Wassail for a Snowy Day

A cold snowy afternoon deserves a pot of hot wassail. Here's is my great aunt's recipe, a personal favorite.

Sliced Ginger Root

Wrap in tulle netting:
12 whole cloves
4 sticks of cinnamon
8 allspice berries
1 medium piece of ginger root, sliced

Boil together for 10 minutes:
2 1/4 cups of sugar
1 quart water
Spices (from above)

Cinnamon Sticks

Add the following ingredients and simmer together:
3 cups orange juice
2 cups lemon juice
2 quarts apple cider

Serve hot. Can be stored in the fridge for several days and simply reheated by the cupful in the microwave.

I use a tea ball for the cloves and allspice berries and just boil the ginger root and cinnamon sticks in the mixture directly. I leave the spices in the mixture and the cider becomes stronger as it sits. If desired, you can remove the spices before storing in the refrigerator.

Cookie Plates

I saw this cute idea on Pinterest a couple of months ago and decided to try it out. I purchased a few glass plates in varying sizes and a couple of  small glass vases and candlestick holders. (All from the thrift store, of course.) I carefully glued the vases and candlestick holders to the underside of each plate. Because I used graduated sizes, I can also stack them on top of each other.

Here's how they turned out:

I have used them on several occasions and have received compliments each time. I have found that using a wider based vase or candlestick gives the cookie plate more stability.

My only complaint is that using the E6000 glue means that the plates smell for a while. I suggest leaving them outside for a few days until the majority of the smell dissipates.

Homemade Halloween 2012

We were in a hurry to go trick or treating so I didn't get great shots of this year's costumes. The kids were just patient enough for me to snap a couple of shots each of them.

Being the baby of the family means you get to wear your older brother's previous Halloween costume. I don't think either of my boys have actually seen the show Blue's Clues but we have a few story books with the character.

To make Link from Legend of Zelda, I used a green wool poncho we found at the thrift store. There was just enough fabric for the tunic and a matching hat. It ended up being cheaper than new fabric. The shield was a dollar store find that we painted with craft paint.

The leather trench coat for my oldest son's Loki costume was a thrift store score a couple of weeks ago. I do wish I had gotten a better picture of the boot covers. I was pleased with how well they turned out. I also wish I had taken a picture of the back of his hair. We let him grow it out for Halloween but he is getting a haircut this weekend!

Snow White took quite a bit of sewing time but was a lot of fun. I just had  regular dress pattern to work with and I had a bit of trouble getting the velvet top to fit properly but in the end it turned out pretty. My daughter made her own shoes (again, we missed the photo op for those as well) and they are darling gold shoes with bows on the toes.

Reading Buddies- Stuffed Friends

Today I'm sharing one of the fun reading activities we do at our house: Reading Buddies.

I don't always have time to listen to each child read aloud as often as I would like so I have paired favorite books with a matching stuffed animal. My sons select a stuffed friend and read the book out loud to the animal. When they are finished with the book, they must return both to the display. Even my 14 year old occasionally grabs one of the books :-). It's a fabulous way to encourage a reluctant reader and reading out loud improves fluency, whereas silent reading does not.

Here are the animals out for display this week:

Several of the stuffed animals in our collection were gifts but most were purchased for under a dollar at the local thrift store and washed in the washing machine. (I always dry them on fluff/no heat to keep the fur looking nice.) On my iPhone, I have a list of animals I want to keep an eye out for during my frequent thrift shop escapades. (Currently my list has a giraffe, a hippo and a brown mouse, among others.) Nearly all of our books were Christmas or birthday gifts or were purchased for 50 cents at the thrift store.

It's also an easy way to rotate books off our shelves that are passed over. Sometimes, the boys even ask if the stuffed friends can join us when I am reading out loud. I currently only have picture books in the rotation but have considered doing the same thing with chapter books and novels. Look for a future post with an update on that....

Raisins

My house smells absolutely glorious today. I have rosemary, mint and parsley drying in the oven and trays of grapes changing to raisins on the counter. I breathe deeply and reflect on how blessed my life is.

My three year old helped pick the grapes yesterday (four different varieties in all) and he spent the entire time with his mouth full of those juicy grapes. We have eaten our fill of fresh grapes and have plans for jelly and juice.I can't help but sneak a few of the earliest raisins and I am grateful for these simple pleasures of life.

