CSA Week 2

Mixed salad greens, carrot leaves, carrots

This week my CSA box included salad greens, romaine lettuce, carrots, strawberries, mint, sage, bok choy, and a cucumber.
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The first thing I did with the food in the box was to mince the sage and mix it with garlic and softened butter for a compound butter. Then I roughly chopped the mint and added it to the jar of peppermint extract that I began last week. I covered the fresh leaves with more vodka and put the jar back in the cupboard. The salad greens fed my sister and I at dinner that same night and provided a salad for me for two more lunches. We enjoyed the strawberries fresh and unadorned. I chopped the carrots and added them to my salads. I separated the carrot leaves from their stems. The leaves went into the salads and a few went into my stir fry dinner on Saturday; the stems will be chopped into small pieces in a stew. The bok choy was really three small heads, altogether being about the size of the romaine lettuce. The first head I sauteed with garlic scapes from last week and marinated chicken and powdered ginger, and uncooked carrot leaves. That was a large dinner for one person but tonight I need to feed four children and myself, so I plan to repeat the same basic recipe, although with beef instead of chicken, but saute some carrots before I add the scapes and bok choy and serve smaller portions with plenty of salad on the side. (Update: my husband and I loved that bok choy. We're ready to add it to our garden in future years.) That salad: The lettuce head from last week was a round head with leaves I could use all the way through. It fed our family for two dinners. This week's lettuce head was a very large romaine. There is a lot more of it but it isn't really as nice. Since the head is obviously as big as it could grow I needed to trim more off the tips and the stems. So the size is larger but I felt like I wasted more of it and I felt like the quality was lower. There is enough lettuce for every dinner though, so we'll have salad from it at least 5 times this week.
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Growing up, we didn't eat many vegetables compared to what I feed my own family now. We were required to eat the vegetable served at every dinner, but really that little word "the" means a lot and our portions were sometimes no more than a single spoonful if it was a vegetable we particularly despised. I went ahead and purchased this CSA because I knew that I would be able to use all the vegetables in it. Our family doesn't often eat vegetables at breakfast, but we generally get one serving apiece at lunch and 2-3 servings at dinner, and our servings are much larger than those I endured growing up. When my two oldest daughters were around 3 and 4 years old we decided that the portion size rule for a vegetable from a vegetable tray was the same number of pieces as their current age. So now, my 9 year old picks out 9 baby carrots (or cucumber slices, or cherry tomatoes, or snap peas) to qualify as having eaten her veggies at lunchtime. Cooked vegetables and salad are less fixed but imagine the amount of space that 9 cucumber slices would take on a plate, and that's a good approximation of the serving size I require them to eat before getting served any seconds on another dish and before eating dessert. It's not a hard-and-fast rule, especially when we're not at home, but it helps us all understand the expectations within our family culture. The little kids are not required to finish their vegetables before receiving seconds until I think they truly understand the concept. Our 3 year old is learning that now, which means that she generally has to finish her servings but not always, depending on whether she seems able to handle that requirement at that particular meal (i.e. is she too tired? overstimulated? too attached to the main dish?). Their portions also match their appetite rather than their age, so the 3 year old receives 2 baby carrots and the 2 year old receives 1. I think the 3 year old will graduate to 3 carrots by her half birthday. When I know they don't like a particular vegetable, I still feed it to them, just a very small amount, so they get used to seeing it on their plates. The 3 year old has been seeing lettuce on her plate a couple times a week for 2 years now (without actually eating it in all that time) and just decided to begin eating that single lettuce leaf. She even requested a second leaf recently!! So, really, I would like to increase our vegetable intake even more, but we do eat more than the "average" household. And when I say that the romaine fed us for 5+ times, that means enough lettuce to cover a third to half a large plate for each adult at that meal and the 9 year old, a quarter of a small plate for the 7 year old, and a single torn "bite-size" leaf for each of the toddlers. Each dinner means 1-3 adults, and all children.
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The other vegetables we did buy this week: 3 pound bag of carrots, two green bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, and a Sam's Club vegetable tray. Of course we still had to buy our normal amount of fruit since a single box of strawberries doesn't go very far around here.

