Thanks Be

We had a quiet day around here at Lake Wobegon Anthrohaus. Anthropapa made an amazing turkey dinner (complete with dressing, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, and biscuits), I made the gravy, and the kids made...noise.

Really, they were quite good. They helped clean the house, helped take out the garbage and recycling, played nicely outside, helped set the table, and were very good at the meal. SillyBilly even got up at naptime to go poop! (Sorry to insert the scatological here, but it's been a big deal lately, as my devoted 6-7 readers know.)

After we ate, we talked about what we were thankful for. We mentioned our warm clothes, the nice daycare the kids go to, Mama and Papa's jobs that they like, and all of our loving grandparents and friends. The kids mentioned 1) the food and 2) Mama and Papa.

At least we ranked #2.

I must say, as a fairly crafty person, that I'm thankful that my kids are interested and talented at crafting. It's something we can always share. Here is a small selection of their most recent works:

They each made a beautiful leaf banners at daycare. This one is Napoleona's.

SillyBilly and I made this paper plate turkey the other day while we had some one-on-one time. He cut the tail slits and did the coloring; I cut out the head and legs and taped it together. Yay impromptu crafts!

The kids and I made this construction paper Indian corn from directions in the latest Your Big Backyard magazine from the National Wildlife Federation.

Even though a good chunk of my readership does not celebrate Turkey Day, I still wish a happy day to you all and hope that you all have manifold things in your lives to be thankful for!

Mellow Me Out

Sometimes miracles happen.

After a few rough days of conflict, things are a bit calmer today. In fact, when I picked the kids up from daycare, Napoleona was quiet enough that I started to worry she was sick. Turns out she just had a really good nap and was still sleepy.

I thought I'd continue that trend by feeding them some crackers and warmed milk when we got home. I know, sounds like a bedtime snack. But it was very cold and windy today, and it just sounded so yummy. I even put a dash of cream and egg nog in the milk!

They just spent over an hour sitting at the table playing with play dough.

Warm milk may just become a regular part of our diets.

Saturday Surprises

Today's been a pretty good day, so far. After a wonderful pancake breakfast, the kids and I went out in the backyard for the first time in many days. It's just been too cold, and often rainy, to play out there. (OK, the kids could probably have played out there just fine. I just don't usually have the energy to do much outside stuff after picking them up from daycare at 3 pm.)

While they played (SillyBilly got out some of his tools to hammer on something or other, Napoleona made leaf/dirt stew at the play kitchen. I don't know where they get this gender-specific stuff from!) I decided to try to tackle the leaf situation.

Our yard is ringed with maple trees. They are quite beautiful, but it is truly shocking and amazing how many damn leaves there are. And how heavy a leaf pile is after it has sat out in the rain for several days. After trying to budge the medium-sized leaf pile I had made before Halloween, which needed to merge with the main large leaf/brush pile in the corner of the yard, I decided to give my arms a break and sweep off the steps leading to the basement.

As I was sweeping off the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, I had my first surprise of the day when I saw this wildly trying to get away from me and my evil broom:

I think I was more excited than the kids were, especially after I told them they couldn't touch it! After looking at far too many herpetology websites, I think I've narrowed it down to an Ambystoma jeffersonianum (Jefferson salamander). It was probably enjoying living under all the leaves piled up next to the house, where the hose occasionally leaks and keeps things nice and moist. I deposited him (her? It's hard to tell with salamanders.) in the thick leaves at the edge of the brook, where I figured it was most salamandery.

After SillyBilly and Anthropapa went to run errands, Napoleona and I went inside because the leaf pile had turned my arms to jelly. I decided to make cookies, from the wonderful Waldorf Kindergarten Snack Book. Wonderful, except some of the recipes clearly assume you already know how to bake. I decided to make the ginger snap recipe as a test run for possible Christmas cookies, and (second surprise) it simply stated to mix all the flour, spices, molasses, and butter in the bowl to make dough.

Now, I didn't think that somehow mixing a stick of cold butter into flour and molasses would work! I knew I shouldn't cut the butter into the flour, because ginger snaps aren't flaky. I clearly had to cream the butter and molasses together.

Then I realized the error of my decision to make cookies -- whenever I try to cream butter with an electric mixer, the butter just either flies all over the place or clumps up annoyingly, so I like to cream the butter the old-fashioned way, with a wooden spoon. With my leaf-defeated arms.

It all worked out fine, and here's a nice picture of Napoleona, rolling up cookies all by herself, thank you very much. I tried to help her with some, and she complained LOUDLY. So, she made a whole sheet of cookies all by herself.

Twittery post

Seems like short-attention-span land around here. Or maybe I'm just saving up all the thoughtful, meaningful posts for NaBloPoMo. Bwahahahaha...I'll never tell!

