Friday Photo

Inspired by my very own creative mother, I have been taking at least one photograph everyday. Doesn't sound all that ambitious, but sometimes I'll go several days without picking up my camera. To rectify that I have been taking daily photographs of life around me. And this, my friends, is my offering to you this week. I do hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Of Disasters, Culinary and Otherwise

Lately I have been slightly forgetful and distracted. Not too bad of a problem unless you forget to turn off the burner under a pan with a colander full of pasta in it. Then being forgetful tends to chap your hide. And did you know that after it cools, you can peel melted plastic right off of the beautiful pan you just "inherited" that same week from your mother-in-law. A great deal can be accomplished with a good dose of determination!

And a little note to self, if you put some chair cushions into the washer to clean them, check them first to see what they are stuffed with. In the off chance that they are stuffed with a million little chunks of foam, try another method of cleaning besides the trusty old washing machine. Otherwise you will find yourself scooping out wet little chunks of foam with a dixie cup for at least half an hour. And that's all the nuggets of advice from little old me today!

Thrifting Treasures

On a recent trip to see my family, my mom and I treated ourselves to a day of thrift shopping, antique browsing and non-stop talking in a town near their farm. Of course, since it was just us girls (Sweet Babe was with us) we ate yummy girl food for lunch at a charming lunch spot.

Two of my favorite finds of the day are featured in the photo above. I am delighted by the teacup from the Hotel Peabody in Memphis Tennessee which is still in operation. Of all the china patterns I have seen, this is one of my all time favorites. The weight of it is what makes it perfect. It's like those old restaurant mugs that are just the thing for a steaming mug of coffee on a cold morning. Extra cream please. In fact, I had my coffee in it this morning!

The New Encyclopedia of Modern Sewing is beautiful, full of photos and sketches from the fifties. I picked it up because it had a whole chapter about recovering furniture, something I plan to undertake quite soon. I do believe it will be right at home by my collection of Home Ec books from the fifties.

What is your favorite thrifted or antique treasure?

Read it and Weep

I have a friend here in town, she's one of the doctors at the pediatric clinic we use, and God is using her to transform ordinary lives. Without knowing what would come if it, she embarked on a short medical mission trip to Haiti last winter. Next month she will be going back for the fourth time. To say that God captured her heart through the people of Haiti would be a serious understatement. Her blog, Beyond this Mountain has been transforming my life.

We all read and hear of disasters though there hasn't been anything as devastating as the earthquake in Haiti in our time. I think it is easy to become numb to devastation and statements like "300,000 to 500,000 people died in the earthquake in Haiti". The fact that I could skim over statements like that and read the rest of the paper broke my heart. When you break it down into amounts you can visualize it's not so easy to pass over. There are about 68,000 people living in my town, if you go with the smallest number of deaths, that's about 4 1/2 times the people living here. For every person I see, there would be almost 4 other people who would be dead too. Kind of heard to swallow.

What my friend Stacy is writing about are the people who survived and are now living in what's left. This is what is changing my heart. There are very few jobs, their translators earn $10 dollars a day when they have work. One of them supports his parents and 8 siblings with his $10 a day when he can get work. Work that he has to walk up to 2 hours a day to have, 2 hours each way, in 100+ degree weather. Now whenever I spend money, I break it down into how many days it would take them to earn that. He would have to work 3 days to buy these diapers, 1 day to pay for my library fine, 1 and 1/2 days to pay for this book. Makes it all look different.

Please read Stacy's blog, really read it. Join me in thinking and praying about what you can do. Let the reality of what is happening to these people sink in.

Life

Oh my, it's been too long since I took the time to write. I do love my little bit of the blog world but I've been swept away with life and busyness lately. We've been working on school, making worm jars, eating, cleaning up from eating, cooking, doing laundry, kissing the baby and the other ones who used to be babies. I've been adjusting to our new homeschool schedule and figuring out how to teach more than one student at a time. Of course, there is the perpetual refereeing of fights and administering of justice. There's even been a bit of sewing going on. Not anything ambitious but still, it's refreshing to get out my machine and remind myself that I do love to sew.

