Thanksgiving Week

I'm just getting caught up with life around here after the rush and preparation of the Thanksgiving celebration.

For some reason, our local library thought that two days before Thanksgiving was a good time to schedule their children's craft fair. It ended up working out okay, but a week other than Thanksgiving would have been preferable. Maddy really got a chance to spread her entrepreneurial wings with this craft fair. It was the first that our library has done and the last year that she will be able to participate due to her age. She signed up at the beginning of November on the last day of sign-up, so she had a bit of a late start and was feverishly working on crocheting 100% cotton washcloths, two small purses, making God's eye ornaments and learning how to make lip balm and then making 25 tubes of it and finally hand milling a couple bars of my honey spice cake soap and molding them into cute snowmen shapes. She made three bath packages that had a washcloth, lip balm and a couple soap in a gift bag and the rest of the items were sold individually.

Here is where the picture of her at her table would have gone if I hadn't accidentally reformatted my camera's memory stick on Thanksgiving.

The room chosen for the craft fair was too small, the tables were too close and people were cramped and squeezing past each other to get to the next table, however, there was a good attendance and it was great to see the community out supporting children's talents. There was a diverse group of items from original comic books to coloring books based on original art, origami frogs, hand drawn and penciled greeting cards, woven and stitched purses, candles, jewelry and dog treats and people treats. Maddy ended up selling nearly all of her items and making a bit over $70 in sales, so for a 12 year old girl that was a successful evening.

I'm proud of her for deciding, after counting her takings, to put $50 into her savings account straight away. She and a friend have been telling us for several months that they are going to save up their money to buy a farm together and start a CSA. When they've had enough success they will build two houses so they can each have their own. Ambitious to be sure, but a great goal, I think.

Our Thanksgiving day was really great. I finally got all my dishes prepared, we got the girls bathed and dressed and bags of necessities together and headed out to our friends' farm. We chatted and imbibed while the turkey and other dishes finished cooking and baking. Some visited the pigs that will soon grace our table and we stared out the living room windows over the flood plain and watched fog descend and huge flocks of starlings swirl overhead. The children played, colored, pounded on musical instruments, and screamed Christmas carols to us. The adults talked farming, chickens, politics, community, food and relished spending time with each other. We also played a board game.

The food was delicious and the majority of the ingredients were grown by local farmers, our friends included. It was beautiful to prepare, admire and consume so much local bounty.

After about nine hours of camaraderie, we finally wrangled the girls into their pj's gathered our things, searched for missing children's clothing and shoes and finally headed home into the fog on a dark, country road.

I hope all of you had as perfect a Thanksgiving as we did.

Happy Thankgiving!

I wish you all a great Thanksgiving. We are heading out to our good friends' farm later today for our Thanksgiving dinner. They are taking care of the turkey (local and free range heritage breed) and most vegetables, and I'm making the following:

• Mashed potatoes
• Dinner rolls
• Cranberry sauce
• Pumpkin pie (from scratch with pie pumpkins I roasted last night)
  
• Coconut pumpkin flan (dairy and wheat free dessert)
• Stuffing
• Steamed beets in a vinaigrette

Our children will play, we will talk a lot about a variety of subjects, delicious (mostly) local food and spirits will be consumed and a good time will be had by all, I predict.

Though our country and world is experiencing many problems right now, I feel thankful for many things, but I'm only going to list a few right now.

• I'm thankful for my family. I have a great husband and three smart, lively girls. They enrich my life in so many ways.
• I'm thankful that we are all healthy. I'm serious about this one. After dealing with medical bills from an appendectomy and a drilled-through finger this year, it's so important that we are healthy and don't need to be on medications.
• I'm thankful that our business has been steadily busy and we still have scheduled, future work.
• I'm thankful that we have built a community of friends. This is especially important to me since we don't have much family up here.

Be safe and well this Thanksgiving, friends.

