Wild Thangs

Makes my heart ‘Sang.  Makes everythang..groovy…too.

Look what Wild Thang is growing in my garden!   Vining right up a tall bean pole stake. This is not a bean. My mom says they are Moon flowers.  Aren’t they beautiful?

Learning Their Way Around the Labels

this post is scheduled for july 5  on the Latter-day Homeschool blog but with less pictures

No cow’s milk in this brand of semi-sweet chips.
I’ve learned that it will cost me about $900 to acquire
my  year’s supply of these.

In our house, as my children are learning to cook, we have to concern ourselves with labels on packaged foods.  We have milk allergies in our household and have learned to work around it.  They are learning to read the labels with the listing of ingredients and understand them.   We have also learned that the majority of pre-packaged food has what we are allergic to: milk, whey, lactose, casein and certain ingredients we prefer to avoid.   And to do that, we mostly cook from scratch.

Now, mind you, my children are high school age and older and some are disabled.  It is definitely time to teach them about cooking, food labels, ingredients,  proper nutrition (the interest is now there, also) and it’s a good idea to teach these things whether our children  have allergy issues or not.  I wrote a post for the blog a few months back, Teaching the Older Ones to Cook, (tips, links, USDA Food Pyramid, what works for us)  and was asked to expand on this from the label reading perspective.  I didn’t think about that in the original post, because, as Dana mentions to me often enough, some things are just second nature to me—such as reading the label and teaching about it.

When we go shopping, we look at the label of pre-packaged foods before we toss it in the cart. Even if something is a “safe” food for us, we have learned that manufactures will change their ingredients from time to time and so the label must be checked anyway (my tell-tale sign will be seeing red, cracked hands, runny noses and earaches among my children).  One brand of bread may have some form of milk products in all of it’s many types except for one.

And just because the package says,”Dairy-free” does not mean it is.  I have found many of these products contain Casein, which is the protein in milk and , actually, the culprit for my family.  My children look for these ingredients.

Now, I’m not going to take it upon myself to tell you how to eat or shop or what is acceptable. That is, of course, your decision .  I teach them this:

• The Word of Wisdom (D&C 89)
• Food Pyramid (see the above link for the link to USDA food pyramid activities)
• Look at the Allergy Warning at the end of the ingredient listing. Does it have something we are allergic to?
• Read the rest of the ingredient label anyway, to be sure.
• What is the first ingredient, which is also the main ingredient? Sugar or a whole grain?  White or Wheat?
• Where is the sugar listed?
• How many calories from fat?
• What type of fat or oil is acceptable to us?
• Does it contain certain ingredients we, in our family, want to avoid? (some additives and preservatives give me a headache or leave me feeling weird)
• Does this box mix look so good, we don’t care how much fat or sugar it has in it?
• Would we be better off to just make it ourselves? (depends on how yummy it is and enticing the picture) 
• I’ve read more than once that if you want to buy Organic produce, do so for what you eat most frequently.
• Quality of the product is important to me and I teach it. I don’t buy it just because it is cheap.  My father taught me that you get what you pay for. So, yes, I go for the Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips (no cow’s milk~Hershey and Nestle have dairy) over some Yak-ola sub-store brand that tastes, to me, like plastic pen caps dipped in brown crayon juice.  (Forgive me if I have offended anyone.  Personal opinion and choice. And yes, I will eat your Chocolate Chip cookies made with the 99c bag of chocolate chips)

If I bring a box mix home, Katie reaches for the box and reads the label. Success!!  Buddy wants to learn new things now and helps more in the kitchen. More Success!  Patrick can read the recipe and make it without burning the house down.  

Here are a few recipe links to how we get around our dairy allergies (from my Flamboyant Gourmets blog):

Buddy, my 20-year-old Aspie,  wanted to learn to help us (!!!) make Spanakopita and asked me to make a cheese-free version (!!).  This recipe has step-by-step photos, which makes cooking easier for my ganglings. Never too many visuals.

My gang loves Macaroni and cheese so we make……Macaroni and Un-cheese. 

You will find my recipe for home made Taco Meat (no mixes) in with this recipe for Shepherd’s Pie. You will find I add cheese to this for those of us who are not so milk allergic.  I leave the cheese out for the others.

Fudge

I have not learned to make bread that my ganglings will eat in a sandwich and am requesting YOUR recipe for a great whole wheat bread that you have mastered and are proud of.  Will you share? 

How do you teach cooking to your children? Any special tips?

