Saturday, November 29, 2008

Low-cost, healthy meat--maybe a dream, these days...

Once again, I find myself in the position of having paid the bills, and looking at a very small amount of money left for groceries and general living. I headed out this afternoon, with high hopes, to our local Cub Foods grocery store, and found absolutely no meat on sale for anything like a reasonable price.
With six people to feed, four of them adults, a pound of anything doesn't go very far, let alone a pound of the various pathetic, fatty looking cuts of beef and pork I saw today for nearly $4 per pound. There was no chicken on sale at all--I can't imagine paying $12 for a package of chicken wings--the dregs of edible flesh society. They should be giving those away, really, for the amount of actual meat involved.
I am a big fan of the boneless/skinless chicken breasts for many recipes, but I was fully prepared to buy whole chickens to save money today, but no dice.
So, I actually came back home with no meat at all. My mom and I will sit down and do some planning, and we'll divide up some of the cost and share some cooking, and that will help. But I am really bummed out by my experience. I'm all for meatless-meals, but I do not want to be a vegetarian.
I did, however, thaw my last bag of chicken leg quarters today, and I made a massive stock-pot full of soup, with all of the fading carrots, pale celery, random potatoes, and bits of veg from the freezer. It is delicious, absolutely the ticket on a cold night, and everyone loves it. Plus, there's enough for at least 2 more meals left after dinner tonight, and I also have a couple of cups of chicken leftover (it was a 10lb bag) for a casserole. I served it with a loaf of homemade bread, and everyone is fat-tummied and happy and warm now.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Things on my mind...

Lots of miscellaneous things have been tossing around in my mind the past week or so, kind of a thought-salad, and I have just started to realize that there is a bit of cohesiveness to the mixture.

The big issue this week has been the gastro-illness of the family pug, Bijou. She was very very sick for a week, apparently after swallowing some non-food items whole. But, this morning, just before her scheduled sugery, she experienced what appears to be a complete turn-around, and is herself again, eating and eliminating and playing, etc.

Another ingredient of the salad in my brain has been our finances. I have again been anxious and thinking too much about where we'll get the money for the things we need.

Yet another issue has been time-management. I still struggle against my newborn schedule, though I know that it has amazing benefits.

There are other things, too. Child-management, discipline, for myself and the kids, honoring my husband, meal planning, housework, world affairs, etc.

I have allowed my mind (again) to become this nightmarish maelstrom of cares and worries and anxieties, and I kind of drift through them, seemingly anchorless.

But here's the connection--if I am consciously trusting God, relying on Him, running to Him with these things, as I am supposed to be doing, the thought-salad never even gets started. All of these things should be brought to the throne and left there. I'm not the captain of this ship.

Frequently in our church, we sing the hymn "Come, Thou Font of Every Blessing", and I am invariably brought to tears by this verse--

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

The wandering part--what's the matter with us that we do this? I know, we're sinners, and that's why, but when we consider the magnificence of Christ, how can we do it, day after day?
As precious as this life is to me, with all of the joys God has given me, my heart doesn't pass a day without yearning for the end of this age.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Easy, Healthy Breakfasts

I really hate cooking breakfast. I really do. Once in a while, I get a little bit of an urge to do it, and I go all out with omelettes or waffles or something, but generally I'm a peanut-butter toast on whole grain type of person. It's easy and nutritious. We also often have leftovers from dinner--really, there's nothing like a big bowl of home-made chicken soup for breakfast. Jim works overnights, so I like to make sure he gets something to eat before he goes to bed.
I myself have a really hard time eating in the morning--I can do coffee, but my stomach is always a bit unsettled for some hours after I get up. I have noticed, though, on the days I do manage to choke something down, my metabolism really gets revved-up--I'm starving all day, and can keep it under control with a bit of cheese, fruit, or some nuts. When I don't eat breakfast, I wait until I feel ill, eat lunch, and then have unhealthy cravings all day, culminating in probably eating too much at dinner. So, I need to find something that I can manage to eat right away in the morning. I need something I can prepare ahead, something that I can face in the morning, something that everyone will like, and something that is packed with nutrition.
I tried this oatmeal muffin recipe today, as is, just to see how it holds up. I am planning to alter it a bit to beef up the nutrition with whole wheat flour, a bit of milled flax seed and oat bran, and perhaps once in a while some chopped nuts or fruit. My friend Jeannette gave me a delightful jar of organic apple butter, and it's just the ticket for these muffins. I found the recipe at allrecipes.com.

