Healthy Granola

    This recipe is originally from a cookbook entitled "More With Less". That poor old book! It's been through at least five moves, burned on two different stoves, and stained twenty shades of brown. The granola recipe page, which before now had been in two pieces, actually tore clean out of the book today. What a well-loved cook book!  This recipe isn't directly out of "More with Less" because we've tweaked it quite a bit to make it just what we want.
    This granola recipe calls for lots of seeds and nuts, but isn't hard and fast. Try more less ... or different seeds depending on your needs or tastes.

     It's very important to get the oil, honey, and vanilla smooth, of it's separated like it prefers to stay then some bites of the granola will be extremely sweet while others will be really oily. It takes a lot of arm strength with the whisk, but hang in there!

  Mix, MIX, MIX! Sometimes this part take a couple people (especially in the 8x batch) if we can snag Dad we have him take a turn with the spoon until consistently mixed. Then we take a breather before spooning into the baking pans    

    At this point my brothers and sisters like to dip a bowlful and eat it raw. Some eat it with milk and others just like it plain. I prefer it cooked, but not with milk. I don't even eat it with a spoon. I put it in a cup and dump out a mouthful at a time. This is easy for me to eat breakfast while working with a keyboard or papers that i don't want to spill on ... it also means less dishes! 

   After all that timer setting, adding this and that, and mixing every-so-often you're ready to have the pan cooling on the counter filling the house with it's warm aroma ... and even more ready to dip a bowlful.

Ingredients:

    4 cups old fashioned rolled oats

    1/2 cup sesame seeds

    3/4 tsp salt

    1 tsp cinnamon

    1/2 cup honey

    1/2 cup vegetable oil

    1/2 tsp vanilla
    1/2 cup coconut

    1 cup chopped nuts

Ingredients (8x Batch):
    32 cups old fashioned rolled oats
    3 cups sesame seeds
    4 cups sunflower seeds
    2 cups pumpkin seeds
    2 TB salt
    4 TB cinnamon
    6 cups honey
    4 cups oil (we used coconut oil)
    4 tsp vanilla
    4 cups coconut
    10 cups chopped nuts (We used almonds, but have used pecans before)
  
Directions: 

    Mix oats, seeds, salt, and Cinnamon together in a large bowl. In a separate bowl add the honey, oil, and vanilla together. They will be separated so whisk together until they are smooth. Combine dry and liquid before the liquid separates again.

    Spread into baking dish, you may need more than one. Depth doesn't matter, it only means you'll be cooking it longer. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes. Remove, add nuts & coconut, and stir. Bake for 15 more minutes. Remove and stir. Bake for additional 10 minute increments until it's the way you like it. 

    Wait until it cools before putting it into storage containers. The granola will get dryer and more crunchy with time. Keep this in mind when you declare it cooked enough.

Corn Starch Custard

    Today is my birthday and my family knows I love Corn Starch Custard. I slept in and woke up to wonderful smells. This time we made it with milk thick with cream AND bright yellow Jersey Cow butter, both from our Amish friends ... it was a melt-in-your-mouth masterpiece!

 

     The custard is made on the stove. It takes quite a while to thicken so don't lose the faith ten minutes into the process. Believe me, the outcome is worth the patience!

   Toast the bread ... we have a wheat allergy in the household (Guess Who? :) so we toasted whole wheat and spelt bread and made separate piles on the plate. Don't forget to butter the toast, the butter seems to tie the whole meal together.

    Wha-la! (is there a legitimate spelling for that? :). Cut a piece off your toast with your fork, soak it in custard, and pop it in. Don't forget to give it time to melt in mouth

Ingredients: 

   1 cup milk

   1 egg

   1 TB cornstarch

   Honey or sugar to taste

   Cinnamon to taste

   A dash or two of salt 

   3 TB butter 

   1 TB vanilla

Directions:

   Add everything except the butter and vanilla to the pot and stir well to mix the eggs throughout before turning on the heat. Cook on a low heat, at first slowly increasing it until it hovers before a boil. Milk curdles when it boils so don't let the mixture get too hot. Also, keep that spoon moving so nothing burns.  It will thicken as it grows hotter. When you see it reach the consistency of custard turn off the heat and add the vanilla and butter. 

   Toast bread and butter it if you like. Serve the custard warm over the toast and eat with a fork.  

Amish School Benefit Auction

    Every year, before school starts, each district has School Auction. Items are brought in or donated from companies, families, or community members and all proceeds go to help the school. Lots of people turn out for the event to socialize, eat some good Amish food, buy the gorgeous Amish furniture, and support the area's school.

 

     I had a sausage burger with mustard, catchup, and Swiss cheese (sue me :) and putter pecan ice cream (sue me again :). MMM ...so good!  

