Crafting On

The act of creating, in one form or another, preserves my sanity amongst the chaos of life. This explains why I always have more than one project going at a time as well as why my housework tends to fall behind. I enjoy seeing what others are working on and keeping calm with, too. What are you creating? What is keeping you going? Snap a picture or two, post it on your blog, on Instagram #craftingon and/or Flickr and then share it with the rest of us by leaving your link below.

Having fun with the dehydrator again. This time making cheesy kale chips.


What are you working on? Happy creating!

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Crafting On

Crafting On

The act of creating, in one form or another, preserves my sanity amongst the chaos of life. This explains why I always have more than one project going at a time as well as why my housework tends to fall behind. I enjoy seeing what others are working on and keeping calm with, too. What are you creating? What is keeping you going? Snap a picture or two, post it on your blog, on Instagram #craftingon and/or Flickr and then share it with the rest of us by leaving your link below.

Still spending most of my time in the kitchen. I spent today dehydrating zucchini and baking garlic rosemary sourdough.
What are you working on? Happy creating!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Crafting On

Crafting On

The act of creating, in one form or another, preserves my sanity amongst the chaos of life. This explains why I always have more than one project going at a time as well as why my housework tends to fall behind. I enjoy seeing what others are working on and keeping calm with, too. What are you creating? What is keeping you going? Snap a picture or two, post it on your blog, on Instagram #craftingon and/or Flickr and then share it with the rest of us by leaving your link below.

We baked some sourdough bread, knit a washcloth and made a beeswax ornament as a thank you gift to our dear neighbors that plowed our field for us over the weekend.


What are you working on? Happy creating!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Crafting On

Crafting On

The act of creating, in one form or another, preserves my sanity amongst the chaos of life. This explains why I always have more than one project going at a time as well as why my housework tends to fall behind. I enjoy seeing what others are working on and keeping calm with, too. What are you creating? What is keeping you going? Snap a picture or two, post it on your blog, on Instagram #craftingon and/or Flickr and then share it with the rest of us by leaving your link below.

Sorry about last week everyone! The week just got away from me and I completely forgot to post. A lot of my crafting has been small needed tasks like embroidering letters on the boys' roosters. Actually most of it has been happening in the kitchen, as of late. finished up my ginger bug last week and made some ginger ale with it. Now I am looking for more beneficial recipes for it. Any suggestions?

What are you working on? Happy creating!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Crafting On

Crafting On

The act of creating, in one form or another, preserves my sanity amongst the chaos of life. This explains why I always have more than one project going at a time as well as why my housework tends to fall behind. I enjoy seeing what others are working on and keeping calm with, too. What are you creating? What is keeping you going? Snap a picture or two, post it on your blog, on Instagram #craftingon and/or Flickr and then share it with the rest of us by leaving your link below.

While my children are crafting their little hearts out I have been more focused on going back to my roots and making everything we eat from scratch. The past few weeks have had me learning how to make sourdough bread - something I have wanted to do for forever!
What are you working on? Happy creating!

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Click here to enter

Crafting On

Wild Violet Lemonade (Water Kefir) Recipe & the Newest Additions to Our Flock

 The warm weather is finally here so I can start planning my mini-garden. I was told by the old-time farmers here to wait until Memorial Day before planting anything outdoors so I am still having to play the waiting game for just a bit longer. In the meantime the kids and I are busy foraging for chickweed, dandelions, ramps and violets. Endless amounts of violets!! They are one of Baby F's current favorite snacks straight out of the ground. I enjoy them a but more in salads, personally. As for the rest of my family, they love them fresh from the ground, too but their favorite way of having them is in Wild Violet Lemonade Water Kefir. I thought I would share the recipe with all of you.

 To make it you first need to make a Wild Violet Syrup:
Gather 2 cups of violets (flowers only) and bring them inside to rinse off. Heat 1 cup of water in a sauce pan just to a simmer. Turn off the heat and then add your violets. Stir well. Let sit for 24 hours.
Now strain the violets and feed them to your chickens or compost them. Pour the violet water back into the sauce pan. Add about 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice to the violet water. This is my children's favorite part - you get to see the color go from a muted blue/purple to a bright purple in seconds! Now add 2 cups of sugar to the sauce pan and stir constantly over a low heat. Do not boil! You'll lose that beautiful color. Store in your refrigerator. Ours lasts us about 2 -3 weeks but that is because we use it all up by then.

