Drumroll, please...

Photo credit: seemann from morguefile.com


The lucky winner of the Pinstriped Pill Bottles Giveaway is....
Kate of Foxs Lane!  Thanks to everyone who left a comment!

Challah-days

Every Friday morning, I roll up my sleeves and bake bread for our family's Sabbath meals.  My first attempts were, shall we say,"unimpressive."  (We could also say, "not fit for human consumption," or "terrifying to small children," but that would be ungenerous.  And accurate.)  After fifteen years of practice, I've got it down pat, and I figured I'd share a little of the process.  I make what's called a water challah, which doesn't call for any eggs in the dough.  I also cheat, and use my KitchenAid stand mixer to do the heavy work.  Here's what you need:

Ulana's Water Challah

6 cups of King Arthur's bread flour
3T. yeast (I buy it in bulk at Sam's Club)
2 1/4 cups of very warm water
1/2 cup vital wheat gluten
1/3 cup honey or maple syrup
1/3 cup oil
3 T. sea salt

For the glaze:
1 egg, beaten
sesame or poppyseeds (optional)

Combine the dry ingredients and mix for 20-30 seconds with the dough hook (or your hands).

Add the water, oil, and sweetener.  Knead until the dough is smooth and elastic, and cover with a damp towel.  Let rise one hour, then punch down and shape.  It should look like this.  (Or better, if you have the patience to make pretty braids.)

Brush with beaten egg, and sprinkle with poppy and sesame seeds.  Bake at 350 degrees until golden, like this:

 (If you've been paying attention, I've revealed the next major littelgreenbums undertaking in this post...)

My Creative Space: Giveaway!

Look what I made!  Another batch of yogurt!  (Yes, we ate a gallon of yogurt in a week.  It's okay, though...it's fat-free.  And organic.  And there are a bunch of us, so it's really more like we each ate an eighth of a gallon of yogurt in a week.  Which still sounds like a lot of yogurt, no?)  I have to say, the whole yogurt thing gets high marks in my book.  Try it.

I have this incredible day job.  I get to play secretary at our synagogue, and one of the many perks is that I get to keep all of the security envelopes that come in the mail.  And then I cut them up and make fun things with them.  (But not at work.  Because that would be inappropriate.  And immature.)  So today, I covered some prescription bottles in blue pinstripes.  Just because.  And I'll be darned if I know what I'm going to keep in my pinstriped bottles, but they're pretty cute.  So I'll tell you what.  Since this is a craft blog, and we know that all the cool craft blogs have giveaways, I'm going to step up to the plate and put three of these little cuties up for grabs.  If you'd like to win the set of them, leave me a comment explaining what you'd use a prettied-up pill bottle for.  I'll choose a winner on Sunday evening.

Take a peek at everybody else's creative spaces over at kootoyoo!   And thanks again to Kirsty for hosting us...

Brain-freeze

When it's this cold outside, all I want to do is sleep and cook.  And eat.  And wear sweats.  I do not want to do dishes or laundry.  Nor do I have any particular desire to shuttle little people to and fro.  I think I'll spend the next week or so in my jammies under heaps of quilts.  With seed catalogs, trashy novels, and lots of bon-bons.

Keeping it under control

In the middle of the night, when one of my brood comes in to my room to share a bad dream or a bellyache, I can identify them by feeling their heads.  Without my glasses, I make Stevie Wonder look like a top candidate for flight school.  And somehow, I always manage to misplace my specs...while I sleep.  Which results in an early-morning game of  "Let's find Mommy's glasses so she can get out of bed without injuring herself or someone to whom she fairly recently gave birth." 

Yeah.  So when this brainstorm hit, I was a very happy camper indeed.  This folding wire crate (trashpicked, thank you very much,) holds my book and a few other bedside essentials:  my MP3, pen, journal, and , of course, my glasses. I've been using it for a couple of weeks, and we've had nary a scavenger hunt since.  In my book, that's a Very Good Thing.

If you've been paying attention...

Photo credit: mactabbie from morguefile.com

You've probably noticed that I'm getting crunchier.  Eating locally.  (Well, trying to.  Not easy in February.  In Iowa.  But I did forgo those bananas on Thursday when I did my weekly shop, so that's gotta count for something...)  Composting.  Gardening.  (Thinking about gardening, anyway.  Still February.  Still Iowa.)  Raising chickens.  Taking the pledge.  Making my own yogurt, even. (Had to get that last one in there...we're almost ready to make Batch #2.)   We're making progress, crunch-wise.


Last night, our little family sat down for an educational movie night.  (Those of you who know me well should catch the significance of this event:  I've probably  managed to sit through 3 feature-length films in the past 10 years.  They don't call  me ADD-Girl for nothing...) The feature?  Food, Inc, the eye-opening documentary from Robert Kenner.  There's a conspiracy theorist in our house, and people, it ain't me.  I'm usually the one grasping at straws, Pollyanna-ing on about how probably the Twin Towers were structurally unsound to begin with, and maybe Lee Harvey Oswald was just cleaning his gun....but this flick had me ready to swear off processed foods altogether.   I was gratified to have ordered the seeds for our garden-to-be, and fired up to build that chicken ark once and for all. 

