Treasures

"I write to hold what I find in my life in my hands and declare it a treasure" (Lucy Calkins).
That is my writing mantra, yet I've failed miserably at living up to it. I'm not referring so much to the writing part of it as that is rather inconsequential. I'm referring to the part about glimpsing the treasure, even in the seemingly mundane moments of life. It seems the last few months, even the last several, have been rather stale. Not that anything has been wrong necessarily, nothing specifically negative...just a dry spell, I suppose.

It feels like I spend most days just going through the motions, checking things off of a list, but not really holding on to the moments in order to remember them and give them meaning. I suppose that is why I haven't been here. Because who wants to hear about another tedious day of school? Or a lazy afternoon? Or a trip to the mall? 

See? I'm missing the point. I'm missing the treasures. Instead of that tedious day of school, I need to focus on the fact that I found a new way to teach long division so one of my boys could better understand it. I should tell about how the kids created a crepe paper laser beam obstacle course to take up some time on a rainy afternoon. I should highlight the big smile that we couldn't erase from one boy's face when he got his new Transitions lenses on his glasses. Or I should tell about how one of those tedious days ended with my baby saying to me, "Mommy? I love you so much!" 

These are the treasures I'm missing because I've no longer been intentionally making the effort to see them and mull them over and cherish them. Moreover, I've no longer been putting forth any effort to create experiences for the kids that generate these treasures. I can't believe how quickly they're growing up. Everyone warned me. They just warned me when I was up to my elbows in spit up, dirty diapers, and crumby floors. So I didn't believe them. Now I've forgotten to remember how fast it goes by.

It is time now to start recapturing the moments and declaring them treasures.

In which a friend and I go all Laura Ingalls on some dairy products...

Ever wonder exactly what Little Miss Muffet is eating while sitting on her tuffet? After today, I know! (And if you google "tuffet", you'll see she was sitting on a stool - not as poetic, huh?)
I recently switched our family from industrialized, pasteurized, grocery store milk to raw, fresh-from-the-farm milk. If you have done any research on raw milk, you know that the choice to consume it straight from the cow is not without controversy. Here in Connecticut, though, where farms and local agriculture are well-supported, my decision is met with far fewer raised eyebrows than in other states where raw milk is illegal. My research led me to a realization that the health benefits of non-pasteurized milk far exceeds the small risk we face in consuming it.

Besides the myriad of vitamins and nutrients found in raw milk that are pasteurized out of grocery store milk, raw milk offers some pretty cool things. Did you know you can make 4 items just out of the milk itself? The cream can be skimmed off to make butter. The whey that drains off the butter is buttermilk. The natural skim milk that results from skimming the cream off can be made into cheese, and the whey that results from this can be used to make ricotta cheese.

For some time now, I have been wanting to try to make cheese and butter, and my friend Heidi found the perfect opportunity. The farmer from whom we get our milk (and to whom she introduced me) had a lot of extra milk and was thus selling it off at a discounted price. We stocked up. A lot. I think we may have misjudged a little. Because we got 32 bottles of milk. That's 16 gallons of milk. It turned out to be a bigger project than we anticipated.

But we embraced the project anyhow. And then poor Heidi was in a car accident. But was brave enough to proceed...and even get almost elbow deep in the cheese. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Let me tell you how to make each of those 4 products:

Butter - The easiest to make.
1. Put cream in a blender and blend it to death. Or at least until you see a separation.

2. Open the blender and  you should see the butter bits floating at the top.

3. Holding the butter bits back with a spoon, let the liquid - which is the buttermilk - pour out into a container where you can reserve it for pancakes and biscuits.

4. Pour some ice cold water in with the butter to rinse it.

5. Blend again on high for about 30 seconds.

6. Pour out the liquid but don't reserve it this time since it's mixed with water.

7. Ta da! Grass-fed, raw milk butter! (Oh, and you can add some salt too at this point if you want.)

Mozzarella Cheese
You need:
2 gallons of milk
2 1/2 t. citric acid
1/2 t. liquid rennet (or 1/4 tablet)
1/2 c. salt

(Our sweet farmer gave us the citric acid and rennet tablet, but if you need your own, you could get it from Leeners.)

