Birthday Bread

I've been making all of our bread at home for a while now. Okay, so I mostly use the bread machine. But it's still better than store-bought sandwich loaves. It's good bread. The kids like it. The main problem is that I can only make one loaf at a time. And with the kids getting bigger, they are eating more. It's gotten to the point that I practically have to run the bread machine twice a day to keep up with demand. So I've been trying to figure out how to work in baking bread in the oven into my routine. I figure that in the oven I could do several loaves at once.
To help me figure out how to do that, I recently bought this book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day, with some of my birthday money. (Thanks Mom and Dad!) It is amazing. The idea is that you mix up a huge batch of dough, keep it in your fridge, and then you can just pull off what you need each day and bake it up. I have now made several loaves of the basic boule recipe and the kids eat it so fast I haven't been able to get a decent photo of it. All I can show you is the book and our bread plate with a few crumbs. It is so good.

More Summer Goodness

Last week was my birthday. Since the kids were mum about whether or not Ray was bringing home a cake for me (he did!) I thought I would make my own birthday cake. I've been wanting to make a chocolate cake from scratch for a while now. This seemed like the perfect time. I used this recipe. It was awesome! And very easy. I don't think I will ever buy another box cake. I made some cream cheese frosting, then the girls decorated it for me with colored sugar sprinkles. On one side only because some people don't like sprinkles.

The day after my birthday we went blackberry picking. The weather was perfect. A little overcast and cool. I could have picked for hours more than we did.

The kids ran out of steam a little earlier than I had hoped. Will still picked enough berries for about 3 batches of jam, a couple gallons of frozen berries, and enough left over to eat fresh for a few days. The one thing we wanted to make that we didn't was a pie or tart. We just ran out of berries. I guess I could use up some of the one I froze. But I kind of wanted to save those until this winter when we might need a nice reminder of summer.

The next day was all about soccer. Soccer season is here and the kids had a blast at their first games. Unfortunately, my little point-and-shoot camera is woefully inadequate when it comes to getting action shots half-way across a soccer field. This is the only decent one from the whole day:

Mint and Lemons

A woman that works for my husband brought us some chocolate mint sprigs from her garden recently. So a few days ago I decided to try to do something with them. I really wasn't sure what they would be best for. I didn't want to make mint sauce out of them since they were the "chocolate" variety. I found a few recipes online that looked wonderful! Mint chocolate torte, chocolate mint juleps, chocolate mint ice cream. Unfortunately, I didn't have the right ingredients on hand for any of those. I did have a bunch of lemons, though. So the kids and I decided to make some fresh chocolate mint lemonade. It sounded good at the time.

It turned out pretty good.
And we tried to make some mint ice cubes. Some blended, some whole leaves.


Those did not turn out good. Especially the blended ones! Bad idea! :)

The best thing that came out of the kitchen that day, however, was from the lemon peels. After we made the lemonade we had a bunch of leftover peels.

Rather than just throwing them away or composting them I decided to try to make candied lemon peels. They were a hit! First I had to carefully slice all the pith off.

Then I boiled the peels for about 5 minutes in water. Then I boiled them in a sugar solution for about 30 minutes. Finally, I dusted them with more granulated sugar. I saved the sugar solution which had become a lemon syrup. It turned out pretty yummy.
Another fun afternoon in the kitchen!

Jam...finally.

I put up some jam today. Not a huge deal. But I've been feeling kind of overwhelmed with all the day-to-day tasks of taking care of a house and four kids and keeping up with the homeschooling. I've been feeling like I don't have enough time to do any of the extras. I'm slowly trying to get back on top of things and making jam is a small step in the right direction.

One batch mashed up.

One batch done!

I got two batches done today. Two more tomorrow (hopefully). Then, if we are lucky, we will get another trip to the strawberry fields. And several more batches to come.