    After eating, my brother and I just walked around and watched & looked at everything we could while mom and dad stayed in the main bidding tent. I loved looking through the quits. I had to wear latex gloves to handle them, but they were absolutely stunning. This year my favorite quilt was a Mariner's Star pattern in various browns. It went for almost five hundred dollars ... someday I'll just bite the bullet and make one. 

    Our bid number was 503 and to bid you held the number high above your head. Dad bought a hickory rocker (lot # 54-9) with that number. Mom bought 20 pounds of bananas (at only 6 cents a pound!) and a flat of pineapples ... she didn't she to bid for those, they were a 'Buy Now' sort of deal.

I love listening to the Amish auctioneers. You actually have to train to be one. They literally sound like banjos with how fast and musical they make their voices. They really do a good job getting the crowd excited.

A Sea of "Slow Moving Vehicle" signs.

And Who Pulls All Those "Slow Moving Vehicle" Signs?

   I have to pinch myself every day. Do I actually live here? Do I actually live here? The answer is Yes ... and I'm so grateful. My family has truly been blessed.    

The Nauvoo Pageant

    This summer is my last at home so we wanted to do something as a family to bring us closer together. We applied for the Nauvoo Pageant in early fall of 2011 and were accepted as Gold Cast. The Nauvoo Pageant depicts the early history of  the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) and their chapter in Nauvoo Illinois. Being a cast member is a week long commitment, in 90 degree weather, in the thick of Mississippi mosquitoes ... but the experience was so spiritually uplifting and emotionally fulfilling that the whole family wants to reapply. 

    The Friday before we left our Bishop gave us each a blessing and set us all apart as pageant cast members. Our first day in Nauvoo was a busy one. We registered, met the director & pageant president, learned the county fair dance steps, got fitted for costumes, learned how to preform and sing the finale, met our district leaders & fellow district members, and preformed int the dress rehearsal.However, we soon realized that every day was just as busy.

Now That's a Prairie Wardrobe!

    Women got to wear dresses, petticoats, & bloomers while men got pants, shirts, suspenders, & vests. If a woman's hair was too short to style they received caps or bonnets, and if your family were farmers then the boys got hats. Our family were Merchants and our assigned color was purple.

The Gold Cast heading to the stage for a group photo.

    There are about two hundred and fifty performers together: Two family casts (one hundred participants each) and a core cast (about thirty men and women who auditioned for the main roles) and a handful of preforming missionaries (young men and women who shared the gospel through song and dance). There are chairs enough to accommodate an audience of two thousand!

    We didn't only have to wear the 1880's clothes, but also the hairstyles. One of the costume directors declared, "Hairspray is the glue that holds this pageant together!"

Rocking the 1800's hairstyles!

Elayne S. Dalton ... General Young Women President

    Every night we had a district meeting and cast & crew meeting. Districts were made up of two families and a core cast member who led the gospel discussions. Our district leader was Melanie Cartwright who played Anna Fordham in the pageant. The cast & crew meeting included all pageant members (core cast, preforming missionaries, bagpipe band, stage crew, and the two family casts). We would sing hymns, recite the standard of truth, and listen to a few short talks. Once night we were honored to hear from Elayne S. Dalton.

Rag Dall Station

    Every night Before there was a county fair with lots of fun family oriented activities for the audience to come and do before the pageant. There were handcart rides, stilts, branding, log sawing, stick balls, puppet making and more. Our family was in charge of the rag doll station. My brothers didn't think so much of the idea, but soon they came up with rag action figures and rag cowboys and rag super heroes. We almost had more little boys visit our station than little girls. 

Within our cast strangers soon became friends and friends soon became family.

Gospel Sisters

    We had a taste of Zion in Nauvoo. Within the first few hours our cast became a family. Mothers would see their little ones on a young man's shoulders or young woman's lap and not even bat an eye. We held umbrellas over each other in the rain, fanned each other in the heat, found band aides for each others scrapes even though we really didn't know each other. All the uncomfortable costumes, all the sweat, and all the thousands of mosquito bites just brought us together and made us one in love and purpose. 

 

Jeff and Aurora Dickamore: The couple that played Joseph and Emma Smith in the pageant

    Every night we would sing the hymn "The Spirit of God" with all energy of heart with the Nauvoo Temple lighting up the background and the huge stage lights lighting up the our faces. The spirit was electrifying! At the conclusion of the pageant we would mingle with the audience and find out what they thought and how the felt. If they weren't a member of our church we asked them if they would like to learn more. If they were a member of the church we asked them to think of someone who they could share the gospel with.

Family photo in front of the Nauvoo Temple

    I couldn't have asked for a better family vacation. Sure my head was plastered in hairspray or drenched in sweat all the time, sure I was swallowing mayflies as I sang on the stage, sure I didn't get but six hours of sleep each night, sure I will always have mosquito bite scars on my calves, BUT, I will always remember Nauvoo as a time of joy, love, and peace. My testimony was strengthened and my life redirected. The gospel is true!