Our first CSA

Beet Greens

I bought a CSA for the first time this year. At $400 for 20 weeks, if we buy this CSA or another again then the cost of $20 per week needs to prove its worth. With my brain going in a million different directions these days I thought that keeping a record here will help a LOT when it comes time to evaluate the benefits of this CSA and decide whether to purchase it or another CSA next year.
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In the first week's box we received carrots, garlic scapes, beets, asparagus, lettuce head, mint, thyme, oregano, sage, and mixed salad greens. I made a pound of compound butter with the thyme, oregano, sage, and a couple garlic cloves and froze most of it in an ice cube tray. I was concerned that the scapes would make an unpleasant texture in the butter, like the Egyptian onions did in the stew I used them in the first time, which is why I used minced garlic cloves instead of scapes. We diced the carrots, unpeeled, and roasted them and the asparagus seasoned with some of the compound butter, and served them with the mixed salad greens at dinner. There were enough salad greens for a second dinner's salad, and the head lettuce also lasted us as a side dish for two more dinners. I tried to roast the carrot greens but that was a complete bust. I put the leftover carrot greens in the next night's soup but when I pureed the soup, the greens wrapped around the stick blender. Next time I plan to cut the leaves up to garnish a soup and chop the stems into small pieces to add into a soup or roast. A couple of the beet greens, leaves and stems, went into the second night's soup and the rest were included with other non-box veggies cooked with a lamb roast. I peeled the beets with a vegetable peeler and sliced and boiled them. The older girls assured me that they tasted just like Grandma's (a good thing in their opinion) but not quite as tender. I think I'll increase the amount of water in the pot next time. The mint leaves I chopped into small pieces and covered with vodka. That mixture will steep in the cupboard all summer long, then I will strain it and bottle it for mint extract.
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My first week's thoughts: The box is smaller than I hoped it would be, but not really smaller than I thought it would actually be. $20 seems like a lot for the quantity we received (compared to what we normally buy), but I also realize that each item went further than the same item from the grocery store would have stretched for us. The carrots, for instance, didn't need to be peeled, so we didn't pay for the peels to be put straight into the compost or trash. The asparagus were tender to the very end so I didn't need to snap the ends. The beets came with their greens and I was able to use everything except the peels. I wonder, if I boiled the peels for a natural dye whether I could freeze the dye water and expect it to work to dye Easter eggs next spring? We might experiment later this summer if we get a lot more beets. What actually went into the compost: beet peels, herb stems, carrot greens. Some of the items didn't really replace what we would have normally bought at the store, so they seem to be an extra cost, but might really save us money in the future. I never buy fresh herbs but I won't have to buy another bottle of peppermint extract for the foreseeable future and the compound butter will replace a small portion of the dried herbs that I would normally buy. That savings will disappear in future years if I start growing more of my own herbs again. The asparagus was an extra cost since we don't normally justify its expense to buy it outside of special occasions so the produce it displaced in our meal (cooked frozen broccoli, probably), which would have been cheaper serving-for-serving, made it a treat rather than a money savings. Of course, all the items in the box were higher quality than what we purchase at the store, so the quality justifies the expense, but whether we can afford that higher quality in future summers remains to be seen. I also need to remember when I evaluate whether to buy a CSA again that our grocery expenses increase during the summer on other types of food. I don't expect our weekly grocery bill to go down as much as we might actually be saving with our CSA items since during the summer we buy more expensive meat (to grill rather than roast) and more convenience food (vacations, vegetable trays, fruit trays, junk food).
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Another benefit which could help us in the future and possibly save us money is in the items which will show up in our box which we aren't used to buying. Since they're in the box, I will use them. Since I've never used them before, I will be pushed to find ways to use them that we all like. Once I find ways to enjoy them, we'll all want to buy or grow them, so our normal diet will expand and include other healthy, possibly even cheaper food, such as cooking greens, turnips, radishes, and beets. We'll know how to use the carrot tops that we grow as well as the more familiar roots. We'll want to grow other cooking greens and become familiar with more unusual items such as garlic scapes. I'm motivated to use every single item we receive, since it did cost me more than I'm used to spending, so I'll learn how to preserve anything that we can't use immediately. And when the okra and rutabaga show up, we just might discover a new favorite vegetable. Of course, when the corn and peaches show up, no one will complain about those either!