Pentecost Cake

This past Sunday was Pentecost (or Whitsunday). So the kids and I made a cake. Because you really can't have too many reasons to celebrate. I got the idea from here. I made a white cake that was pretty tasty. It turned out a little too yellow because the recipe called for the whole egg. Next time I will try a recipe that only calls for the whites. I ran out of vanilla extract so I used almond extract instead. We all agreed that it was delicious that way. The kids said it reminded them of our Christmas Almond Pastry. The strawberries were from our most recent trip to the strawberry fields. The 12 whole strawberries represent the 12 fruits of the Holy Spirit. The 7 heart-shaped sliced strawberries represent the 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit. The small candles stand for the apostles and Mary that were present when the Holy Spirit came. And the large candle in the middle is for Jesus. The kids thought it was great! Next year I will have to make sure the kids can name all the fruits and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Hopefully their answers will not be STRAWBERRIES! :)

Homemade Yogurt

I've been wanting to try this for years. And yesterday we finally did it. We made yogurt at home! We did it in the mini crock pot. Well, first I scalded the milk on the stove then I added the starter and poured it all into the preheated crock pot. I had a little instant-read thermometer tucked in there since I wasn't sure how warm the pot would get. As it turns out, it gets pretty hot. I left it off most of the time, just turning it on occasionally when it looked like it was starting to cool off. Eight hours later we had yummy fresh yogurt! The flavor is really nice. And it is about the right thickness. My only complaint is that it's not perfectly smooth. It has very, very tiny soft curds. I don't know if that means I left it too long or not long enough. Or maybe the temperature wasn't quite right. Still, for a first try I thought it turned out great. And so did the girls. Matt, on the other hand, refused to try it until he was sure it was safe. He said he was going to wait a couple of days to see if anything happened to us. I guess my microbiology talk during the yogurt making freaked him out a bit. Ooops!

Here is C about to enjoy her third(?) bowl. We topped it with some homemade strawberry syrup from last year's strawberry picking. Although she did say it was good enough to eat plain.

We are almost finished with this first quart. I have just about enough to start another batch. I guess I know one thing I'll be doing tomorrow.

A gift on it's way

I finished this gift mei tai 10 days ago. I waited to post about it until I could get to the post office and send it on it's way. Hopefully this carrier is now with it's new owner, so here are the completed pics.

I used up the left over fabric to make a matching bag for it. I followed the directions in Weekend Sewing by Heather Ross for the bag. I'm happy I finally got to try a project out of this beautiful book! It's been on my "to do" list for months.



Earlier this week I woke up extra early (on account of my falling asleep at 8:30 trying to get T to sleep) and decided to spend a little quality time with my sewing machine. I needed something quick and easy because I didn't know how long it would be until T realized that she wasn't snuggled next to me anymore. So I decided to whip up this pair of cloth-diaper friendly (lots of room in the rear) pants for said little girl. I used the sleeves of an old shirt of mine. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. Especially the way I was able to keep the stripes lined up! I still have some trouble with the stitching puckering up on the knit fabric. I need to work on that. But it's passable for play clothes for a 17 month old.

And here's a picture of T modeling them later that morning.


And do you remember all that picking we did last week?



Well, just today I finally finished up preserving all that produce. We've got blanched and frozen broccoli, spaghetti sauce, and lots of applesauce and apple butter. We made some delicious apple crisp. And we have lots and lots of apples individually wrapped in paper and stored in the "root cellar." It was a lot of work, but I know we will enjoy the fruits of our labor in the months to come (pun intended).

Baking and a garden update

We spent some time in the kitchen today. I love that we are able to make (nearly) all of the bread we eat. And I also love that it means we have plenty of stale, day-old loaf ends to turn into this:

Bread pudding makes a yummy dessert and may be my favorite quick and easy breakfast, too. I also used up the last of the plums we picked earlier this summer to make this crisp:

It was the perfect treat to have after a long evening at back-to-back soccer practices.

It was a dreary day today. But we did get outside for a while to check on the garden and pull a few weeds. And admire the flowers.


Considering my black thumb I've had some pretty good success with my cucumbers.

The most of the tomatoes are still producing well, too.

The most amazing to me is this "wild" tomato that is growing at the bottom of our steps. It has even survived an accidental near-decapitation with the weed whacker.

And the kids, of course, spent some time on the swings. That swing-set was a good investment.