Valentine's Day Baby Gym

Happy Valentine's Day (a day late) to you all.  Sorry I didn't get this up yesterday, but we've had a couple of crazy, busy days here Under The Old Oak Tree.  By the time we got home from school and then getting the stitches taken out of Toadstool's head, I was just too tired to take the last few pictures I needed or to write up this post.

I've been thinking for a while that Rosebud would probably really enjoy a baby gym.  Her favorite place in the world is at home on the floor on her sheepskin rug.  It's a warm cozy spot and big brother Toadstool likes to join her there (he got his own sheepskin for Valentine's Day so they can be near each other but not have him so in her space all the time).  

I looked into buying  her a wooden baby gym, but the price was way more than I could justify for a toy she'll probably only use for a few months.  I started looking online and came across these directions from Seedpod Craft.  I decided that I could do this!  I used heart plaques instead of ovals and Toadstool and I spent quite a while sanding all the rough edges off and rounding them to have a more Waldorf aesthetic.  We also rounded off the ends of the 4 support dowel rods.  We don't have a huge amount of space in our small apartment so I felt that it was important that we be able to take the whole thing apart and reassemble it easily.  I'm not sure how often we'll do this, but I'm sure there are times we'll need to, so instead of attaching the legs with wood screws, I drilled all the way through and used machine screws with wing nuts.  I decided it was safe enough if they were well tightened and we take it apart and put it away once she's pulling up on things.  To go on it I knit a pink and red heart and a pink and red ladybug  lovebug with heart spots which attach to the cross bar with i-cord.

 I did a bit of cooking for Valentine's Day this year too.  I made us heart shaped brownies.  My brownie recipe is an adaptation of Elana's Pantry's breakfast bread, but you'd never know it.  They really have  a good bit of protein and very little sugar in them and are so so rich and chocolatey!  I'll have to post my changes to her base recipe at some point.  

I made these heart shaped peanut butter cookies for Papa to take to work for the Sweets Day he was organizing for his co-workers.  They turned out really cute shaped as hearts.

For our breakfast I made my guys and I heart shaped eggs and bacon with a little chocolate cherry mouse.  These mice have been quite the hit with Toadstool.  He loves mice (so much that his teachers at school gave him a little needle-felted one for his birthday) and cherries so when I saw these over at The Magic Onions, I knew I had to make him some!  One on each plate was a perfect little sweet start to our Valentine's Day.

 Toadstool and Rosebud show off one of the Valentine hearts he made to give to family and friends this week.

Linking to Creative Friday at Natural Suburbia.

Preparing for Autumn-Pumpkin Pie Chia Pudding

Forgive me, I totally forgot to take any pictures of this before we ate it all up, but it's too good not to share.  I'm sure I'll be making it again soon and I'll try to take a picture and post it before it's gobbled up.

Recently, W and I have been eating Greek yogurt with a little granola, chia seeds and walnuts for breakfast.  It's been one of the few breakfasts that seems to fill him up and stay with him for any period of time.  Anything else and he's hungry again in 15 minutes.  Second and third breakfasts were becoming common place at our house because W was just always hungry till we started on the Greek yogurt/granola combo.  So yesterday I found this recipe for Pumpkin pie chia pudding and it sounded so, so good, but I knew to meet our current  nutritional needs, it needed some changes.  I'd been craving pumpkin pie for some reason all day and had bought a little canned pumpkin thinking I'd try to make myself something to quell that craving.

So, I came up with my version of Pumpkin Pie Chia Pudding, made with W's beloved Greek Yogurt, and using stevia to replace much of the maple syrup (I left a little in just for some lovely maple flavor).

The verdict is that this is some seriously yummy stuff!  Perfect for fall!  W ate his with his usual granola and walnuts (I just had walnuts to top mine).  W told me that "It is spicy but it's my favorite!" It also seemed to fill him up adequately enough to make another good breakfast choice for our family.  It's nice to have a little variety from time to time, so I'm working on variations of our basic tried and true breakfast.

