All in a day: my Monday.

We made snow ice cream yesterday. Ruby decided we should never buy regular ice cream again. I reminded her of the abundance of snow in July. Liberty thinks we ought to fill up the freezer with snow to solve the problem. I’m skeptical. Charlotte loved the ice cream, but asked if I could get her something to warm up her tongue. Pierce shook and shook from the cold and finally gave up. The problem with snow ice cream: snowy weather and ice cream just don’t go together.

Liberty proclaimed she’s going to pour a can of sweetened condensed milk and a bag of chocolate chips together in a bowl and eat it when she’s a grown up. High ambitions.

Sterling walked past me rubbing his mouth, muttering, “My lips still hurt!” I questioned him about it… and laughed. “I zipped up my mouth in my coat zipper.” Well then.

Sterling’s new to Spelling in school this year. He’s doing quite well, and has grown accustomed to his 100% tests. I test on Thursday, and a 100% earns no test on Friday. Any wrong means another test on Friday. Sterling got two wrong on his last test: learn and pearl. Frustrated, he wrote the words a bunch of times. And then rewrote learn because he’d written it wrong all those times. As he numbered his paper for his Friday test that was moved to Monday due to our short school week last week, he muttered “ea… ea… ea” over and over. Then, he came up with a request. “Can you give me learn and pearl first so I can write them down before I forget how to spell them?” Umm… no. How does that prove you’ve learned anything?! He got 100% on the test, in spite of those words coming towards the end of his test.

I’m a big fan of letting my kids make mistakes – and then figure out how to fix them, hopefully learning something in the process. I set one dear daughter to making syrup for our pancakes. “Put two cups of water and four cups of sugar in a pan. Bring them to a boil.” This particular child struggles with following through, so I opted to put the maple flavoring in myself, later, to keep my instructions ultra simple. She came back moments later, wanting me to repeat instructions. I refused, knowing a lesson might actually be learned in this. You know, that lesson about paying attention. A few minutes later, she returned, announcing there were four cups of water and two of sugar in the pan. Um… no. Too much water, not enough sugar. Now we have to compensate, and instead of making a double batch, we’ve got the makings of a quadruple batch. She figured it out, we have three quarts of syrup in the fridge… and yesterday, we ran out of sugar. Something about putting eight cups into the syrup might have something to do with that. I’m not certain any lessons were learned – but we have syrup made up for a month or two.

I made deer stew last night for supper. Charlotte protested, saying she likes deer on her plate but not in her bowl. I’m assuming this means she liked the breaded/fried deer I made this summer… but not so much the stew I’ve been making lately. She fought me on eating it, but in the end, ate enough to satisfy me. When I went to scrape her bowl, I found all veggies and no meat. Turns out, the deer in her bowl isn’t the problem. It’s the broth and vegetables that come with it.

Start them young.

Mashed potatoes: It’s what’s for supper.

I invested in enough potato peelers for the whole crew last year. Best investment ever.

Pierce was feeling left out. I’m not sure how productive he was… but he tried. Ruby started him out, and he aerated the potatoes for us.

I love having my kids help in the kitchen. I don’t love tripping over them so much… but they’re turning into fabulous helpers who jump at the chance. The supper crew lineup made me smile tonight.

Garden Supper

Supper the other night was veggie pizza. I wanted to try to make Papa Murphy’s white sauce. Every place I found that discussed it said it was simply ranch dressing with extra garlic cloves in it. I made ranch dressing and added 4 cloves of garlic (to 2 cups of sauce). While it was quite good, I’m not certain it was the same. At any rate, until I think of a better idea, I’ll do that again.

The veggies for our pizza all came out of the garden, except for the mushrooms. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, chives, and basil all came fresh from the outdoors. While I didn’t take a photo of the finished pizza – because, while the crusts I make taste good, they are lumpy and bumpy and full of “warts”. So, you get the cutting board. It’s prettier.

Colorful. Fun. I love it when our food looks pretty.

Next time, remind me to think twice.

For two days last week, I made zucchini relish. In a moment of stupidity, I decided that all the zucchini in the kitchen needed to be used up, and relish was how it was going to go. Turns out, there was about 45 squash to deal with. And I’d just told my dear helpful daughter to shred ALL of them.

She went to town on the kitchen aid shredder, and in no time, we were ready to start. And then I counted bowls. Unable to use metal bowls, mostly, I think, because the author of my recipe wanted to laugh at how that would turn out in my kitchen and my TEN batches of relish planned, I ignored my big stack of giant stainless steel bowls that are my go-to bowls these days, I got out glass cake pans, glass bowls, and any other item I could find big enough to hold a batch. The kicker? All of it had to be salted and refrigerated overnight. Ten containers of salted zucchini mixed with 25 chopped onions are not easy to find room for in any refrigerator. We learned to be creative. I don’t think the fridge will ever lose the onion smell.

The next day, I chopped 25 peppers. Fun times. Then, we cooked it down in the canners for lack of a big enough pan.

 

That, my friends, is my sanity, boiling away. 60 cups of sugar, among other things. Insanity.

All of that… for this. In the end, what was supposed to be 70 pints I strained and used less liquid to cramp it into less jars, fearful I’d never, ever use it all or find a place to store it. But, rest assured, we’ll be eating relish for a very, very long time.

And now… there’s more zucchini ripe, ready, and in my kitchen. I’m thinking bread.

*Sigh.

The perils to feeding leftover garlic chicken pasta to toddlers at lunchtime.

Man, I wish Brady (the dog) liked pasta.

What’s for dinner? Floppity Flop Flop Flop.

I made this for supper tonight: Pressure Cooker Recipe – Beer Can Chicken. Their photo looked fabulous.



(Photo Credit)

When I eagerly peeled open my pressure cooker, I anticipated beauty. What stared at me instead:



Oh, the horrors. What on earth did I do wrong?!

It looks like road kill. It even has the cast off cheap beer can.



Then, I added the butter and herbs to my red potatoes that I’d so carefully peeled around the center of each, also expecting beauty. I “shook gently to toss”. And they fell apart.



But darn it, I didn’t ruin the peas. I can boil a bag of peas to perfection, my friends. Be proud to be numbered among my followers. For sure.

Ugh.

Diets, physicals, and being stared back at.

Sterling and Ruby had their yearly physicals yesterday. Sterling was one inch taller and 2/10 of one pound heavier than Ruby. He didn’t care how much; he just wanted to know he was still bigger. I think Ruby passing him up is his worst fear. The look on his face when the doctor told him that she would eventually pass him up, for a season, confirmed my suspicions. It’s hard to be a little guy. Both got shots. Sterling didn’t even flinch and was oh so proud of himself for that. Ruby sang what we commonly refer to as “the owie song” around here. It was a strange moment, watching my two middles acting so big.

I’ve gone on a no-carb no-sugar diet. Once I got past the first few days of not having a clue what to eat and choosing nothing as a good option (effective in the weight loss category, but it makes for one very crabby me) I’m finally figuring this out. So far, so good. I’d have a hard time eating like this long term, but it’s fun to watch the scale drop. Having never really attempted anything like this before, I’m seeing why people don’t stick to it. It’s just not that fun.

Our new fridge is in the garage. It is, at the moment, full of vegetables. Full. I look all healthy or something.

The girls all got owl necklaces for Christmas. Ruby’s owl promptly broke in half, just below the eyes. She still wears it. There’s something eerie about two bright blue jewel eyes staring back at me from my daughter’s chest.