year, the author describes what you can see this time of year, and gives a great deal of fascinating background history and science.  Then there are recommended trips for Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia so you can actually get out there and see it all.  I read the August chapter out loud to the family, and although we weren't up for going on a whale watching cruise or climbing up to the alpine heights to see small native rodents in action, it was still very interesting.

I was inspired to read some german poetry after watching the movie The Lives of Others (a beautiful film - I recommend it).  Although they were not reading Goethe in the movie, I've never read any of his work and had heard he was "foundational" so I decided to start here.  I'm sure a lot is lost in translation, but I'm not impressed.  The poems are very bland, in my opinion.

Dinner: A Love Story is a blog I read, and their book has just been released.  It's more memoir than cookbook, but if you enjoy seeing how food really fits into people's lives you will enjoy this book.

The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook is just a lush delight for the eyes and the imagined taste buds, and I simply must try some of these recipes.

Cooking Day

In my grandmother's time, there was a standard sort of order to when housewives did which chores.  She even had a set of embroidered towels that said "Monday, Laundry", etc.  It's a good plan really, since the work of keeping house is never ending and you could just keep working at everything all the time.  I'm trying to break up this huge task into a manageable routine, so I'm going back to the idea of a task a day.

Friday was "Market and Cooking Day", so I went out and picked wild blackberries from my back field, went to the Farmer's Market and bought a box of tomatoes, came home and baked and canned all the rest of the afternoon.  The results were:

1.  A messy house
2.  A hot and tired mama
3.  Yummy food that the family was thrilled to have!
4.  Local food put up for the winter

I don't go into work on Fridays, so it works for me to do more housework that day.  On the days I do go in, I have to give myself smaller domestic tasks. :)  For instance, yesterday I worked a 9 hour work day in the church, so I had to be content with just weeding one flower bed and calling the "Gardening Day" good.