Posts from — August 2009

My 9-year-old son, Kellen, let me know this past summer that he wanted to learn how to cook. So, being the “capture-the-teachable-moment” kind of homeschooling mom that I am, I said, “No problem. We’ll make it part of your curriculum this year.” (Hey, it’s good reinforcement for working on fractions—and it’s kind of related to chemistry, which also happens to be on his current list of study subjects. And I figure it’s a skill that will serve him well if he happens never to outgrow those pesky food allergies.) I decided we’d start with something absolutely essential: his gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free bread. It’s tough to keep enough of it on hand for him. He easily polishes off a loaf a week—and there are weeks when I just can’t get around to the job of baking it. He’s a good sport when he has to go without it for a little while, and he’s so grateful when he gets some. (I’ve never known another kid to be quite so thrilled about the possibility of having a turkey sandwich for lunch!)

For awhile now, his favorite bread has been one I make from a modified version of a recipe for Potato Sandwich Bread published by Rebecca Reilly in the August/September 2008 issue of Living Without, a magazine for people with food allergies and sensitivities. For his first loaf, I mostly just introduced Kellen to the ingredients and let him add them to the mixing bowl. I talked him through the techniques of measuring accurately, outlined the steps involved in following a recipe, allowed him to operate the mixer and preheat the oven, and explained some of the safety precautions required for working in the kitchen. I think it will take a lot of practice for all of those things to really sink in—not to mention a lot more time for us both to be comfortable with him flying solo on this or any other cooking endeavor. But we’re off to a good start!

While we were at it, we mixed up just the dry ingredients for several more batches of the bread and stored them in plastic zipper bags so that we’d have a head start on making future loaves—both for Kellen and for friends who have similar food allergies. It’s a goal of mine to have our pantry stocked with such mixes for the staple items we bake. And I think I know just the student whose lesson plan will include that particular line item from now on.

This post is part of the Tuesday Twister blog carnival hosted by www.gnowfglins.com. To link to today’s Tuesday Twister on that site, click here.

Lately, our Friday-night fall-back dinner seems to be homemade pizza, and last week was no exception. What was exceptional was the way we topped the pizza this time. Usually we opt for the standard pepperoni (a special brand from Whole Foods that Kellen can have because it contains no dairy) and mozzarella cheese (or a vegan mozzarella-style “cheese” in Kellen’s case)—although Shawn and I have been known to spice our slices up a bit with onions, bell peppers, garlic and other stuff that we know the Littles will end up eyeing suspiciously and then picking off if we put it on their pieces. But Friday morning we picked up our order from A Bar H Farm, which delivers grass-finished beef and lamb, and pasture-raised chickens and eggs to a drop-off point near our neighborhood every six weeks. (The farm is a little more than 150 miles from where we live and is so far the most “local” and convenient option I’ve discovered for putting most of these desirable dietary staples on our table.) Our standard order includes four whole chickens, one beef chuck roast, 6 pounds of ground beef and a dozen eggs. (We’re working on acquiring a dedicated freezer so that we can order more at a time. As it is, we tend to go through it all a few weeks before the next order is due to arrive.) This time around, I had added 1 pound of ground lamb sausage to our usual list, and after we picked up the order I decided to brown it up and use it to top our pizza. Kellen’s pizza also was topped with Follow Your Heart mozzarella-style vegan “cheese,” while the rest of us enjoyed ours with melted slices of the raw milk mozzarella I made last week. We all had the same simple Pizza Sauce, as well as a gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free Pizza Crust. Needless to say, it met with rave reviews: Out of three whole pizzas, not one slice was leftover.

On Sunday morning, I served up the A Bar H eggs—with their amazing, almost-orange yolks—to everyone but Kellen, along with our traditional Sunday Pancakes. (I promised a couple of weeks ago to post the recipe, and I’ve finally gotten around to it.) The ground lamb sausage would have been a real treat with this meal, too—especially for Kellen, as it’s challenging to provide a good source of breakfast protein for him when eggs are on his list of things to avoid.