Recipe: Pumpkin Pancakes

This recipe is for my sister-in-law. We had a family brunch today and she enjoyed these pancakes I made very much, especially considering that she doesn't normally enjoy pancakes. I managed to snap this shot of the last 3 pancakes just in time...they have since disappeared altogether. I will note that I used a gluten free flour mix which does not include xanthan gum, my pumpkin puree was home cooked, and I skipped the baking powder and replaced most of the milk with plain dairy kefir. But I've made the recipe just as it is written below, so anyone should feel confident in making it without those particular changes for their own delicious breakfast.
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Pumpkin Pancakes
1 3/4 cup flour (gluten free or not)
2 Tbl brown sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (or your favorite mixture of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, allspice, citrus zest)
1 1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
1 egg, beaten
2 Tbl melted butter
chocolate chips, optional
Preheat griddle. Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl; mix well. In a separate bowl, combine the milk, pumpkin, egg and butter; mix well. Combine wet and dry ingredients.
As you pour each pancake on the griddle, sprinkle with a few chocolate chips if desired.

Happy Heritage: I want to go to work!

8 year old Maria likes to write notes to me rather than asking her questions directly. Mostly the notes are requesting to be excused from a chore or tattling on her sister or begging for a treat. Recently while she was supposed to be unloading the dishwasher she handed me this note:

Dear Mama,
Why do we have to do dishes? We can always just leave them in the dishwasher and pull out the dishes when we need them
your loveing dauter
Maria

I pointed out that then there would be nowhere to put the dirty dishes and sent her back to finish her chore.
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2 year old Princess seems to understand remarkably well that there is in fact a baby growing in my tummy. She LOVES babies so...she asked me what she should eat to get a baby growing in her tummy also. She points to her mouth every time we talk about the baby, wishing I would explain to her how to eat a baby so she can "own" one of her very own.
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Both she and Ant are jealous of my husband and sister (who lives with us), who get to go to "work" nearly every day. It must be a fun place since they keep going back again and again. So Princess has told me more than once now that "I want to go to work!" I assured her that when she's a teenager then I will certainly allow her to go to work also. She seems content with that answer for now.
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I might have figured out where my kids get their antics from. At a retreat recently I had to apologize to the other women I shared a cabin with. My disclaimers: 1) I was just beginning to recover from a bout of the flu and 2) I wasn't really awake. Of course, neither were the other ladies, until I changed that for them. Anyway, about 3 hours before breakfast I suddenly woke up (well, obviously I didn't truly wake up...) to the sound of someone coughing. I immediately thought that 1) the person coughing was my sister who 2) was thoroughly exposed to the flu I and my kids had fallen victim to 3) was coughing because she was getting sick (normal warning from my kids) yet 4) wasn't awake herself and therefore 5) NEEDED me to wake her up and rush her to the bathroom (as if she weren't adult enough to do that herself: remember, none of my kids would be able to if they suddenly succumbed to the flu in the middle of the night. I therefore jumped out of bed and rushed over to her bunk to wake her up. Unfortunately, the woman who groggily woke up wasn't my sister; I'd gotten the bunks mixed up. A second lady heard the commotion and asked me what was wrong, then directed me to the correct bunk. The third woman I woke up was in fact my sister, who had not been coughing, was not sick and did not need my help. By then the lady who was actually coughing (recovering from a cold, nothing serious at all) was also awake. Thoroughly embarrassed, I returned to my own bed and prepared my apologies for everyone whose sleep I had disturbed.
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The tradition goes back at least one more generation, but I'll let my mom decide who to share her story with from that same retreat weekend. ;-)