(Oh, and here's a gross little tidbit: I read thecheesemaking chapter of Little House in the Big Woods to Audrey before Heidi and I started our project, and we discovered that rennet comes from the stomach lining of a very young, not-yet-weaned calf.)

Anyway...
1. Place milk in a large pot and turn on burner. Bring temperature up to 75-80 degrees. And seriously, you need one of these thermometers to do this project:

That probe-y thingy plugged into the timer might look like an object you would see but not want to see at a doctor's office, but it goes into whatever you are wanting to know the temperature of. Then you can set the timer for a certain temp, and it will ring an alarm when you reach that temperature - perfect for projects like cheese where temps are important.

2. Dissolve citric acid in 1/4 c. cool water and mix with milk for two minutes. Heat milk to 88 degrees.

3. Add rennet diluted (or in the case of the tablet, dissolved) in 1/4 c. cool water. Stir into milk for 20 seconds. Remove from burner and allow to set for 15 minutes.

Curds & Whey

4. Cut curds into 1/2 inch cubes. Let curds set for 5 minutes then warm gently and stir slowly until 106 degrees. Remove from heat and continue stirring for 20 minutes. Allow to settle fro 5 minutes.

5. Drain curds.

6. Mix salt in 1 gallon of water. Heat to 170 degrees. Add hot salt water to bowl of curds so they are covered.

7. Knead curds like bread. Change hot water until it is used up.

And, yes, that's my crazy friend

kneading with her injured arm.

8. Place cheese into cheese mold and cool in a bowl of cold water.

9. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate.

Ain't she purty?

Ricotta Cheese
1. Take the whey from your mozzarella cheese (it cannot be more than an hour or so old) and heat to 200 degrees.

2. Remove from heat and skim curds from the top and into a cheesecloth lined colander or strainer.

3. Add juice from 1 or 2 lemons and wait for additional curds to rise to the top.

4. Drain ricotta and refrigerate. Use within 3 days or freeze.

Our project was a lot of work but fun, and it won't be so difficult now that we know what we are doing...now that we are certified pioneer ladies (didn't want to steal any of Ree Drummond's thunder by using the word "women").

Spring 2012

I suppose I have quite a bit of catching up to do...we haven't had a ton of outings this spring, but we've had fun anyway. Here is a taste of our spring 2012:

Lighthouse Park
At the tail end of March, we had a week of beautiful weather. On the warmest day, a friend and I decided to hit the beach. It was a sunny 74 degrees when we left the Hartford area to head south. I thought about tossing jackets into the car - after all, it was still March in the Arctic. But I figured it was forecasted to be in the 80s, why bother with a jacket? As we were driving, I noticed the temperature reading in the car started dropping the farther south we went: 70, then 65, then 59. By the time we got to the beach, it was 57, and we were greeted wtih this:

We decided to make the best of the foggy situation. We ate our picnic lunches in the car. And then, as the temperature continued to climb, we went to Sugar Bakery. The owner of Sugar Bakery is a Cupcake Wars champion, and this was NOT my first visit to the Cupcakery.

Although it never got real warm, it did warm up enough for us to enjoy a lovely day at the beach. Michael had fun being buried in the sand.

And we discovered a private cove surrounded by rocks which afforded a bit of protection from the wind.

Peabody Museum
Not too long after our beach excursion - and after the weather had turned decidedly back to Arctic cold, we paid a visit to the Peabody Museum. Think Museum of Natural History in miniature.

What was awesome is that the museum's temporary exhibit was all about food.

Unless you follow me on Facebook or Pinterest, perhaps you don't know this, but I've been a little obsessed lately with eating healthily. (And, yeah, the display above shows how many teaspoons of sugar are in each item!) My kids aren't as enthusiastic about this healthy eating as I am, but since I'm the teacher...well, anyway, we had a good time.

Ice Skating
Almost every week for the last few months, we have joined a homeschool group at a local ice skating rink. The kids all started learning by holding on to these little walker things.

They have all improved greatly, though Audrey still holds on to her walker. Jacob and Michael took off, and even Alex heads into the middle of the rink occasionally. It's been a lot of fun learning to skate and hanging out with homeschool friends at the same time!

Ice Cream & Letterboxing

It was a GORGEOUS day today. So naturally we needed to fill the afternoon with ice cream treats and letterboxing.