Pumpkin Pie Chia Pudding
(makes three servings)

1 cup canned pumpkin
1 cup Greek yogurt
3 Tablespoons chia seeds
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (ours is from Frontier)
3-4 drops liquid stevia (or to taste)
1/2 teaspoon maple syrup

Mix all ingredients, pour into single serving dishes and refrigeration overnight.  Top with your favorite granola and walnuts if desired.

Grain-Free Groaning Cake

I mentioned in a previous post that I think most of the reason I'm doing so well energy wise during this pregnancy is that I have made some major dietary changes.  With W, I had diet controlled gestational diabetes and did fine but I feel like I still ate quite a lot of junk during that pregnancy.  I ate the best I knew how at the time, but really, it wasn't great.

This time around I started with my GD diet early on in the pregnancy.  Okay...I tried to start it during the first trimester...but morning sickness and complete and total exhaustion made it really hard.  By the second trimester though I was pretty dedicated to making the GD diet work for me.  Blood work came back showing some other endocrine issues though and after meeting with my wonderful doctor and doing some research I decided that I also needed to go gluten-free.  This was a huge step for me.  I come from a family culture where gluten and wheat (and grains in general) are considered to be of the utmost importance and I really had to break with that type of thinking.

I soon learned though that gluten-free wasn't going to be enough.  Anything with rice flour spiked my blood sugar noticeably and made me not feel particularly well.  I also felt like everything just tasted like white bread and it was hard for me to adjust to that.   In time I started finding some good recipes that call for either almond or coconut flour or a mixture of the two.   I started baking again.  I fell in love with baking again.  Especially with the almond flour I can eat pancakes, bread, muffins etc and my blood sugar doesn't spike.  I feel like I am eating normal and healthy food and I am satisfied with it.  I feel wonderful and my energy is so much higher than it has been in a really long time...probably a few years.  I still get tired...I am pregnant after all, but it's not that same exhaustion I did have. 

Recently I've been trying to prepare myself for birth in many ways...and of course one of the things I've been thinking of is food.  After W was born I was given a little frozen dinner in the hospital and it was awful.  I was starving....my labor with him had been really long and hard and while I did have my support people sneak a little food to me here or there, by 12 or so hours in, I really wasn't interested in trying to eat anymore.  This time, I'm planning on being at home, and I'm planning to have some good food once this baby is here! I've decided to make myself a nice nourishing beef stew with home made bone broth in the crock pot once I'm in early labor.  I'll actually probably prep and freeze most of this ahead and then just dump it all together in when the time comes.  

I've also really wanted to make a groaning cake for this labor (since way before I even got pregnant).  I have several friends and acquaintances who have either made one or had their spouse or other support folks make one while they were in labor.  I love the idea.  It's a dense, nourishing cake with molasses and eggs to help boost the mother's iron and protein levels.

I had one major obstacle to this though.  I could not find a gluten free, much less grain free version of this cake recipe.  Not to be deterred however, I decided to go through recipes and see what I could come up with.  I used this carrot cake recipe from Elana's Pantry as my base recipe and added/substituted elements from the two groaning cake recipes I found online here and here (there are some lovely traditions and history of this cake that are shared on these links). I also substituted dried cranberries for the raisins as we have sulfite allergies at our house and while all/most raisins contain sulfites, we are usually okay with the dried cranberries.  I decided since this was pretty different from any of the recipes I had consulted that I had better do a test run before I went into labor.  So, when my midwife had to cancel our appointment as she had to attend another birth, I decided to make my cake.

Grain-free Groaning cake

·        ½ teaspoon real salt

·        3 cups blanched almond flour

·        1 teaspoon baking soda

·        1 tablespoon cinnamon

·        1/2 teaspoon cloves

·        5 eggs

·        1 teaspoon almond extract

·        ¼ cup molasses

·        2 Tablespoon honey

·        1.5 teaspoon stevia

·        ¼ cup melted coconut oil

·        1 Tablespoon orange juice

·        Zest of one orange

·        3 cups apple, peeled and grated

·        1 cup dried cranberries

·        1 cup walnuts

1.     In a large bowl, combine almond flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon and cloves

2.     In a separate bowl, mix together eggs, honey, molasses, stevia, orange juice, orange zest, almond extract and oil

3.     Stir apples, dried cranberries and walnuts into wet ingredients

4.     Stir wet ingredients into dry

5.     Place batter into 2 very well greased loaf pans or lined muffin tins.

6.     Bake at 350° for 45 minutes to an hour.  Tent with foil to prevent burning if necessary.     A skewer should come out mostly clean, though this is a really moist cake. Cupcakes take about 15-20 minutes to bake.