A Little Bit of Advice

If, for some reason, your toilet should require you to open the top of the tank and pour water into it, it's very likely that if your bathroom and tank are cold and the water you pour into it is hot, your tank will crack and you will have water flood your bathroom floor. But, if somebody does that (not naming names here) you will definitely get a shiny, clean toilet out of the deal.

An Award for Me!

I've been remiss in mentioning a blogging award that I recently received.

I received this award from Cathy at Wives with Knives. Please visit her site if you want to see lots of great recipes, plus she's a fellow Pacific Northwest resident like me.

Thank you for this award, Cathy. It's always delightful to receive sincere appreciation.

I'm going to pass on this award to one blogger, Mon. I'm only passing it on to her, because she has three blog that I read. They are all geared toward different subjects.

Holistic Mama
Global Homestead
Hearth Herbalist

I read many blogs and enjoy all of them, but I thought that Mon deserved this award for covering such a broad range of subjects and posting more than daily and sometimes more frequently.

Rules:
1. Give it to one or 100 or any number in between ~
it's up to you.
Make sure you link to their site in your post
2. Remember the Purpose of the Award:
To send love and acknowledgment to women who brighten your day, teach you new things and live their lives fully with generosity and joy.

Lip Balm and Shampoo Bar Soap

I've been busily making two new products lately. The first is something that I've had some requests for and that is a shampoo bar soap. I personally use baking soda and vinegar, but that doesn't work for some people and others just like the idea of a lathering bar soap. The process is exactly the same as making regular bar soap, the difference is the oils that go into it. Castor oil is generally used in shampoo bars because it makes a thick lather. Extra nourishing and moisturizing oils are also included to keep hair shiny and healthy. In my bar I used sweet almond and jojoba oils in addition to olive oil, coconut and palm oils. Also, instead of plain old distilled water, I made a strong rosemary infusion with rosemary that I cut fresh from my garden. It has this deep golden-y brown color and a beautiful swirl in the center that is all from the color of the rosemary infusion! I finished it off with rosemary, lavender and peppermint essential oils.


The other thing I did was make lip balm. I worked out my own recipe using candelilla wax (vegan and you don't have the smell of honey like you would in beeswax which I don't particularly like in a lip balm), coconut oil, mango butter, castor oil and sweet almond oil. Vitamin E is a preservative and then I've used some of the same essential oil combinations that i have in my soap. Four scents for now: ginger lime, lemon sage, orange lavender, and rosemary mint.


Also this week, I taught my first soapmaking lesson. My friend Angeleen came over to learn how to make soap for gift giving this Christmas. We made six batches together over two days.

Now, I have my own gift giving to think about. I usually make a special item for the girls each year and I think I've decided on making Christmas stockings for the girls. But I haven't found any fairly easy, but interesting/funky/not-boring tutorials online. Do any of you have any that you've seen? If so, would you mind posting a link to one, or if you have a favorite method/pattern would you mind posting a tutorial on your blog?

Getting this House in Order

I've had many false starts in getting my house in order in the past six months or so. My intentions are good and we've even gotten some rooms about 90% completed before we petered out and the room ended up almost back at start in a matter of weeks.

One thing that was pressing was sorting out our upstairs bedroom situation. We have two bedrooms upstairs. One had been the guest room and one had been Maddy and Isabel's shared room. Juliana is still in ours. With Maddy just turning 12 and Isabel and Juliana being so much younger, it was becoming increasingly difficult to referee bedroom messiness and equity. In August we decided to go ahead and turn the guest bedroom over to Maddy. This had been an idea that we always planned on doing, but hadn't ever really had a time line.

This was an undertaking because the guest room was also functioning as a storage room and quite a mess. We needed to sort through many seasons of children's clothing and apparatus, books and miscellaneous items, in addition to deep cleaning and painting. This along with a halt of work to allow Maddy to sort out some attitude issues, dragged the project along for two months.