Today I pick up 2 gallons of raw cow’s milk, plus our monthly order from Azure Standard, an Oregon farm that delivers bulk grains and myriad other specialty items to drop points in cities throughout the western United States—including one not far from my house. I’m expecting organic strawberries and peaches, so I’ll be looking for creative ways to put those on our plates—as well as culturing some of the raw dairy I pick up. Suggestions welcome!

This post is part of the Tuesday Twister blog carnival hosted by www.gnowfglins.com. To link to today’s Tuesday Twister on that site, click here.

I received a copy last week of The Urban Homestead (Process Media), by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, as part of a giveaway hosted by Edible Aria, and I am getting lots of ideas from all of its practical advice and how-to instructions. Today, however, I came across a passage that was particularly inspiring more for its philosophical flavor, and I wanted to share it here:

“We’ve lost our knowledge of farming and animal husbandry, and more recently, we’ve lost most of our practical knowledge regarding housekeeping. Housekeeping is no longer considered an art. If we have the money, we outsource it. We earn money so we can buy prepared food and pay someone else to clean our home. The home is little more than a crash pad where we watch TV and a storage unit where we keep the things we buy when we are not working.

The home used to be a place where we made things. We made the things we used, and the things we ate, and we made them with pride. With generations of experience guiding their hands, homesteaders transformed the harvest into usable goods. They could make almost everything they needed. There is power in that, power that we’ve exchanged for convenience.

This exchange is often celebrated as a liberation from drudgery, but art is never drudgery, even if it is hard work. The practice of art is profoundly satisfying, precisely because it is challenging, and when it comes off well, you know you’ve created something of real value. Drudgery is not about hard work, rather, it is a condition of skilless work. One of the big lies of the last century was that the home arts were drudgery that needed to be abandoned in favor of commerce. We gave them up, just as we ceded farming to factories.

Now the tide is turning. Just as there is growing interest in growing food and raising livestock among people who were not raised up with these skills, there is also a resurgence of interest in the indoor arts. If we take the kitchen back from the microwave, we discover a whole new world of flavor, a world of living, healthy, nutritionally complex foods. The kitchen becomes an arena where you, the domestic artist, learn to harness the forces of life. It is time to resurrect the lost domestic arts before they are lost for good.”

After reading this, I felt a little differently today about the effort required by my some of my routine chores—including “loading my solar clothes dryer” (a k a “hanging clothes on our outdoor clothesline”)—and the extra preparations that go into providing nutritious food for our family. I hope you will, too!

Please note: It is my goal to provide a top-quality, content-driven, ad-free blog. That said, I do occasionally include affiliate links in some of my posts. For example, if you click on the book cover above, you will link to Amazon.com, where you will have an opportunity to purchase the book—and if you do buy it after clicking through from my site, I will receive a small commission to support my work here, as well as my own book-buying habit. Seriously, though, I’d be just as happy if my recommendation inspired you to check out the title from your local library or borrow it from a friend.

It’s all in the way you look at it. You see, for us, home is school. So I guess you could call the one day a week that my two oldest children spend in a traditional classroom setting “school away from school.”

Brotherly love: Pals Kellen and Kerrick prepare for a day of “school away from school.”

We have always homeschooled our children, beginning when our oldest son, Kellen, was about 3. At that point we knew, given his lengthy list of food allergies and the severity of his symptoms, that it would be all but impossible to keep him safe in a regular school environment. Instead we flung ourselves headlong down the homeschooling path—an adventure I certainly hadn’t anticipated—and we’ve never looked back. (Though food allergies served as our original impetus, many other factors continue to sustain and motivate us—such as the opportunity to provide the kind of individualized, one-on-one instruction that fosters a love of learning, as well as the gift of time to create strong family bonds and instill important character qualities through life lessons.)