     For my trial run, I made one loaf and some cupcakes.   It's really important if you make this into cupcakes to use liners in their pans.  The loaf came out fine, but the cupcakes stuck terribly and I couldn't get most of them out in one piece.  Luckily W and DH didn't mind too much.

The results were actually really good. It's dark, dense and very moist. Both of my guys and I really enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to trying to make it again once I'm in labor.  I found that I especially like it with a bit of Swiss cheese.  It's still has more sugar than almost anything I've been eating during this pregnancy so I really feel like I can only have it if I have the extra added protein.  The nuttiness of the cheese is a nice contrast to the rich sweetness of the cake.  I will say this was a tad bit work intensive and  I am slightly concerned about trying to make it while I'm in labor.  i think I will try to have my dry ingredients mixed and freeze some orange juice and orange zest ahead.  I'll also try to use the food processor to grate the apples since that took forever by hand.  

Nourishing Traditions (or an explanation for my absence)

I'm still here though things have been pretty quiet here on the blog over the past couple weeks.  I mentioned in my last post that I have been reading Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon recently.   This book has inspired such a huge change in our house.  I skeptically got this book from the library after listening to friends rave about it and traditional foods in general for the past couple of years.  They had some influence on our family for sure.  I've been cooking with coconut oil for a couple years now, I occasionally soaked my grains, was known to make bone broth a couple times a year and I had developed a healthy (if expensive) kombucha habit.  We ate whole grains almost exclusively at home and ate some produce from local farmers' markets, but we weren't really eating a real/traditional foods diet on a daily basis. W and I would grab fast-food lunches often if we were out and about (way more often than I ever care to admit) and I drank diet soda like it was going out of style. It only took me a few days reading and cooking from the book to realize how much this is revolutionizing the way our family eats.

At first my plan was to implement a couple things here and there, but the more I started preparing and eating these real foods, the more I craved them and the better I started to feel. It was like a fog was lifted.  Then, one day W and I were out and hungry and decided to stop to get some fast food.  BIG mistake.  I felt sick and sluggish for three days afterwards.  It's not an experience I care to repeat anytime soon.

I also started reading Real Food by Nina Planck and found it to be a wonderful companion to NT.  Honestly it has had a bigger impact on the types and sources of the foods we are now eating than NT has I think.  I've been getting more of our food from the local farmers markets and much less from the grocery store.  I found a local milk source at one of the markets.  It's not raw, but it is grass-fed, local, whole and unhomogenized (and since we always make the majority of our milk into yogurt or kefir, I'm okay with it for the moment).  I feel like it's the best I can do while I seek out a source of raw milk.  I've also found a wonderful meat and egg vendor that we are also frequenting along with all of our favorite produce vendors.

Okay, so on to the fun stuff going on in my kitchen now!  Just look at what I have going on above my kitchen cabinets!

One of my first projects was starting my own kombucha scoby.  It seemed to take forever, growing that first scoby from a bottle of GT Dave's, but,  I now have three jars of kombucha going and multiple bottles in a second ferment stage. (In the picture above the jars covered with clothes are my first fermentation stage jars and the bottles next to  them are the second fermentation stage). This makes me very happy and I can honestly say I don't even want to think about diet soda anymore.  For me, I think the kombucha made this such an easy and much needed transition.

I also have jars of cortido, pickles, ginger carrots, beet kvass, bean paste, and peach/tomato salsa fermenting up there.  The two jars on the right contain my sourdough starter.

I realized this past week that we are buying far fewer processed items and that I am now really making almost everything from scratch including most of our breads, tortillas and pastas.  What all of this has meant is that I spend way more time in the kitchen than I did previously and that I have to be way more organized about our meal planning and food preparation than ever before.  This is especially true for any foods containing grains or beans that need to be soaked or sprouted or meats that have to be thawed.  It has also meant that much of the computer time I do have gets devoted to researching information, recipes and tips than ever before (so less time for blogging).

