It was with joyful hearts that we threw open the doors yesterday and ran out to enjoy the fabulous day that greeted us! What a day it was, filled with a playhouse being opened up, soil being worked, and sun being soaked up by our pale skin.
food
A Little of This a Little of That
This week we have spent a great deal of our time in the kitchen, hence my cooking-themed posts this week. This led me to think about how much I adore this space, my kitchen. It is a place where we as a family gather to make, share and consume the bounty that God has blessed us with. A place where we talk about our day, our struggles and our dreams. A place of learning letters, numbers, words and shapes. A place of play. I love this space, my kitchen.
This is the activity my girls most love to do while I am preparing our evening meal. Playing with play dough allows them to be in the kitchen with Mama while also giving them the freedom they so desperately need.
This particular play dough recipe is one of my favorites because it smells oh so yummy. You can find the recipe below. Hopefully your little ones will enjoy it as much as mine.
Pumpkin Pie Play Dough
1 cup flour
1/2 cup salt
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 cup water
2 tablespoons oil
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon orange colorant (this could be left out if you so desire)
Combine flour, salt, cream of tartar, cinnamon and nutmeg in a large saucepan. Mix together the water, oil and colorant in a small bowl. Gradually stir the liquid mixture into the flour mixture. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until a ball forms. Remove from heat and knead until smooth. Cool. Store in an air tight container.
Simple Solution
In keeping with the theme I seem to have started this week, I wanted to pass along an extremely easy recipe that my family uses at least once a week. I try to make my family’s bread from scratch, but as we all know, making yeast breads can sometimes be very time consuming. On those nights when time is scarce, I always reach for this recipe.
Mix together 2 cups self-rising flour and 1 cup local stone ground wheat flour. (I also add in 1 scoop of Garden of Life’s Super Seed. This, of course, could be left out.)
Then add 12 ounces of your favorite beer. (Maybe you were so inspired by Monday’s post on home brewing that you have some homemade brew on hand to add!) Mix in the beer and then pour the batter into a loaf pan.
I like to sprinkle a bit of brown sugar on the top at this point. But you could definitely leave that part out.
Bake at 350 degrees for 45-50 minutes.
Enjoy!
Breakfast From Scratch
Apparently I am on a DIY food kick this week! After writing about our home brewing yesterday, I started to think about the other foods we make from scratch and soon thoughts of our delicious, and incredibly easy to make, granola popped into my mind.
I have been in a constant battle recently for something easy to serve my girls in the mornings when we are a bit rushed. Of course I would love to make my little ones bacon and eggs or pancakes each morning before school, but we all know that some mornings do not play out the way we wish they could. We all know those mornings…When we wake up late, it seems to take years to get the kids even dressed, let alone to get them to use the bathroom and brush their teeth, and then we have exactly five minutes to eat breakfast before we have to leave for school. Enter…Homemade granola.
I make my granola in giant batches and store it in an airtight container and it lasts up to several weeks. It is much, much cheaper than buying organic granola in the store, and the best part is that I know every single ingredient in my granola! There are no long, four-syllable words that only someone with a PhD can decipher. Just 5 yummy ingredients:
2 lbs organic rolled oats
1 lb raw slivered almonds
12 oz unsulphured, unsweetened coconut
1 lb local honey
cinnamon to taste
And here is the incredibly easy part: You dump all of the ingredients, except the honey, in a giant bowl. Mix it.
Put the honey in a small saucepan over low heat and warm just enough to make the honey a bit runny.
Then pour the honey into the dry ingredients. Mix again.
Bake in batches in a shallow baking dish at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. (I stir the granola in the baking dish about every 10 minutes to assure it bakes evenly.)
And that’s it! I store my granola in the bin pictured above and it lasts a long time. Let me tell you, I can get A LOT of quick breakfasts out of one of these batches. It is truly a breakfast time saver!
Brew Master
As a family, we try to make as many of our meals from scratch as possible. We bake our own bread, make our own pizza crust and love to can our own sauces and veggies. So it seemed like a natural progression to begin to make our own beverages as well.
My husband has recently discovered home brewing and I’m pretty sure he has found a new love! And I must admit, as skeptical as I was in the beginning, there is something just awesome about knowing that the brews our family enjoys on holidays and celebrations is crafted by our hand.
I am not much of a beer drinker myself. I would much prefer a good glass of red wine, so we are thinking we may begin an adventure in wine making in the very near future. Hopefully I will have an update on that soon!
“I want to make my own thing!”
These are the words that ring throughout our home at least three times a week. My girls just love to cook and/or bake “their own thing” and yesterday was quite the large step for my oldest daughter.
In the past, she had been content to mix random ingredients together, put it in our counter top convection oven (with Mommy’s help of course), and eat her creations. Now with that said, she has done quite a bit of experimenting with various flavors and has come up with some delicious combinations, but the creations were random none the less. But yesterday she said to me, “Mommy, I want to make my own thing, and I want it to be an actual recipe.”
So I decided, why not throw caution to the wind and let her completely take over the kitchen. With a little bit of my help reading the measurements, she made cut out sugar cookies completely on her own!
Now the crowning moment of this adventure was when it came to the topping for these cookies. My little five-year old gazed up at me and said, “Mommy I think I am going to sprinkle a little sugar, cinnamon and rosemary from our garden on top of the cookies. That way we don’t have to use food coloring or sprinkles with the yucky chemicals.” (Oh she had just made her mama’s day with that one!) And an fyi…the cinnamon and rosemary combination is one of those flavor combos she came up with during her previous food experiments. And let me tell you, it is really delicious!