One of the best books I ever read when I initially began researching the idea of educating our children at home was Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Works, by David Guterson. Written almost two decades ago (and several years before then-public high school English teacher/homeschooling dad Guterson made it big with his novel-turned-movie Snow Falling on Cedars), the book so intelligently and eloquently supports the notion of parents teaching their own children as a natural course of action—especially in the face of an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction with the state of public education. The fact that Guterson himself was, at the time, a part of that system lends both irony and credibility to his writing. (Which, by the way, is just beautiful: I remember being moved almost to tears by one passage in the book that describes the subtle but incredibly meaningful transference of knowledge from a grandfather to his grandson.) And although Guterson distinctly made the case that institutionalized education is errant, he also laid out a vision toward the end of the book for a mutually beneficial partnership between homeschooling families and local public schools, decrying the notion that such a relationship need be adversarial. I remember thinking his idea was a nice one, but that it was probably a bit too pie-in-the-sky to ever really work.

Then, just before Kellen reached kindergarten age, I discovered that such a program actually existed right in the city where we live. Created by homeschooling parents with the cooperation of a local school district, C.A.S.A. Vida (the acronym stands for Community Assisted Schooling Alternatives, but is pronounced like the Spanish word for “house,” followed by the Spanish word for “life”) provides a way for homeschooled children from kindertgarten through sixth grade to attend one full day a week of extracurricular classes (art, music, P.E., technology, Spanish and some science) together in a classroom setting at a local public school. No standardization, no assessment or grading. Simply enrichment on top of the heavy lifting handled by homeschooling parents (who prefer to provide their own instruction in major subjects like reading, writing, mathematics, history and more science). The students learn alongside other homeschoolers of multiple ages under the direction of teachers who have come out of retirement to participate in the program (and who love that they can do what they do best—teach!—without the incredible pressure of preparing students for standardized testing).

It’s all about the backpacks: Pirates of the Caribbean for Kellen, and Power Rangers for Kerrick.

Kellen is now beginning his fifth year in the program, and Kerrick is starting his third. We’ve experienced incredible support and understanding from both the staff and other students with regard to Kellen’s food allergies, and he has never had a reaction while in attendance. (Of course, he takes his own lunch, and I’m on campus keeping an eye on things occasionally, too). Their one day away from home each week gives both me and the boys a bit of a break from the 24/7 homeschooling routine. They get to experience a small taste of what traditional school is like, and I get a minute to breathe and regroup. We miss each other during the day, and we come together at the end of it eager to share what went on while we were apart, as well as refreshed and energized to start our schedule again.

We catch a bit of flak sometimes from other homeschoolers who frown on any interaction with the public-education system. But that’s OK. It would be difficult for me, I think, to adopt a completely separatist stance on the issue considering my admiration for the gifted professional educators in our extended family—all of whom, by the way, are in complete support of our homeschooling efforts. They say (and I agree!) that we really have the best of both worlds. Homeschool parents opposed to such a program also express their fears that it might cause homeschooled children to resent being taught at home and could create in them a desire to attend traditional school. All I can say is that that hasn’t ever yet been the case for us. In fact, I vividly remember Kellen saying sometime during the second year that he attended C.A.S.A. Vida as I picked him up one afternoon, “Mom, one day a week is enough.” I couldn’t agree more.

After reading Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon, and upon the advice of our family friend and chiropractor, Dr. Chad Hood, I have begun to incorporate raw dairy (unpasteurized milk straight from the cow or goat) into our diet. This is quite a change for us, as we gave up drinking regular pasteurized cow’s milk a few years ago, when our son Kellen’s severe dairy allergy first appeared. At that point, we all gradually made the shift to using rice milk in our breakfast cereal, and carefully consumed other dairy products (cheese, butter, yogurt, sour cream) so as not to cross-contaminate what Kellen ate or came into contact with. Because I knew what could happen to Kellen if he ingested or even touched a small amount of milk (immediate hives, wheezing, eyes swelling shut, runny nose), I chose to err on the side of caution and avoid buying the ubiquitous gallon from the grocery store each week.