Beginning with a schedule

My plans and expectations were so disrupted recently that I couldn't even remember what normal was supposed to look like. For about a month we had children waking up for a couple hours each night, children coming down with the flu, with strep throat, with whoknowsexactlywhat virus, and children sharing their sickness with me. :( I didn't get up at my normal hour, I was kept busy caring for sick children and their laundry, I didn't have the same alertness I would have after a normal, restive night of sleep. The kids watched tv, we skipped schoolwork, our meals were simple and less healthy and less substantial than normal...when we gathered together for a meal at all. As appetites returned and normalcy became a possibility again, I needed to pick up the broken bits of our schedule and put them back in the correct order. But what belongs in our schedule? Time to watch tv? Personal quiet prayers? Exercise? And when is each supposed to happen anyway?
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There is a fine balance between cheerfully letting the Lord rearrange my plans and "planning to fail by failing to plan". I need to have a baseline to work with even though I need to have a good attitude when my plan falls down around me. So, I printed a basic weekly schedule, wrote in first the items which are most consistent (meal times, mostly), then filled in the remaining hours from the most common to the most vague (four hours each day to "clean/cook/laundry" can mean a lot of different things). I kept it as realistic as possible rather than as efficient as I might dream it could become. There's not much time left for some very important pieces, which is why I was struggling to make them happen. Hmm... Well, that didn't surprise me! Yet, just filling in the schedule form gave me inspiration for tweaking some areas, including some more reading time for the kids, to their great excitement.
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I can see that some small steps need to be attached to big areas but I need to make sure they aren't taking over the big areas altogether. For instance, during my time to shower and dress, if I spend a couple minutes cleaning up the bathroom but I make sure that I do not add any other little chores to that time slot than I will have a cleaner bathroom without spending 15 minutes later in my day to come back and clean it. I'm there already; the supplies are there already; no toddlers are there yet to interrupt; but I really don't have time to spruce up the bathroom and the bedroom and the closet and put away that load of folded laundry. Those little chores are not visible on my schedule. Nor are the little interruptions such as bumped knees and baby cuddles. I could look at this outline and become depressed at how little I am actually doing or I can realize how general it truly is and accept that I could never fit all the little items on one sheet, no matter how tiny I wrote my letters. I try to give myself credit for the many things I do which will never be visible on a piece of paper especially on the days which end with a messier house and a frustrating review of an uncompleted to-do list.
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I cannot foresee which days will be turned off-kilter with no private time left for quiet prayer but I can make choices which allow me to spend time with the Lord despite a disrupted schedule. Redundancy helps: a habit of listening to the Bible in audio form while I am getting dressed, a semi-regular pattern of memorizing verses as a family at mealtimes, family devotional read every morning at breakfast, Bibles on my phone and my Kindle and my desktop, and subscriptions to motivating Christian podcasts and blogs help me keep God's Word in my life even when I don't read it right after waking up or find my reading thoroughly interrupted by my children. Consciously choosing for the Lord also helps: I don't know when I'm wakened in the middle of the night whether that interruption will be a one-time event or whether it will end up keeping me up for 3 hours and derailing my morning plans. But I do know that if I choose during that first time to read Scripture and/or a good devotional then I can reduce the damage done to my relationship with the Lord even if I sleep in the next morning. I have a choice; I can choose to spend that time with God rather than with the tempting novel or facebook or other media distraction. The result might not produce the same type of prayer life as I would have if I were a cloistered nun. But then again, God didn't call me to be a cloistered nun, He called me to this life, complete with all its interruptions. He must therefore want me to seek out ways to maintain and build my relationship with Him while embracing the interruptions.
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My schedule will never be perfect. It will never go entirely according to plan. But ocassionally reviewing what it's "supposed to" look like helps me realign my priorities despite the disruptions.

Frequently changing plans

The Lord seems to delight in changing my plans. He knows me thoroughly and He seems to find it essential for my well-being to upset my schedule and my expectations frequently.
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I am a person who appreciates a well-organized schedule. I like a little variety in my routine yet I like having a routine for that variety to fit into. I would even be inclined to schedule my meal plan for an entire month at a time ... and save the meal plan to reuse the following year.
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Instead I hardly plan our family meals at all, simply keeping the supplies on hand for a small number of meals and planning in advance only about 1 meal in 30. There is a certain level of ordered routine to my day which is ignored more often than it's followed. I don't even take time each summer to plan my kids' school year, a practice so common among homeschoolers that it's practically required. I just find that my plans are disrupted so often that it's not worth putting much time into making them in the first place.
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I don't know all the reasons why God has me in this position where planning ahead is mostly a frustrating waste of time. I do know that it pushes me beyond my comfort zone, it forces me to rely more completely on God, it prepares my attitude to more willingly accept interruptions which are disguised opportunities to serve others, and it enables me to say yes to new plans without the disgruntled attitude which I might be naturally inclined to have otherwise. I can't see the big picture from my perspective but I can glimpse enough of it to realize that the frequent disruptions to my plans are well within God's plan for me, for my good.
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I wouldn't want to give the mistaken impression that I've given up on planning nor that my life is completely unstructured. I am a strong supporter of routine, I do keep a schedule, and I think that in general faithful Christians will have structure in their days and in their prayer lives. But as God is not limited by a calendar, we shouldn't be either. There are opportunities in front of us which were not anticipated and planned for last week. Opportunities to love, to serve, and to welcome others into our hearts.
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Right now my schedule says that I sleep until 6:10, I pray before the kids wake up, and they pray before doing their schoolwork or playing. As important as prayer is, even this part of my routine is frequently interrupted. Sometimes it is more important to cuddle a child in the middle of the night than to wake up and pray before my children get up. Sometimes my personal, just me-and-God time is less important than the person asking for some love. Sometimes my kids need to experience God's love for them, shown through me, more than they need to practice their personal prayer time. Sometimes that means they miss their Scripture reading altogether for the day, replaced with a walk through the neighborhood or a "family visit" to a doctor or another family outing (fun or not). The only real question is, did I use the disruption to my routine to honor God and love another person or did I use it to distract me from the Lord?