Once she was done with her sprinkles, she sat back, looked approving at her creations and said, “Perfect. It’s just like Jamie Oliver’s pumpkin muffins when he sprinkles lavender flowers on top for sprinkles!” (My how this little one impressed me yesterday!)
Pumpkin Scones
As promised yesterday, here is the recipe for the pumpkin scones I made on “Seed Starting Day.”
Mix together the following ingredients in a large bowl:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons sugar
4 tablespoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Using a pastry cutter, add 1/3 cup cold butter cut into small pieces. Make a well in the center of the mixture and set aside.
Next mix the following ingredients in a medium bowl:
2 eggs
½ cup heavy cream
¾ cup pumpkin puree (In the fall my husband halves pie pumpkins and scrapes out all of the seeds. He then roasts the pumpkin halves on the grill until soft. I then scoop out the meat of the pumpkin, run it through the food processor, and freeze it for later use in recipes. This is what I used for this recipe.)
Add egg mixture to dry mixture all at once. Then stir with a fork until just moistened.
Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and flatten into a circle. 
Then cut the dough into wedges. Separate the wedges as much as possible.
Brush the wedges with a bit of additional pumpkin puree and sprinkle with additional cinnamon and sugar.
Bake at 400 degrees for 12-14 minutes. Serve warm. Enjoy!
2012 Seed Starting Day
Ever since we started our garden three summers ago, the third weekend in February marked our “Seed Starting Day” for the year’s garden. This past Saturday marked this occasion and a wonderful day was had by all. As I said last week, I was feeling the need to get in the soil and grow something, so I was very happy to see that day pop up on our calendar!
We normally start the morning off with some sort of yummy breakfast, made with products from last year’s harvest. This year I made pumpkin scones, and they were delicious! (This recipe to follow in a post later this week.)
Then the girls drew pictures of what they thought would happen to the seeds once they were planted.
Here is my five year old daughter’s drawing. She said, “This is a picture of a pot, with the plant marker and a few sprouts coming up. The sun and rain are coming down on the sprouts.” Such the gardening expert!
This is the drawing my two year old completed. She said, “This is a plant with a rainbow.” She is on her way to garden expert status very, very soon I’m sure.
This year for our seed starting mix, we took a five gallon bucket and filled it up half way with compost from last summer. We then mixed in one small package of coir (coconut husk fiber), which helps to retain moisture much like a peat mixture does.
We mixed away until we had a nice ground mixture, perfect for seed starting.
Then my husband and girls got busy planting tomato seeds (Amish Paste, Martino’s Roma, Speckled Roman, and Italian Heirloom…all my favorite tomatoes to make tomato sauce with in August), basil seeds and Butterfly Weed seeds. The girls were really able to contribute to the effort this year and it was awe inspiring to see those little hands working the earth, and instinctively knowing how to plant these small seeds so that they will later grow to provide us with a bounty of vegetables.
We keep our seeds in our craft room in our basement. My husband hooks up fluorescent shop lights that can be moved up as the plants grow. He also hooks the lights up to a timer so that the plants can get 14-16 hours of light per day. We also put an oscillating floor fan in there with the seeds to help prevent mold or fungus from growing on the surface of the soil.
A Bit of Spring
This morning I feel a bit remiss because as I peer out my kitchen window I find a fairly hefty amount of snow fell overnight. The garden that was showings signs of early spring just yesterday is now covered with a thick layer of snow and the earth is hardened once again by the cold temperatures. Even though we have had a very mild winter, the need to delve into the soil and plant something is seeping into my veins.
I often find myself feeling this way on these cold February mornings and I think today I have come up with a temporary solution for my need to plant something, anything.
The girls and I grab a few Mason jars and go to work. We will sprout some seeds this morning! You can purchase sprouting seeds at just about any garden center and all it takes are those seeds, cheese cloth, a Mason jar and water.
Simply follow the directions on the back of the seed package and in about 4 days you will have lovely little sprouts to add to salads, stir fries or smoothies.
I wish you all a wonderful weekend filled with fun and family! Enjoy!
Inspiration
Last week in my post about our Red Wigglers, I mentioned that we purchased our most recent batch from Growing Power, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Growing Power is truly one of the most amazing places I have been in my lifetime, and it is no wonder why there were only a few people on our tour who were even from the Midwest. People travel from all over the globe to visit founder Will Allen’s urban garden, situated in a food desert on the north side of Milwaukee. If anyone reading this post is ever in the area you must, must, must stop by for a tour.
For my birthday, my husband told me that my present was going to be a family trip to Growing Power. Now that is my kind of present! Love it!
I’m not sure what exactly I was anticipating going into this trip, but Growing Power far exceeded every single one of my expectations! Not only were there thousands upon thousands of plants being grown in this facility, there were mushrooms, fish, chickens, turkeys, bees and goats. Solar cells and cisterns. It was unbelievable.
And what is more amazing than all of this is their outreach programs. Growing Power sells their food at a store front food stand, sources their food to local restaurants, collects waste from local breweries and coffee houses for use in their compost bins, and they have unbelievable youth education programs. One man on our tour was there with his three young children and he was from Milwaukee. He told my husband and I that Growing Power even does a CSA-type food drop off for many of the local schools. He said that on Mondays parents can turn in a sheet if they want a box of food on Friday, and then on Friday the students are sent home with their box filled with vegetables from Growing Power and a new order form for the following week. I was floored.
Why can’t every community do something of this nature? All children deserve to have their bodies nourished with this healthy food. All children deserve amazing educational opportunities like the ones that Growing Power offers to youth of their community. I believe with every fiber of my being that something like this is possible in every city in our nation. Growing Power reaffirmed my belief that this is actually possible. I am truly inspired.
Making of a Home 