I picked up a good friend and her two kids, and we went to a dairy farm to try their deliciously creamy ice cream.

We needed some adventure after our dairy treat, so we went letterboxing. Not surprisingly, our hunt took us to a cemetery.

And to a reservoir.

It was a very enjoyable afternoon!

Sweet!

Due to the prohibitively high cost of maple syrup, I have kept my children on a strict Mrs. Buttersworth syrup diet since their first bite of pancake. Since then, of course, I have discovered that sometimes cheapest isn't always best. Not that any type of syrup is healthy, but when choosing the lesser of the two evils, maple syrup certainly beats high fructose syrup on pancakes and waffles.

Unfortunately, once conditioned always conditioned...the last time I purchased the liquid gold, the children declared they did not like the taste at all. So imagine my surprise when they all but drank some maple syrup during our last field trip to see the process.

We began our tour in the barn so we could have a chance to visit with the animals.












After the barn, we kind of headed in a backwards fashion through the tour. Since there were three other groups doing the tour with other leaders, our next station was the pancake station to sample maple syrup. And that is where the kids decided they do indeed enjoy real maple syrup. Unfortunately, this was not syrup from the farm as this is a 4H teaching farm and therefore does not produce enough syrup to sell. They loved it nonetheless and may have even licked their plates.




After sampling the syrup, we learned about how to identify a maple tree in the dead of winter and then how to tap it. We followed our indoor instruction with an outdoor trek to check out the sap that was draining into the buckets of some tapped maple trees.

Following that, we went to the sugar house to see how the sap is boiled in the evaporator until it becomes thicker and develops that beautiful amber color. We learned that it takes 40 gallons of sap just to make 1 gallon of syrup! No wonder it's so expensive!


I probably don't have to tell you that I stopped by a farm on my way home to purchase some real maple syrup!

It's a pain in my...everywhere!

Before I was ever diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, I was very skeptical. We had a few friends who claimed they had Fibromyalgia, and I always told them, "It's all in your head. Just get over your whoa-is-me attitude, and you'll be fine." OK, so I never actually spoke those words to any of my friends, but I thought them. It's got to be God's sense of humor that I now suffer from the chronic syndrome I used to make fun of. I have to admit, though, that even as I have endured the many symptoms of Fibromyalgia, I have often wondered if these things aren't all in my head, a figment of my hypochondriac imagination.

That is until I read FibroWHYalgia by Susan E. Ingebretson. I'm thrilled to have come across this book because I finally feel validated. I am almost relieved to know that the things I have felt have not just been my overactive imagination, that I'm not, in fact, going crazy.

Not only do I feel validated, but I feel almost a comraderie with Ms. Ingebretson...she's someone who understands what it feels like to wake up almost every morning feeling like you've been pavement for a dozen mac trucks during the night; she knows about missing out on getting down on the floor to play with the kids because you know that when you try to get up again, you will feel like your body is going to break in a million pieces; how carrying a purse or camera slung over your shoulder for an hour can give you neck, back, and shoulder pain for weeks after; she knows what it's like to try to open those blasted save-the-planet smaller caps that top water bottles; she would probably even understand how a haircut can help alleviate headaches because just the weight of hair can cause pain; she understands why I'm cold all the time and why I have to change seats in church if anyone around me is wearing perfume.

These are all things I experience from day-to-day, usually with no rhyme or reason. I joke that I have a Pain of the Week - some joint or area of my body that hurts for no apparent reason, and the pain comes and then leaves very abruptly, also for no apparent reason. I truly, honestly thought I was somehow conjuring these pains up from my mind. It's good to know there are other people out there like me!

Ms. Ingebretson offers some great tips for fibrofolk, as she calls us, to work toward wellness. Of course, the two main areas she focuses on are nutrition and exercise. I'm grateful that I am already well down the road toward good nutrition and exercise: after all of my previous reading and documentary viewing, I have been eating a lot more healthfully, and I have been faithfully achieving my 10,000 steps per day. So hopefully I begin to see some positive changes in my health.

In the meantime, I desperately want my children to be healthier. They don't know this yet, but we are about to embark on a study of nutrition for science! I'm going to use Michael Pollan's kid version of The Omnivore's Dilemma and throw in lots of other fun science things like studies of food chains, cows, plants, dirt, and anatomy. Maybe I'll at least plant a seed (pun intended)!