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It's raining here right now....we needed that. Though I'm sure the mold levels will now officially go through the roof, it's getting cooler and the leaves are really turning beautifully now.

Earlier today I was working by an open window when I heard a bunch of kids walking back to the Waldorf school from the playing field nearby...they were lustily singing "Doe, a Deer." Sweet.

SillyBilly evidently knows how to open his bedroom window. The one that looks out over the one-story drop down to the concrete outside the basement door. After some nausea- and tears-inducing freakouts (on my part), I think we've imparted to him that it's not OK to open the window. And I think he doesn't understand how to work the little tabs that pop out to stop the window from raising more than 3 inches. But I'm sure he'll get that one of these days...

We got out the down comforter from storage and put it on the bed last night. Mmmmm, snuggly. Now if it would only cool down again to merit it!

Imaginative play triumph #4,239: yesterday the kids were making "second breakfast" with their wooden play kitchen after we finished real breakfast. My dear little hobbits! And today, Napoleona was going around the house putting small, colored wooden blocks here and there, saying that they were candles..."cool ones, Mama, the ones that only burn you a little bit, for one day. The burning hot ones are for Christmas time. These are for Halloween night."

We splurged on going out to dinner tonight. Turkish food, yum. I am constantly amazed and grateful at the kids' ability to eat just about anything. We had baba ganoush, tomato/cucumber salad (Çoban Salatası) with shredded feta cheese, lamb kebab, and tiny dumplings (Mantı) in yogurt and tomato sauce, with rice pudding and caramelized milk pudding (Kazandibi) for dessert!

Still trying to figure out why the kids have been kinda whacked out the last few days. Perhaps it's just tiredness from the vacation...evidently they have been taking big naps at daycare. Or maybe it's their souls that are tired, from being driven all over creation and being away from home for so long, as Anthropapa suggested to me tonight. We'll have to spend some time outside in the fresh air tomorrow.

Oh, My Lord...Who Has the Time?

I just came across this in my daily Craftzine blog email:


The E-Bento daily lunch diary! I want someone to make me lunches like that!

Monday Mishmash

I'm serving up myself a nice hot dish of humble pie* for dessert tonight....

Yesterday I made the following comment on someone's blog :

"I don't think TV is appropriate for young children at all, and only in small doses for older children."

I followed that up by entertaining my children for a half an hour looking at pictures and YouTube videos of animals from the cuteoverload.com site.

I loathe the overly cutesy captions and comments, but we were all cracking up at kittens attacking empty boxes, overfed hamsters, and the world's tiniest snail.

I know, I know.

It's just that when the kidlets wake up from their nap and I'm already on the computer, they immediately beg for pictures of dinosaurs or puppies or whatever. And I'm weak, I'M WEAK, I TELL YOU!

*I just love Wikipedia: where else can you find the following things all related to each other: Offal | Savoury pies | English idioms?

* * *

This afternoon SillyBilly reminded me of his greatest superpower: eagle-eye vision. (The boy can spot the tiniest things, as well as the one thing that you didn't want him to notice, or the one tiny thing that you changed in the room.) He noticed a visitor in my bedroom window:


Though I hate tormenting creatures, I just had to go outside and bring this amazing mantis in for the kids to see. (It was raining, and the thought of getting the kids ready to go outside in rain gear before the mantis left was beyond me at that moment.) It was mostly reddish brown, with bright green wings peeking out. And about 6 inches long!

I had caught it in a large glass water pitcher, and the mantis showed us his amazing superpower by crawling all the way up the sheer, slippery side of the pitcher and almost escaping!

* * *

Tomorrow is my birthday (yes, it's a nice birthday to have. I just get a little extra pondering of mortality every year now). I decided to make my own birthday cake. Mostly to give the kids a project, but also because the last store-bought cake we ate just wasn't that good, and this way I at least know what the ingredients are and can pronounce them!

I also decided to try out my spiffy cake pan that I bought a long time ago:


Of course, I don't have a recipe for this pan's shape or volume, but with my trusty Joy of Cooking I was feeling no fear. I used the Sour Cream Chocolate Cake recipe.

Now, I seem to have a constitutional inability to follow recipes exactly as written. Though this time it wasn't all my fault: Anthropapa had bought some almond extract so I just had to add some, and we didn't have enough sour cream so I improvise a half cup of whole milk and lemon juice.

The kids had a great time sifting and stirring, though mostly they liked licking the spoons. Coming out of the oven, all seemed well:


I hadn't expected the batter to completely fill the pan, and in any case I could live without a little train around the bottom of my cake.

The problem occurred when I tried to get the cake to come out:


I don't know if the batter just wasn't quite right for the pan, or I didn't grease the pan enough, or didn't let it cool enough before attempting it.

