Krafty Kitten

So, preparing for the holiday season is well underway.  I have Big Guy all shopped for and we’re working on Little Guy. I have a major weakness when it comes to Christmas shopping though.  I like to keep going.  Big Guy gets upset with me every year and tries to limit how much I can buy for him.  This year, when I made my first purchase, he immediately got irritated and told me I spent too much, even though it was under $25.  I think it’s because he’s somewhat flustered, having a wife who tries to dote on him on the holidays.

I have to figure out what we’re getting everyone else for the holidays and work from there.   It’s a different type of holiday than last year.  It will be our first Christmas without the kids.  Luckily, we have Little Guy to focus on and we can work to make it good for him.

Right now, I am also trying to plan my Christmas Eve dinner and breakfast.  For breakfast on Christmas day, I am strongly considering a meal of “Night Before French toast” (recipe to follow), sausage, bacon, coffee, and biscuits.  But dinner the night before is usually a good meal.  My mom comes over and we have our Christmas Eve family gift exchange.  This year, it looks like I am making a turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, sweet potatoes… I’ll have a few finger food snacks and we’ll have a wonderful night.  I am excited and looking forward to it.

The big meal the night before enables me to play around the next day and not have to worry about meals.  And Christmas Day is one of my favorite things to do.

Night Before French Toast

1 loaf Texas Toast
lots of brown sugar
about 1 stick butter
4 eggs
2 cups milk
1/2 tsp cinnamon
dash nutmeg

Directions:

Melt butter and brown sugar together stirring frequently.

Spray a 9×13 pan (important!) with cooking spray. Pour mixture on the bottom so it’s about 1/8 inch thick. Lay the bread slices on top of it.

Mix together eggs, milk, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Pour egg mix over the bread. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

In the morning, preheat the oven to 350 and uncover the baking dish. Bake for 30 min. You can serve with toppings of your choice.

I’m still alive and kicking.  And around here, we’re preparing for the holiday season.  The past couple months have been exceedingly busy and involved classes, Halloween, and a dead computer.  Now, though, things seem to be settling down and I am trying to get a hold of myself in an attempt to prepare for the upcoming holiday season.

For Thanksgiving, we’re visiting family and eating heartily.  I made “Russian Tea Cakes” to take to both Big Guy’s parents and my mom’s meals.  These things are delectable, delicious, and completely fattening.  The recipe I follow is the same one my mom uses from Betty Crocker , with our own little differences of course.  We can never make a recipe without improving it somehow.

And on Friday, we did participate in the rampant consumerism that is Black Friday, but we also got something good out of it.  We ended up NOT buying at any of the major stores, for by the time we arrived, all the deals were gone.  What they had left was not enough to tempt us to brave those lines.  So, we went to breakfast and then went to Big Lots where there weren’t as many people and the deals were much better.  While there, we did find some good gifts for Little Guy to open Christmas Morning.

For the rest of the evening, I imagine we’ll play games, watch movies, and eat pizza.  And for that, I am truly thankful.

Russian Tea Cakes
1    cup butter or margarine, softened
1/2    cup powdered sugar
1    teaspoon vanilla
2 1/4    cups flour
3/4    cup finely chopped nuts (I used pecans)
1/4    teaspoon salt
Powdered sugar

1.    Heat oven to 350ºF.
2.    Mix butter, 1/2 cup powdered sugar and the vanilla in large bowl. Stir in flour, nuts and salt until dough holds together. (If it still seems dry, cover and place in a warm spot for a few minutes.  The butter will start to bind the dough together a bit more.)
3.    Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Place about 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet.
4.    Bake 10 minutes or until set but not brown. Remove from cookie sheet. Cool slightly on wire rack.
5.    Roll warm cookies in powdered sugar; cool on wire rack. Roll in powdered sugar again.

A chill is in the air as fall and winter begin to descend on Northern Indiana.  I should consider myself lucky that we had such pleasant weather lasting through September, but now I can see the leaves go from green to the yellow and red shades for fall.  The warm colors belie the coolness in the air though.  We had our first frost this week.

My tomatoes never did well, nor did anything else I planted this year.  I know part of it was the sheer distraction we experienced with the losses we suffered this summer, but I also blame the groundhog for eating my beans and the ground for sucking so hard.  There just isn’t enough good dirt to grow anything useful.  So, next year, Big Guy is building me a raised bed and we’re going to go through and add real dirt to the soul and hopefully do much better.

I finished my super secret project, which was a 9 square blanket for my sister-in-law for her birthday.  It turned out much better than I could have hoped for, considering the crunch I was under.  9 granny squares of 9 rounds, with each grouping 3 sets of triple stitches.  Clever enough for a birthday that occurred on September 9, 2009.

I’ve also been busy teaching.  I just finished a round of Composition 2 and am preparing to start a class for the basics.  This will be my first time teaching this particular class, so wish me luck!  I was telling Big Guy, I really do love teaching and it is rewarding to see people connect with the language.

