Weekend Goodies

 

Zach surprised me this Friday with a dinner date night. Actually, he surprised himself, too, since he had forgotten that he had found a babysitter until she e-mailed him that day to confirm. I had already assembled the pizza and rosemary focaccia for dinner, so I held off on baking it until the babysitter was on her way. The kids got pizza and a movie night with our good friends, Mary and Gabe, and I got to eat without cutting up other people's food. It was a win all around.

We go out on a lot of dates, actually. With my dad living here too, we are pretty much free to go once the kids are all in bed, which is usually between 8:00-8:30 for the older ones, earlier for the littles. Usually we end up having half price Happy Hour appetizers somewhere. Dinner dates, though, are rare.

With five little kids, we don't often go out to eat as a family, at least not for full meals. Don't get me wrong, the kids are actually pretty well behaved at restaurants, but it's not cheap to feed the hordes when we dine out. Consequently, I find myself often thinking, "I'd like to try that place. Maybe the next time we get a dinner date." Then, when that magic day comes, I get in a panic and my mind draws a complete blank. Luckily, this time, Zach remembered that I had wanted to try a cafe that a Facebook friend had recently opened, Betty's Cafe and Pies in Eagan.

Delicious

I am a big, fat wimp about trying new things in restaurants. I'm cheap and like to know what I'm getting for my money, so although there is a part of me that is always vowing to try something different next time, I usually end up with my standards. French Silk is my default pie. I loved their French Silk. It actually tasted like chocolate instead of chocolate-flavoured sugar, a sin many french silks fall victim to.

Anyway, with a partial loaf of Rosemary Olive Oil Bread and a partial loaf of Rosemary Foccacia leftover the following day, I decided to make a batch of croutons.

 

Usually, I can take or leave croutons. The one exception was the croutons at a restaurant I volunteered at in my youth, St Martin's Table in Minneapolis. I believe the restaurant is now closed, but I still have fond memories of it. After my final layoff from my brief career in IT, I had hit a crisis period in my life. I knew I didn't want to go back to another software job, but I had no idea what I did want to do. It was a cold, harsh winter, both literally and spiritually. Rather than sitting around in my pajamas feeling sorry for myself, I decided to fill the void with acts of service.

 St Martin's was a non-profit restaurant staffed mostly by volunteers, with a small core staff of some of the kindest, most gentle people I knew. They served fresh baked bread, homemade soups, salads and sandwiches, hot tea, coffee and some lovely desserts. It reminded me of a hobbit-hole, with its simple, natural decor and hearty portions of simple, wholesome food. I worked several times a week as a volunteer waitress, with tips going to a different hunger related charity every month. It was the bright spot in my otherwise bleak winter. Consequently, salad has become something of a comfort food to me. This time of year, that is a very good thing.

I didn't add any herbs to this batch because the bread itself was herbed, but I did add garlic. I don't know what I like more about this recipe, the croutons themselves or the little, buttery crumbs on the bottom of the pan. Both are delicious. Only half of them made it into the salad. The kids (with, maybe, a little help from their mother) ate the rest as a snack.

On the Fourth Day of Christmas...

Candles lit from the Peace Light

 

Today is the fourth day of Christmas. Yes. It is still Christmas through Epiphany. I love celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas, but over the years it's become an increasingly simplified celebration. My mom was always good at the big, over-the-top celebrations. I think it's a gift she has. She has an eye for the beautiful and we always looked forward to her perfectly wrapped presents, the house decked, as it were, with boughs of holly and the dozens and dozens of Christmas cookies, candies and treats. Those count among some of my best memories. She jokingly called herself The Queen of Christmas, and she was. She made it a special, magical time for us and she seemed to find a lot of joy in the process. When we had our own family, I tried that once and quickly realized that I was going to have to blaze my own trail. I am not the heir to that throne.

 

By knowing my limits, keeping things simple and mostly avoiding celebrating Christmas until Advent is actually over, the Twelve Days of Christmas are a joyful time, not just for the kids, but for me as well. The one thing I can't hack beyond Christmas Day, though, is Christmas eating. Enough is as good as a feast, as Mary Poppins once said. After a few days of constant eating, my body is ready to slow things down and get back to basics.