Poppies and Irises

I have neglected my gardens for several years but for the past week, I have spent a short time each day getting my hands dirty. I had forgotten how important that connection to the earth is for me and I have recommitted myself to spending more time outside in the sun, wind and rain. Today is a beautiful Sunday morning and my late spring poppies and irises are blooming.

(I also planted tomatoes, yellow squash, lettuce, sunflowers, basil and cilantro this week.)

Reusable Valentine Napkins

Have you ever considered using cloth napkins instead of paper napkins? Cloth napkins are a fantastic way to reduce the amount of disposable waste a family creates.They can be inexpensive and the beautiful colors and prints brighten up mealtimes.

I grew up using cloth napkins on many occasions so it was only natural for me to use cloth napkins when I started my own housekeeping. (When I founded my kids' charter school, I even insisted that the lunchroom use cloth napkins for meals instead of paper napkins!)

My kitchen table has side drawers that are the perfect spot to store our everyday napkins. Special napkins and holiday prints are kept in the linen closet at the end of the hall.

We wash our napkins after every use (my four children are very messy when they eat) so I keep a laundry basket near the washer where the youngest child drops off the napkins after each meal. I throw the napkins in with a regular load of wash. No extra fuss and no extra soap or water to wash them.

I make my own napkins out of cotton fabric that I buy either at the local fabric store or repurpose from second-hand sheets and tablecloths. There are many reasons that environmentally conscious families avoid cotton and some people prefer linen napkins but I have found cotton fabric to be inexpensive, readily available in many prints and colors, easily obtainable. (I don't like the commercially available polyester napkins. They aren't particularly absorbent and just smear the food around.)

I made new cloth napkins for Valentine's Day this year. I selected a red print that I fell in love with and cut 15 inch squares.

I serged the edges and then hemmed them. (Sometimes I just serge the edges of my napkins and occassionally, I even let the edges fray in the wash.)

Using cloth napkins isn't a new idea but many families still think that paper disposables are more sanitary and convenient. A few people even claim that paper napkins are more environmentally conscious. (I disagree with their logic.)

Are you ready to switch to cloth napkins?

Heart Pancakes

As a general practice, I don't do elaborate celebrations for holidays but I do think a few simple touches can make the day special. Today's is Valentine's Day and one of our favorite traditions is to make heart pancakes.

To keep it quick on a school morning, I used a "Just Add Water" pancake mix and added some extra water to make the batter runny. I did large open hearts, small hearts and XXOOs. Sometimes, my kids like to help make the shapes. That's part of the fun.

The secret to is to pour the batter in a picnic-type squeeze ketchup bottle. This gives the best control over the designs. I have previously done quite intricate designs but it is more difficult to flip them and I admit that I was in a hurry this morning to get kids off to school so we kept it simple.

These are small enough to pop in your mouth without any toppings like syrup or jam and make great snacks for the rest of the day. Happy Valentine's!

Chinese New Year 2012

This past week brought the Lantern Festival which marked the end of the two week long Chinese New Year holiday. For our family's celebration, I chose a new dinner recipe and had my children make the decorations. We set the table with chopsticks, small goldware forks I inherited from my grandmother and our red Christmas damask napkins. It was simple but elegant.

DECORATIONS: One of my seven year old son's teachers taught him how to make paper lanterns at school. He came home and began making colored lanterns to decorate the entire house.They are pretty simple: fold a piece of paper in half longways and make three inch cuts perpendicular to and across the folded edge of the paper. Open the fold and secure the two shorter sides of the paper with glue or staples. Add a handle if desired.

Another of our decorations was the vase of "cherry" blossoms. I cut a few scraggly branches off of my Hawthorn tree. The red bark was the perfect match. My teenage daughter hot glued crumpled squares of leftover pink tissue paper in clusters along the branches.

MENU: This year, our dinner menu consisted of noodles, rice, honey-walnut shrimp, spicy egg drop soup, jiaozi and, of course, Mandarin oranges.

Unfortunately, I can't take credit for honey-walnut shrimp recipe, but I can certainly offer a fabulous review. I found the recipe online at Rama Malaysia. It was easy to make but I did make a few small changes to her original recipe-- I decreased the shrimp to 1/2 pound of smaller sized shrimp, used walnut pieces (and increased the amount), added an extra 1/2 tablespoon of honey and increased the sweetened condensed milk to 2 tablespoons.