Now there IS cow’s milk in our refrigerator, but it doesn’t come from the grocery store. Instead, I pick it up (two gallons every other week) at a neighborhood drop-off point served by a local dairy that provides raw, organic milk to its customers. Raw milk advocates tout the benefits of unpasteurized milk (obtained, of course, from a scrupulously clean and careful dairy), including the presence of healthy bacteria that play an important role in digestion and nutrient absorption. (We tried raw goat’s milk, too, which tasted surprisingly the same as cow’s milk, but it was a more complicated process to purchase it and a farther distance to travel to pick it up.) We’ve been buying the raw milk for a couple months now and are getting used to having it in our diet, but I’ve been trying to develop a system for efficiently and economically—at $10 a gallon, we handle it like liquid gold!—incorporating it in different ways for the members of our family who can have it. (I had some hope, as I was researching the idea, that Kellen might be able to tolerate raw dairy, but he still exhibited some symptoms after trying both the goat and cow varieties. Our next test will be to culture some of the milk into yogurt or cultured butter to see whether that process makes the milk’s proteins any less volatile for him.)

So I picked up two gallons of milk last week, and here’s what I’ve done with this latest batch so far:

• Using a tip I found on an online forum, I poured one gallon of milk into a jar with a wide opening at the top and a spigot at the bottom—such as you might use here in Arizona to steep and then serve a batch of sun tea. I allowed the milk to rest in the refrigerator in the jar for about 24 hours so that the cream would rise to the top. Then, using the spigot at the bottom of the jar, I released some of the milk into another container, which gradually moved the inch or so of cream down to a point where I could scoop most of it out from the top with a ladle. I saved the cream in the refrigerator and repeated the process with the second gallon (I only bought one jar to try it out, but it worked so well, I think I’ll buy another one so that I don’t have to wait as long to get all the cream separated). I got about 2 cups of cream total (1 cup from each gallon), leaving a little behind so that the leftover milk would still have some in it. From the cream, I made butter (1/2 cup) and buttermilk (1 1/2 cups) using my Vita-Mix blender. It was a really easy process, and the results tasted great. Of course, I do wish the butter yield had been higher! We have used some of the butter on bread and to cook eggs, and I plan to use the buttermilk this week to add to the soaking liquid of our breakfast oatmeal and maybe to bake something with the sprouted spelt flour I’ve got on hand. Any suggestions?

• I used a gallon of the remaining milk to make mozzarella cheese following the recipes and methods outlined in Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (click here) and the online directions provided by the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company (click here). Because I had removed much of the cream from the milk, the resulting cheese was a bit drier than when I made it previously with whole milk. And I should have added more salt toward the end of the process. But I think it will work just fine shredded or sliced (it should yield about 2 cups) on top of homemade pizza, which will be our dinner later this week.

I’m hoping to make yogurt with some of the remaining milk using piima or viili cultures I purchased from Cultures for Health a few weeks ago. The rest I guess we will drink or use in smoothies or something.

So I’m a little closer to establishing a regular routine of processing the raw dairy we purchase. I think it will take me a little while to get a system operating smoothly. And at some point, if we can fit it into the food budget, I will probably need to increase the quantity that we buy, as we still find ourselves occasionally needing to purchase regular butter, cheddar cheese and sour cream from the grocery store.

Other projects in the kitchen this week included making juice pops from last week’s leftover Cherry Juice, and ice cream treats from Wardeh Harmon’s recipe for Dark Chocolate Ice Cream—Non-Dairy, Naturally Sweetened—both enjoyed by my naturally sweet daughter, Kennah.

This post is part of the Tuesday Twister blog carnival hosted by www.gnowfglins.com. To link to today’s Tuesday Twister on that site, click here.