There Were Never Such Devoted Sisters

     I am especially grateful for my Ever-Devoted-Sister tonight. It was the first hay cutting of the year and as we were coming home from Youth activities at the chruch the lighting was perfect. 

    "Oh, let's get a few pictures on the hay bales." I begged. She was more than happy to oblige. My "few pictures" turned into "many pictures" as we had fun trying fun settings on the camera and catching different angles.

 

 

    All kinds of weather ... we stick together ... the same in rain or sun ... two different faces ... but it tight places ... we think and we act as one ... uh-hu! Love U Sis! 

Tapping Our Sugar Maples

    This is my favorite family activity ... no doubt about it, and it's so sad that it was my last time for a while, thanks to college. In late February of next year I'm going to have a wave of home sickness and my roommates will think I'm nuts as I find myself a sugar maple on campus and use my hairpins to drill a hole and tap my maple syrup.

    When the days are above freezing and the nights still below freezing the maple sap runs and we get busy. It's possible to tap in the autumn, and some of our neighbors do, but the weather is more unpredictable in the autumn so we tap all we need in the early spring.  

 

    We only tap a tree if it's diameter is ten inches or more. You have to tap at least 4 inches to the side and 8 inches below all previous holes. The hole should be about 2 inches deep, and a centimeter wide to accommodate the tap. 

   We can tell a sugar maple by it's bark most of the time, but the sap doesn't run in any other tree so if you've drilled into an oak or a hickory by mistake it is easy to immediately tell because the sap doesn't start to run down the tree. We know our woods well enough to know which trees produce the most, and which trees need to be given a break.

Is There a Rhyme of Reason to this Madness?

    We run tubing from the tap into five gallon buckets that sit on the forest floor. To place a tap just hammer it into the hole until you feel the strikes with the hammer grown solid. Then you know you have it it deep enough. We then run the tubing into a hole in five gallon bucket lid and secure it on top of the bucket so rain and bugs can't get inside.

  

    One tree produces an average of two gallons on a warm day that proceeds a freezing night (that's the best weather conditions for tapping) and about ten gallons in a season. We usually gather the sap every day and take it up to the house where we slowly boil it down.

     We use this pan to boil down the sap because it has a nice amount of surface area and gets very hot. We also love the spout at the end. I think we got it from an Amish auction at a sensational price. But after it sits in the basement for a year it really needs a scrub! 

 

     It take forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. Our family needs about fave gallons a year, but that includes all the half pints we give away as Christmas gifts (about a half gallon in all). So that means two hudnred gallons of sap and twenty plus trees to tap just for our family. it's a lot of work.

    You don't want to store your sap for than two or three days becuase the bactiria starts to eat the sugar content and it because a waste of your time to boild down all that water with so little sugar.

    We actually built our furnace out of cinder block and leftover firebrick from building the fireplace in our house. It works well, but is really ugly. Someday we want to build something permanent and much nicer looking.

    We start the fire early in the morning and work in shifts until late at night when we cover the pan and go to sleep. This lasts for as long as the season lets us, with our only breaks taken on Sundays. The person manning the boiler has to wheel their wood over from the shed (the best wood to use is elm because it burns very HOT), cut it into smaller pieces with the ax or hatchet, and feed the fire almost constantly. They also have to add sap so the boiling mixture doesn't get below four inches deep. It could burn otherwise. 

    The last of the boiling is very technical so we do the last bit in the kitchen. The syrup is ready to can when the sugar content reaches between sixty-six and sixty-seven percent of the mixture. We know it reaches this stage when the liquid rises to two hundred nineteen degrees Fahrenheit, (depending on your elevation). 

    When it reaches that point we filter it to remove the 'sugar sand' and ladle it into sterilized jars before putting it through a quick hot water bath and storing it in the food storage room.

A Pup's First Christmas Eve

    The pups are all one month old now

    It's incredible how much they've grown. We've already decided which two we are going to keep and in a month or so we'll give the rest away. They are all mutts so we aren't going to sell them, but we do want to make sure each one has a nice home to grow old in.

    This little guy is one we're keeping. His name is Shaska -- after the sword. He's the second largest, but he's the most mellow out of all of them -- and we love his coloring the best -- it makes me think of a husky or another kind of snow dog.

    Shaska and Jules playing together

   The other puppy that we're keeping is Jules (pictured above) she's the smallest and the smartest of the bunch, she's already become an incredible escape artist. We've made a little yard for the puppies outside of the shed with hog wire, but no matter what we do, she manages to get out and lead the rest out. We've started checking on the puppies every hour to herd them back into their yard.

    Well, today is Christmas Eve and as a special gift we wanted to bring the puppies into the kitchen to enjoy it with us. Mom and Dad agreed and we spent an incredibly fun evening all together.

    It's going to be sad to see all of these puppies go to other homes, but we are all just grateful that we got to have them in the first place. It's been a wonderful two months. I think that every child ought to know what it feels like to raise a puppy. 

   There's nothing quite like it.