Heat Wave!

You know you're from Colorado when it's 43 degrees outside and you see people jogging in capris and a tank top, and no one's even wearing a sweater.

Yep, it's a heat wave.

The kids are happy. They played outside for a couple hours today. I couldn't convince Cora to come inside at dinner time. Heck, I couldn't even convince her to stop digging in the dirt long enough to pull her drooping pants up.

Happy Valentine's Day :o)

Valentines for Little Girls

Valentine's Day isn't a big deal around here, but I like to at least acknowledge it with a little something for each girl.

This year, they're getting these:



Little tin lunch-box style 'treasure boxes', altered to match their bedrooms. Inside each is a stuffed animal and some homemade heart-shaped chocolate candies.

Remember when...

After dinner last night - when it was pitch dark at 6:00, Chloe asked me, "Mom, do you remember a long time ago when we could go outside after dinner and play? And I could watch the sun set while I played on the swings, and it was really pretty?"

Yep, we're ready for spring.

The intestines - a visual aid

We're continuing our study on the human body, with our current focus on the digestive system. Since Anonymous liked the post about our stomach acid experiment, I thought I'd add another post along those lines.



So admittedly, that looks like a blob of string glued to a sheet of construction paper. Okay well, actually, it is a blob of string glued to a sheet of construction paper. But it carries a lesson along with it.

The average small intestine in an adult human is 23 feet long. The large intestine is about 6 feet long. As we were reading those facts in our book, I realized my seven year old barely understands the concepts of one foot and one yard, let alone what 23 feet actually looks like. So we measured it out, using yarn. The red yarn in the picture is 23 feet, the blue is 6 feet. Once we had the yarn measured, we glued it to the paper similar to the way it would be found in a body, with the large intestine sort of going around the "blob" of small intestine.

Alright, so it's not scientific. But it helped her see how long intestines actually are, which really is pretty amazing.

A recipe

Because I'm lazy and don't have pictures of the other things I want to blog about, I'm going to give you a Darn Good Recipe that you should definitely try. I originally found it years ago, posted by Julia on AOL's Penny Pinching message board. I've altered it a touch to fit my taste. Love this because you can toss it in the crock pot with hardly any prep and it's ready at dinner time... even if you forget to put it in until noon.

Adobo Beef (or elk, if you happen to have some lying around.)

2 lbs beef or elk steaks, sliced in 1/4" strips
1/2 c. naturally fermented soy sauce (or the regular kind)
1/2 c. apple cider vinegar
1 bay leaf
1 tsp black pepper
1 c. water

Put the meat strips into the crock pot. Stir together the remaining ingredients and pour over the meat. Cook for 6 hours on the crock pot's low setting.

This is a fantastic meat for tacos and burritos.

Tried a new taco-shell technique. My mom always fried corn tortillas in hot oil until about half-way between soft and hard. Instead, I tried laying the corn tortillas on a baking sheet, brushing with olive oil, and baking at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes, until they reached that same soft/hard stage. Then I dabbed the extra oil off with a paper towel. Still not really healthy, but at least healthier, and almost the same as mom's. :o)

Top the shell with some of the elk/beef, then add some lettuce, tomato, onion, cilantro, homemade guacamole and homemade salsa, and serve with a side of hot black beans.

Oh, and for the guac:

2 avocados
1 clove garlic, minced
juice from 1/2 of a lime
sprinkle of chili powder

Mash all ingredients together until creamy and well blended. Refrigerate for an hour to blend flavors.

Okay, so it was more than one recipe. But together, it's fantastic.

Happy Cooking!

The Makeup Challenge

I made a deal with myself Thursday night after my shower: I'm going to try to go a week without make up. I did really good with this deal until Friday morning when I looked in the mirror.

I sucked it up though, and I managed. I ran errands all morning without a hint of makeup. I didn't put makeup on when my husband was on his way home, like I do on many days.

And then my mom called and asked if I wanted to go visit my little brother at school. And I thought about how bad I look without makeup, and how he might actually be embarrassed to have to introduce me to friends... and so I gave in. I consoled myself by wearing as little as I could possibly get by with. But in the end? I still failed.

I'm not a girly girl, but I am well aware the wonders a bit of eye liner and foundation can create if used properly.

Grocery Day

Is it pathetic that grocery shopping is the highlight of my social life each week? That is to say, I'm outside of these four walls that surround me, and there are people my age milling about. So it's not social. But it *feels social after a week of homeschool and toddler-speak.

I grocery shop once every three weeks, with short trips in between for fresh produce. My most recent goal is to buy only dairy (because we have no cows or chickens) and produce (because it's winter and I can't grow it) and baking/dry goods (until I have a wheat field and a sugar farm, anyway.)

I'm almost succeeding. We're eating almost entirely from scratch, still a lot from the freezer (veggies frozen from last year's garden) and I love the satisfaction in that.

I finally figured out a recipe for ranch dressing that tastes just like the real thing, is healthful - even medicinal - and includes no gmo's or msg or artificial colors and flavors and preservatives and even no dairy. It takes less than five minutes to mix up a batch and I can eat as much as I want without feeling bad about it. And we all know that the only good reason to eat raw vegetables is for the ranch, so this pleases me.

In addition to the ranch, I've concocted a fantastic balsamic dressing that's equally as easy to prepare. One more store-bought convenience food I can scratch off the weekly grocery list because I can make it better and cheaper and healthier from scratch.

