Real Food This Week

One of my New Year's resolutions is to focus more on "Real Food". By that I mean food that is local, organic, in season, nutritious, frugal, within budget, sustainable, gluten-free, and delicious. Easy, right?

This week it's been:

Monday I noticed I had half a tub of organic cottage cheese still in the fridge, so I made gluten-free Cottage Cheese Dill bread in my bread machine. It was ready by lunch time, so we had fresh warm bread and butter and a sliced apple and cheese slices for lunch. Then for dinner I used two of the squash I still have on my window sill from our CSA last year, and made a pureed squash soup, which was served with more of the bread and yogurt and toasted sunflower seeds to stir in.

Tuesday we had cereal for breakfast, and warmed up last week's leftovers (enchiladas and potato salad) at church for our lunch. For dinner I used the last of the bread as topping on a gluten-free macaroni and cheese.

Wednesday I made gluten-free pancakes for breakfast, and the kids had peanut butter and jelly (homemade blackberry jam, but store-bought bread) sandwiches for lunch. I was out running around, so I treated myself to a bowl of pho at a restaurant for lunch. For dinner I made a very interesting soup, "Native American Three Sisters Stew" for dinner.

Thursday has so far been scrambled eggs (from our own chickens) for breakfast and leftover macaroni and cheese for lunch. It will be leftover soup for dinner.

A really great tool for organizing recipes and planning meals is plantoeat.com I was impressed enough to pay the money for a membership, and I'm not sorry I did. You can try it out with a free trial membership - and if anyone joins and wants to be my friend on the site we can share recipes and menu plans!

I got the two soup recipes this week from this wonderful magazine:

Native American Three Sisters Stew (as I made it, not as the recipe called for):

10 dried pitted prunes

1 small red onion

6 cloves of garlic

a large dash of oregano

1 green bell pepper

1 can of diced tomatoes

2 small yellow finn potatoes

1 sweet potato

3/4 cup frozen corn kernels

1 can kidney beans, rinsed and drained

1. Soak the prunes in water for at least two hours. Reserve the liquid and chop the fruit.

2. Heat oil in a soup pot, and saute the diced onion and garlic. Add diced bell pepper, oregano, and tomatoes with their juice. Cook two minutes.

3. Add the potatoes and sweet potato, and the reserved fruit liquid. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 15 minutes or so.

4. Add corn and diced fruit, and beans. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 5 minutes more.

The prune broth makes for a sweet soup, but not cloyingly so.

How to do Nature Study from the indoors

My girl doesn't like going outside in the wet and the cold, so we've set up a Nature Study observation post in the kitchen window seats. :)

The Reading Life

Older Than the Stars is one of those Wonder-Filled, Science-Based books about the universe that I love for young children. It is a repetitive format, like "The Green Grass Grows", with simple-but-interesting illustrations. A great book for children a bit too young for Born With a Bang.

Blue Chicken is an art joke, because when a painter leaves without finishing her painting of a farm, a (drawing of a) chicken decides to "help" but ends up spilling the blue paint over everything.

I Want My Hat Back is one of the best books of 2011, and one of the best we read all year. It's deceptively simple, but clever and mischievous with a great ending.

We're also enjoying:

Judy Moody, Girl Detective (Book #9 in the series but the first we've read)

The Penderwicks at Point Mouette (the charming family returns for their third book)

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (both of my kids loved this on audiobook and have listened to the whole thing through multiple times, and walk around with paper yodas on their fingers now)

And I've joined Goodreads.com, and I'm loving the way you can organize bookshelves and the recommendations are wonderful! A great way to organize your reading life.

My New Year's Resolutions

I want to BE HERE NOW, and I think these things will help me do that:

1. More yoga. It brings me into peace within my body in a way nothing else does.

2. Real Food. Food that I grow and cook - I want to pay more attention to food and feeding us all well.

3. Reading more Real Books, and spending less time surfing the internet or obsessively checking Facebook.

4. Enjoy Each Moment that presents itself, and turn off the Mental To Do List. Avoid To Do Lists entirely if I can.

5. Avoid multi-tasking, or try to do one thing at a time, and do it well.

What have you resolved to do this year?

