4 Feb 12

The Tipping Point

I’ve wondered a long time what to call this… lifestyle we’ve taken on with the move just over a year ago.

It’s something I’d consciously wanted for over five years, and probably on some level since I was a kid (what little girl doesn’t want to be surround by cute furry things that she’s in charge of?).

 

Okay, maybe the necessity of both components is unique to me.

But somehow a herd of rabbits and a flock of chickens is hard for me to name.

It helped when I took over the animals’ daily care (my good husband had been doing it all as a gift to me, but that meant the only time I interacted with the animals I was managing was during breeding and birthing.  It felt too unbalanced).

We are in the process of planning a garden, and a rather extensive first-go, at that; but even the seed-starting is a month or two away, and doesn’t seem quite real.

Then, yesterday, we jumped at the chance to get our own milk goats. And now, with that addition, calling our place a little homestead seems legitimate for the first time.

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3 Feb 12

Whole Grain Gluten Free Pancakes

We had a power-outage last night.  Lasted something like four hours. [Okay, I checked with Jay and he says it was more like 2.5 hours.  So we got to see how prepared we were/n’t for emergencies.

We have our woodstove, so heat wasn’t a problem, and our kitchen stove is propane, so we have the cook-top at least (the oven requires electricity).

With everyone clambering for food, I decided (feeling clever) to make pancakes for dinner.

But then was thwarted by not being able to find my scale (it was in a back corner.  Someone else must have put it away).

And while that should scare me into transitioning my recipes into dry measures (cups), I think I’m just motivated to buy extra batteries for my scale. You see, having learned the variation possible in each batch of flour (the 70/30 version at least) I prefer the consistency of weights.

So we had pancakes for breakfast instead and I took pictures ;)

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3 Feb 12

Gluten Free Transitioning Tips #1: avoiding gluten

One of the few things eating advisers agree on is the value of eating foods without labels.  Foods that look the same (or nearly so) when you prepare them as when they were grown: vegetables, meat, dairy, fruit, even fats. Everyone may quibble over the best kinds of these, or the “correct” ratios, but all will agree you will be stronger and healthier if these dominate your food-choices.

None of these whole foods contain gluten in their original form.

In point of fact, very few “real foods” contain gluten at all.  Gluten is a specific protein that only appears in a limited number of grains: wheat, spelt, barley and rye.

That doesn’t sound too bad, right?

If you have a “whole foods” approach to eating– the type where you maximize label-less foods– you are well on your way to going gluten free “the easy way.”

Shirley Braden of gfe (gluten free easily) writes about this all the time. I heartily recommend her blog for food ideas and encouragement for the newly shell-shocked GF transitioning, especially her (PDF) tip sheets that include such hope-inspiring titles as 50 GF foods you can eat today, and 50 meals that are gfe

GO. Benefit. Be encouraged.

The difficulty in going gluten free, then, isn’t the limited number of foods available. The difficulty comes down to relearning.  New basics. New habits. Too many of our go-to food are contaminated, and most of the ostensible replacements are prohibitively expensive (if we’re being sensible) and/or a huge disappointment pleasure-wise.

Eventually, if you want to be happy as GF-for-life (GFFL), you’re going to have to make peace with your kitchen, and the amount of time you will spend there, for the rest of your life.

The food you make, the skills you will master, will strengthen you.  You don’t have to embrace it right away, but prepare your mind for it.  Anticipate it. Look forward to the time when the work that is hard now will become the invisible step to your new favorite meal.

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31 Jan 12

Rabbitry Talk #1: Learning Curve

This is Mneme.  She is 6 months old and having her first litter Friday.

(That’s one of my favorite thing about rabbits so far: their due-dates are so much more predictable than humans’)

The three Muses (so named because all of their line have “mythic” names and came from one breeder, as opposed to the B-rabbits, whose names, originally enough, all begin with B) were housed in a single cage until they reached breeding age.  We culled a few cages to empty, split out the girls and bred them that same day.  Or tried to. We bred all three of “The Muses” when we separated them, but only Mneme took.

This has been our learning curve: taking General Principles and filtering them through actual experience.

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30 Jan 12

For Brooke B.

Just for you, since I told you I’d show you the rest of my kitchen. ;)

 

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29 Jan 12

Sunday Snapshot #1

We have such a good daddy. :)

This is from last spring.  Jay was trying to get away during Chase and the girls weren’t going to let that happen.

And here is Elisha, considering whether he likes holding something without a sphincter. Cute can win-out, if no one reminds him. (He’s this way about the young rabbits, too. Less so as they get older and more… self-controlled.)

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28 Jan 12

M-B #9: More About Cognitive Functions.

Acknowledging from the beginning I’m treading on thin ice, here’s what I’ve learned about cognitive functions.

First of all, if you want to refer back to the typing children post (and maybe even the original processes post), because the four groups we divide children into are what we refer to as the cognitive functions.

iNtuition
Sensing
Thinking
Feeling

With two worlds to notice/spend time in (the inner world and the outer world), each of the cognitive functions develops first in one of those two directions.

When a child is developing his or her Dominant function s/he will do so in his/her preferred world.

That is, as in introverted, dominant-intuitive, I didn’t follow my mother around all day telling her stories. I spent my story-creating time *alone* (or, when I was a bit older, with a single trusted friend).

In contrast my extroverted, dominant-intuitive daughter once shouted at her brother (who’d reached his limit), “But I can’t tell it if nobody’s listening!”