I’ve been reading through a book I picked up at the Arizona Families for Home Education annual convention a few weeks ago—The Backyard Homestead, by Carleen Madigan (Storey Publishing)—and a passage I read this morning gave me some encouragement after my not-so-successful experiment on Monday with sprouted-spelt bread. Thought I’d share it here:

“Here’s a final suggestion on how to incorporate grains into the diets of people who still think oats grow in little Os and corn and wheat grow in squares inside red-checked boxes. Do it the same way you’d approach a big black bear—very carefully. Most of us hate to admit it, but we resist change. Probably this statement includes even you. A person accustomed to food that’s bland to the taste and effortless to chew is not going to gobble up his first slice of sprouted wheat bread shouting, ‘Goody, goody.’ More likely, he’s going to feed it to the dog and head for the neighbor’s in search of a Twinkie. And if, after reading this chapter, you get all hopped up, run out, and buy eight different grains and serve them all for supper tonight, your neighbor is probably going to get your whole family.”

“The way to do it is to create as little anxiety as possible. Nobody should feel that he or she must like anything. All the familiar old favorites shouldn’t be replaced suddenly with strange casseroles and dark breads. And no one, especially children, should fear that if they don’t like the wheat soup, they’ll get no supper at all. Instead, include a whole-grain dish along with the food you usually serve, with as little fanfare as possible. If somebody doesn’t like it, refrain from commenting. And never scream, “How come nobody in this house ever want to eat anything but hot dogs and vanilla ice cream?”

“Don’t get preachy about nutrition. But don’t give up, either. Continue to include whole grains in each meal, beginning with the more familiar ones like corn and rice. . . . Save the less familiar grains such as millet and whole cooked rye for later. When you come up with something you like especially well yourself or something that seems to appeal to others, make it again. The change won’t come quickly, but in time the people you cook for will come to enjoy and often prefer whole grains.”

Hmm. I don’t know Carleen Madigan, but I think she’s been secretly having dinner at my house. And, Carleen, if you’re reading this, thanks. I needed that.

Incidentally, this book is a lot of fun for folks like me who dream of turning their urban landscaping into a mini farm. Coverlines include:

“Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!”
“Eat from the garden year-round with fresh veggies and homemade preserves”
“Make omelets from eggs laid by your own chickens”
“Pick fruits and berries from your back door”
“Learn how to milk a goat, prune a fruit tree, dry herbs, make dandelion wine, bake whole-grain breade, tap a maple tree, make fresh mozzarella, brew beer, mill grains for flour, save seed for next season, and a whole lot more”

Sounds good to me!

Please note: It is my goal to provide a top-quality, content-driven, ad-free blog. That said, I do occasionally include affiliate links in some of my posts. For example, if you click on the book cover above, you will link to Amazon.com, where you will have an opportunity to purchase the book—and if you do buy it after clicking through from my site, I will receive a small commission to support my work here, as well as my own book-buying habit. Seriously, though, I’d be just as happy if my recommendation inspired you to check out the title from your local library or borrow it from a friend.

Now that I’m blogging about our kitchen life, my husband, Shawn, asks, “Are you going to take a picture of every meal before we can eat it?”

When the weekend rolled around and found me with several large containers full of organic Bing cherries that needed to be consumed before they became compost, I devoted part of my Saturday to destemming and pitting all that were in good shape. (I actually only had to part with about a dozen or so cherries that were mushy or starting to mold.) The firmest and prettiest I served at dinner that night (they didn’t last long!) And the remaining ones became the basis for a batch of Cherry Juice, inspired by a recipe in Missy Chase Lapine’s book, The Sneaky Chef. I knew we’d be having Sunday Pancakes the next morning (our traditional, pre-church breakfast), so my idea was to use the Cherry Juice to make Cherry Syrup to top them off. It worked wonderfully and became an instant family favorite. We even had enough Cherry Juice left over to add a fun flavor (not to mention extra fiber and antioxidants) to our applesauce the next day.