Hippy Chick

Today after church, I took the kids to a restaurant called Flatbread. As its name suggests, it serves flatbread pizzas. The menu is by no means extensive, but what I love about it is that it serves all-natural food: organic produce, freshly milled flour for its pizza crusts, nitrate-free pepperoni tops its pizzas, and free-range chicken stars in some of its dishes. The best thing? The kids love it!

While the kids have enjoyed take-out from Flatbread, they had never been inside before today. They were very impressed with the interior...the eclectic seating arrangements composed of tables, booths, picnic tables, and couches; the wood-burning oven; the tin cans turned lighting fixtures; and even the outhouse-like restrooms (outhouse by decor only!), which each of them checked out in turn. As Alex looked thoughtfully around, she noted, "This place is kind of hippy." Her comment was not critical in any way, just her observation.

I chuckled inside because that hippy label is a bit reflective of me at this moment. You see, I have spent a lot of time over the last few weeks educating myself about food, especially the food here in America. I watched Food Inc. and Fresh, two documentaries about how food is handled in the US. As you can imagine, the focus is on the fact that food is so very processed here. In addition, I have been reading Michael Pollan who wrote both The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.

I have not finished the latter title, but I thoroughly enjoyed The Omnivore's Dilemma. The only way I can describe this book is by calling it grippingly informative. And more than that, it gave me a greater appreciation for nature. Mr. Pollan clearly does not share my views on creation, but even so, all of the information in this book put me in absolute awe of God..His creation, its intricacies, and how everything works together so very perfectly! Additionally, this book lowered my ignorance about food so I can make much better decisions about feeding my family.

I have heard many people say they decided to stop eating meat after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. Totally not the point of the book! The point is that we need to make wiser choices in the meat we do choose to eat. Knowledge is power as they say. I think most of America is completely ignorant about the food they eat. Not ignorance by anyone's fault, really. The true information out there is hard to find. This book spells it out definitely, thoroughly, and in an interesting way.

Although I'm still processing all of this information as well as picking up additional information, one of the biggest things I have taken away so far is the importance of ensuring that the beef I buy for my family is from grass-fed cows. God created cows to eat grass, not the grain diet they are fed by big beef producers. If they are permitted to eat grass as God designed them to do, they will not get sick and thus they will not need the antibiotics the big meat producers must pump into them. And if they are permitted to eat grass as God designed them to do, their bodies will produce the nutrients that sustain them when they are alive and that are passed on to us when we enjoy a burger or a steak.

Now I won't go on and on about a cow. I have already been chastised by my oldest who rolled her eyes and asked me why I am suddenly so obsessed with the cow and its diet. I did convince her to go with me to a local store today which carries grass-fed beef. I'm thankful I live in a state where there are so many local farms and other outlets where I can pick up fresh and more healthful food.

Getting the food is only half the battle of course. If you know me, you know I am not on great terms with my kitchen. However, over the last few days the kitchen and I have become much more intimate. This takes a lot of time and is not easy! When the kids want a snack, instead of turning to that big red box of Cheez-Its, I have to make something for them (homemade Cheez-Its are actually very delicious!).

It's definitely an adjustment and one I'm trying to make slowly...for my own sanity and for the sake of the children. Although I do not regret never forcing them to eat something, I do regret not providing better choices for them. It's hard for them to see some of those processed choices disappear to be replaced by one of Mom's kitchen experiments. Naturally, their suspicions have decidedly risen as they wonder what healthy thing I have hidden in those crackers or where exactly that package of processed Oreos has disappeared to.

I hope eventually I am able to educate them about health. In the meantime, one big reason I want to head my family toward more healthful eating is to address my fibromyalgia. I have been experiencing a lot of aggravating pain, and I hope that a healthier diet and lifestyle will help alleviate some of that. I do not want to turn to any of the marketed drugs at the risk of any of those side effects (possible side effects include thoughts of suicide? No thank you!). More importantly, I want to protect my family from the myriad of ugly diseases out there, most of which can at least in part be traced back to a poor diet.

I want to get back to eating a little more like God intended us to eat (and thankfully, my personal chef loves to cook from scratch!), and if that makes me a granola girl or a hippy, I'm OK with that!