My N is introverted (Ni).  The stories are rich, but largely private. As a child I hid in the basement to tell my stories aloud.

Melody’s N is extroverted (Ne).  The story doesn’t exist if there’s not someone else participating.

(This is not an ultimate definition, but CFs are slippery things, and I’ve found examples the easiest way of getting a clearer view of them.)

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26 Jan 12

Starting Gluten Free — Sandwich Bread Recipe

If you learned you needed to drop gluten, chances are you froze.

You are a capable, resourceful person and have mastered many challenges in your not-too-long life. And there’s a part of your mind saying No big deal. We can do this.

Then there’s the other part.

The tired part that probably is the reason you even considered taking on this extra burden (and it is a burden) of learning-under-pressure.

When I began, I felt like I was one ripple from drowning (of course, that was about the same time I discovered depression), but that’s all I’ll say about that for now.

At this minute everything seems huge and you just want something to feel normal.    

Well, as long as you don’t expect it to be *the same* I do want to offer you a recipe that will at least give you something useable to replace sandwich bread in your life. Then you might be able to feel a little more normal. If you’re a sandwich family.

Just make sure the fillings you choose are gluten free. Some sandwich meats have gluten-laced “natural flavors” added, so check your labels!

This is the way I make Amy Green’s Perfect Bread, once or twice a week.

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26 Jan 12

We have pictures!

Here is Natasha, sewing her cousin Brooke’s birthday present. She was so pleased to put the whole thing together herself.

It’s called a “warmy” in our home, and the kids each got one for Christmas (a fun surprise, since they knew their cousins were getting one each, and I made a second set after they went to bed Christmas Eve).

These next two are a couple of the pictures I wanted to include in this post.  They were the chosen ambiance for each room.

That’s the Elephant Thread-Holder you see to the left of the large quilt has a fun family story behind it.

My mom has a giraffe-shaped piece of wood full of finish-nails that holds her spools of thread in relative tidiness.

Early in my marriage I was very busy with quilting and sewing, and building up a healthy spool stash of my own.  I was the second child to leave the nest, and my parents began the long project of streamlining their household.

Behind the kitchen sink, all my growing-up years, as long as I could remember, there was an elephant-shaped cutting board.  My dad had made it of the bit of bathroom counter top he’d cut out years ago to put the sink in.

I knew it was old, and probably unsanitary and all that, but it was still hard to watch it disappear. Well, our second Christmas (I think it was) Jay hung out at my parents’ place more than usual, and surprised me with this thread board (with pretty matching dowels rather than nails) still slightly sticky with my favorite wood stain.

He had taken the blocky, familiar shape and recreated it as a memory-keeper that served a real and needed purpose.

And it was a total surprise.

This is my kitchen wall (three weeks ago. Now the picture at the top has been changed, and the slogan,

Ut tensio sic vis

has been added below the two bottom pieces.

It doesn’t have a clean/literal translation, but the meaning of the saying is “Strength in proportion to stretch.”  That is, think of a spring, or a bowstring.  The tighter it’s stretched the more force in contains.

I like how the words look, and use it as a reminder to let the tightness I feel focus my strength, rather than snap me.

And here is Natasha’s birthday party on the 14th. We had another -30 party and a handful of dear friends who joined us to make the celebration complete.

Yeah, that’s a doll in the middle of those candles.

We used a dress-form pan and filled it only part way so it would be a little-girl cake. (I looked through a few stores before I found just the right little girl doll to use for the centerpiece.)

So there you are: the highlights of January. Oops.  Sans rabbits.  But Jay’s on the editing computer now, so I’ll have to do it some other time.

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24 Jan 12

The Twisting Track of my Mind.

So, it’s funny to me how my mind really compartmentalizes.

I can be really tired (or excited) in one area, and it can affect any other area.

And I can think of something else and completely shift my focus, and I forget what was weighing on me before.

For example:

Last couple of days I’ve been working out the next month’s menu

Somebody remind me to tell you about menu-planning for the month, rather than the week. Would you believe it’s easier?! (Maybe not faster, though.)

Then today I let a corner of my mind loose in The Novel, and 30-minutes on the treadmill flew by in a storm of delightful speculation and investigation.  I came back to the house more energized than when I left (which is good, because my body’s not used to the renewed demands yet.

So I was all keen to shift off the menu and work on the novel for a while.

Then I saw the time, realized the lights would be going out soon in the rabbit/hen house, and I had to decide if I wanted to bring my angora doe back to in finish plucking her

I got her back plucked clean Saturday night; need to finish the rest.

No, it doesn’t hurt, she sits quietly in my lap the whole time.

But I decided I wanted to write *something* so I framed a thinking-outloud email about the story ideas, to untangle them, then another to a local group that’s doing a “wool expo” in April.  Asked if they’d consider rolling angoras into the event {grin}.

Then, as I considered what I next wanted to put up here at the scrapbook (more M-B? GF cooking?  Lotso links to my fav recipes or foods of my own?) I got an email from a friend who is in the process of switching over to GF for her whole family.

And I thought of the other folks in recent months who have announced (or whispered) to me that they are embarking on the scary unknown path of Gluten Free and with each story I remembered my strong overwhelm, and I wished I could bring them home and cook them a simple dinner and tell them it doesn’t have to be scary (forever).

So, in dearth of clambering requests for more M-B talk, I’ll shift gears for a while.  We’ll squeeze into my little kitchen, and I’ll show you what I know, and how I made it not-scary for me.

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