Category Archives: Life Untangling

by

Sickness

We’re currently fighting a serious bug going through our house.

Melody’s fever seems to have finally stayed away (after four days of persistence), and everybody’s been pretty listless on both ends of the fever (N and E have had symptoms as well.  And it’s been interesting to observe how feeling yucky really does make you act yucky. It’s a backwards sort of nice that I can say, Woah, this is really out of character!)

Melody went through an entire square box of tissues Saturday. Elisha and Natasha picked up her cough by Sunday evening, and until yesterday (Tuesday) Elisha’s the only one who could hang on to energy.

Sunday I stayed home with the younger two. Elisha was a great helper, and Melody got dressed, which was an accomplishment compared to Saturday.

Monday both girls held their low fevers and needed lots of holding by Mama. Which was fine, accept when people want to eat, too.

Conveniently, when they’re feeling this crummy, they don’t seem to care as much about food.

 

by

April 2012 Update

So it just took asserting how much I planned to blog (both here and at Untangling Tales) for life to expand and fill all writing time.

So let me just give a quick two week update, since a slow one would take two hours.

Jay was gone for one of the last two weeks. While he was gone:

  • I got an average of 6 hours of sleep/night (leaving me with a 14-hour deficit).
  • Both our baby goats got sick.
  • Buttercup (a rabbit) had a litter of *9* kits (though she was down to 7 three days later. Those all are doing well.)
  • I forked the compost from the outdoor coup and filled it with chickens.
  • One of our chest freezers died, and I had to do a Tetras/canning scramble to save as much as I could from the meat freezer.

On the upside the freezer-death happened right before the weekend my mom had offered to keep the kids, so my marathon work sessions didn’t have to fit around the needs of the kids. I just didn’t have the time/brain cells to do as much novel work as I’d hoped to accomplish.

Cream (the white faced doe kid) was close to skin and bones and she came back with a few days of focused care, but Friday night (two days after Jay got home) her twin, Sugar, died. It wasn’t really expected, since Cream had looked so much worse than her sister and recovered.

So now we’re left with the question of whether to get a second goat (because all the writing talks about how goats don’t do well alone), or to sell Cream so she’s not living as an only-goat.

We’d rather keep Cream, it’s the second goat that’s tricky.  The kids- all 4- and I went to see a Nigerian doe today, but “Molly” was much too rough and aggressive with Cream, so we had to pass. (Made me *so* grateful we’d brought Cream and knew before we brought a new goat home that they weren’t compatible.)

~ ~

The snow is almost completely melted here, Jay’s moat is doing it’s job just as it should, and we’re beginning to simplify our life here in other ways.

I’ve been looking at my choices and thinking about how much of what I do is externally motivated and how much intrinsically motivated.  I realized I was doing too much just because it was “sensible” and “could pay off later,” but that preparation was reducing my margin now, and margin is what I need, more than I need (say) rabbits that people might pay more for later.

In this case I’m referring to showing and keeping records.  The level of detail and engagement required to do them well eliminates my breathing room for things that matter more to me: like reading and meal planning.

Yeah. Reading and meal-planning matter more to me than a “potential” side business– especially considering the low level of payoff that looks to be available.

Anyway, we decided we’re not interested in stretching beyond what our family needs/is using, so we’re in the process of selling off extra/older rabbits.  We just finished selling all the mixed-breed chickens, today, so in a couple of weeks if we still have hens that want to go broody we should be able to let them and still end up with consistent layers.

We still want the eggs (since store-bought make me ill), and the “ethical” meat, but I’m sick of how much I’ve been trying to manage.

Along those same lines, I don’t anticipate a garden to be in our plans for this summer.  If it happens it happens, but I think for now we’ll just work at stabilizing our ballance. Once we find it.

(I’ve got other projects/ideas percolating– primarily having to do with food– and that’s where I want to spend “extra” energies.)

No promises any more. I’ll give what I can, and no more.  There will always be more to teach and learn than I can be a part of, and accepting that is part of accepting reality.

Admittedly, hard for me, but I’m learning.

by

Salmon Noodle Casserole

Made this for lunch today.

It was not on the Menu.

All the left-overs were either eaten, left at a friend’s house earlier in the week, or left out (*sniff*) because they weren’t in a see-through container. So for lunch I had to make something from scratch.

Back in the summer when we got our massive amount of salmon from Chitna I learned how to can fish.

I was impressed at how well it went, and hope to can a higher percentage this year. Everything we like best– like this dish– is ready to put together so fast with the canned stuff.

And the best part is any bones left in the fillets are mushified by the canning process. (Not so with the commercially canned stuff, or maybe they just start with bones that are too big.)

This is my GF version of the tuna noodle casserole I had growing up, so if you don’t have a pantry full of salmon you can use a couple cans of tuna, or any other cooked meat you’re wanting to use up.

