Heart to Heart with Diane

Yes, I am still on a food-drying binge!  First it was kale, and tomatoes, which I made into “V8 powder“. . .  then yellow squash, herbs of course, and finally green beans.  Well, I am not done yet. Let me tell you about what we did with our grape crop.

When the grapes come on, you can’t possibly eat them all.  And I definitely don’t want to cook those luscious vitamin-bursting grapes into juice, destroying much of the vitamin C content in the process.  I have frozen some and they make a good snack.  And I have fresh-juiced them into raw grape juice to freeze, which is also yummy.  I wanted a way, though, to preserve that high-sugar, high-nutrition, high fiber health morsel that a grape provides. So, I turned to my latest craze:  drying.

Raisins were highly prized by the ancient Romans, who adorned their places of worship with them and used them as barter currency. Raisins were also the trophy for the winners of sporting events.  I can see why, now that we’ve transformed some of our delicious grapes into raisins!

Here’s how:

Makin’ Raisins on Your Dashboard

Pick grapes at the peak of ripeness.  Wash and remove from stems.  Rig up a drying surface:  a nylon stocking pulled over a baking dish works great.  A window screen is even better.  Those black plastic trays that hold seedlings at the nursery work well, with a piece of light cloth or paper towel in the bottom. The process goes faster if the air can circulate around the grapes, but it still works on a cookie sheet.

Spread the grapes onto whatever surface you choose, and put this on your car dashboard.  Roll up all windows, face the car into the sun, and let Mother Nature do the work!  You can use the back dashboard also, if sun comes in that window. It took about a week during the month of September for the grapes to dry into raisins that were quite dry.  It can take a week longer if the sun is not intense.

You can still drive your car—just don’t come to any abrupt stops or you’ll end up with raisins in your lap.  And the aroma of drying grapes is pretty sweet!

Taste them every few days and stop once they are the dryness you like.  If you dry them very dry, they will store for years. Once the raisins are dry, store in an air-tight container.  Unlike store bought raisins, our home-grown raisins are pesticide and preservative free!

Easy, breezy!

How do I use them?

I add them to the recipe of cookies, muffins, breads, and oatmeal.  You can cover with hot water, wait 10 minutes, and you’ll have soft raisins. Use the nutritious, sweet, rehydrating liquid in your recipe too.  My newest use is making a natural sugar substitute.  Buzz very dry rasisins in your blender to make a natural sweetener granules to add as a sugar substitute when you bake. You can also use raisins as a sweetener by just adding them to the liquid ingredients in your recipe, buzzing until smooth in the blender. I’ve noticed “raisin juice” as an ingredient in some natural breads, so it’s not a new idea. They are sweet!

Just how nutritious are raisins? Raisins are one of the richest sources of the mineral boron, which increases bone health and prevents osteoporosis (bone softening). Studies have shown that boron reproduces many of the positive effects of estrogen therapy in postmenopausal women. Raisins are a fabulous source of antioxidants, which help prevent oxygen-based damage to cells in the body. They are low-fat, and contribute both B vitamins and iron to the diet.  Research has shown they protect against Macular Degeneration, a degenerative disease of the eyes. They are pretty healthy!

No electricity is even needed to make raisins.  They last almost forever (if you dry them quite dry and store air-tight) and they provide both sweetness and nutrition all year long.  What a great food to store!

Our homegrown, homemade raisins

Jane Eyre

Isn’t it great how the characters in books become friends?  Friends who never grow old and die, but are there: ever true, always energetic . . . for the next generation to meet and love, too.  Friends can have such a powerful influence! I have often paused to reflect on what Little Britches or Jane Eyre or Little Dorrit or Atticus would do if they had been in my situation, when I have a tough decision to make.  Even though they are literary characters, the virtue of Christ shines through in their choices, and it is very inspiring to know them! I would like to share with you some of my favorite friends.