  



In a pretty glass to make it celebratory

 Zach grew up with a dad who was very much a fan of health food and a food he has a particular, and somewhat odd, sense of nostaliga for is carrot juice. I can't manage straight carrot juice myself. It's just not, well, fruity enough for me. Add an apple, though, and I'm good. Carrots are good, cheap food (we get a mega bag at Costco for maybe $5 or $6) and they juice up quickly. Since the only way to keep fruit for any length of time in this house is to buy it in quantities that would suffice to feed the monkey house at Como Zoo, by Fridays of most weeks I usually have a few thises and thats in need of using up. Friday is my juicing day. Basically, I juice some carrots and then toss in anything else that needs to be used up. This week it is, apples, oranges, clementines, ginger and grapefruit.

A gallon pitcher that will be full when I am done

I juice the carrots and anything else that might have useful pulp first and set it aside. From this batch I saved the carrot, apple and ginger pulp. You have to add a little extra liquid, but it makes a very tasty carrot bread. Or carrot apple ginger bread, as the case may be. If you put the juice in a pretty glass and put a little butter on the bread, it works for a celebratory Christmas breakfast.

Settling in for Winter

 

 

Winter is finally here! Well, winter weather has been here for a month, but I refuse to acknowledge winter's existance until it is really, truly winter according to the calendar. This is Minnesota. If you let the weather make those kinds of decisions for you, you'll lose out on a good chunk of spring and fall. I used to hate winter, so much so that I packed my bags in my early 20s and moved out West to find the sun, only to discover after a few Los Angeles winters that it is exhausting to have nothing but sunshine. I like weather. I like to have an excuse to sit in my pajamas by a warm fire with a cup of cocoa and do needlework.

 

 

 

 

I love bread baking and soup making. I've been making this Rosemary Olive Oil Bread a lot this fall and winter. It makes four loaves at a time and I always end up thinking that there will be some leftover to freeze, but it's so good that it never lasts that long. I'm lucky if there is some for lunch the next day. It's been a while since I baked bread regularly. The past two winters I was pregnant and tired, but I seem to have gotten my feet under me after three babies in a row, so there will be more bread this year.

My grain mill might even find its way out of the pantry. It was a hand-me-down from my father-in-law, his spare grain mill. We were just sitting there in his cabin in Arkansas talking about how much I wanted to try milling my own grains someday and he went to his cupboard and got me one. That is why I love him.  

 



 

Rosemary Olive Oil Bread

 

 

Even in winter, though, it's nice to have signs of life. I bought this at the store thinking it was just cut, fresh rosemary, and it turned out to be a live plant. I'm going to repot it and see if it grows. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but it's worth a try. 

 

 

Which reminds me of another sign of life in the Bleak Midwinter. The arrival of the first seed catalogs. Is it funny that seed catalogs always remind me of winter? Probably not.

 



 

 

Happy Feast of St Stephen!

Today is the feast day of St Stephen, the first martyr of the church (stoned to death) and patron saint of both myself and my father, Steve. It's kind of a tough thing, finding a way to celebrate our feast day after eating our weekly allotment of calories in the matter of a few hours just the day before. I'm not even kidding you, we have gone through three dozen eggs and two pounds of butter in the past two days. The last thing I am in the mood for is more dessert. In the past we have sometimes done brunch, but alas, I am nearly out of eggs and it just wouldn't feel celebratory dragging five Christmased up kids to a restaurant. Still, we wanted to make it special and it is, after all, still the 12 days of Christmas.

Dad came up with a plan. He and a friend of ours went to visit our friends at the Queen of Peace Friary and brought home the Bethlehem Peace Light.

 

The Bethlehem Peace Light is lit from the grotto in Bethlehem where Jesus was born and carried in a blast-proof miners lamp, first to Europe, then to North America, with a message of peace. It travels to various churches and from there, people can bring it to their homes. The Franciscan Brothers of Peace have it available in their chapel along with an oil lantern to transport it (which you have to bring back to the friary).