Now that you have your Wild Violet Syrup, it is time to make it into lemonade. We make ours using our water kefir grains for gut health. Just add 1/4 cup lemon juice and 1/4 cup Wild Violet Syrup to 1 quart of water kefir (grains removed - this will be your 2nd ferment). Stir to combine and store in your refrigerator. You can drink it right away but I would recommend waiting until it is chilled. The longer it its in the refrigerator, the more the flavor will develop. You could make wild violet lemonade without the kefir by just adding lemon juice and the syrup to water.

Enjoy!


p.s. - I realized that I never shared photos from our latest flock. They arrived back in March and actually just graduated from brooders in my girls' room to living outside in the coop with the big chickens.

Wild Violet Lemonade (Water Kefir) Recipe & the Newest Additions to Our Flock

Snippets

Our school year begins Monday and I am still doing last minute preparations so this blog post is just little snippets of our lives the past couple of weeks. I have to thrown in here just how excited I am for this school year. I have been a rather reluctant homeschooler up til now (I am not saying I am head over heels still, but I am getting there). There is something about this year that has me so enthusiastic about schooling. Maybe because it is Little L's first real year, or how much I planned out, or maybe even the crazy strict homeschooling laws here that will keep me in line (somewhat joking there). I don't know, but I am going to embrace it! We'll start our day off with a special back to school surprise breakfast treat - waffles with whipped cream. 😋



Little L has been having fun digging for treasures on the banks of our creek. There is one special place her calls his mine where most of the treasures are found, especially after the flooding. He has quite a stash of old glass bottles from that mine but the ones you see above I just can not get clean. The top photo shows how they were when he dug them up and the bottom one is after I scrubbed them with baking soda, vinegar and thieves soap. I got them mostly clean but as you can see in the one bottle there is something stuck inside. Kevin thinks it might be old hardened stove polish (that is what the bottle once held). Any thoughts on how to get it out?



Made my first ever sauerkraut thanks to a great group of ladies I joined at our local library. It was very Home Fires-esque. I look forward to the next meeting. I was the youngest one there which was a bit funny but eh, that's okay. This is from the group's flyer:  "FULL CIRCLE FUTURE HARVEST is a group of like minded people that meet throughout the year to discuss what WE CAN DO to improve our lives as well as those around us. The programs are presented by the group and community members, including Master Gardeners and healthcare professionals. The group promotes the importance of having healthy soil and growing non-genetically modified seeds to produce nutritious fruits and vegetables, as well as explores the use of functional medicine. Applying these practices to our lives help us attain and maintain a higher quality of life."



Little L's latest creation out of Kevin's old construx - a helicopter. It has already been taken apart and made into a corn combine. He is obsessed with those right now. In September he gets to go visits one of Purple Grandma's friends and ride in one as he harvest the corn. That will be quite the big day for him.



There is a big possibility one of our chickens might be a rooster. This is Egger, one of Little L's chickens. We are a bit nervous about the outcome of this if Egger really is a rooster. Thankfully we live out in the country where we are zoned for roosters so either way we won't have to find him a new home. Phew!!

Snippets

Real Food on a Budget

Most of you already know of my love for real, organic food. I have been carrying on and on about it in this space for years now. I am also pretty sure you know of the importance of budgeting in my family - more people means more love but also more money spent on food. Let's face it - eating healthy, real food and saving money don't exactly go together, unless you think about the money you'll save in the future on doctor's bills. However I am talking about the present. The time when we only have X amount of money to spend on groceries that need to last us Y amount of days.

I confess as hard as I try to budget (and believe me I put a lot into it - hours each week), there are weeks where we'll eat like kings for a few days only to find out we are short on money towards the end of the week and end up having to eat ramen noodles to get by. We are essentially undoing all the good of the real food we previously ate with the processed junk. Ridiculous, right?! I just find myself confused and thinking something's gotta give.

With that in mind, you can imagine my excitement when I saw that one of my favorite authors is coming out with a book all about eating real food on a budget. 😍 Lisa Leake's new book 100 Days of Real Food on a Budget is available for pre-order now and will be released on Tuesday August 14th. I had the pleasure of getting an advance copy in the mail just the other day (I may or may not have jumped up and down and squealed like a schoolgirl when it arrived). I have been reading through it every chance I get. The recipes all look incredibly scrumptious and I look forward to trying them as soon as possible - the Southwest Salad is calling my name. For my fellow vegan and vegetarian friends this cookbook has quite a few recipes to meet our needs and most can easily be adapted (ie. use homemade sprouted almond milk in place of the cow's milk). It contains recipes for other dietary restrictions as well. Equally exciting though is the entire first chapter. Lisa shares her budgeting tricks, ways to lower your grocery bill, and meal plans that even include average costs as well as a meal plan template. She also has a supermarket coast comparison chart that really opened my eyes. Granted prices vary depending on where you are living but it still gives you a good idea of where to shop for particular items. Every family that wants to eat healthy but feels like they never could due to expense needs a copy of this book. It really can be done!