  • 1 cup milk
  • 1 cup quick cooking oats
  • 1 egg
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 cup white sugar
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (220 degrees C). Grease muffin cups or line with paper muffin liners.
  1. In a small bowl, combine milk and oats; let soak for 15 minutes.
  2. In a separate bowl, beat together egg and oil; stir in oatmeal mixture. In a third bowl, sift together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Stir flour mixture into wet ingredients, just until combined. Spoon batter into prepared muffin cups until cups are 2/3 full.
  3. Bake in preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

Nice and simple. The appearance of the muffin is wholesome and milky on the top, and the flavor is mild and slightly nutty. If you are into big, sweet, cake-y muffins, this is not for you. But if you enjoy the subtlety of a good buttermilk scone or a shortbread cookie, these will be very satifying. I am very pleased with the results.

Once of the few things I can eat in the morning (beside steak, oddly enough) is a baked good. Most muffins at the store are SOOO expensive and SOOOO sugary. Not a good option for a health-conscious family on a budget. With the additions I plan to make, the fiber and protein levels in these will go way up, and hopefully these will hold everyone for a bit.

One thing we really like here is butter--not huge amounts, but real butter on things that use a spread of some type. No yucked-out oil-based garbage to wreck our food (and undoubtedly our bodies). I like to buy the tubs of whipped butter--it's inexpensive, and has about 1/2 the fat and calories of regular butter, yet it's still just butter. The texture is delightful, too.


Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Finally, a peace, and new things

I realized over the summer that I was very busy, in an unhealthy way. I was trying to keep up with too many things around the house and the garden, as well as my more primary duties to the Lord, my husband, and my kids.
As fall approached, I began to settle into a bit of a depression, which culminated in what I fondly think of as my "freak out". The girl child is now in 5th grade, and the boy child in Kindergarten, and I realized that if I was going to do any justice by these children this year, I was going to have to get more organized, and make (horrors!) a schedule.
I have always kept a rudimentary calendar, and I have always had a lesson plan of sorts, but I realized that I needed more. So, in bizarre fits of motivation, I made a daily schedule for the whole family, lesson plans, curriculum arrangements, etc.
I also went through every room in the house and gutted them. I got rid of so much junk, I am embarrassed to look our garbage men in the eye. I gave my self a goal--September 19th. This was 2 days before my birthday, and the Friday before we started our official school year. It was a mess. A huge mess. I made some very unfortunate discoveries, such as the fact that I actually owned over 60 bath towels. How shameful is that?! I didn't actually buy more than 3 or 4 of them. People know that I really enjoy my baths, and so bath towels seem like the perfect gift. But four people definitely don't require 60 towels. And most of them were on their last legs, or threads, or whatever. That explained why my linen cabinet was so hard to keep tidy, I guess.
The towel thing actually co-relates to the schedule thing, though. I went with a color-coded idea. In the past, Jim and I have always purchased the same 2 colors of toothbrushes--his is always purple and mine is always pink. So I started there. I gave a bunch of those towels to my mom for dog towels, which she uses a lot of, and I gave a bunch of the nice ones to my friend Tami, who for some reason did not have 60 bath towels. I saved about a half dozen for emergencies, and for the YMCA and the pool. Then my little troops and I went over to Wal-Mart, and purchased 8 new bath towels--2 for each of us. Jim is purple, I'm pink, Stella is orange, and Gabe is green. Everyone got to pick out what they liked, color wise, and everyone got 3 new matching wash cloths. Thus, my linen cabinet became manageable.
But I took the color thing further, as well. These same colors are the ones that I now use to delineate everything related to that person. Our daily schedule is color coded, and things are labeled in these colors.
So far, the organization thing has really helped. We have such a small house, and any little mess looks awfully big in here, so we really had to minimize the amount of "stuff" we had, and make sure everything has an actual home. The kitchen is still a hot spot, because we do everything there. All the cooking, school work, projects, etc. It also serves as my "office", and the computer is there.
But, we have successfully completed our first really good unit study, on Agriculture, from Christian Cottage Unit Studies, and I have to say that if I hadn't organized all of my school things so completely, I would have found the activities daunting. The kids really enjoyed the things we did, and I am excited about the next unit on the Constitution which seems appropriate in an election year.
The schedule has also made a difference in how the kids respond to school work and chores, etc. I've always known that Gabe was a more schedule-y person, but I thought Stella was more of a free spirit, and I have always been somewhat dismayed at her reaction to schoolwork, because I felt like I was approaching it in a way that would appeal to her, kind of off the cuff. With a clear plan of expectations, though, she is thriving. Recently, Jim and I had a bunch of things to do outside during school time. I thought I would come in to find Stella dawdling around, perhaps weeping gently over her math book. To my delight, she had followed the lesson plan and was just finishing up her Mavis Beacon typing, which was her last task that day.
I should have listened to my mother when she said "those kids need more of a schedule"....