Dad bought an entire case of 6 day candles to put in our lantern at home. We're going to see if we can keep the flame burning until next year. It was a lovely, simple way of celebrating our feast day. Much nicer than Dad's original suggestion of making rock candy. :)

Making Peace with Mess

Each year on my birthday I pick a virtue to cultivate in the coming year. I take this pretty seriously. I start thinking about it about two months before the actual day and I give it some serious consideration in prayer. I start with a list and narrow it down little by little until I've found the one that feels right. For several years the virtue of Patience has made the top two and finally, this year it rose to the top of the list. The conversation I had with God in my head went something like this.

God: "I think it's time to work on Patience."
Stephanie: "That does not sound like fun."
God: "Right. But I still think you should choose it."
Stephanie (whining just a little): "Yeah, but, no offense, asking you to intentionally try my patience sounds like madness."
God: "Oh, because being impatient is working so well for you?"
Stephanie: "Touche."

I continued to pray about it and eventually came to the decision that this year would be the Year of Peace and Patience. Just before my birthday I discovered I was pregnant with baby #5. God has a sense of humour.

One of my major struggles as a mom is with mess. I am a chronic reorganizer. What can I say, my Grandma and IKEA share the same heritage. I am fascinated by the usage of space. I have a picture of a perfectly organized upright freezer I clipped from Better Homes and Gardens hanging on my kitchen bulletin board and I don't even own an upright freezer. It just calms me to look at it. The reality of my day to day life, though, is not quite as calm and organized.

It's been kind of a battle, dealing with my own feelings about cleaning and housework. There is a part of me that really wants to hold onto that idea that someday, in spite of my 5 small children, husband, father, cat and the plethora of friends who visit from day to day, my house will look like something from my House board on Pinterest. Everything perfectly placed and tidy with only strategically placed mess, a coffee cup perched on the coffee table (which I don't even currently have) and the throw draped over the arm of the chair. Like my mom's house or my grandma's house, both of which are lovely and immaculate pretty much all of the time. Don't get me wrong. We clean. We clean a lot. Daily tidies, daily chores, daily laundry. It's manageable, but it's far from perfect.

Lately the house has been a little to the left of lived-in. We're still in newborn territory with Miss Charlotte.

Gratuitous photo of my stunningly beautiful C-Monkey

We've had a college graduation, a remodel, a new job and an extra kid coming for the summer. I haven't totally figured out which way is up. As much as I know that is temporary, it's been bugging me lately and making me a little bit crazier than normal.

Yesterday morning I woke up in a bit of a mood. I was planning to keep things as simple as possible for myself. I woke up early hoping to get some time to pull myself together, only to have the Charlotte and Cheyenne wake up before I had my first cup of coffee. Deep breath. I greeted them both with a smile and a silent prayer for patience. As I've mentioned before, I am not a greet-the-day-head-on kind of girl. Soon after Isabella, James and Travis woke up and soon after that Gabe arrived for the day.

Gabe hadn't eaten yet, so he asked if he could make himself an omelet. Cheyenne and Isabella's ears perked up. They wanted to make omelets too. They'd make omelets for everyone and wouldn't it be great! We'd have a nice breakfast and they would do the work. I was reluctant. Kids cooking means mess and a messy kitchen was the last thing I wanted at that moment.

Another deep breath. I have been teaching them to cook for a reason. I want them to feel confident and capable. No. I want them to be confident and capable, and the way you become confident and capable is by getting in there and making a mess. It's not just the way you learn to cook. It's the way you learn to write. It's the way you learn to paint or draw or program a computer. It's the way you learn to ride a bike and it's certainly the way you learn to be a parent.

I asked myself if my goal was to have an easy day or to raise good kids. 20 years from now would I even remember today? Probably not. Would they? Well, maybe. I remember my earliest efforts at cooking, from my disaterous olive oil brownies to the first time I successfully made butterscotch. I remember the time I accidentally dyed my dog blue when an entire batch of icing spilled on him while I was making petit fors and I remember the look of respect on my home ec teacher's face when I told her I had made petit fors for extra credit. 20 years later I don't bat an eyelash at a complicated recipe precicely because my mom wasn't afraid to let me get messy. The same mom who now has an immaculately clean house. I guess there is a season for everything. I relented.