I'm pretty squeamish, but the carnage and filth didn't get to me.   I believe animals should be treated humanely, but I'm not naive enough to expect that they will.  It was the footage of 2-year-old Kevin Kowalcyk, who died after eating E. coli tainted beef, that did me in.  Kevin's mother, Barbara, shares her struggle to reinstate Kevin's Law, which would give the USDA power to shut down plants that repeatedly produce meat contaminated with E. coli or other deadly pathogens.  I'm not getting why this is a struggle.  It's distressing to think how "bought and paid for" the food industry is. 

Right.  Hopping off my (borrowed) soapbox now...the point of this post would be simply that the Hubs and I are in agreement that we'll be cutting (further) back on processed foods.  We'll be making more of an effort to feed ourselves locally.  We're placing an order for kosher grass-fed beef today.  And of course, we hope to rely on the bounty of our impending urban homestead to fortify our family.  Stay tuned...

Got culture?

Breakfast chez nous: homemade organic yogurt.  Excuse me while I jump up and down and spit nickels, folks. I made yogurt!  It was like magic, no joke.  (Did I mention I'm a cheap date?  Did I need to mention I'm a cheap date?)  I used Avivah's tutorial and made a GALLON of yogurt for less than $6.  (Compared to the $3.69 32 oz. tubs of Stonyfield Farms that my creepies suck down in one sitting, that's very, very good. )  And, as an added bonus, it's ambrosial---as in, "really, really yummy."  The part of the process that I had to stay awake for  took a little over an hour, which was fine, because it gave me a chance to check out a bunch of creative spaces when I'd normally have been dead to the world.  It was me, a pot, a lid, a candy thermometer, and a gallon of organic milk.  Heat, cool, stir, sleep, eat.  That's it, in a nutshell.  We used it to make Pink Drink this morning, and had lots of happy little breakfasters.  Here's the 'recipe':

Pink Drink:

• yogurt (1 cup per serving)
• frozen strawberries
• flax oil (1 tb. per serving)
• wheat germ
• rice milk (1 cup per serving)

Put all of your ingredients in to a big bowl and use an immersion blender to reach the consistency you prefer.

Enjoy!

My Creative Space: Avalanche!

Things are breaking in the Haven o' Craft.  First it was the changing table that's been standing in as a set of shelves (made me glad I'd never put anything fragile on it, like, oh...a baby!)  Then the big vinyl bag I'd been using to stash my refashoinables went and split a seam.  (Yes, I get it: too many items awaiting my attention....so what else is new?)  So now I feel like we've slipped back to square one...the whole place looks like it's fallen victim to a natural disaster of epic proportions.  In the midst of the mess, though, things are happening.  Two crates got covered, and I'm fusing a plethora of plastic bags to make a slew of these.  Thanks to Kirsty for hosting us...make sure you click over to kootoyoo so you can get an eyeful of what everybody else is up to this week!

O happy day!

I bit the bullet and covered two ugly milk crates. As Akiva told me when he was four years old, "My heart is filled with gleed." I didn't really get what he was talking about till I finished making these.  (It scares me a little that I can get a rush like this from crate covers.)  This was the perfect project for me: quick, simple, and utterly useful.  I was able to put the pair of them together in just under 3 hours, and that included supper, 2 diaper changes, a broken needle, my first attempt at using bias tape, 17 re-threads ---don't ask....this machine is making me insane!---and a spontaneous decision to add a freezer-paper stencil to the mix.  The tutorial is over at Laura Gunn's website, and it's ridiculously easy to follow. And my crates look like they shop at Pottery Barn.

Unpacked.

I finally finished unpacking the kids' books tonight.  No small task, this...we've filled 4 tall shelves full of our accumulated literary treasures.  Mind you, they're not organized yet---just sorted into rudimentary divisions of fiction and non-fiction, novels and picture books.  I did try to group like with like, for the most part--- the Robert Munsch books together,  the Curious Georges, the Annes , the Raggedy Anns..but I never manage to find a way to keep them sorted for long, anyway.
I have a penchant for kiddie lit, and seem to pick up books wherever I go.  I never met a thrift shop I didn't like, and when yard sale season starts there are "new" books to be had at every corner.  My own well-worn copy of Linda Richards: America's First Trained Nurse is in our collection, as is my Fog Magic and Hans Brinker.  There are dozens of volumes on each shelf that I could recite in my sleep (and probably do, for that matter).  There are some that I'd read when I couldn't sleep--the literary equivalent of warm milk.  And there are some that I drop behind the couch when the kids turn their backs ---stupid almost-namesake-Bears!--and pretend that I just can't find them.