The challenge now, seems to be getting the rhythm of all of this worked out so that I can do small amounts of food prep a few times a day to maintain it all and do the other things that I want or need to do done.  I hope within a week or two I will have that part sorted out a bit better.  In the mean time, I am enjoying the creativity and health of this new way of cooking and eating.

Yarn Along

I'm joining with Ginny of Small Things again today for the Yarn Along.

I haven't had a huge amount of time for knitting lately, but when I have, I've been working on this large worsted weight shawl.  I really want to get it done and blocked soon so that a) I have it to wear once the weather gets colder and b) so that I can focus on really getting started on gifts for autumn birthdays and Christmas.

I have been reading a good bit recently though (and perhaps thus neglecting my knitting).  I started reading Nourishing Traditions recently and of course I have thus been spending most of my time in the kitchen cooking, and soaking and fermenting up a storm.  I was a bit skeptical going in to it, but I have really enjoyed the book and implementing as much of it as possible so far, I feel fantastic.  I think this will have to be covered in a later blog post at a later time.  If you are interested however, my friend Tiffany  at The Real Food Mom has been blogging about it from her own unique perspective.  It's been fun sharing thoughts about more traditional foods with her.  I've also been reading Nina Planck's Real Food and have found it to be a good companion to NT.

Otherwise in reading, I have set aside Wuthering Heights for now.  I'm thinking I'll go back to it this fall, but for now I am doing some reading to prepare for our upcoming trip out West to visit my parents.  While my husband, the Park Ranger is looking into all of the National Park sites between here and there, I'm excited about getting to visit the Little House on The Prairie Museum.  We've been reading the My First Little House books to W on a daily basis and he absolutely loves them and is also really excited to go see "Laura's House".  So, in preparation for the trip, I just completed Little House in the Big Woods and I will start Little House on the Prairie this evening.  We read all of the Little House books when I was a child and our family vacations often included visiting Little House sites.  I think Pepin Wisconsin is the only one we did not visit when I was a kid.  Once W is a bit older, I think we will have to do all of the Little House sites with him as well.  I so love sharing this with him already.

As I read, I'm looking for ways to make this come alive for W as we travel across the country to the plains.  I think this may have to be it's own post as well at some later point, but if anyone has any suggestions for resources or activities that would work for a three year old boy, please leave me a comment!

Lavender Cake

A few weeks ago I discovered this recipe on the blog Chocolate Eyes.  I wanted to make it that very second, but didn't have the lavender or even know where to get it.  A few days later, I was at our local farmers' market and the wonderful herb man there sells bags of dried lavender blossoms.  I went to buy one and learned from him that the French lavender I had in my hand, while good for perfume or potpourri, was not what I should use for tea or cooking.  Instead, he went to his van and brought me a bag of English lavender.  


I made this lavender cake for the first time that day and was hooked, but wanted to make a few tweaks to the recipe.  To start, we don't necessarily need a gluten free recipe at our house and I had our home ground whole wheat pastry flour on hand, but did not have chickpea or rice flours.  Also, my bunt pan is fairly tall and the cake batter was not enough to really fill it so that we could appreciate the pretty architectural detail the this pan uses to form the cake.   By a misread, I also added a whole lot more lavender than the original recipe calls for, and find that I like it that way....note though, it might be too much lavender for some folks taste.  This is quickly becoming a favorite summer desert in our house.


This cake tastes so good and the lavender is amazingly calming.  A few bites in and I feel mellow and ready for a nap.

In the end I rewrote the recipe out our version of the recipe:

Lavender Cake

1.5 cups butter softened

1.5 c sugar, white, brown or honey
6 eggs, beaten
3 cups whole wheat pastry flour
2 t baking powder
6  T dried, minced lavender
1  t vanilla
0.5 c milk

Glaze
1 c. powdered sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla
1-2 tsp dried, minced lavender
milk or non-dairy substitute to thin to desired consistency

Preheat oven to 350 F.
Grease & dust a tall bunt pan with flour. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in eggs.  Grind lavender in a mortar and pestle and fold lavender and vanilla into the batter. Whisk together dry ingredients and add a little at a time alternating with several tablespoons of milk to get batter desired consistency. Pour into pan and bake for about 25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Let cake cool 10 minutes, then turn out onto plate to cool further. Make glaze and drizzle once cake is completely cooled. Garnish with additional lavender if desired.