Here is a sample recipe from 100 Days of Real Food on a Budget. Click on it to see a bigger version.




For once I look forward to sitting down and planning our meal plan and budget for the upcoming week. I feel like perhaps now I can finally conquer the beast that is eating healthy while staying within our means.

I am giving away a copy of Lisa Leake's first book (a big game changer and personal favorite of my family) 100 Days of Real Food on my Instagram account. Be sure to check it out!

Real Food on a Budget

K's Birthday (and her apple doughnut recipe)

Hey there! I am still here, slowly crawling out of the hole of sickness and exhaustion. Apologies in advance for a scatterbrained post. That cold that Baby F had ended up making its rounds and we all came down with it minus Little L. We even got poor Purple Grandma sick, who came all the way out here from PA. We did quite a bit of celebrating the whole week of K's twelfth birthday (TWELVE!! Let's take a moment to acknowledge how old my baby is. 😲 My how she has grown.), including meeting up with some dear friends at Flock and Fiber, but for now I thought I would share just a few photographs.

  I am sad to say that all of our birthday supplies (including K's birthday crown, the birthday ring and our other traditions) are in storage as I never expected to be in this house for so long. Talk about total mama guilt. Thankfully K was understanding and I was able to pull off some of our other birthday traditions like her homemade apple doughnuts with hot apple cider for breakfast (recipe to follow). She requested zucchini lasagna for lunch, play time at the local park and her usual pumpkin soup for dinner. We had plans to go to the ocean, too, but it rained a lot that day (and would you believe all our rain gear is also in storage?!). However, we did make up for it later in the week, but more on those adventures later.

I have been asked by a few people on IG about our traditional homemade apple doughnuts so I thought I would share the recipe here. I found it online many, many years ago and unfortunately no longer have the source. If anyone happens to recognize it and knows where it is from please do let me know.

K's Birthday Apple Doughnuts

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups AP flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup brown sugar (we have substituted maple syrup for this in the past)
3 tablespoons coconut oil (or margarine)
1 egg equivalent (we use 1 tablespoon ground flax seed mixed in 2 tablespoons water)
1/4 cup apple cider
1/4 cup almond milk
1 grated apple (peeled first)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
oil for frying


Directions:

In a large bowl combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon. In your mixer, cream together sugar and butter and then beat in the egg replacer. Add the apple cider, almond milk and vanilla to the creamed mixture and beat all together. Add the dry mixture into the creamed mixture and beat until smooth. Gently stir the apple into the batter.
Cover and chill the dough for one hour.
Place half the dough on a floured board and knead lightly. Roll out to about 1/2" thick. Cut with a doughnut cutter if you have one. We use the 3 - 4" canning jar lids to cut ours out and then just cut a hole in the middle with a knife. Heat the oil in a wok or skillet to about 375 degrees. Fry the dough for 1 - 2 minutes on each side, until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Allow to cool and eat plain or dip them in confectioners sugar.  Serve with hot apple cider with cinnamon sticks as straws. Enjoy!


p.s. -
I usually get quite a few questions about her gifts so I thought I would do a run down here of what she received from us and extended family members.You'll notice a theme of Narnia/C.S. Lewis and books.

- Courage Dear Heart shirt and jean skirt (I had to get the woman's size!)
- A Family Guide to Narnia: Biblical Truths in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia
- Companion to Narnia
- Childhood Chronicles Before Narnia: Boxen (She loves writing stories so this seemed very appropriate)
- This lion pattern along with yarn and knitting needles
- St. Therese/Sts. Louis and Zelie Bracelet 
- Father Brown Readers 
- The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings set 

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K's Birthday (and her apple doughnut recipe)

Absent

Sorry, I just can't get enough of sleeping baby photos! Three out of my four children are under the weather as of right now, including my sweet baby. He is finally sleeping and I am about to go join him. I know I have been absent in this space a lot more than usual lately. I was hoping to get back to a better rhythm with blogging starting tonight but I might just have to push it off a bit longer. I am missing my routine. I have been pretty active over on Instagram, though. I admit I post there pretty regularly since there is more interaction. Blogging has become a bit lonely. Does anyone read blogs anymore? I still do, but I know I am not one to go with the crowd.

Absent