Some of My Favorite Friends:

Little Britches (Ralph Moody)

Man of the Family  (Ralph Moody)

Laddie: A True Blue Story  (Gene Stratton Porter)

To Kill a Mockingbird  (Harper Lee)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin  (Harriet Beecher Stowe)

The Scarlet Pimpernel  (Baroness Emmuska Orczy)

Anne of Green Gables  (Lucy Maud Montgomery)

Amos Fortune: Free Man  (Elizabeth Yates)

Carry On, Mr. Bowditch  (Jean Lee Latham)

A Lantern in Her Hand  (Bess Streeter Aldrich)

God’s Smuggler  (Brother Andrew)

Little Women  (Louisa Mae Alcott)

Summer of the Monkeys  (Wilson Rawls)

Tom Sawyer  (Mark Twain)

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (Mark Twain)

Pinocchio  (Carlo Collodi)

Sense and Sensibility  (Jane Austen)

Pride and Prejudice  (Jane Austen)

Jane Eyre  (Charlotte Bronte)

Robinson Crusoe  (Daniel Defoe)

A Tale of Two Cities  (Charles Dickens)

The Hiding Place (Corrie Ten Boom)

What a collection of excellent people!  People who—even though fictional—inspire me to live better!  And they are there, waiting, to visit again, whenever you need a boost.  They are human. They have their flaws. But consistently they choose the high road;  the hard decision to do the right thing.  We are helped by their example and it strengthens our own resolve to be a good person.

And they are there in movies too.  Have you watched Larkrise to Candleford?  It is hard not to love Miss Lane, with all her compassionate understanding of people. . . .or Luke Skywalker’s control of his anger for the cause of good and his faith in the last spark of goodness in a father who had so badly betrayed him . . . or Sense and Sensibility‘s Eleanor, with all her forbearance, patience and self-control.  These wonderful people—I am happy to know them!

Leave a comment here.

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Laddie

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Here’s a very easy fall craft to make with your kids to bring that cozy autumn feeling into your home. I don’t get too fussy about crafts—just use whatever you have on hand and have fun together!  Then stand back and admire your cleverness—that’s the joy of crafts.

Easy Cloth Pumpkins

1. Cut orange fabric into rectangles.  I don’t measure—just “guesstimate”. To make a tall pumpkin, cut the fabric approximately 10″ high by 18″ wide.  A big short pumpkin takes a piece of fabric about  14″ high by 30″ wide .  Little pumpkins need about  6″ high by 14″ wide.  These  figures are just to give you an idea, but you can make them any random size you wish.  It’s sort of fun to just cut and see how it turns out!

2.  Fold the fabric in half, right sides together, and sew across the bottom and up the side. Just like you are making a pillowcase. Don’t sew the top closed!

3.  Gather the bottom (sewn) edge with a needle and thread, pulling it tightly and securing. Or  just gather it back and forth with your fingers like you’d fold a paper fan, then secure by zigzagging over the end.  This does not have to be exact. The idea is just to scrunch up the bottom edge and secure it.

4. Turn the “pillowcase” shape inside out.

5. Pour about 1-2 cups of rice, beans, acorns, pebbles, chestnuts (or whatever you have on hand or can gather in your yard)  into the bottom to weight it down and make it stand up nicely.

6.  Add fluffy batting, stuffing your pumpkin full.

7.  Using a long gathering stitch, hand stitch around the upper opening, cinching it tightly closed.  Stitch and knot to secure.

8.  Set pumpkin on a long piece of twine, yarn or string, and tie it up like you would a package, crossing the twine on top and bottom.  Knot firmly on the top.  Leave a length of twine to look like a tendril. Arrange the twine so it creates sections, like a pumpkin.

9. Using a glue gun, top the pumpkin with a piece of branch, corn stalk or whatever other natural “stem” you can find in your yard, along with artificial leaves (get them at the dollar store).  Tuck the knotted twine ends under the stem when you glue on your pumpkin stem.

That’s it! Easy, and adds a festive look for the harvest season!

My daughters: Louisa, Emily, Julianna

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Another delicious gourmet recipe, inspired by my daughter-in-law Melissa!

Jalapeño Poppers

• 12 jalapeño peppers
• 6 Anaheim peppers
• 1 pound sausage
• 8 oz. cream cheese

Garden veggies and herbs:  here’s what I used, but use whatever your garden is producing.  This recipe is fabulous even if you leave the veggies out, but I like to sneak as much in as possible.

• 1 yellow squash, finely chopped
• 1 bunch chives, finely chopped
• handful fresh basil, finely chopped
• 3 small leaves swiss chard, finely chopped
• 1 small leaf kale, finely chopped
• 1/2 large onion, finely chopped
• 1 large clove garlic, finely chopped

Fry sausage and veggies together until browned and veggies are tender.  Drain any grease.  Take off heat.  Meanwhile, slice peppers lengthwise, and use a spoon or knife to remove membrane and seeds. Try not to touch the membrane or wear rubber gloves. My daughter Louisa wears a bandana like a cowboy.  Seriously, you will find yourself choking, wheezing and sputtering—those peppers are HOT to breathe!