I also think this cake would be wonderful with some lemon.  I've been thinking of either substituting lemon juice for the milk in the glaze or making the recipe as cup cakes and using a lemon curd filling to make little butterfly cakes using this technique.

A Glimpse Of Our Weekly Rhythm-On Friday We Grind Our Flour

I thought I might share a little bit about our weekly rhythm here.  Specifically, I want to share what we do on most Fridays.  This is the day that we grind our flour in order to prepare for baking day on Saturday.  It's also the day that we have some sort of pie for dinner.  It can be pizza, or a quiche, or pot pie.  Usually it's something that requires using some of our freshly ground flour.  W doesn't like the noise of the mill particularly, but he does love to help with the grinding.  Honestly, he's more help with this than I have ever wanted!  Still, I wouldn't miss involving him in this process for anything.  Grinding our own flour helps to connect him with the source of his food even at this young age.  He knows what wheat looks like when it's growing, thanks to the wonderful folks at Mount Vernon.

And within a few weeks we'll be able to go see how they separate the kernels of wheat from the chafe in this threshing barn.

We also have been to see them operate the Mount Vernon Grist Mill where they grind wheat and corn.

Picture courtesy of my MIL.  
W was too terrified of the noise for me to get any pictures inside.

Okay, back to our home flour grinding.  This is the mill we grind on.  Someday I'd love to get one of those lovely hand powered mills too, to help W get an even better feel for the process.

Please ignore the kernels of wheat all over the counter and 

kindly remember that I have a two and a half year old helping with all of this!

We mostly grind soft white wheat for pastry flour and hard white wheat for bread flour. 

Soft white wheat on the left and hard white wheat on the right.

W helps me to measure out the grain and sort it to make sure there are not any rocks that go into our mill.   And then we fill up the hopper of our mill, turn it on and go read a book in the other room.

Then W thinks the fun begins as we bag up the flour as soon as it's ground.

Next time I must remember to put an apron on him!

What a mess!

Do you see what I mean about more help than I ever knew I wanted?

And here are my giant bags of flour with the wheat.

The hard white is on the left and the soft white is on the right.

And then of course the best part about our flour grinding day.  Making pizza for dinner.

 He is such a big helper getting that yeast to proof....

...and helping to mix up the dough with Mama's dough hook.

Sorry I didn't manage any pictures past W mixing up the dough for the pizza.  I was too exhausted from cleaning flour off of every surface in my kitchen.  You'll have to take my word for it.  It was delicious!

Simple Joys: Preserving Spring

Recently one of the mom's from my old local attachment and natural parenting groups sent us all a link about making violet jelly.  Later that day W and I took a walk and realized that our new neighborhood was teeming with violets so we decided to give it a try.  Our family went for a walk and picked as many violets around the neighborhood as we could.  Two cups is quite a lot of violets to pick!  But it was a wonderful family outing and we found some really lovely wooded areas in our neighborhood.

We brought them home and I then washed them and let the steep over night.

After they were strained the water was a lovely deep blue color and the violets were practically white.

The magic happened when we added the lemon juice.  The violet infusion turned from deep blue to this beautiful bright shade of pink-violet.

I also recently used this same recipe to make rose petal jelly.  For that we used some of the roses from our balcony and petals from some of the rose bushes my husband cared for last summer ( we visited his old workplace and I gathered them from some of the roses that were starting to fade a bit).

Of course W and I also made jam from all those strawberries we picked.

Here's a sampling of our spring preserves.

Of the three I think the rose petal jelly is my favorite.  It is delicate and just heavenly.  It doesn't have the pink color I was expecting, but I did not want to add food coloring to it.  My mom and I have however toyed with the idea of adding a couple of drops of beet juice  to make it more pink but hopefully not enough to make it taste like beets.  She's going to test it out so we can see how it works.