  1. Start by heating your noodle water (I always forget to start here and lunch takes that much longer. Planned right this all sorta finishes at once.)
  2. Make your cream-of sauce
  3. Add 5 or six cups GF pasta to the water whenever it’s hot & follow directions/your preferences to tell when it’s done (I do about a cup dry per person, since I don’t like left-over GF pasta)
  4. Mix the cooked noodles with your meat (I use a 1 pint jar salmon or two cans of tuna), one cup of the sauce (save the rest for another recipe)
  5. Stir in 2 cups shredded cheese

Yes, this is just glorified macaroni & cheese.  And it’s one I feel much better about serving my kids than the dayglo orange variety.

And no complaints from their end either.

“You can serve this is me *any* time, Mom,” Natasha gushed. “Even breakfast.”

“Me too!” Elisha agreed.

So I’m pleased to confirm another winner.

 

by

Real Life Menu (a new series with recipes)

Need some specific ideas for a gluten free attempt?

This is the menu our family is currently eating from.

If you want to print it out on one page, specify landscape orientation and under scaling choose *Fit all columns on one page.*

It is a five-week grid of real food, mostly from our freezer/pantry, mostly recipes I have made before (One exception include a page number so I know where to find the recipe).

Over the following (many?) weeks I plan to share the recipes for my staples (at least 10-12 basic meals, remember?), and maybe some general stuff about being comfortable in the kitchen.

Expect it to be  a slow process, but we’ll get through the elephant eventually.

~ ~ ~

Here are the recipes from this menu written/referenced already on the blog:

Because we’re already part way through the menu not everything will be posted in order, but since some things are just simpler or more familiar than others, they may get used (and therefore photographed and posted) out of order.

Just think of it as a real-life example of how a menu/meal plan can be used: a guideline, a suggestion, a gift not to think about one. more. thing.

by

Sherlock, Sickness, Snow & Story

So life doesn’t slow down just because I’m doing things besides writing.

Here’s my quick update:

A) Jay and I downloaded the first movie/episode of Sherlock last month and ordered the whole first season from B&N soon after.  But it took nearly 3 weeks to arrive.

  • This was really only an issue because of another aspect of our “new life,” and that is mail confusion.  There is another home on this mail route with the same house number and 1st-letter in the street name.  At least, that’s what I attribute the confusion to. We frequently receive their mail, and occasionally get mail with a hand-written, Wrong Address! scribbled by our names.
  • I’ve often felt it would be good neighborhood relations to meet whoever it is we’re swapping magazines with, but when we didn’t receive our eagerly-anticipated blue-ray for a long time I was really concerned that it had been mis-delivered and we’d have to eat the cost or make things awkward with the neighbors.
  • So the package’s arrival was a huge relief that had (for me) less to do with a fun couple-time than with easing my mind.

B) This week I’ve been a bit sick– nothing completely miserable, but enough to make most “efforts” quite draining.  Even so, we’ve had a few projects to manage, including a few trips to town for the making of Easter outfits and supplies for them. We haven’t done homemade dresses for the girls before, and I’m excited, hoping they’ll be able to be involved quite a bit.

  • Naturally I’ll post pictures when they’re done, but for now I’ll say it’s this pattern for both girls, and the different fabrics are a sparkly, butterfly-heavy print for them both. (Hm. ‘Butterfly heavy’ sounds… odd.) Continue reading →
by

Gluten Free Stopgaps: options to replace glutened recipe elements

More foods are gluten-free than contain gluten.

But most foods we eat on a regular basis are either based on gluten-containing foods (spaghetti and meatballs), made from recipes that have gluten-containing ingredients (cream-of mushroom soup in green bean casserole) or both (Soft tacos: the shells are made with wheat, and most taco seasoning contains flour as a thickener).

Eventually I hope you make peace with your kitchen and discover the joy of learning new recipes, but I understand that can be too much to ask for  in the  beginning.

At this point in your journey the most manageable thing may be learning how to make your familiar recipes without gluten.

Here are a few ideas that may help with that.

Continue reading →

by

Animal Talk: Introducing the goats

This is Cream. Her twin sister, Sugar, was a bit more shy tonight and  wouldn’t come up for the camera.

They’re only interested in jack-in-the-boxing when they’re being ignored.

Like when we’re making lunch.

That’s where the goats have  been hanging out for the last week: in a tarp-lined Pack’n’Play with a shavings-bed.

They’re in our main room, so, yeah, the same room we eat in.

It’s the room Jay and I sleep in too, so it’s definitely been like having infants: their little (but insistent) bleating whenever they think were’ awake (and therefore should be FEEDING them, of course).

Continue reading →

by

Snapshots: Spring Breakup 2011

During break up of last year, our neighbors’ property flooded with the snow-melt, and we learned our land is lower than theirs.

I had noticed the rotting back-step and had attributed it to the age of the structure.  Now I more-strongly suspected it was due to annual flooding.

Jay rented a mini-excavator and used the bucket to dig a channel along the edge of our property (there’s a road in the winter/dry season dividing us).  The ground was still frozen, and the water was flowing fast, but he managed to get enough dug to keep the house dry.

Later in the year he had the same machine out again, and the difference between the two times couldn’t have been more marked: “It’s like butter!” Jay said when I asked him how it was going.

Aside from the normal reasons for looking forward to spring, I’m eager to see how this work will affect the run-off pattern this year.