Finding Jesus in the Laundry

I don’t know about you, but one of the most seemingly mundane tasks of my week is laundry. As cliched as it sounds, it really is never-ending.

Here’s my ideal: People in my family wear clothes. Clothes get dirty- sometimes really dirty because we live on a farm. The laundry fairy shows up and viola! Clean clothes. Folded and put away.

But because we live in the real world, that’s not how it happens. You all know as well as I do that in the grand scheme of things, laundry can sometimes get pushed to the bottom of the list of things to do in a day. I used to feel as though it was a chore, drudgery, a nuisance. Something that was to be an annoyance, a hassle, an inconvenience and only completed grudgingly and with an ungrateful heart.

Then Jesus got hold of me, and boy did He change my heart around. He showed me grace in the middle of my distain and mercy in the midst of my chore. And I’ve never been able to look at it the same since.

The soft, quiet whisper of the Spirit reminded me what a joy it can be to serve those with whom I share a home. He prompted me to start small. So I did. Instead of seeing the piles of laundry, He caused me to look at the blessings it held.

It holds the blessings of a sister and a brother who enjoy spending time together- even at the ages of 16 and 15. It holds the blessings of a hard-working man who loves his family and me more than we can possibly understand. It holds the blessings of the day to day rhythm of life that comes from living on a farm. It holds the blessings of joy, peace, love, and laughter.

But mostly, what I learned, is that it holds the blessing of enough. Enough.  It holds the blessings of a single-income, homeschooling family for which God provides enough. It holds the blessings of a family who sits together at the dinner table every night. It holds the blessings of a 16 year old daughter who still holds her daddy’s hand in public. It holds the blessings of a 15 year old son who still hugs his mama. It holds the blessings of a devoted husband who appreciates and values his helpmeet in ways too numerous to mention.

And how, do you ask, does dirty laundry hold these blessings? Simple. The life that is being lived is being lived in the clothes that are piled on the floor or in the hamper. The dirt and the grime that is on the knees of my son’s jeans is a direct result of the life being lived. A tear on the sleeve of my beloved’s shirt came from his determination to work and provide a decent income for his family. A stain of poo on my daughter’s coat came from her desire to provide our animals with a safe, warm place for them to lay their heads at night.

After I started seeing the laundry through the eyes of Jesus, He took me one step further. I now pray over each item of clothing as I fold it. I spend quality time with God in intentional prayer of the members of my family. I will ask Him to give them wisdom, protection, favor, guidance, grace, direction, and many others as they go about their day wearing the clothing I’m folding.

My sense of humor has certainly developed as I’ve prayed over my family while folding their underwear. And I think that might have been the biggest lesson for me overall- that there is joy to be found in the mundane. There is communion to be found in the details. But most importantly, that Jesus cares so much about me and my heart, that He met me in the laundry room.  

Homemade Bread

The recipe book refers to this as Very Good Bread. My family and I have to agree.

Once you start making bread, be careful. It's hard to go back to store bought bread once you've made this one. The natives get restless without homemade bread and will stage a coup if batches are produced too far apart. 

6 cups of bread flour* (AP works, but not as well)
2 1/4 cups of whole wheat flour
2 cups of hot water
1 cup of cool water
3/4 cup of oil
2 T fast acting yeast
2 t salt
1/3 cup brown sugar

Put the two flours, salt, yeast, and brown sugar in big bowl. Mix well. Add in the water and oil. Knead until very soft and pliable- about 10-15 minutes.

**If you have a Kitchen Aid mixer, the directions go like this: Put flours, salt, sugar, and yeast into mixing bowl. Turn on mixer with bread hook. SLOWLY pour in the water and oil. Keep mixer on low speed for about 5-7 minutes.

Turn out into a large, greased bowl and spray with oil. Cover and let rise until double in size. Punch down, separate into 4 equal piles. Form into loaf shape and put into greased bread pans. Poke holes in top with fork. Let rise again until double in size.

Bake in heated 400* oven 18-22 minutes or until golden brown and hollow when thumped.

My Amish friend takes her butter wrappers and wipes them over her loaves of bread when they come out of the oven but that is purely optional. 

Immediately turn out onto wire racks to cool.


*Bread flour is a high-gluten flour that produces the most tender bread ever. If you can't get your hands on it, don't worry, your bread will still be better than anything from the store!


If you ever have stale, leftover bread, try this recipe for homemade bread crumbs. 

Vanilla-Glazed Apple Cookies...Hello, Autumn!

Finally! An autumn recipe that contains not one iota of pumpkin!

