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!

Celebrating Midsummer

Cling, ding ,ding

The summer bells now ring:

There’s laughter on the hills,

The daisies show their frills.

Cling, ding, ding

Be welcome Summer King!

Cling, ding, ding

The summer bells now ring:

The shepherds pipe all day,

The lambkins frisk and play.

Cling, ding, ding

Be Welcome Summer King!

~Wynstones' Summer

W and I have been joyously singing this song all day.  He especially loves the "Cling Ding Ding" lines.   In our family Midsummer/St. John's Day is one of our happiest and most loved celebrations of the year.  W and I have been preparing for this celebration for the past week.  It has been a lot of fun since he was really able to assist with many of the preparations this time.

W helps his mama with the Midsummer decorations.

He is especially proud of these suns, which I cut from some watercolor paintings that W did this week. I oiled the paper to make it translucent with the intent of taping them up to our balcony door.   unfortunately the oil caused them to slip right off of the tape so we decided to scatter them on our table instead.  W likes to point to them and tell me that he made them and that they are beautiful.  They were inspired by this post from Seeds from The Yew Tree.

I also worked on several Window Stars especially for Midsummer in the colors of the sun.  They turned out so beautifully and I love having them hanging on the balcony door, though we may need to edit out the collection a bit as it's getting rather crowded, but they do really brighten up the room when the sun shines through them.  We are very fond of our stars and they have gone a long way towards making this new apartment feel like home.

I love this dragonfly!  Actually I love dragonflies in general and one made from window star folds is just so much fun.  Directions can be found here for the dragonfly, butterflies and flowers.

Other paper decorations included making more suns for the china cabinet and the yellow paper spirals we hung from the dining room chandelier.  Both of these were inspired by All Year Round which remains my go-to book for most of our festivals.  I especially love the explanations and background information this book gives on the festivals and their origins.

My other crafting projects for the day included making floating beeswax candles (which I wrote about last year) and a sand candle.  W supervised me in making these projects but I wouldn't let him too close to the  hot beeswax.  I think both of these are destined to become part of our family midsummer traditions.  W did help make the little dish that holds the sand candle from sand clay that we made together.  We had a lot of fun with it, but he kept trying to eat the clay...silly boy.  He never tries to eat regular play dough, so I'm not sure why he thought the sand clay was edible.

W and I also put together our summer nature table and W has been thoroughly enjoying exploring the various elements of it over and over.  I love how things on our nature table spark his curiosity and  imagination and are the jumping off point for many of the discussions during any given day.

Of course food is always an important part of our family festival, so W and I have been cooking too.  We made homemade honey butter and mixed in some basil from our garden.  It is so incredibly delicious.  We ate it on homemade bread and on corn on the cob and all just loved it!

For our bread, again, inspired by Seeds From The Yew Tree, I attempted to make a  beehive out of bread.  It ended up looking more like a coiled blob, but it is some of the best tasting bread I've made in a while, so I'm not going to complain.  Daddy was as always in charge of the grill which also served as our big fire element since we can't really have a bonfire in our apartment complex.  He grilled delicious burgers and some healthy-ish nitrate-free hotdogs.

While he was grilling W played with some neighborhood kids and I was able to visit with one of the moms who happens to be from one of the places I used to live a while back.

I didn't manage to get the giant bubbles together for this year so W and his new friend played with some bubble wands though most of the bubble solution ended up on the ground...but that's to be expected with toddlers.  W also really enjoyed trying to catch the bubbles I made with mine.

Then we came inside to eat, rounding out our feast with fresh green beans, watermelon and basil lemonade.

For dessert we had the same Summer Berries Bread Pudding I made last year (link to post with recipe).  It was as delicious as I remembered from last year.

W was especially fond of it and really wanted seconds.  Then again, this boy has never met a berry he didn't like and this has fresh raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and strawberries in it.

W also celebrated Midsummer by leaving some dried wild blueberries in these little tea cups for the fairies, who should leave him something in return tomorrow morning.  He is really looking forward to seeing what they bring.

I also wanted to mention one other source of information that I have drawn heavily from this year for our Midsummer/St. John's Day celebration.  This post from Christine Natale has so much wonderful information about the day.  She even convinced me to watch A Midsummer Night's Dream on Netflix yesterday while W napped.  I ended up with this 1968 version instead of the ones she recommends since it was the only one available to stream.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, though it is quite obviously a very late 1960's production....oh the strange juxtaposition of the story, scenery and costumes! All the women except for Judi Dench are wearing these little mini dresses and knee high boots and the men's costumes are almost out of a period piece! Ha Ha!

Anyways, back to  Christine Natale's post.  I also really liked her explanation of the significance of St. John's Day coming six months before Christmas and preparing the way for Christ as well as her discussion of balance.  I definitely find that I am needing a bit more balance in my days right now and it is something I will be working on in the coming days as we look towards fall, winter and Christmas.  This has all greatly enriched my appreciation of Midsummer and made it more meaningful on a very profound and personal level.  It is not an aspect of the festival that I bring directly to W, but I know he benefits from my working on it myself.