Whatever. It will still taste good, especially after I melt some more chocolate to drizzle on top.

Shove a few candles in it, and pass me a fork!

Raw milk adventures

Every week from spring through autumn we are part of a raw milk co-op with Pleroma Farm. Why do we choose raw milk? (I'll start using first person here so I don't try to speak for Anthropapa.) I like that the cows eat only grass and hay, their natural diet. I like that I know the farmer personally. I like that the milk comes from an antique breed (Dutch Belted) of cow that has not been bred for unnatural milk production (like modern Holsteins). I like that there are no artificial ingredients in the milk. I like that the milk is totally unprocessed.

And that leads us to the part that makes most people squeamish. This milk is unpasteurized and unhomogenized. Most people think that pasteurization makes milk "safe." I believe that pasteurization can make milk safer if production methods are unsanitary or cows are diseased. But I can see with my own eyes that the dairy at Pleroma Farm is clean and neat, that the cows are healthy and contented. The milk is regularly tested by the state, in addition. Homogenization is just unnecessary in my opinion.

Growing up, I thought any sour smell meant that the milk had gone bad. Now, I know that sour milk is just on its way to becoming something yummy like cottage cheese or yogurt. (Though since my childhood milk was pasteurized, sourness probably really was a sign that the milk was bad, since all the good bacteria and enzymes had been removed during processing.)

Part of this comes from my milk Little House obsession. Those books are full of recipes for making hard and soft cheese, butter, and many other unprocessed foods. The other part comes from learning about traditional foods and nutrition from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook and Dr. Thomas Cowan.

We've been getting 1 1/2 gallons of raw milk a week, but recently SillyBilly has had a string of colds and coughs, and we were swimming in extra milk. Since we certainly didn't want to waste any of it, I made homemade cottage cheese. The nice part of this is that it's easier to digest and you get lots of whey for Nourishing Traditions recipes.


*Set out raw milk in a clean bowl and cover with a clean cloth. Let this sit for a day or so, depending on the temperature, until the milk smells nicely sour.

*Set the bowl of soured milk over a pan of water (to create a double-boiler) and gently heat the milk until the milk solids and whey separate. Don't boil the milk!

*Pour the curds and whey through cheesecloth, saving the whey in a canning jar. Gently squeeze the rest of the whey out of the curds in the cheesecloth. Rinse the curds in cold water and gently squeeze again.

*Put the curds into a clean bowl, mash or cut gently with a fork, and add cream for consistency and salt to taste.


Then I realized that because the milk is unhomogenized, there's at least a good inch of cream at the top of each milk container. I poured it off, set it out to sour, and whipped up some homemade butter. (In part inspired by a recent post by The Not Quite Crunchy Parent!) The butter came out amazingly yellow, thanks to the good pastures at the farm. There were several disasters along the way, including too much milk in the cream and sour milk all over the kitchen table and floor, but in the end we did make a little pat:


Update: I tried another round of cottage cheese, and this time it would..not..separate! I think the double-boiler rig I created just didn't work, or I got too impatient and turned the heat up too high. Ah well, another day of kitchen chemistry!

Remembrance of Foods Past

Being at home with my kids, much of my days revolves around food. Shopping, preparing, cooking and cleaning up meals are primary tasks each day. Lately the Huntlings have been going through ups and downs of eating: some days just nibbling, other days seemingly eating more than their body weight!

I was thinking about the food of my childhood. Growing up in Southern California, I had year-round access to fresh fruits and vegetables. My dad still has large lemon trees in his yard, and not too far from there are avocado orchards and lettuce fields. But that's not what has stuck in my memories.

Sometimes I think about festive foods: my mom often made wonderful roasts with Yorkshire pudding for holiday meals. I always turned up my nose at yams at Thanksgiving dinner.

Other memories are the stuff of funny family stories: my dad once tried to make a cinnamon roll. It tasted quite good while hot, but by the next day it had formed what we from then on called the "cinnamon doorstop." My dad was also famous for his "anything goes" omelettes, frugally using up leftovers in sometimes dubious combinations.

For many years we had dinner every Friday with my German grandma. She made wonderful, simple foods like chicken soup with cauliflower, celery and carrots, and stuffed cabbage rolls (no tomato sauce, thank you.) She was also a fan of the after-dinner "little bit schnapps," which she often shared with my dad.

Then in my teenage years, when I could fend for myself in the kitchen, came a precipitous drop in nutritional value. I was a regular consumer of Hot Pockets and lunchmeat sandwiches. I fondly remember orange Creamsicles and Otter Pops in summer. As an evening snack I would share a pot of Earl Grey tea and some buttered toast with my mom as we watched TV.