This recipe comes from a 1965 Good Housekeeping Cookbook. I have another one that I use frequently from the same era (that I stole from my mom) that starts out by saying, "The way to a man's heart" is by cooking a great meal. I'll let you ponder that while I eat these Vanilla-Glazed Fresh Apple Cookies 

Start with 1/2 cup shortening (remember, kids, the book is from 1965). 

Add in 1 1/3 cups brown sugar and 1 egg. 

Cream those together.

In a separate bowl, sift 2 cups flour, 1 t baking soda, 1/2 salt, 1 t cinnamon,
1/4 t fresh nutmeg, and 1 t ginger (original recipe calls for cloves instead of ginger, but I intensely dislike cloves, so ginger it is).

With mixer running on low, pour in half the flour mixture, 1 cup finely chopped apples (peelings left on, if desired. I leave it on- it's easier that way), 1/4 milk or apple juice, then remaining flour mixture. It should resemble something similar to this:

Drop them by scooper-fulls onto a greased baking sheet 

and bake at 375* for 11-14 minutes, or until done. 

 Remove to wire rack to cool. 

I put mine on the rack with a cookie sheet under them

to catch the crumbs and the overflow of the glaze.

Mix up a quick vanilla glaze of 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, 1 T soft butter, 1/4 t vanilla, 

and 2 1/2 T light cream.

These are actually just as good the next day, if they make it that long, as they are the first day. They store really well as long as you layer them on wax paper.

The kids love these and I have been able to tweak the recipe enough to make them gluten-free (I just use my own gluten-free flour mixture). They can even be dairy free, just use apple juice in the dough and again in the glaze recipe. 

I hope you are able to make up a batch of these soon. You won't be disappointed!

They are so delicious you won't even miss the pumpkin~

Mother Earth News Fair

A few months ago I was scrolling through my Facebook news feed and this post came up for the Mother Earth News Fair. I had heard of Mother Earth News and had read their magazines while sitting in the library waiting for the kids' summer reading program to end. And I loved them.

I discovered that Mother Earth News puts on a fair in different parts of the country during the year. The closest one to me was going to be in Pennsylvania in the middle of September. I talked with a friend and we decided to attend. Our daughters decided that we couldn't go by ourselves and have all the fun, so they came with us (as a mama, that made the trip even better).  

First of all, the entrance fee is so reasonable it's crazy- if you place your ticket order early, you can get a 3 day ticket for $25. And kids under 18 are FREE. So, yeah, crazy prices.

I looked around and found a B&B for us to stay in for the weekend- again, crazy reasonable pricing. Plus, breakfast was included. The room was clean, the breakfast was hearty, and the other guests were a riot. We all had a great time together.

We left for our destination early Friday morning and arrived at our B&B around noon. After checking in and depositing our bags, we headed to Seven Springs Resort for the fair.

Let me tell you something: I was blown away. Seriously. The venue, the weather, the scenery. Oh, and let's not forget the actual fair itself! The vendors. The workshops. The education. The people. And I usually am not a real big fan of people. But these 15,000 people were just like me! They were seeking knowledge about living life. About being alive. About doing stuff that matters, not just today, but into the future. About realizing that the status quo isn't all it's cracked up to be. About finding a new way to do an old task. About making a difference. About not settling for something that works just because it appears convenient.

You are probably expecting me to describe these people as older, hippie-ish, tree-hugging, no animal product, women in long, flowing skirts, birkenstocks, and long hair everywhere. Ah, no. Not at all. There were so many families. So many people in my generation. I couldn't believe how many people under the age of 45 were there. It was amazing. And so encouraging!

I took workshops on crop rotation, herbalism, goat cheese making, hops growing...can you say 'diversity?' There were over 200 workshops to choose from! I learned so much over the weekend that I felt as though my brain had turned to mush and was leaking out of my ears.

A few words of advice:

• Take good notes. Even if you don't think it matters at the time, take them anyway. You won't regret it- you will regret thinking that you can remember everything you heard in the workshop
• Good walking shoes. Obviously. 
• More money than you think you'll need. Although, most of the vendors are set up to take credit/debit cards now on their smart phones, cash is king
• Go with a friend or friends. You can a) divide and conquer and make it to twice as many workshops if you split up and b) have someone to process information with.
• At least one bag- preferably a backpack- for you to haul stuff in. 
• Don't feel like you have to have basic knowledge in any given area in order to attend a particular workshop. I found that most of the presenters went from basic to advanced teaching within one hour. It was fascinating. 
• GO

If this has piqued your interest at all, wonderful. If not, sorry 'bout your luck.

