Amish Baking

I have been really enjoying baking from a family cookbook that my Amish cousins gave us for Christmas last year.  They make everything from scratch, so I am able to use the organic flour that is not enriched and it is so much better for all of us without the artificial vitamins added to it.  The recipes are so simple and so good.  Here are a few pictures of what I have made so far.

Corn bread

Pizza with Rich's homemade pepperoni sausage

Apple pie with a crumb topping.

The pie and the corn bread turned out so good that I baked another bunch of muffins and a pie and took it over to Rich's folks house for Sunday dinner.

This is how I make our cinnamon raisin bread.

 

My bread has a yellow color because I add turmeric to the dough.  I found out that turmeric makes the vitamin B and iron that is naturally in flour more bio available.  Between the turmeric and the bread starter I use, with all the probiotics in it, makes a wonderful and healthy bread.

 

This loaf turned out perfect!  We love to make French toast out of it.

 

This are my new chocolate chip cookies I made.  I put the recipe together myself.  I am using Sorghum flour in my pancakes and cookies now.  It is a gluten free flour.  I had to change the regular chocolate chip cookie recipe as with sorghum, it needs more body to the recipe or it will make the cookies super thin and crisp.  Here is the recipe:

 

2 1/2 cups sorguhm flour, 1/4 cup ground flax seed, 1 tsp baking soda, 2 tsps baking powder, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 cup butter- softened, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup of sourdough starter, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 1- 12 oz package of chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and set aside. Combine brown sugar, granulated sugar, butter and vanilla and beat until creamy. Add eggs and starter and mix well. Add dry ingredients and mix well. Stir in chocolate chips. Drop by spoonfuls on cookie sheet with parchment paper. Bake 8 - 10 minutes.

 

 

Ellie Baby

This is Ellie, Mary's beloved kitty.  Her piano teacher gave her to us in March.  She is half Himalayan and half tabby cat.  She is the sweetest cat.  We all love her.  Last week Ellie started having some trouble.  She was going to her litter box every 5 minutes and only passed a few drops of urine and looked in pain.  It was on a Saturday night and we had to go to the emergency vet.  We were glad they were close by.  It took a super long time to see a vet (just like the emergency rooms for people sometimes).  It was 2 am before they got it all figured out and we got to take her home.  They tested her urine and her blood.  They found out she was very healthy with no bladder infection but her urine had crystals in it and was causing her a lot of pain and irritation in her bladder and urinary tract.  So they gave us some pain medicine and some special food that would dissolve the crystals and keep it from happening again.  I guess some cats develop this when their food does not have enough protein in it.  So this special food has lots more protein.  It took her few days to slowly switch over to the new food.  We mixed it with her old food until she got used to it.  Every 12 hours we had to get a pill down her throat by prying open her mouth, dropping the pill in covered with canned cat food and clamping her mouth shut until she swallowed it.  Then we had to squirt some pain medicine on her upper gum area.  This went on for 3 days.  She is such a sweet cat, she never scratched or fought to get away.  In fact on the vet's notes on the paper work they sent home, noted what a friendly and sweet cat she was.  Well, the new food worked and she is back to her normal self now.  We are all so thankful, especially Mary. 

Special Days

We celebrated Rich's birthday.  Mary had fun decorating the cake. 

She put chocolate chips in the swirls.

We got this really cool candle deal.  It had a sparkler in the center that lit the candles and then they unfolded down into a flower.  It then rotated and played happy birthday.

We figured Dad needed special birthday candles as he is 62 this year and in a month he will retire and we are so excited!

Reading the cards

Two days later we started homeschool.  Mary is in the 5th grade now.  So hard to believe!

She has a study buddy now.  Ellie is such a sweet heart.  She loved the sunflowers I picked from the garden.  We are looking forward to this school year.  So many wonderful things to be learning.

Monarch Butterflies

We had a wonderful experience this summer with our butterfly garden that we planted this spring.

We were out looking at our beautiful flowers when a mother monarch butterfly came and landed on our milkweed and layed  her eggs.

 

We brought them inside and put them in our butterfly cage.

and waited

about 4 days

and out hatched little 5 tiny caterpillars.  They ate their egg casing first.

Then they went on to eat the hairs on the milkweed

until they got big enough to eat some holes in the leaf itself.

They grew very quickly.

They shed their skins several times and then would eat the skin.  Nothing was wasted!

They were so cute and fun to watch.

Five siblings all eating on the milkweed we brought in for them.

After 2 weeks of feeding they shed their skin for the last time. and became a beautiful crysallis

10 days later they broke out into a butterfly.  Such a wonderful and amazing transformation.

We let them hang outside on our morning glory vine to dry their wings.

One we put on my orchid plant for some pictures.

They were very tame while they waited for their wings to dry.

Mary had so much fun holding them and looking at them up close

Finally we put them in the little garden where their life began.

In a short while they took to the skies, heading South

It was so rewarding to see them fly and know that we had helped and protected 5 beautiful butterflies to become strong adults and continue their migration. 

The lovely Monarchs, amazing creatures of God's beautiful world!

Solar Eclipse 2017

We had a lot of fun with the eclipse today.  Yesterday we made our viewing boxes so we could see the eclipse without having to look at the sun.   

We made a yummy eclipse breakfast.  We cut our homemade bread in the shape of a sun and our spam in the shape of the moon.

Mary had fun cutting that all up for me while I scrambled the eggs with the leftover spam pieces.

This is how it all looked on our plate.  It sure was yummy and Mary got such a kick out of it!

Our boxes worked out really well.

I took a few shots of the sun over my back.  It has been really smokey hear because of all the forest fires, so it made a little bit of a filter.

This is right when it was covered by 93%.  That was as much as we got here in Southern Oregon.  It was like sunset but it was 10:15 in the morning.  It definitely got colder as the sun's light was blocked.

Here is my shadow.  It is amazing how much light the sun puts out even if it is only 7%.

Another shot of the box viewer.

Mary had a lot of fun.  I had seen one eclipse before and so had Rich but it was a very long time ago.  This was Mary's first and she was just a little bit excited.  lol

One last look before we went in and watched the NASA videos on the computer.

Nap time after the eclipse.  It sure was a lot of excitement even for our little pup, Mac.