Teresa is a widow, with 4 children, one high school age homeschooler, and 2 adult homeschoolers on the Autism Spectrum.  They embrace their Inner Rubber Chickens on a regular basis with a good, tight squeeze, leaving a puff of feathers in their wake.  You can find their family squeezings, ponderings and a few homeschool posts at Wockenflock Daze.

I Should Have, Indeed, Stayed In Bed

Upon arising this morning, I realized that I should, indeed, have just spent yesterday in bed, reading.  Everything i touched yesterday morning just turned into a mess.  (or could I say it was a Picasso day, and call it art?)

My poached eggs got full of water, my stove burner is finicky, working only when the circumstances are just so….like, the barometric pressure being just right, and the humidity can’t be above 98%, the moon must be in the 7th house and Jupiter aligned with Mars

,

and Love steers the stars….etc. (who is ready to belt out the next line?) I decided then that I should stay in bed and just read.  But, did I listen to myself? No. 

I did just kind of fiddle around,load ’a laundry, which required dumping the wash water into the garden because the septic is blocked between the above ground pipe and the tank itself (things are kind of ugly around here).  Luckily, we still have a bedside commode that we can put in the bathroom for times such as these.  Patrick loves the job of emptying it.

I stayed up late (10:15 pm, mind you) canning tomatoes, being constructive, or so I thought, and ended up putting twice the amount of salt called for in my canned tomatoes, which I had forgotten to do in the first place along with forgetting the lemon juice.  So I re-opened my jars (before processing, which was good), added the lemon juice and too much salt.

I added a Basil leaf and a small sprig of Oregano in 2 of the red tomato jars. They sure do look pretty. Maybe I’ll enter them in the county fair, calling them, “Sea-Salted Tomatoes.”

I also remembered that I forgot to turn off the sprinkler in the garden last night.

 
(photo property of Ruth Lehman)

Just Paint it Pink

I bought a folding chair at a second hand shop that just cried out to be painted pink.

Patrick primed and spray painted.  Katie stenciled.

Getting started….

Wah-lah! Love it!!

Next we will spray it with clear enamel.

Going Green~Made Reusable Mesh Produce Bags

So , in my efforts to go Greener, I mentioned a couple of posts back that I had found some mesh produce bags for sale at amazon.com. Liked these.  You take these to the grocery store instead of using their plastic bags in the producesection.  They are very light, adding only minimal amount of weight (but you can take your produce out of the bag for weighing also)

 

Well, instead of buying them, I went to the fabric store and bought mosquito netting for $3.99/ yd, buying a yard of white and a yard of olive green.  Then I bought 7 yards of cording which was $1.19 yd.  By now, you can see that I have already spent more than what I could have bought them for.  Being emotionally involved in this project now, I do like mine better, tho I don’t have the cute side tabs on my bags.  BUT! I do have Olive Green.

I ended up making 7 bags for $15.  (Amazon has 5 for $11.00, or is it $11.99?)

 

One of my bags is two toned, having used what was left of each color to make the 7th bag (I had no waste, either).  They are 17 inches long by about 15 inches wide.

When the cording didn’t handle nicely as the drawstring, I found some ~*PINK*~ Nylon shoe laces (swoon) in a drawer and slid them through 4 drawstring sleeves. I used a length of white cotton yarn for one drawstring, but I’m really not satisfied with the thickness.  Maybe I’ll braid a cord out of it. 

SO, if you want to make them for the fun of it, don’t buy cording as it drives up the cost.  Braid some lengths of cotton yarn (comes in a ball for about $1.30-ish).  Use any 42-in+ shoe laces you may have laying around, but be smart about this, please.  We don’t want you or your big-footed teenage sons falling out of your shoes.  *;-.)   (I know I have now taken all the fun out of it)

Just my Green 2c

 
Nice, yes?

I Have a Problem

My sister, Kris, the NASA geek, came for a visit in March and mentioned the Sesame Street Yip-Yip Martians. You remember them, yes?  The detective shows up at the empty house, looks around and has determined, in great detail, that the Martians have been having a birthday party in this dining room. His partner has determined that the detective has gone off the deep end.

Or the Martians are at the window when the phone rings and they go…..”BBRRRRIIIING! yip yip yip yip yip yip!”

Well, I’m walking around my house going “yip yip yip yip yip” alla time now, too, especially when the answer is “yes.” And forget it when the phone rings…I’m a gonner..”BBRRRIIIINNNGG! yip yip yip yip yip yip.”  Thanx, Kris.

Katie’s Paint-by-Number pictures

Katie had a birthday recently and she always wants a new Paint-by-Number.  She got 3!!  Here are two completed projects.