Easiest.Crisp.Ever.

This recipe will totally make your life easier. I promise.

Picture it, Sicily, 1942- you are on the meal train at your church and need to add a dessert recipe to your dinner offering. Or a new neighbor moves in and you'd like to welcome them to the area. Or a last-minute potluck lunch comes up with your homeschooling group at the park.

I'm not even kidding when I say this crisp recipe has the potential to change your life.

Ready? Set. Go.

Preheat oven to 375* or 350* if using glass baking dish.

Spray your baking dish. I use either a 9x9 or a 9x13

Put a thick layer of any type of fruit in said baking dish. The most recent two times I made this, I used frozen apples. Ahhhmazing.

In a medium size bowl, combine equal parts brown sugar and rolled oats (I use Wheat Montana's 7 Grain Cereal which I have a certain affinity for, as discussed in this post) and half of that amount of whole wheat flour. With your fingers, blend in that same amount that you used for either brown sugar or oats of real butter. (Spelled out: example- 1/2 cup of brown sugar, oats, 1/4 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of butter) Add a healthy sprinkle of cinnamon, ginger, and a 1/4 tsp of baking power, and a pinch of salt.

Sprinkle on top of fruit. Spray top with baking spray if you like it super crispy, like I do.

Bake until fruit is tender and topping is browned.

Viola.

As my daughter says, "easy peasy, lemon squeasy"

Trust me: you cannot screw this up.


Some fruit combinations that are a big hit around my house:

You can use frozen, fresh, or canned-
Apple- add nutmeg into topping
Apple and cranberries-
Pear
Pear and raspberry
Black raspberry, blackberry, and blueberry
Peach- add nutmeg into topping
Peach and raspberry
Peach and pear
Rhubarb and peach

You can totally make this with gluten-free flour and certified gluten-free oats.

Enjoy!

It's All Good

We have kids!

The four-legged kind!

The cute as a button, jump like popcorn kernels, lanky, leggy kind.

Check out the video of their first time seeing grass. As my Amish friends say, "Joomba!"  It means "jump."

And do you know what that means? It means that we have to redo the inside of our barn. Oh joy.

These next few weeks will be filled with pounding posts, building stalls, putting up tin, and generally making our barn more of a safe haven for our little animals from the big, bad, wiley coyotes that live very close by.

While we're at it, we're building a bigger and better chicken run for our hens, too. For as much as I love having them forage through the property for their daily intake of bugs, worms, grubs, and so much more, I don't love them digging up the garden once it's planted or laying their eggs under the raspberry bushes. So, we have to corral them for a few months while we grow and harvest the food I'll can and preserve for our family. They'll be let back out to roam once the last of the potatoes have been dug early this fall.

I was talking with someone a few weeks ago and they had mentioned how as their kids had gotten older (mid-teen years) their farm  had gotten smaller. I thought: how nice. The older our kids get, the bigger our farmingness (<--is that a word? It is now) gets. The older they get, the more things they get interested in. Rare breed pigeons. Meat goats. Milk goats. Turkeys. Chickens. One current steer with another one coming to our farm soon. A rescue horse. Two dogs. Two children. One cat. All kinds of love I tell ya. All kinds. 



Life.is.so.good.

Chickens and Memories

We have raised chickens before as the meat/egg breeds. Those were a lot of work, but fun. You get the eggs for two years, but then comes the butchering part. The processing of them would fall to me, and I just didn't want to do it anymore. It's a lot of work for a little bit of meat. 

Then we got started in broilers for meat and realized that pound for pound, week for week, feed for feed, the broilers were worth more to us than the layers were, meat-wise.

We have raised different breeds of chickens for many years and decided two winters ago to get Golden Comet chicks. This was a new breed for us. I’ve heard many people will only raise Golden Comets for eggs due to their consistent egg laying, feed-to-egg ratio, docile nature, and their final slight size.

I got the call from my post office that our day-old chicks were waiting for me. We got them home and settled in their box near the woodstove. 

Aren't they cute!?

They spent some time with us in the house near the woodstove for heat, but by the end of March, it was warm enough, reliably, to put them in the chicken coop. By that time, of course, the kids had grown attached to them. The chickens had become pets. They had become friends. Never mind that their life-plan was to lay us eggs, eat our kitchen scraps, and scratch our garden looking for grubs until that fateful day when they would say goodbye to this world and venture to that Great Big Chicken Run in the sky.