Since it was a infrequently used guest room, we never got around to painting it. It was still the same chalky white as when we moved in 9 1/2 years ago.

Maddy chose a golden yellow called honey pot. She had her heart set on a blue originally, but the carpets are blue and we thought that it would be just too much blue. Yellow was her second choice. It was a mess during the middle of the project!

Now, for the finished room:

Lawrence and I purchased this bedroom set when we were first married and Maddy is the proud recipient.

Lisa might be excited to see her gift being utilized here as a message board type of thing. It will hold notes, photos and random girl stuff with straight pins. We got this wedding band quilt on Ebay.

This room gets a lot of light from these two tall windows. It also gets a good amount of noise since it looks over the street. Good thing Maddy is a sound sleeper!

This project didn't only include fixing up Maddy's new room, it also included sorting and rearranging and donating unused and extra items from the original bedroom, which is now for the two little girls. We got rid of a lot of stuff and put away baby things, like the changing table, which had been taking up space in our bathroom and still holding Juliana's clothes. Now, her clothes are in part of the wardrobe in the bedroom. The upstairs looks clean and organized now and it has been tidied daily by all the girls. I'm so thrilled. I could only get happier by removing the blue carpet and refinishing the wood floors. That will have to wait. In the meantime, there is a whole twin bed waiting empty, with a matching butterfly comforter for Juliana when she's ready to sleep upstairs.

Peace has mostly been restored. The little ones can pull out all their pretend animals and built blanket forts and not have Maddy yelling at them for pulling everything out. Maddy can have a project out on her table under the window and not have the girls mess it up. And we can move our focus to another room and sort and donate more things that just get in our way and don't add to our lives. I'm making a serious effort to pare down (in between other projects!).

Poorhouse Pies

My good friend Angelina posted a recipe for Poorhouse Pies on her blog last week. The filling calls for cabbage, mushrooms, onions (duh! any savory recipe worth cooking calls for onions), feta and a few other seasonings.

Since cabbage is available in copious amounts this time of year here in the Pacific Northwest and I had a four pound tub of feta sitting in my downstairs fridge, I decided that this would be a perfect addition to my menu this week.

Angelina's recipe doesn't include a recipe for the dough, so if you don't have a favorite calzone dough recipe, here's the one I've used for several years.

I made the recipe exactly as she wrote it with this exception: I used homemade mustard in mine and decreased the amount a bit because I was worried that, though my mustard has been relaxing in the downstairs fridge for approximately six months, that it might still have too much bite to put a whole tablespoon on each calzone. I did a small, small smear and it could have used more. However, they were delicious.

If you have cabbage on hand, give this a try, then go and give Angelina feedback on it!

The Kindness of Bloggers

Tonia over at Try to Catch the Wind is such a sweet woman. After my post about Maddy's Nancy Drew themed birthday party she dug through her own personal collection of Nancy Drew books and sent this Nancy Drew Cookbook to her! How cool is that? Maddy was so surprised and shocked that somebody she had never met would do that. So, thank you for making a 12 year old Nancy Drew fan very happy, Tonia.

Silencing the Gossip Machine

I've been doing some deep thinking lately. I've come to the conclusion that I need to stop my habit of gossiping. I think that when I engage in gossip it doesn't put me in a good headspace. It makes me focus on the negative aspects of people and it doesn't leave room for the benefit of the doubt or allow people the grace to become better versions of themselves. It doesn't allow me to extend compassion or kindness the way I would like to, either.

Gossip is fun in a dark sort of way. It is always a sort of powerful feeling to envision that you are better or have fewer problems than other people and it is entertaining to imagine you know the intimate details of a person's life.

I think that there is probably a fine line between gossip and chatting with friends and exchanging one's experiences with and perception of others, but I think that the line is definitely there if you look for it. If I can generally find that line, I think I will become a better version of myself.

