Me: Would you like some broccoli?
Samantha: I don’t like broccoli.
Me: What do you like? Besides cookies and candy.
Samantha: I like ice cream and cake. And icing on cake.
My mom claims she gets it from her, and that she got it from her mother. I think it’s time to start making some “nutritional” cookies. ;) (= sneaky mommy face)
Homeschooling Journal:
Visited the Farmer’s Market and Whole Foods. The girls are getting to meet lots of new vegetables since Craig has decided we’re going to try to eat as “raw” as possible. Yesterday I brought in the last bell peppers from the garden and each of the girls ate a whole one like an apple. (They were small.) That made us really happy. Lucy also was chewing on cabbage like a dinosaur.
This afternoon we went with the Justice Walking group to the nursing home and the girls got to watch us sing Christmas carols and talk to the residents. Lucy barely said a word, but when we left she said she liked it and wanted to go again.
Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Nearly a month, actually. If you’re still checking, I’m impressed. There has been a lot going on, including my going offline for weeks at a time and some serious writer’s block. But here’s the update.
School ended, thank God. Everyone survived. Summer is hot, hot, hot. There will be not trips to the zoo any time soon, membership or no. The goal is for everyone to survive the summer.
Lucy has been waiting, oh, about two months for the kettle corn man to re-appear at the farmer’s market. I don’t know if we just missed the weeks he’s been around, but we haven’t seen him there in a while. But today, there he was, and the popcorn was purchased, and nibbled around the rest of the market and back in the car. And as we were driving down Magazine on the way to the grocery store to finish our shopping, in the midst of proclaiming the delight brought on by the popcorn and retelling the story of its finding, Lucy cried, in what must have been her best revival voice, “Thank you, Jesus!”
For once, the pause in posting wasn’t my fault! Last Saturday Craig put insulation in our attic, and bumped something that killed the electricity in the room with the computer. So that was finally fixed yesterday, when Craig was home in the morning when it was cool enough to get up in the attic again and fix it. But now we’re functional again, anyway.
We’ve been busy in the garden, and I’ll have to put up some details and pictures sooner or later. But the exciting thing, we realized last night, is the variety of foods we’ve had this week. Almost all of which Lucy has at least sampled. Many of which are things I’ve only started eating recently myself. Here’s the list, at least what I can remember, from the last week:
“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint–virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if the wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. ’Blah blah blah,‘ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by whole sale desires.”
Craig was pretty excited about his Whole Foods deli purchase. We brought it all home (going to Whole Foods is like a pilgramage – it’s forever away and only done on occasion when we’re feeling rich) and I heated up the roast. We started to eat, and Craig wondered out loud if it was cooked through when purchased, or if we should have cooked it more than the quick nuclear reheat. I asked him if he was sure this was meat.
Of course it was meat! It was “field roast”. What could roast be, besides meat? Probably meat which lived in a field. What kind of meat didn’t matter, it had looked good in the deli window.
In an attempt to make up for the long, long silence, here are some pictures. First, the “man pit” that Craig build over the old (dug out hole in the grass) fire pit. It is now an oven and stove. I picked up the brick off the curb, in my church clothes, no less. Dad would be proud.
The roasted (in brick oven) vegetable quesidillas (cooked on brick stove) were really, really good.
We have done a little planting. We’ve had several dafodills bloom, and the tulips and iris are ready to bust.
Last week was black bean and sweet potato week here at the Baker house. I know that probably sounds strange to you, because it did to me a couple of weeks ago. But we (and by “we” I mean Craig) had purchased many, many pounds of sweet potatoes about a month ago, and they needed to be eaten. And black beans are cheap (as were sweet potatoes, hence our abundance). And I generally trust Moosewood cookbooks, so I thought I’d give the “black bean and sweet potato hash” a try. Now, I’m not one to make hashes, as a general rule, so this involved a little bravery to start with. Here’s the recipe, so you can see for yourself what I was getting into.
So Lucy likes to take down the spices (and extracts, and colored sugar) from the spice rack and smell them. This is usually a harmless passtime, which possibly develops her sensory awareness, so usually I let her be. There have been a couple of spills (sesame seeds come to mind), but, as I say, it’s all usually harmless.
So yesterday, I noticed Lucy pouring the orange sugar from the bottle into the bottle cap and eating it. I questioned her, and she denied eating it. I warned her that the things on the spice rack go in foods, but aren’t very tasty by themselves. (Not true of colored sugar, but it was a general statement.) I walked away.
Loyola Kids Book of Heroes: Stories of Catholic Heroes and Saints Throughout History by Amy Welborn
The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks (Penguin Classics) by Unknown
The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day by Robert Ellsberg
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the by Sam Kean