Praise God for wisdom gained while it can still be applied!

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Addendum to the pre-made pages business



I did another one, with a pre-made page by Brenda Kempf at sbbytes. This time, I wanted three pictures and there were only two frames, so I added one by cutting and pasting. I also resized this one from 12x12 to 7x10. Here's the finished page and the original element.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Pre-Made Scrapbook Page

I recently began a voyage into digital scrapbooking--wow! It's fun! No mess, either, and I love that. I use PSP8 anyway for other graphics work, and it's perfect for scrapbooking. I initially began with textures that I already had saved for other work, and that was fine. But a couple of weeks ago I discovered that there are free, ready to use scrapbook paper and elements and alphabets just waiting to be plugged in. The first thing I did was the yearbook pages for our homeschool group, and I did that much as I would do regular scrapping--cut and paste and muck around, and I really enjoyed it.
This evening, I thought I would try a pre-made layout, which is something that I would normally view as "cheating", but I thought maybe it would be a nice way to get something ready fast. And it was! It's really cute, perfect for the photos, and I have a completed page ready to be printed, and it took about 10 minutes to do. Here it is: (Click the picture to see the full-size page--if it doesn't load the first time and you get the title of the photo instead of a picture, go back and try again. There seems to be a glitch there.)
I don't think I'll always use pre-made pages, but I can definitely see the possibilities. This particular one is from Shabby Princess, a site with absolutely lovely, free materials. The alphabet I used is by Jennifer Riggins at Scrapbook Bytes. All of the pieces required a lot of resizing, because they are huge, and the original page was meant to be 12x12 and I resized it to be 7x10 because it makes a nice clean printout on standard 8.5x11 paper. I found the whole experience to be oddly liberating; it was really kind of nice to be able to ignore my usual desire to mess around with things as much as I normally would!

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Underestimating Our Childrens' Ability to Follow Christ

This morning, the sermon at church began a new series on youth in the church (as a body)--our expectations of them, whether they have heard the gospel rightly, what they are doing with it. It seems that some of the messages in this series will be aimed at the youth, and some at the parents, and some at the church as a whole.
One of the points that Pastor John made (the sermon will be available online shortly at Desiring God) was that we often underestimate our children when they have made a profession of faith. As I think about this, I am in agreement. Although we homeschool and definitely do not participate in most of the silliness the post-modern world has to offer, the idea of children and teens being kind of empty-headed and completely fun-oriented is very pervasive, and I have to admit that I have lower expectations of my kids than I should at times.
My daughter has professed faith in Christ, and as time passes I have been excited to see the beginnings of all kinds of good fruit in her. Of course, a parent can't say with certainty, "My child is saved!", since only God truly knows the heart, but nevertheless, I am delighted to see her begin to grow in righteousness.
But I am concerned that I'm not encouraging her enough to live for the Glory of God, to delight in Him, to rest in the security of His future Grace, while still persevering in a life of good works to reflect His mercy. Certainly, I encourage her in her efforts to be more Christ-like, I try to recognize and comment when I see fruits of patience and kindness and self-control. But I'm wondering if I should be doing something different. I'm thinking that when it comes to helping our children grow in faith, we maybe need to be coming more alongside them, sinner to sinner, and encouraging them as we would adult believers, with a heart to helping them glorify God with their lives. Not to minimize or change the authority of the parental role, of course, because that's part of God's plan, but just to try to empathize more, as the struggles our children have are the same as the ones we have, day to day.
I think I am underestimating her ability to have a real focus in her life.
I really need to give this some more thought, as I see that this post is kind of a babbling affair, sort of a stream of consciousness, but I'm excited to see where this new idea leads me, and excited to hear how this new sermon series develops.
Praise Him!