Honey Walnut Shrimp
1 lb. 51/60 count shrimp
3/4 C walnut halves
3 T mayonnaise
1 T honey
2 T sweetened condensed milk
1 t lemon juice
1 egg white
1/2 C corn starch
2T oil for frying

For the walnut glaze:
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water

Peel and deveined the shrimp. Pat dry with paper towels, add the egg white, mix well with the shrimp and set aside.

Rinse the walnut halves with water, drain and set aside. Heat the water until it boils and add in the sugar. Keep stirring until it turns thick and golden color and then add the walnut pieces. Boil for 2 minutes, then drain and place walnuts on a greased cookie sheet to dry.

Heat the oil in a wok over medium-high heat.

Coat the shrimp with a thick layer of corn starch and then and then fry in the hot oil until golden brown. Remove the shrimp from the wok and drain on paper towels.

In a bowl, stir together the mayonnaise, honey, condensed milk and lemon juice. Add shrimp and toss with the mayonnaise sauce. Transfer to a serving dish and serve immediately.

Banana Cream Pie Filling

I made a delicious banana cream pie yesterday and thought I would share my recipe. (I wish that I had taken a picture but....) I love this recipe because it uses powdered milk.

Banana Cream Pie Filling
2 C reconstituted powdered milk
3/4 C granulated sugar
4 drops yellow food coloring
3 T flour
1T cornstarch
1/2 t salt
1/4 cold water
1 egg
1 1/2 T butter

Combine the milk, sugar and food coloring in a 3 quart pot. Heat to near boiling. In a separate container, combine the flour, salt, cornstarch with the cold water (1 T at a time) until they form a smooth, thick paste. Add slowly to the hot milk mixture, stirring constantly. Cook over medium-high heat for several minutes until slightly thickened. (Do not allow the mixture to burn.) In a small bowl, beat the egg well. While stirring briskly, add the egg to the hot mixture and cook for one additional minute. Add the butter and remove from heat, stirring until the butter is melted. Let mixture cool slightly in the refrigerator.

For yesterday's dessert, I used a graham cracker crust with one large banana sliced in the bottom of the dish and I topped each serving of pie with Cool Whip.

Weekend Thrift Store Finds

I love to spend the occassional weekend browsing our local thrift store aisles for beautiful and useful things that catch my eye. Here are a couple of my favorite pieces from this last weekend's trip: a vase and two candy dishes.

Beautiful? Absolutely.
Thrifty? At a price of 50 cents each, I believe so.
Environmentally responsible? Someone else discarded them and now I am reusing them.

Thick as Pea Soup

Until this week, I'd never made pea soup before. I am not a big fan of soup anyway and somehow the pictures of lumpy, green-gray soup have never seemed appetizing. But dried legumes are such an inexpensive and healthy food. The start of a brand new year was the perfect opportunity to try something I had never done before and a cold winter's day was a great match.


I skimmed through several recipes on the internet and gathered my ingredients: one cup of dried split peas and one cup of leftover Christmas ham from the freezer. (I know-- again with the leftovers-- but being thrifty means using up the things I already have, preferably in unique ways.)

The first recipe instructed me to run the dried peas through a food processor and then mix the resulting flour with water to form the soup base. Unfortunately, all my food processor did was whiz the split peas around and around until the motor overheated. I suppose a wheat grinder might produce better results but my old electric grinder probably wouldn't have worked and honestly I was too lazy to lug it up from the basement.


Note to self: save up and buy a hand operated wheat grinder.


Plan B: Soak the beans in water for several hours (adding water as necessary to keep the peas barely covered), cook them slightly to soften (about 15 minutes) and run them through the food processor again.  I included all of the soaking water in the processor.

This worked much better, however, the "soup" was still not smooth enough so I cooked the mixture for ten more minutes and gave it another spin in the food processor. I added approximately 1 1/2 cups additional water to keep the soup the consistency I wanted. I added the ham and let the soup heat through.


Overall, my family was not impressed with my efforts. My 16 year-old remarked that it looked like baby food. My 7 year-old (who was recovering from a queasy tummy anyway) told me that just looking at the soup made him want to vomit. The 2 year-old simply ignored the soup all together. Only my sweet 13 year-old son ate every last bite and that was only because he didn't want to hurt my feelings. He did suggest that I not cook it again for a very long time.


In the past, I have encouraged my children to try out new foods by reading a story that goes along with the meal. I did a quick search on Amazon and found a few books that I think would have been fun to read with my kids. Maybe next time....