Staycation

I'm coming to the end of a two week "Staycation" that I took from work. Working for a church, it was a bit crazy for me to take the Christmas weeks off, but there were volunteers and the minister to do the holiday services, and I hadn't used any of my vacation time this year. Use it or lose it, and there is no cashing it out option.

So I've been cozied into home for two weeks, which has proved fantastic. I tackled some reorganization tasks that were fun to do and will feel really nice to have done. Since I enjoy that sort of task, it was a "fun" way for me to spend my down time. The pantry, filing cabinets, and book shelves are all fabulous now.

There's lots of different ways to get some R&R. This time at home didn't cost anything extra, gave me time to tackle projects that had been bothering me, and it's been restful too. Now I'm chomping at the bit to get back to work. :)

StoryBook Art

We are using the book StoryBook Art by MaryAnn F. Kohl as our art study, and I LOVE how much more accessible for my kids the art of picture book illustrators is than say, the work of Da Vinci. Each lesson is based around a picture book, and then there is an art activity that uses a similar technique or imitates the style of the illustrations.

We started with Molly Bang's When Sophie Gets Angry, which StoryBook Art tells us the author painted using "gouache". We were just using tempera paint, but the kids were delighted to notice that actually some of our Crayola-brand paints said "gouache" on the labels. So we had "the real stuff!".

A bit of planned activity is very helpful in getting past the post-Christmas cranky days, I'm finding.

2011, in retrospect

This has been quite the year, and it was not at all what I set out to make it. At the beginning of the year I picked a guiding word: Less. It's interesting to look through my blog entries from this year, because the word lasted as a focus for about three months, and then I just couldn't keep it anymore.

This wasn't the year of Less. It was the year of "push Sara to the burn out point".

I got heavily involved in fundraising for Carbon's school (and ended up feeling burned out as a volunteer).

We fell in love with the idea of some land again, and went through a home search and then found our dream home - and got it! This was all wonderful stuff, but also stressful. We had to put in our savings, and a lot of our time getting the garage fixed up, and all the uncertainty and stress around a major home purchase pushed both me and my husband to our burn-out points. Moving in the Fall, during the busy start-up season at church, was another time for burn-out and stress.

And my husband got laid-off work this year, right as we were buying the house. He landed on his feet with another job, but it still added to our stress load.

I spent the year fundraising for a youth mission trip to Transylvania, and went on the trip as one of the chaperones. It was a huge project to take on, and it definitely burned me out as well.

I hit the new church year running with an ambitious plan for lots of activities and a big program, and also really jumped in to the credentialing program at the same time.

And we returned to homeschooling again this year.

It wasn't the year of Less.

In some ways it was the year of More, More, More. Do More. Buy More. Stress More.

It was a year of anxiety. Of pushing myself just for the sake of pushing myself. I wanted to prove that I could do it. I felt a huge anxiety to perform at 110% at all times, to be SuperMom, SuperDRE, SuperWoman.

And I'm realizing that in all that rush, bustle, stress, and anxiety, somewhere along the line I lost track of WHY to do anything. I became anxiety driven rather than values-focused. It was really just about doing a lot of stuff, being busy, and constantly in motion.

It may not have been a year of Less, but it was a year of Big Learning for me. And now I want to take that insight into 2012 not with a Guiding Word or a list of resolutions, but with just this one simple thing I've learned: keep what is most important to you, your deepest values, the ideal vision statement for your life and the world - keep all of that close to your heart always and don't forget it in the scramble of daily life and the buffeting of our society and its pressure to consume and be busy. If you are living a life that is in harmony with your values, there are no further goals you have to achieve. It's not a rush to finish, after all. It's a life to live, moment by moment. And I don't want my obituary to read "she was a very busy woman".