Wishing you all the happiest of Midsummers!

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: Spiritual, Emotional and Physical Nourishment

One of my greatest needs that has been the hardest to meet since we moved here has been finding a new church for our family to attend.  I'm finding this much harder this time than I did in our previous city.  At that point, W hadn't been born yet and it never occurred to me that I needed to find a church to meet his needs as well as my own.  We were lucky with our church home there.  They have wonderful children's programs, and a nursery staff  who were kind and loving and who knew our family well.  We didn't even use the nursery there all that much.  W stayed with us in services till he was a year old and started becoming disruptive.  Before he turned two we started keeping him with us for the first part of the service and taking him to the nursery if sitting still and quiet started to become an unrealistic expectation for him.  He is a toddler and I think that an hour long service is a long time to expect a little boy to sit quietly and not be disruptive, even if he has plenty to occupy him.

Now, with his new job my husband is working on Sundays so I am also left to take W to church on my own.  In the past he did much of the active parenting during church, respecting my need to be able to participate fully in worship as a way to recharge for the week.  We have tried quite a number of churches since we moved here.  Some were just bad fits all the way around.  Others would have been wonderful places for me, but did not have other children W's age or even nurseries for him.  Another, which I thought was going to work for our family only had a nursery intermittently, and we had very bad results when they did not.  The last time we went to that church, I left in tears as I chased W back through the doors after his third energetic running screaming trip down the aisle during a prayer.  I left feeling more drained and spiritually and emotionally depleted than when we arrived.  It was suddenly very obvious, that this church, while lovely, was not going to meet the needs of W or myself on a regular basis and our search started all over again.

This past week we tried yet another church, and I'm cautiously optimistic.  I took W into the service to start, and he loved all of the singing that started the service.  When he started to become fidgety, I took him to the nursery and he had a wonderful time!  The nursery was staffed by a paid attendant (never realized just how important this is in terms of the nursery being a safe and reliable place before) who had her son who is W's age there too.  She met his needs in a kind and loving way and took the boys outside to play.  I could hear them outside having a wonderful boisterous, energetic time while I was in the service and it was really freeing for me.  The service was very different from what I am accustomed to, but it was deeply nourishing spiritually, and I felt recharged in a way, I have not been since we moved here.  The experience could not have been more different from that of the previous week.  I'm praying that our future experiences there will be as positive.  W had not wanted to even go to church again after the experience we had the previous week.  On Sunday, while I was putting him down for his nap, he turned to me and said "Mama, I love church".

After the service W and I stopped by our local farmer's market for the first time.  It was wonderful!  Almost everything I could ask for in a farmer's market.  It's big!  Lots and lots of vendors who grow crops locally.  Many sell plants as well as produce. The prices were quite reasonable.  Most were comparable or better than what we've been paying at the grocery store.  The herb man is wonderful and knowledgeable and we had a wonderful conversation about the uses of different types of lavender.

This is what we ended up buying at the market...

Two bags of lettuce, asparagus, kohlrabi, sugar snap peas, radishes, baby potatoes, a bag of English lavender, a bag of French lavender,  a chocolate mint plant, an elfin thyme plant (which is the cutest daintiest thing I've ever seen), an English lavender plant and a zinnia.

W couldn't wait to try a radish after we read Peter Rabbit hundreds of times this spring.

He spit it back out pretty quickly so I'm guessing he thought the flavor was a bit strong.  He has been eating them in salads this week though.    We have eaten so well this week and the market ingredients have really energized my cooking. Each dinner has featured some ingredient from the market.  So far we have used our farmers' market ingredients to make several salads,  asparagus pasta (as a treat we added some shrimp and I also added lemon juice and dill to the recipe), steamed sugar snap peas,  a lavender cake (heavenly), and roasted kohlrabi and baby potatoes.  I've also taken to having a cup of lavender tea in the evening before bed.  I think we will make a habit of going to the market each week after church.

All in all, by the time we arrived home last week I felt so nourished: spiritually, emotionally and physically.  Even better, I knew that W had been as well.  It makes our situation after this move feel much less desperate too, which is such a comfort.

In other good news this week, we also found out on Sunday that W and I have been accepted into the Parent-Child class at the local Waldorf School for September.  It feels like such a long way off, but it really gives us something to look forward to as well.  We are really excited!

Strawberry Time Under The Old Oak Tree

May is strawberry time here Under The Old Oak Tree.  This week W  and I went to our favorite berry patch and picked two of these great big buckets of wonderful strawberries.

W had such fun picking the berries and sampling of course.

He also loved playing in the sprinkler system while I paid for our berries and transfered them into containers to take home.

The next two days were all about STRAWBERRIES!  We ate lots of whole fresh berries, made jam, and shortcake, ate sliced berries on our yogurt, and made roasted strawberries to eat now and froze some.  I think the roasted strawberries which are surprisingly sweet yet savory would be especially wonderful on a sandwich in place of mayonnaise.

Even W's doll Sammy, got to have a strawberry for breakfast.

All of these strawberries inspired me to make an Under The Old Oak Tree creation.    She will was created for my etsy shop.