We received our Angel Food Ministries box and already have made some tasty meals from it.  My personal favorite involved pork chops, pears and fresh sage from my garden.  It was truly delicious and the pears complemented the pork beautifully.  I also made chicken and beans in the crock-pot because we received two HUGE chicken breasts so I used one breast with beans and I think the other might be slated for some homemade chicken soup.  Yum!

Well, Big Guy’s job situation was finally clarified and his hours were cut.  Down to practically half.  He’s now on contractor status but can only work a total of 24 hours per week, no benefits.  So, we’re implementing some serious budgeting measures.

We’ve gone back to ordering from Angel Food Ministries and I am going to prepare weekly menus.  Angel Food Ministries is an excellent source for good cheap food.  $30 and you get an order of food that is billed as “enough to feed a family of four for a week”.  This month’s order comes with steaks, chicken, pork chops, ground beef, veggies and fruit, eggs and a dessert.  It’s pretty well balanced and you can come up with ways to stretch it.  We order one box at a time and can generally make it last the whole month.

I’ve also got a running tally of our funds on an excel spreadsheet to keep track of our budget.  We’re going to run into some issues because what we’re bringing in is less than what we need per month.   If we’re careful with the payout for his vacation time, we may be able to limp along until he either gets another job or they decide they need him full time.

He is looking for another job, both full and part time, and I’m working on teaching.  If we can keep it up, things should be OK.

I recently dumped the photos from my camera.  It had been a while and now my batteries are dead so it’s time to recharge them.  Luckily, I managed to get pictures of a great, relatively cheap meal that Big Guy and I partook in.

We had taken our friend shopping since her car quit working.  While we were at Kroger’s, we looked at some of the stuff that was “priced for quick sale”.  They had to get rid of it or else it was going to go bad.  This included 2 salmon filets and 2 portabello caps. We also had 3 bell peppers in the fridge, which we sliced with some onion and then grilled the entire set.  We used olive oil and went very light on the seasonings.

It was amazingly fresh and delicious.

I also spent most of today cleaning.  I managed to get our family room in reletively OK shape.  I vacuumed, picked up, and threw out all the excess papers that we seem to hang on to, “just in case”.  We’ve got company tomorrow, arriving for a D&D game.  And there was no way I was going to have company in our house when it looked like a tornado had decimated the place.

We’re going to start buckling down now that things are slowing down, and hopefully, we’ll be able to come to some sort of peace in the house as well.  We’ll pack up some of the kids’ clothes and toys and take them to Goodwill.  It’s important that we start reclaiming our lives and moving forward.

We’re quite inundated with flowers here on the Urban homestead.  My bean plants and tomatoes are flowering, as are my herbs.  I have pale pink blooms on the oregano, my purple sage flowers are fading out, but the lemon balm has a bunch of tiny white blooms and even the basil was attempting to blossom.  I had to pinch the blooms off the basil to keep it alive and I clipped some of the oregano blooms because they were just so very pretty.  They are currently sitting in a vase on my kitchen window sill.

We went and saw my in-laws today to help with a potential computer issue.  Big Guy and I are a pretty good team when it comes to dealing with computer problems.  He knows how to handle hardware difficulties, I know how to work around software issues.  We ate dinner there and chatted while we got the computer adjusted and then came home.

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the scent of the oregano blooms.  They don’t smell like oregano, but instead have a very light, floral fragrance.  The bees like them too, considering they are bouncing from plant to plant drinking them in.  Another plant that’s drawn surprising visitors are my petunias.  They’ve brought some little hummingbirds to our yard who flit from blossom to blossom and then zip off.

Some of the wildflower seeds we planted earlier have also sprouted and started to bloom and seem to contain petunia and marigold seeds.  It was rather amusing when we discovered that because we planted marigolds and petunias in the same spot last year and were shocked when we found more marigolds and petunias there this year!

Little Guy and I are working on an art project, a paper plate fish.  I got the idea for it from watching Sprout.

You take a paper plate and cut out a triangle for the mouth.  Then you glue the triangle on the opposite end to make a tail.  Let the child color it and decorate it.  Then, punch a hole through the top and attach a string to hang from the ceiling or a high up place for a swimming decoration.  Little Guy is loving the coloring part.

I’m also going to try and get the last batch of peach jam made today.  I only have a bit left to do and then I will can them and (hopefully) sell a few.  That is, if Big Guy doesn’t devour them all first in the name of “quality control”.  I’ve got one of the jars from the first batch listed on Artfire .  I think this batch may be more peach-y due to the fact that the peaches sat for a few days longer.  It also has some larger chunks in it.  Now, I hope it just sets.  That seems to be a common problem between first and second batches for me.  I don’t think I do anything differently, but my second batches never seem to set.

And, my tomatoes are finally flowering.  We’re going to have a nice crop of tomatoes when they ripen.  The pumpkins are getting larger as well, but not flowering yet.  The beans are also growing nicely, I think the past few days of rain have really made a difference.

One of the other things I need to prepare for is the Harvest Market at Woodlawn Nature Center here in Elkhart.  Mom and I have plans to sell some of our homegrown, homemade goods.  She has a ton of eggs to sell, I plan on bunching my lemon balm, oregano, and sage and selling it.  I also have hairbands, birds, and other things I can sell.  I can make small aprons for little girls, pillows and lovies, and sell some of the extraneous junk around the house, like books and knick-knacks.