Dairy-free ranch dressing:
1/2 c. canned coconut milk (not the sweetened stuff, just plain coconut milk. look in the Asian foods section.)
3/4 c. Vegenaise mayonnaise substitute (made from grapeseed oil)
1 Tbsp. parsley flakes
1/4 tsp. dry mustard
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1/4 tsp. onion powder
1 clove garlic, minced

Mix all ingredients well. Let sit for an hour before serving so flavors mingle. (I use my stick blender for this, it works great.)

Balsamic dressing:

1 c. olive oil
4 1/2 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
2 tsp. dijon mustard
1 clove garlic, minced
juice of 1/2 a lemon

Combine all ingredients except oil in a glass jar. Stirring briskly, pour the oil in as slowly as you can manage, stirring constantly.

The other option is the stick blender or a small food processor - process until the mixture becomes slightly thickened and is rather creamy in texture. I like this more than just stirring.

I don't think I ever even considered salad dressing to be a convenience food until a couple of years ago, and even then I was afraid to try making it myself on any sort of regular basis. But with some practice, it's pretty easy to get used to.

Fenugreek

A friend has managed to convince me of the benefits of glyconutrients. Essentially, they're sugars that are missing from today's average diet - sugars that are only found in fresh fruits and vegetables within days or even hours of them being picked. If we buy our food at a grocery store, these sugars are pretty much completely gone. In so many ways, eating store-bought produce robs us of essential nutrients, and this is just one more way.

So I bought the supplements. And I looked at the ingredients list. I'd just assume get the nutrients from real food instead of a capsule if at all possible.

Some of the things aren't really feasible - I won't be eating an excess of maitake mushrooms, for instance. But one ingredient listed was an old and familiar friend: fenugreek.

Fenugreek is a nursing mother's best friend. If ever one's milk is in short supply, simply swallow a dozen fenugreek capsules each day and soon you'll be overflowing. I've taken it myself while nursing both babes at one time or another.

But fenugreek is good for more than just nursing moms - it's a primary source of mannose and galactose (which are glyconutrients.)

And voila! - fenugreek seeds are found in the local health food store, ready for sprouting and quite tasty on salads and in soups. Just for fun, I decided to try them.



I posted once about growing sprouts - it really is an easy thing to do. Some people invest in fancy seed sprouting equipment, but I manage just fine with mason jars and pantyhose. Seeds are cheap - $3-4 for enough seeds to a few months at least, and that's with eating sprouts nearly every day. They're green and fresh - you can't get much fresher than pulling them out of the jar and putting them in your favorite soup.

If you're not up for fenugreek, there are lots of other sprouting options - our Vitamin Cottage has a whole rack of different seed varieties. Just in case you're as desperate as I am to grow something green, it being winter and all. ;o)

Hooray for seed catalogs

It's that time again - time to start thinking about what will be planted in the garden this spring, poring over seed catalogs and websites, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over purple striped pole beans and tomatoes as big as my head.

It's kind of hard, looking out the kitchen windows and seeing a big bare patch of dirt surrounded by three inches of snow and some patches of brown grass, to even imagine the warmth of summer, picking veggies and listening to the girls splash in the pool and throwing the ball for the dog... hard to imagine, but I know it's coming.

I'm glad for the notes I made last fall, thinking about where I'd be rotating crops to, drawing out my 2010 layout on graph paper to be filed away until this month. Now I'm reviewing my plans and placing seed orders. And wishing I had more than the 140 square feet that I have to work with. So many vegetables, so little space!

Among the new experiments this year:
leeks
red onions
birdhouse and luffa gourds (thanks Wendy for the inspiration!)
some herbs I've not had success with in the past... but I'm refusing to give up. I want fresh oregano, dammit!
and musk melons, because I like the idea of going outside to pick breakfast out of the garden.

Lots of fun new varieties of things like White Icicle radishes, Dragon Tongue beans, Patisson Jaune et Vert squash... and lots of tried-and-true favorites like Kentucky Wonder pole beans, Mammoth Melting Sugar peas and Bloomsdale spinach.

My seeds are on their way from Baker Creek and Pinetree. I've ordered from Baker Creek several times now and am always thrilled with the service, but Pinetree is popular among the crew at organicgardening.com and their prices are much lower so I gave them a shot.

I'm shooting for primarily heirloom varieties this year, but there are a few that are hybrids - sometimes I just need reliability. My cukes, some tomatoes, and peppers will be hybrid - those are things I'm not willing to do without, and heirloom varieties really are much harder to grow and are less dependable... though it must be said that they are much better for us, too. I'll do some heirloom tomatoes too, since they're always the most exciting plant in the garden. I'm happy to report that the seeds we saved from last year's garden - pumpkin, sunflower, lettuce and marigold - all sprouted successfully when we tested them last week, so that means we're going to complete the circle on those four plants. (A silly thing, maybe, but exciting if you're into heirloom gardening.)

Since Andrew built me a cold frame in the fall (which did me no good with the 20-below weather we had shortly after), I'll be able to start seeds as early as Valentine's day - not long now! I bought a day planner specifically for gardening. I marked each day that seeds should be planted, and then I'll mark the days I should expect them to sprout, and expect to harvest. It's never exact, but by mid-June I'll forget entirely when it was that I planted those beets, so the reference is nice. Organized is good when it comes to gardening.

So I suppose that's all I have to report for now. Hopefully in another couple of months I'll be posting photos of the first harvests!

Who else out there is working on garden planning? Feel free to share your favorite tips!