Mix cream cheese into sausage/veggies.  Scoop mixture into each pepper, setting them side-by-side in a glass baking dish. When the dish is filled, sprinkle parmesan cheese on top.  Bake at 350° for 20 minutes or until peppers are tender.  Children may enjoy the milder Anaheim peppers, but I crave the zing of those delicious jalapeños! Yum! They really aren’t hot cooked and with their seeds/membranes removed.  They are super-delicious!

Ha!  Just have to share my smile this morning!

Last night my daughter Louisa and I made the most scrumptious sugar-free chocolate ice cream as we listened to “Devil Went Down to Georgia”, an energetic fiddlin’ song.  As we sat down to relish it, spoons-in-hand, she exclaimed with all the passion of a 15 year old:

“I don’t envy anybody!

I’ve got everything in the world I want!

I’ve got ice cream and bluegrass!”

Does it make you smile too?

My garden is ripe!  In fact, I can’t keep up with it, which is a good thing that I am grateful for!  I know in just a short time, a frost will bring all this luscious late summer nutrition to a screeching halt, and the source of all our delicious garden-fresh meals will be gone.  So I am trying to lay up in store, right now, while the harvest is abundant!

I’ve talked before about drying my garden veggies: kale, chard, tomatoes, summer squash, basil, oregano, and more.  Right now, I am laying up green beans as fast and furiously as I can pick them, dry them and get them into containers.  They are so easy to dry and taste so fresh!

Just snip off the ends of the beans, rinse off, and lay on dryer trays.  You don’t need to line them up perfectly, just dump them on and smooth into a layer.  Even if they overlap, they shrink so incredibly much in the food dryer, it won’t matter. They will end up looking like “green strings”. . . which probably accounts for the slip I made in labeling them!  Either that or my brain couldn’t decide whether to call them green beans or string beans. Anyway, I was talking to my daughter while I wrote out the label and it ended up saying:  “Green Strings”.  I left it. It will make us smile in the winter, when we are shaking them into soups, stews and casseroles.

Big, over-mature beans.  These aren’t very tasty to eat fresh and usually get relegated to the compost pile, but stop! You can dry those big, bumpy beans and buzz them in the blender to make a nutritious powder to thicken soups or stews, giving them added health and tastiness!  I put these old guys all on the same dryer tray, as they are hard to distinguish once dried.  Then they go right from that dryer tray into the blender to be powdered.

For normal-sized, tender beans—the kind you’d like to eat—just dry them until brittle and then snap the dried “green strings” into pieces with your fingers. It is easy: much easier than cutting them fresh before you dry them.  Dried beans are amazingly compact to store, and their garden freshness enhances the taste any dish you add them to.

Running out of jars and big spice containers, I turned to recycling my empty metal cans with the plastic lids—that once held dried food storage. When I filled them up, I realized that I had made my own dried food storage, only brimming with organically grown goodness! And with only a little labor and electricity for my food dryer.

Winter is coming.  We’ll be glad for the fresh tasting “green strings”, and other garden product we’ve dried.  Drying is so much easier than canning, takes a fraction of the space on your pantry shelf, and can be stored long-term without electricity (freezer).  Dried veggies are simple to reconstitute, or better yet, just add to your cooking pot.  It feels great to me to have my jars full of dried foods from my garden!

Fresh green beans (top), dried green beans (left), dried "snapped" beans (right)

When I was a new homeschooler years ago, I read Ruth Beechick’s homeschooing philosophy. She was a pioneer in the movement and had some interesting thoughts.  She said that research proved that spelling, taught as a school subject, did no good in the long run—it just didn’t stick.

At the time I was spending time teaching spelling, testing spelling, drilling spelling.  When I gave my kids a “review” test after a month, going back and retesting words they had on their list a month ago, I was chagrined to find that Ruth Beechick was right.  My kids seemed to forget everything I had taught them in spelling—very frustrating.

Ruth Beechick’s research concluded that children only retain those words that they use in their daily writing, those words that they actually need. All those contrived lists that we find in workbooks—your child may never even speak, let alone write.  That made some sense to me. But what to do?