It’s finally sunny.  And, of course, it is a day I have to teach.  Oh well.  I’ll do what I can.

The peach jam is delicious.  Apparently Big Guy had a peach jam sandwich for dessert last night, had one for breakfast this morning and nearly had one for dessert after lunch.  I have blueberry sun tea brewing and life is pretty good.

We bought a pack of chicken thighs on sale from Sav-A-Lot, 6 lbs of chicken thighs for $7.  We got 10 thighs in that package which I have seperated into packs of 2 thighs each and frozen.  That’s a good five meals there.  We can grill them and add a baked potato, toss them with pasta or rice and veggies, so many other things.

Big Guy and I buckled down and got all the dishes done… and then promptly dirtied a bunch in our quest for the tasty peach jam.  And trying to keep up in the family room seems to be a losing battle with a 3 year old who has discovered the joys of driving his cars across the barren tundra of grey carpet. And then forgets about them.

His new “cars” table is one of his favorite things.  It has a road on it which is apparently used for crashing EVERYTHING on.  And his books are also scattered around it which means he’s been devouring books just like his mom and dad.  Good boy!

My Entrecard time is running out.  Today.com has decided to pull the plug on Entrecard since some people were allowing paid ads to run, a violation of today.com’s terms.  Now all of us have to remove our widgets once the ad progression runs out.  It’s frustrating that those of us who behaved are being punished by those who chose to violate the terms, but there you go.

And, the contest is still up and running with no entries!  Time’s running out!

Big Guy found peaches on sale at the local grocery store and requested that I work my culinary magic and make him some peach preserves.  Since I am a good, wonderful and amazing wife (and so modest too) and since I enjoy doing the whole homemade goodies thing, I decided to acquiesce and this morning began the preparations needed for delicious, delicious homemade preserves.

I decided I was going to deviate somewhat from the recipe included in the “Certo” box and leave the skins on my peaches.  I knew it would lead to a much darker, pinker color but my bigger fear was that the jam would not set.  I cut open the first box of peaches and began pitting them.

Now, pitting peaches seems reletively easy.  You take a sharp knife and follow the peach groove all the way around the pit.  Then you take the fruit and twist it like an oreo.  In a perfectly ripe peach, this leads to one half popping off the pit with no problems.  Then you just pull the pit out of the other half.  However, in over-ripe peaches, your attempt to follow this path will lead to cutting the it in half and a more difficult attempt to get the pit out.  In under-ripe peaches, the peach doesn’t want to let go of the pit and you have to fight to get the fruit off the seed.

We discovered the reason these peaches were on sale so very cheap ($2 for 5 lbs) was probably due to the fact that the bulk of them were over and under-ripe.  Imagine my frustration as I had to alternate between digging the remnants of a pit out AND scraping the fruit off the pit in order to get enough fruit in the food processor for chopping.

However, I did eventually succeed and with sugar, lemon juice and some boiling and pectin later, I had a few jars of peach jam.  We managed to get 4 and a half pints out of the first box of peaches.  It may seem like a whole lot of effort for just a few jars of jam…  But let me tell you, we tasted some and it is DEFINITELY worth it.  I sealed up the pints in a water bath canner and they are sitting out to finalize the seal.  Let me tell you, the sound of the “tink” as the seals pressurize is an inordinately pleasing sound.

We had some leftover peach mash as well, and I ask you… What is an Urban Homesteader to do with extra processed fruit but turn it into wine.  By July 25th, we should have a tasty, tasty batch of peach wine to drink in the waning, hot summer nights.  I’ll let you know how it turns out!

We now have a full on, soaking rain.  This is definitely what the plants need.  My pumpkins are doing excellently, and my tomatoes are growing well too.  Little Guy and I had a mini crop of strawberries too which were sweet and delicious.

A couple days ago, Little Guy developed a slight fever accompanied with thirst and tiredness.  To talk to him, nothing else was wrong.  He doesn’t hurt, his stomach isn’t bothering him, he’s just tired and wants snuggles…  Until the ibuprofen I gave him kicked in.  Then he was back to his old self.  He seems to have come through it for the most part today.  He’s still a little run down and in need of a nap but no fever today.

Mom came over to visit and brought some frozen pizzas.  So we all sat and talked and ate frozen pizza.  Little Guy, of course, devoured it.  He considers pizza to be an amazing food and entirely deserving of it’s own food group.  That may be why one of my favorite quick recipes is an English Muffin Pizza.

All it requires is one box of English Muffins, split.  One jar of spaghetti sauce.  A Bag of mozzerella cheese.  And a container of pepperoni along with any other pizza toppings.  We’ve used onions, mushrooms, black olives…

Heat up the broiler.  Spoon the spaghetti sauce out onto the split english muffins, top with pizza toppings and cheese.  I also sprinkle a little italian seasoning and garlic on top.  Broil them for about 10 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly and browning.  Pull them out, let them sit for a couple minutes, and serve.  Easy and quick pizzas.