These photos are of my kitchen and dining room/school room. I love this space, it's small but homey. We use every inch of it and lately it has been showing it. My usual means of self-motivation aren't working to get a cleaning system in place but I'm trying to get rolling. I've used several cleaning systems in the past, including FlyLady (which I love) but something in the back of my mine says the "just get up and do something" system would work just fine. Thanks for listening to my ramblings about life and cleaning. I hope your fall is off to a glorious start!

Bread for the Challenged

I love bread. It's serious folks, I bake some form of bread almost every day. Yesterday it was tortillas, today was homemade crust for our cheese pizza at lunch, Monday I made a loaf of the hearth bread you see in the photograph. This weekend it was two loaves of braided Oatmeal Sunflower Bread for a family get-together. I am blessed to own a wonderful bread mixer that I love but with the time constraints of homeschooling and keeping up with the brood, I was looking for a faster and easier option for my baking fixation.

Enter the no-knead bread method. This had been all over the internet but I just recently picked up the book at our library. If you are a cookbook reading nerd you will enjoy reading through his introduction and the descriptions of each recipe. If you are a bread snob like myself you will love the final product of his recipes. What I can't get over is how easy and quick it is to make fabulous bread following his methods. My only problem is that it makes one loaf. My family is ravenous and one loaf doesn't last too long. But I guess that's a good problem to have.

To make the loaf in the photograph I mixed 1 and 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour with 2 cups of white flour, 1 teaspoon of yeast, 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of salt and about 1 and 1/2 cup of water. It takes just enough water to make the dough come together, it will be sticky but that's okay. I stirred it together right before I went to bed, popped a lid on the bowl and left it on the counter. That's all! No kneading, watching or punching down. Nothing. The next morning, I turned the dough out onto the countertop after I sprinkled it with some flour and quickly shaped it into a ball. Then I dusted a cloth napkin heavily with flour and set the ball of dough, smooth side up on the napkin and let it rest. The dough is quite sticky so you have to work quickly but it isn't critical to get it smooth or perfect, just rounded up. After about an hour I put my cast iron pot with a lid into the oven while it heated to 450 degrees. About 45 minutes later I took the lid off the pan and tipped the risen loaf off of the napkin and into the pan. This is a bit nerve-wracking for recovering perfectionists but it will rise in the pan while it's baking and that seems to take care of any mess-ups in the dough transfer. The bread baked for 15 minutes with the lid on and 25 minutes with the lid off. Then all there is to it is to cool on a rack.

This recipe works great for pizza dough if you increase the yeast to 2 teaspoons and let it rest in the bowl for about 2 hours. I mix it up before we start school to make pizza for lunch. It just can't get any easier than that.

I hope you try it out and look for the book, he has so many other recipes that I didn't try out, not yet anyway!

A Year of Pie: August is Fresh Peach Pie

Everything has been wild and crazy around here. So much of my time since the baby's birth has been spent adjusting and just staying afloat. It is however peach season, my favorite season of all. I wait all year for August, the divine month of perfectly ripe Arkansas peaches. While I was waiting to pay for my bushel of Red Haven's, tears came to my eyes. It's pretty serious, folks, peaches and I go way back. On Sunday I chopped some up for preserves, set some aside to eat fresh and then sliced the remainder up for our August edition of A Year of Pie. Perfection!

You don't need a recipe for Fresh Peach Pie. Just peaches. Oh and pie crust would be nice too. Above you can see the sliced peaches tossed with about 1/2 cup of brown sugar, a pinch of salt and 2 tablespoons of cornstarch. Let it sit while you work on the crust.

When you get the bottom crust in the pie plate, fill it with your luscious peaches and dot with butter. Wet the rim of the bottom crust and gently lay the top crust on it and fold the edges under.

Crimp the edges, brush the top with milk and sprinkle with sugar, be sure to cut some slits in the crust for steam to escape. Put it in a 425 degree oven for 15 minutes, reduce the heat to 350 degrees and bake until the crust is golden and the filling is bubbling out of the slits. Set your beautiful creation on a rack to cool as long as you can stand to wait and then serve that baby up!