However, one chicken in particular, decided she liked the ‘human life’ a little too much. She would join us in the wood pile, right at our feet scratching for grubs, hopping up and sitting on the kids’ laps while they ran the handle for the log splitter, riding on the rack of the four-wheeler as we moved the wood into the woodshed…she was always around us. My husband, who would be running the chainsaw, would have to stop what he was doing to pick her up and set her down on a log that would be crawling with bugs, worms, and grubs.  Our family became so attached to her, that we named her “Fri-hen-d.” 

Yes, this chicken is in our house. 

She also received a blue zip tie on her left leg so that when it came time to butcher the chickens, we wouldn’t accidentally butcher her. (This foray into the kitchen is what prompted to blue zip tie- so it's not on her in this photo)

She lives the good life now- when she hears the back door open, she runs up on the deck hoping that we will be hand-feeding her something tasty. When it snows, or is too cold outside, she comes up to the back door and will peck on the door asking for admittance. Once, we took pity on her and brought her in and warmed her up by the woodstove. She plopped herself right down in the warmth and sat there for a while.  She comes when she’s called- like a dog does. 

Our family has enjoyed her antics and will allow her to be free and safe from The Ax.  The memories she has given our children will live on long after she’s gone. My husband and I are in the process of creating for our kids their ‘Good Ole Days.’ These are the days and times that the kids will look back on and remember with fondness.  Besides, what more can a mom ask for but memories to cherish close to her heart when the kids have grown up, and those same memories that they can take with them to pass along to their children. One day, they will be sitting around the table at a Thanksgiving dinner after their dad and I pass on, and they’ll say, ‘Remember that chicken we had when we were kids that mom and dad let us bring in to the house? What was her name again?’ And they’ll regale their families with stories of Fri-hen-d and growing up on a farm. And their memories will be tinged with gold and warmth and love. 

Herbal Horse Healing

Living on a small farm means being ready for just about anything. 

Reader discretion is advised.



A few weeks ago, one of my rescue horses got a huge wound on his right rear quarter. The wound was about 7" in diameter and about 2" deep. There was nothing to stitch together. (We're still not sure how he managed it).  I am not a vet tech nor am I really good around ouchies, but he needed tending and it's what one does when one lives on a farm- no matter what the size of the spread.

I was able to clean it out and get all the foreign material out of it- dirt, hair, whatever else a horse gets in a rear end wound- with warm water, paper towel, and persistence so that I could expose some raw edges. Healing has to start from the inside and not cover over dirt and yuck. <-- Life lesson #1 of this situation.

Thanks to the willingness of my good friend, Char, from LiveLifeLoveOils, she was able to hold his head and scratch him behind the ears at the north end while I worked on the south end. The deeper I got into this wound, the more I knew that this was going to be a beast to heal. <-- Um, yeah, we'll call that Life Lesson #2.  Great. I didn't want to stall him because I wanted him to walk on it and keep blood flowing and his joints from getting stiff. I needed to keep him healthy, which is tough with an older rescue horse in the easiest of times. Add to this the combination of record-breaking cold, dangerously low windchills, snow that kept coming, and this wound, and I knew I was in for a doozy of a battle.

We're not a big bunch of panickers around our house. We have been using essential oils for almost a year now and have never looked back. I love the doTerra brand due to the fact that they can be used internally, but there are a few oils that I will buy from other sources. One such oil is Lemongrass.  Knowing that it can speed healing and is a powerful pain reliever, I added it to a bottle of Herbal Solution sample that I had picked up from my local granary. The ingredients followed along our 'first try nature and God's offerings' mentality <-- #3: aloe, myrrh, comfrey, goldenseal, cayenne, and elder, in an isopropyl base, and decided this would be a good option to start with. After I got it all cleaned out, which took a very.long.time, I applied this mixture to him.

Pardon the quality of the iPhone pic.
It was so cold my hand was shaking.

Twice a day, I would head out there to do a wound check. It was so cold that the seepage from the wound was freezing before it could get out of the wound completely. So, I had to continuously pull off the frozen seepage. Multiple times a day. And apply the solution. Multiple times a day. And pray. It seemed as though he was getting worse for about the first week. I had to increase his feed, add in about 8 cups of rehydrated beet pulp, and about a cup of corn oil just to keep him going. His body was using so much energy to heal and keep warm that I was afraid that it wasn't going to be able to do both sufficiently.

After about 10 days, the healing started to occur. The seepage eased, his energy came back up, and the wound started showing signs of health. I wish I had a photo of him today, but he went to his forever home about 3 weeks ago.

I will have this Herbal Solution in my barn forever now. It's worth it's weight in gold. Or vet bills.