Homeschool in Our Home Part 2

Sometimes I've been asked at what age I begin my children's education...uh, when they're born? My goals during "kindergarten", as I told my friend recently, are 1) learn how to read, which can take up to three years (barring unexpected circumstances such as trying to teach them when they're not ready to learn or a condition such as dyslexia which would cause the process to take longer), 2) familiarity with numbers and basic addition, and 3) learning to love learning. Everything else is meant to help you accomplish those 3 goals. But really, I set them up for these three achievements from the time they're born by counting snaps on their onesies, singing the alphabet while washing their hands, reading books aloud, reading more books aloud, engaging their curiosity, and so much more.
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My friend and I were chatting about what resources I used when my older daughters were officially beginning to homeschool. Many of these sites are ones I still use; others I will want to remember in a couple years when my third daughter is ready to begin officially schooling. Since I typed up the list anyway, I figured I would record it here as well, for my future reference and for anyone else who might find it useful. I also sent her links for some local resources that our family has used or that I have thought of using but haven't actually taken advantage of yet: mainly local homeschool groups, a local homeschool conference, and our local YMCA, where my daughters have taken a "swim and gym" class several times now.
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http://www.starfall.com/

http://www.first-school.ws/theme/alphabet.htm (This was my main resource for our alphabet books. I printed off maybe 5-10 different coloring page/tracing page/activity sheets and when the girls finished them I punched holes in the pages and in two pieces of construction paper. The construction paper provided the cover for their books, I helped them sew through the holes with yarn and a plastic tapestry needle to bind the book together, and then they and/or I wrote a title and their name on the front cover. They had the option of decorating the cover with a picture and I wrote the date in a corner.)

http://www.dltk-holidays.com/xmas/cards/index.htm (This site has a lot of complementary activities: coloring pages, Christmas cards and tags, preschool puzzle pages, etc. I've used them sometimes to help fill out the alphabet books that we made and to make Christmas cards/tags/thank yous printed on cardstock and colored for relatives.)

http://amongstlovelythings.com/ (This is honestly my favorite homeschool website right now. Her biweekly podcasts have so much good in them and usually include interviews with high profile homeschool experts I had previously not heard of but immediately discover I need to learn more about.)

http://www.likemotherlikedaughter.org/ (Not directly homeschooling, but rather Catholic family culture, the "mother" Leila homeschooled all her own children and has a lot of advice, whether you want it or not, about teaching, reading, family prayers, reading lists, etiquette, home management, raising boys to be men, and anything else you let her give her opinion on. Three of her grown daughters, with young children of their own now, share the blog with her.)

http://www.holyheroes.com/ (The Holy Hero kids share most weeks a short video illustrating the Sunday Gospel reading, a coloring page, and a short quiz. Most helpful of all, though, is their Advent Adventure with daily videos, coloring pages, activity pages, audio rosary decades, and audio saint stories. My kids LOVE these. I put together a Jesse Tree with coloring pages before I knew about Holy Heroes, but now we do a combo of the two since everything is assembled for the Holy Heroes but they don't have any women in their ornaments. They also have a Lenten Adventure similar to the Advent Adventure. Both adventures include a variety of ideas for Catholic seasonal activities, most of which we don't do, but we get a lot out of them without the extra activities.)

http://amblesideonline.org/curriculum.shtml (Although I don't use their curriculum, I try to plant their book suggestions on our shelves, or in my daughter's Kindle, or through audio books resources. I review their lists regularly so my kids are exposed to those appropriate to their grade level. I find many more books on many more book lists, but the ones on this list are a solid beginning and after all, if the particular book is free on Kindle or available through our library, why not? If we study it together later on, then they'll already be more prepared by having read it first by themselves. If we don't, their literary knowledge will be more complete for having read it by themselves than if they had never seen it before in their lives.)