My other food foray this week was an attempt to make my friend Wardeh Harmon’s Easy Sprouted Spelt Artisan Bread. She developed her recipe and method from the techniques laid out in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François. Wardeh uses sprouted spelt flour for much of her baking these days, motivated by her research (much of it gleaned from Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon) into its nutritional benefits and ease of digestibility—even for the gluten-intolerant members of her family. After seeing what she was up to on her blog, www.gnowfglins.com, (and following up with my own reading of both Nourishing Traditions and Artisan Bread), I was eager to try her recipe for our family—and especially for our oldest son, Kellen, whose food allergies have meant that he has eaten gluten-free for much of his 9 years.

Unfortunately, my results weren’t what I’d hoped they’d be on my first attempt. The dough was supposed to be pretty wet—as indicated by both Wardeh’s recipe and the Artisan Bread methodology. But mine was initially way too dry and stiff, so I tried to compensate for it by adding more water to get it to the right consistency. The resulting loaves had a nice crisp exterior crust, but they didn’t rise well and the interior was too moist—almost a bit gummy. Kellen and I couldn’t resist tasting the bread with a little Earth Balance spread, though, and it actually wasn’t bad. (And although Kellen had some mild stomach discomfort about an hour afterward, it didn’t seem to bother him too much at all. We’re still not sure whether sprouted spelt is going to be something he can tolerate on a regular basis, but I’m so proud of him for overcoming his anxiety and giving it a try!)

Meanwhile, I had these two loaves of bread that I wasn’t sure what to do with, so I drew inspiration from yet another friend with whom I have done a lot of collaborative gluten-free baking. Her solution for loaves that don’t turn out quite right? Make French toast! And that’s exactly what I did this morning. Kellen opted out (which is probably a good thing, as I haven’t figured out how to make egg-free French toast to accommodate his allergy), but the rest of us tried it—topped, of course, with more Cherry Syrup. I liked it a lot, but I think it will take some time for the others to get used to the bread’s taste and texture. They did eat it and say they liked it, but the fact that I have a few pieces left over means they aren’t big fans—yet.

French toast fix: Not-quite-right sprouted spelt bread—topped with Cherry Syrup— gets a makeover.

My blog is new and I don’t have a recipe index set up yet, so I’ve posted the Cherry Juice and Cherry Syrup ones here and will move them to the right place later—along with our recipe for Sunday Pancakes.

Cherry Juice (adapted from The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine)

2 1/2 cups pitted organic cherries (I used fresh, but frozen is OK, too)
2 cups water
1 tablespoon Rapadura (unrefined and unbleached whole cane sugar)

Bring cherries, water, and Rapadura to a boil in a medium pot. Turn heat to low and allow to simmer for 10 minutes. Occasionally mash the cherries with the back of a spoon (or a potato masher) to release their juices. The original recipe suggests pouring this mixture into a fine mesh strainer over a container or bowl, pressing the cherry “pulp” with the back of a spoon until all the liquid is released. And if you want a clear juice, that’s the way to go. I didn’t mind a little more texture, though, so I simply poured the mixture into my Vita-Mix (any other blender should work, too) and blended it until it was fairly smooth. The recipe yields 2 to 2 1/2 cups of juice, which can be refrigerated for up to three days or frozen for later use. For cherry applesauce, simply stir the desired amount of Cherry Juice into applesauce until the desired color and flavor are attained.

Cherry Syrup (adapted from “Homemade Berry Syrup” in The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine)

Combine Cherry Juice and pure maple syrup in equal proportions (I used 1/2 cup of each). Serve warm over pancakes or French toast.

This post is part of the Tuesday Twister blog carnival hosted by www.gnowfglins.com. To link to today’s Tuesday Twister on that site, click here.