With my children, I stumbled around, trying this spelling program and that.  I finally discovered that the best spelling teacher is daily journal writing. I would have my child write on any topic they wanted to, and illustrate it too.  Sometimes they would get going on an adventure story, or they would just write about making paper airplanes for a couple of weeks. Whatever topic they wanted to write on was fine with me. As long as they were writing daily.  It is in free expression that a child can really enjoy writing, and lots of writing helps make a good speller . . . as long as they have a mentor to help them correct their errors.  And the mentor is you, Mom!

When you check your child’s daily schoolwork, read through his journal entry and make a little light pencil mark by any misspelled words.  I have my children write their journal entries on specially wide-lined paper in pencil, or erasable pen, so that they can correct each misspelling.  If your child is misspelling several words per line, then just choose the most common words to work on first. Let’s not overwhelm them!

Have your child go through and correct the misspelled words on his journal writing page, and have him transfer those misspelled words, writing them correctly on a list to be reviewed daily.  A younger child will need your help spelling the word. I always try to find a little “spelling clue” to help them remember, such as find the word end in the word friend—a friend is a friend ’til the end.

For an older child, I put a little number in light pencil at the beginning of the line that contains a misspelled word. If the number is “2”, then he knows there are two misspelled words he has to search for and correct in that line of writing. My child has often responded, “Oh, I knew that was wrong!”, when he sees his my little number!  It helps him to develop more care in his spelling if he has to figure out what to correct himself.

I have a favorite book I have used with success to help my young child to spell correctly: A Spelling Dictionary for Beginning Writers. Arranged alphabetically, it helps a beginning writer to find words that he wants to include in his journal writing.

For your older children, my favorite resource is How to Spell It. The beauty of this book is that a student can look up the misspelled word, and the correct spelling is listed.  The trouble with using a dictionary for spelling is that if you can’t spell it, how can you look it up to check it?  Several common misspellings are listed under each word, so you are sure to find your version of the irksome word!  I love this book!

Some children are natural spellers, others struggle with it.  But, learning to spell the words one uses everyday seems to be the solution at my house for spelling woes. Daily journal writing is the only method that I found worked consistently—and with holding power—for teaching spelling in my homeschool.  And journal writing is a much more pleasant, creative, and productive activity than spelling workbooks!

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Ahh…how I love late summer!  It is my favorite season and I am basking in it! The sky is so bright blue. The air feels so still, peaceful and full. It seems to stir contentment in me, and if I open all my windows, it seeps into my home, with all that luscious contentment spilling over the windowsills, into the room to be breathed in, sedating everyone.

I wonder if it is the ripeness of the fruit weighing down heavy the trees, or the wandering green vines of so many melons and squashes, tumbling out of their supposed-to-be places and unwinding themselves out on the mowed lawn or into the field outside the garden fence.  Wild sunflowers brighten every corner, every patch along the side of my country road: a celebration of the season! Everything is fulfilling the measure of its creation! All is ripe.

Maybe God gives us late summer air to fill up every pore, to be breathed into every cell of our bodies—sort of stocking up, so we can be happy still when the storms force us inside and make us yearn for the sunshine.  Maybe it is the balm that makes us feel satisfied with our spring/summer toiling in the earth.

Don’t miss it. Go out and walk in it, bike in it, sit under a tree and inhale it in. I’ll bet if it had a color, someone would bottle “Late Summer Air” and market it.  It is so good for you!

Enjoy!

My backyard

I’m starting to understand Italian food.  Just go to the garden and put it all in a big pot.  Simmer it down until it is a rich and tasty sauce.  Serve over pasta!

I went out into my garden today and picked everything that was ripe: eggplant, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, yellow tomatoes, basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary, kale, chives, parsley, Swiss chard, green peppers, red peppers, yellow peppers, Anaheim chili peppers, onions, garlic, yellow squash, zucchini and green beans . . . plus some fragrant red carnations (my favorite!) to sniff from time to time to give me more joy while I was cooking.

Then I started chopping and tossing it into the pot. I loaded fresh tomatoes . . . plus garlic, onions, greens and more  . . . in my blender and just buzzed it until the contents were coarsely blended.  I didn’t peel anything.  Just au natural. All this went into the simmering pot.  By the time my husband got home from work, the most exquisite sauce was bubbling on the stove!  All that garden fresh nutrition filled the house with the most delicious aroma! Served over whole grain pasta . . . does food get any better, or healthier, than this?!

No recipe needed.

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