 I was greatly surprised  by how much I enjoyed the violet jelly.  I remember really disliking some violet candy I was given as a child.  I found the taste to be sickening and can honestly still remember it very clearly.  I'm not sure why I even actually decided to make violet jelly based on that experience.  This jelly was however, much more mild and not sickening at all.  The taste was pleasant, floral and not overpowering at all.  We served the violet jelly with our Easter dinner and it was a big hit.


I'm going to use this post to participate in Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday.  So fun to see what so many people are creating!

Celebrating May

Having May Day fall on a Sunday during the week between Easter and Mother's Day really through me for a loop this year I have to admit!  I found myself scrambling to get something together to mark the day/season when all we really wanted to do was spend a week recovering from Easter and having company.  Also, having moved recently, I had a difficult time finding public celebrations near our new home. We like to have a family picnic as well at a local park for May Day too though. As a family, we decided not to celebrate on May Day itself but on the following Tuesday instead.  This allowed Daddy to celebrate with us, and allowed me to delay starting our preparations till May Day.  That day I started making the May wine that Daddy and I like to enjoy as a part of our celebration.  I start with a bottle of German mosel wine and pour it in a half gallon jar along with sprigs of sweet woodruff, sliced strawberries and sugar.

 I let this set in the fridge overnight, then strain it out the next morning.  At that point I also add fresh sprigs of sweet woodruff, rose petals, and a bottle of sparkling mineral water and return it to the refrigerator.  It is so, so good and I look forward to it all year!

Daddy toasts May with some May wine

I also made W this Strawberry pomegranate sun tea and added sliced strawberries to it prior to serving.  It was so pretty, I had to take a picture of it with the sun shining through (please note I did not leave it sitting out in the sun once I added the strawberries). 

W thought this was so special.  Our little May King was so careful not to spill a drop of it!

 Before we ate our picnic, W and I made May crowns with leaves and flowers we found at the park.  Last year we made these braided raffia crowns and we simply slip the stems through the braids.  They work really well and we are able to save the crown base from year to year.

Here we are in our May finery!

For our picnic food we had homemade stromboli stuffed with ricotta and mozzarella cheese, pesto, spinach and Italian sausage.  This doesn't have much to do with May Day per say, except that in our family, this is standard picnic food.

We also had goat cheese salad with grapes and walnuts, and fresh cut strawberries mixed with some xylitol.

For dessert, we were supposed to have Rosemary and  Strawberry scones, but I accidentally left them at home.  We ate them for breakfast for a few days instead and they were so delicious!  I think they taste like May with the fresh rosemary W and I picked from our little balcony garden.  

After we ate we flew kites until W decided that the kites were scary.  Then W and Daddy played catch for a while.

To be honest these pictures were taken a few days before  our celebration (I forgot to get the camera back out after we ate).  I wanted to include them though because I love how my two year old plays catch.  There's always a couple of minutes between each throw while he wonders around looking at something else that has caught his interest...lol, but he loves this as special time spent with Daddy who is a very patient ball player!

The following Saturday W and I made the trip down to the Richmond Waldorf School for their May Faire.  We loved watching the May Pole dancing and catching up with dear friends there.

We have continued our celebration of May with W spending lots of time out on our balcony playing in his new sand pot...

...and visiting the sheep at a local farm.  W loves all sheep with a passion that is truly fitting for the son of an avid knitter and felter.  It warms my heart to see him walk right up to the sheep and pet them. I also love that he knows at this early age that the wool Mama works with comes from the sheep.

 He is especially fond of the black lambs here and spent a very long time with this little guy, petting him and talking to him.  I am amazed by the gentleness he shows to his sheep friends.

W and I went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival on Mother's Day  It was quite a drive, but was the perfect way to end up our week of celebrating the best of May.  I was able to stock up on some fleece, locks, roving and yarn and W was able to spend lots of time with the sheep.  He spent half the day giggling in delight each time a sheep would baa.  He also loves watching the sheep dogs.  Another year we will have to take Daddy as well so that I can participate in some of the workshops and W can spend more time with his sheep while I shop for wool!

Our favorite sheep at the festival.  He was so friendly and demanded attention.  

W was happy to oblige!

Wishing you all the very best of the happy month of May!