I'll admit that the soup was pretty bland. I figured that the ham would flavor the soup but it didn't. I think some salt, a clove or two of garlic, a half a cup of diced carrots and perhaps a bay leaf would make nice additions.

On the plus side, the spring green color of the soup was gorgeous. I had trouble with the thick soup sticking to the bottom of the pot so I was carfeul not to cook the soup at a very high temperature. The result was that it retained the color of fresh garden peas.

Very Hungry Caterpillar

The new year always finds me revamping our 72 hour kits (emergency "bug-out" kits) and this year was no exception. With a family of six, space is at a premium so I try to focus on including only the necessities in as small of packaging as possible. With children, one of the necessities is toys and entertaining distractions. If just an hour in the car can be miserable for the parent of a bored child-- how about three stressful days? Besides the easy to gather card games and drawing materials like notebooks and colored pencils, this year I am adding flannel board stories for my two year old.

One of our favorite stories is  Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This particular book lends itself well to storytelling without the physical book (which would be a heavy and clunky thing to put in a kit.) My children are also familiar with the story and it can be told in a variety of ways. (I love this story so much, I even created a tissue paper mural in the math room at my kids' charter school.)

Although you can probably buy similar kits online from various WAHMs, using old scraps of felt made this addition to my kit practically free. The felt sticks to any cloth material (including T-shirts and car seats). I used left-over puff paints to add details to the figures and I glued different colors of felt together to provide variety. At first I used Elmer's glue but that didn't work very well. I finally went with the hot glue gun. I also originally opted not to put the holes in the food pieces but after I watched my son play with the the set, I went back and cut out holes in each of the fruits.




The entire set squishes easily into a leftover space or side pocket of our 72 hour kits. (I do store them in a little ZipLoc bag to keep them protected from moisture and to keep the pieces from getting scattered or mixed up with other sets.)

Other stories I am now working on include Old Mac Donald, I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, The Berenstains' B Book, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and The Mitten. Some of these I will put in our kits and some I will put on our home-school shelves. I plan to change them out quarterly when I rotate the food in our emergency kits.

Feminine Pillowcases

I have this weird quirk about not mixing my pillowcase up with anyone else's. I know it's not like sharing underwear (kinda weird even if it's been washed...) or toothbrushes (eww, gross!) but I still imagine that I can smell my husband's hair products on my pillowcase even when it's been freshly laundered.

He thinks I'm crazy. Maybe I am.

For Christmas this year he asked for flannel sheets.The set I bought him came with flannel pillowcases as well and I was inspired to decorate my pillowcase with a bit of lace and ribbon. Such feminine charms are lost on my husband who can't stand frills. On the other hand, my heart skips a beat every night when I look at my handiwork. I figured this was a perfect compromise. My pillowcase is pretty. His is plain. They don't get mixed up. We're both satisfied.

It's a pretty simple project and took less than 10 minutes.

I wove the green ribbon through the lace and stitched it just to the open edge of the pillowcase about three inches in. I used two straight stitches down each side of the lace, not bothering to follow the scallops of the lace itself. At the end, I folded both the lace and the ribbon underneath, overlapped it by an inch, and stitched it down.

Black-Eyed Peas

Tradition says that eating black-eyed peas to ring in the new year will bring prosperity and good luck. Every year for Christmas Eve dinner, we buy a ham. This year we chose to start a new family tradition by cooking the leftover ham bone in a pot of black-eyed peas for our New Year's Day family dinner. It was accompanied by homemade brown bread, butter and strawberry jam.

The perfect start to a year of simplicity, thrift and bounty.

Beans and Ham
Soak dried beans overnight in enough water to completely cover, adding more water as necessary during the soaking process. (Allow 1/4 cup of dried beans per person.) After 10-12 hours of soaking, drain and rinse the beans. Place the ham bone and beans in a large pot and cover the beans with water. The ham bone does not need to be submerged. Bring to a boil over medium high heat and then turn the stove down to a simmer. Cook for several hours over lowest heat until the beans are soft.


Brown Bread
3 t dried yeast
1 T honey
1 C hot water
1/4 C whole wheat flour (plus 1 3/4 C)
Gently mix these first four ingredients. Let the mixture settle in a warm spot on the counter top until small bubbles appear on the surface. Then add enough whole wheat flour to make a soft dough (approximately 1 3/4 cups on an arid day). Knead well and let the dough rise. Form into a single loaf and let rise a second time. Once the bread dough has reached the top of the bread pan, bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until the top crust is brown and sounds hollow when thumped.