Meal Planning & Food Purchasing, In Detail

I've had some people in real life (and also online) wonder where I buy my food, how I buy in bulk, how I use CSA veggies, etc. I think many people have excellent intentions in transitioning to a more local food chain and healthier, home cooking with pre-planning, but sometimes the task of figuring out what to buy and where and how to utilize it when you already have a certain comfort zone, can be staggering. I know that it has taken me a good while to get to my current system. It has been tweaked whenever necessary and I'm pretty happy with the way it is working.

I've covered the basics of my meal planning method before, so I'm going to focus more on where I get the ingredients for meals.

Here are the places I get food:

• Azure Standard-I buy most of our basic pantry items in bulk here, ordering bi-weekly. Oils, some spices, flour, beans, bread, sucanat sugar, honey, raw milk cheddar, apples in the fall, etc.
  
• Harvest Fresh-This is a local health food store where I shop weekly and I get fruit and a few produce items that I need and don't get in our CSA share, I also buy regular grocery items and very occasionally meat.
  
• Winco-A local bargain, bag-your-own-groceries type of store. I don't go here weekly, usually bi-weekly or even monthly sometimes. I get bulk baking soda, cheese (when our raw milk cheddar doesn't ship) and really random things like phyllo dough, green tea, beer, bulk pasta.
• Kookoolan Farms-All of our raw milk comes from this farm. I don't buy pasteurized milk unless they are having supply issues and that is perhaps once per year.
• Eggs, chicken, rabbit, beef, pork, lamb and goat-We get all these items from various local sources. We usually buy a whole animal (in the case of chickens, rabbits and goats) or half an animal (in the case of beef, pork and lamb), very rarely do we buy single cuts. We are getting a side of beef (this will be from my friend Jacki) and either a whole pig or half a pig (can't remember what I ordered) around the 1st of December (this pig will be from Growing Wild Farm).
  
• Oakhill Organics-Weekly CSA share, 10 months out of the year.

I'm going to list a recent meal plan and then list the ingredients for the week and where they came from.

• Beef & Barley Soup; Roasted Kale & Romanesco
• Chickpea Rosemary Soup; Roasted Butternut Squash; Fresh Bread
• Spicy Sweet Potato, Shrimp and Coconut Soup; Chard, Beet Greens and Corn Stir-Fry; Galataboureko
• Pot Roast; Roasted Sweet Potatoes; Sauteed Romanesco
• French Rabbit; Rice; Sauteed Cabbage

Here's a screen shot of a spreadsheet showing where the ingredients come from. You should be able to click it to open into a bigger image. Please let me know in the comments section if you can't read it.














For breakfast we usually eat eggs in some form, oatmeal, yogurt, granola with milk, toast, baked goods or a combination of these.

For lunch we usually have leftovers, sandwiches or on occasion nachos or pasta.

I hope that this has been helpful, and clear. Please let me know if I can clarify any point.

Using (Almost) the Whole Pumpkin

We are big fans of pumpkin carving around here. I only discovered this a few years ago, but I do love to carve a pretty design into a pumpkin and then light it up and see the glowing orange artwork.

Oh the carnage!

I haven't made roasted pumpkin seeds in several years, but I think it's a great way to get the most of your jack-o-lantern. The flesh is really too stringy to enjoy eating, so I always throw mine onto the compost pile by the end of the first week of November. There's really no reason to discard the seeds. There's a sweet and spicy recipe I really enjoyed the last time I made them and it is actually the only way I've ever made them. I would suggest cutting the amount of sugar by 1/3 to 1/2 though, because they really are a bit too sweet and sugary.

We were lucky enough to get a pie pumpkin in a recent CSA basket and I'd saved it for a special occasion. When I was trying to come up with a Day of the Dead themed item for a potluck, I decided that pumpkin empanadas would fit the bill.

Mmm. They were tasty. I still have some pumpkin puree left, so I think I will make another double batch of empanadas. I think they will freeze well and they are great for breakfast.