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Beloved Tomato



By the end of August each year I am so tired of even the thought of tying up another tomato plant or loading up another basket of grape tomatoes, I'm just waiting for that killing frost. But then, in December, the Spring seed catalogs start to come...
In Minnesota, the growing season is quite short, compared to other areas of the country. We can pretty much count on about 90-110 days of frost-free weather, which somewhat limits the kind of veg and fruit we can grow.
But there's the tomato! Oh, how I love them. We all love them. Last year, I grew nine varieties, including some nifty heirloom tomatoes of unbelievable flavor and color.
This year, I'm going to try some "Whopper" tomatoes from Park Seeds, and a couple of new "currant" type tomatoes, so small that three ripe fruits can fit on a dime. Also, I'll be revisiting some of the heirlooms from last year, the Brandywine, the Big Rainbow and the Black Krim, plus the usual Golden Girl, Yellow Pear and plain old Grape.
I gave up on Cherry-types, like the Super Sweet 100, primarily because they are so incredibly prolific, but the fruit doesn't keep for more than a day. I was constantly overrun with fruit flies because my cherry tomatoes were turning to the dark side the day after they were picked. We just couldn't keep up.
The kids just love the little tomatoes. They're always out in the garden with bulging cheeks and full pockets, so it's a good thing that all of the small-fruiting tomatoes are indeterminate and just keep on going from the middle of July until the frost.
This afternoon, I was mucking around the vegetable garden, gradually getting things ready, and found just a couple of little, dried out yellow pear tomatoes that missed the fall clean-up. It was funny to see them out there, unmistakably out of their season, but so at home there in the dirt. I wonder what would happen if I buried them after a winter on the ground.

Keeping Stuff vs. the Mercy of God

Since we moved, 2 1/2 years ago to a considerably smaller space, I have been laboring to get rid of all kinds of unnecessary things. Last spring I went through my storage shed and found that I had boxes and bins and boxes and bins of baby clothes, receipts, scraps that I had written on, old toys (even some of mine!), textbooks, school papers, etc, that I never looked at and suddenly realized that I was no longer attached to. So much of it seemed so pointless, so temporary, I couldn't see why I had bothered to haul it all around with me for so long.

I gave quite a bit of thought to this phenomenon, because in the past, I have always been so sentimental that the very thought of losing any of these things would bring tears to my eyes. I couldn't figure out why my perspective had changed so much. Then it hit me--the last time I really went through these items with an eye to what I really wanted to keep was before I became a Christian!

Wow! This was an incredible realization for me, and a demonstration of the mighty power of the Holy Spirit in a born-again believer--the power to transform thought patterns of a lifetime, without my even knowing it was happening. Yet another example of how the Lord never commands us to do what he doesn't give us the grace to accomplish. Matthew 6:19-21 tells us clearly that we are not be putting our love and hope in earthly things--and I think that that applies to things of no monetary value as well as money and fancy possessions. I had way, way too much invested in those items that I was saving.

Also, it's a demonstration of the mercies of the Lord. He could have accomplished His goal in me by causing me to be convicted that I didn't need these things, and then I would have had a painful "separation" from them as I tried to be obedient. But in His mercy, He changed my heart before I had to deal with the actual situation. Not all sinful patterns are resolved so easily. There are always struggles where I have to simply "mortify the flesh", and run to the Lord with the pain it causes, leaning heavily for the strength to continue. But I am so grateful that in this He allowed me to learn gently.

All this doesn't mean that I never save anything, never keep memorabilia. I have a box with a few special baby items, diaries, love letters from my husband, early drawings from the kids, etc. But I if something happens to that box, I'll be okay, because I'm truly beginning to know where my treasure must be.

Friday, April 18, 2008

A new frontier...


It surprises me that I have never blogged before, as I have been a "diarist" since I was able to write, and I use the computer to do all kinds of other hobby and school related things. But, this is my first experience with it. My friend Tami, at Ambleside Classical, has been encouraging me to do it, and I can see from poking around various blogs that it should be right up my alley.
I am a Christian, and wife to Jim, mother to Stella, 10 and Gabe, 5, and happy and blessed to be a housewife and homeschooler.
We have always been homeschoolers; even before we were married, Jim and I knew we would homeschool our kids when we had them, although our reasons have changed over the years from a purely academic purpose to a focus on obedience to Scripture, especially Ephesians 6:4--"Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord." (ESV)
As all Christian moms know, this is easier said than done, but we are confident that the Lord will bless our work, as He never gives us a command without also giving us the grace and strength we need to obey.
I am seeing this blog as an opportunity to share all kinds of things, like curriculum things, budget and money ideas, cooking and gardening plans, etc. I'm hoping it will be a kind of combination scrapbook and diary that I will enjoy looking through, and maybe others will as well.