Half an hour later my kitchen was a shambles, but three kids had a great big W in their personal win column. It took me most of the day, between the fussy baby, the curious toddlers, the laundry and my own much-needed shower and nap, to get around to cleaning it up, but it was worth it. Long-term worth it.

Apparently patience, as I was deathly afraid it would, is going to require me to give up some control of the now for the good of tomorrow. It's going to mean the occasional batch of extra dishes on a day I really don't want them. It's probably going to mean taking a step back, sucking it up and recognizing that if this is the kind of thing I'm worried about, I am a lucky girl.  I could always offer it up for the suffering of someone with a real problem.

Exploding Soap

Sometimes it is challenging finding projects that work for a veriety of ages, but in my experience very few people under the age of 18 (40 for boys) can resist the words "hey, you wanna go blow something up in the microwave?" This is especially true if the words are spoken by an otherwise reasonable adult.

I saw this exploding soap trick on Pinterest the other day and I figured it was worth a shot. Ivory soap (it really does have to be Ivory) is super cheap and I always have some on hand. We put it in the microwave for a little over a minute. I set the timer for two minutes, but we watched it and pulled it out early.

I explained that this was a demonstration of Charles' Law, that the volume of gasses increases when they are heated. It works similar to popping popcorn. The air and the water in the soap expand when heated and cause the soap to foam.

After we microwaved the soap I put it in the food processor with some water, coloured it and added some essential oil. Cheyenne picked blue and peppermint, Isabella picked red and lavender and James picked green and geranuim.

We pressed the soap into cookie cutters and they each got their own little souvenier of our science project. It wasn't nearly as messy as it looks.

Great American Backyard Campout

Camping is not something I did as a kid. My parents are not the outdoorsy type. "Camping" in the Smith houshold consisted of a poolside room at a hotel with a cooler of your own snacks. That was what made it camping, you see, the fact that you didn't order room service. When I was about 9 years old my sister and I got to go to summer camp. I chose a pioneer themed camp. My sister chose make-up camp, where they learned how to make beauty products out of woodland plants. "You laugh," she told me, "but when they find me dead of exposure in the woods, I'll look fabulous."

The first time I ever officially went camping was on my honeymoon; just me, my cute new husband, my 1977 Dodge van (this was 2003),  the stars over the Arizona desert and my father-in-law. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. Granted I spent pretty much the whole first night afraid I'd be eaten by bears (because God knows, there are a lot of grizzlies in the desert, right?), but I woke in the morning and, much to my surprise, I had lived. We went hiking, ate popcorn from the campstove and explored some caves. It was everything I was hoping camping would be.

Then I had babies. Two of them at once. Then, shortly after that, we moved across country from Los Angeles back to Minnesota. No sooner had we gotten our feet under us than we had baby #3, who was followed almost immediately by babies #4 and #5. I am a hearty woman, my friends, but there are limits, and camping in the woods with two elementary schoolers, two babies and a three-year-old is not really an option right now.

When James was a newborn we participated for the first time in the National Wildlife Federation's Great American Backyard Campout. We loved it. It was the perfect balance of outdoor time and convenience for that busy stage of our lives. It's that time of year again and after some discussion, we decided to put together a team for next week's festivities.

The neighborhood we live in is practically a resort in the summer. Within a leisurely stroll of our front door we have two pools, walking paths, duck ponds, tennis courts, a volleyball court, a lake with fishing piers and canoe rentals, a beach, a picnic area with a fire pit and trails through the woods. There is no reason we can't have some camping fun right here.

We're still working out all of the details, but I have high hopes for this to become an annual event. I'm picturing hot dogs and s'mores and popcorn, fishing and canoeing and swimming. Maybe some letterboxing or a demonstration on how to use a pocket knife. We'll break out the fabric markers and some t-shirts and do some t-shirt crafting. We'll whittle something.

It doesn't fit my husband's stringent standards of "camping" as I will still be sleeping on an air mattress and I will be within walking distance of a professionally made latte, but I think it will do. Secretly I think he's even more excited for it than I am.