In college, on a limited budget, I for a short time survived on 5 for a dollar instant ramen noodle packets, and toast with butter, supplemented with $1 bean burritos (no red sauce!) from Taco Bell.

What are your childhood food memories?

Children and Food

I think it's clear that we have a problem with eating in the US. Either we are obese McDonald's-eaters, or we are anorexic-bulimic fashion model wanna-be's. Somehow we have lost the ability to just enjoy a variety of foods in moderation. And not surprisingly, this problem has filtered right down to our children.

When I read about 6-year-olds worrying about their weight, I feel sick. Children should learn to love food and to eat in a reasonable fashion. They should not worry about being too fat or too thin, or about calorie intake or fat grams. They shouldn't have to think about food much at all, other than how yummy it is.

Evidently even those public officials concerned with our children's health can't seem to see clearly:

Here, in the rural Southern Tioga School District, the schools distribute the state-mandated [body mass index] reports even as they continue to serve funnel cakes and pizza for breakfast.

Um, OK. Part of the problem is economic: the article goes on to say that the district tried to offer field greens and kiwi fruit in cafeterias, but due to high costs they went back to the old iceberg lettuce and canned fruit. Because of government subsidies, processed foods are often much cheaper than whole fruits and vegetables, undermining any public health drives toward better nutrition.

Part of the problem is cultural. I remember savoring baloney/mayonnaise/white bread sandwiches as a child. Now I couldn't choke that down, but that's after many years of reprogramming my taste for healthy food. I imagine many of the kids in the NY Times article eat more pizza at home than kiwi fruit.

I'm doing my best to encourage my kids to have healthy appetites for a variety of foods. I acknowledge that I have unusually game children: for lunch we had homemade seaweed salad sushi rolls made with brown rice. For dinner we had homemade split pea soup and whole wheat biscuits (savory scones not cookies, for my UK and Australian blog friends!). They regularly chow down on mixed green salad. I know it's not uncommon for small children to want nothing but, say, yogurt three meals a day. But I think the key here is to serve nutritious food, model the behavior of enjoying the food, and not make a big deal of it.

And get off your duff and play outside!

Eating Locally

I just got the latest email newsletter from the Organic Consumers Association. I followed a link to a fascinating article about local food: Eating Local: There's No Plate Like Home.

I'm a big fan of eating locally-grown foods. I have been blessed to live for the last 10 years in places like Sacramento, CA and the NYC area, which have access to amazing produce. I've also been lucky to live near biodynamic farms and CSAs, which to me are an improvement on organics.


I've noticed that organic milk in stores is always ultra-pasteurized, because the dairies are few and far between. California allows raw milk products to be sold in supermarkets, so I could get them at the co-op, though they were shipped 150-200 miles. In New York, raw milk is only available directly from the farm, so I currently get raw milk through a herd share program at Pleroma Farm, which is just under 100 miles away.

I'm concerned about both the environmental costs of fossil fuel use and the prospect of diminishing supplies. I learned something about the scope of the link between food distribution and fossil fuel use in this article:

In his book Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market, Worldwatch Institute senior researcher Brian Halweil writes about the enormous Mid-Atlantic regional distribution center for Safeway supermarkets in Upper Marlboro, Md., where all the East Coast produce is inspected. Even if the products will eventually be sold in a farmer's hometown 400 miles away, they must first be shipped to this central location then shipped back.

But this article takes the local concept further. The 100-mile diet sounds like an amazing exercise: only eat foods grown within 100 miles of your home. I could easily live on vegetables from the biodynamic garden across the street (at least in summer, but then I could get more local stuff from the co-op down the street). I could even get apples and berries from within 5 miles.

But...no coffee? No iced tea? NO CHOCOLATE? I would really miss that food of the gods.


And...no sugar? No olive oil? No salt?

The article recommends using butter instead of oil, and honey instead of sugar. I guess if I can't get coffee, I don't really need sugar to go in it.

I used to think, yeah - we should just eat locally and so many problems would be solved. We'd eat more nutritious food, use less petro resources, support local business, etc. Sounds like a winner all around.

Then I realized that I was partially basing my utopian food vision on an incorrect historical model. I was a big Little House on the Prairie junkie as a girl, and I recently bought a Little House cookbook. But they used sugar, salt, and a bunch of other imported items in addition to wild game and homemade sourdough.


Humans have been trading foods and spices for thousands of years. I realized, duh, once we had the wheel and seaworthy boats, everyone could have sugar and salt.

Sure, those things were once so prized and expensive that the woman in charge of the house would keep the keys to the spice cabinet on her person at all times. But nowadays, I think I could make an exception for sugar and salt in the local food arena.


Also, I live in a maple sugaring area, so I could get sugar from my backyard. Also I found out that there is an active salt mine within about 200 miles of my home. Gotta love the internet!