Hello February 2017

So let's just let a snowy wind blow away my missing week or two. Have you seen the snow outside? My goodness it is almost 2 feet deep! The chickens are not impressed. The children on the other hand are thrilled.

I am thrilled to say that I did in fact keep our grocery budget as well as every other budget we set. So this post is going to be a purely a goal update but I promise to get back to delicious recipes very soon.

Sausage, Beans and Goals

Sorry I missed you last week. I got knocked down by a terrible head cold. When I finally started to feel human around Thursday, it was just in time to cook and clean for L2's birthday. So now that I am feeling better, I am playing a bit of catch up. Thankfully the weather has been lovely so the kids haven't been under foot while I do laundry and dishes. The quiet house has given me some unexpected and welcome time to enjoy The Dave Ramsey show with minimal interruptions.

If you have never listened to his show, or read any of his books (I am currently reading The Total Money Makeover), his show is definitely inspirational. It has been inspiring me to continue working our budget without coming up with creative ways to cheat or talk myself out of it. For now though, I have been sticking to all our goals.

Bootstrapper

I have no idea what I expected when I read the cover of Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm but it sounded intriguing. I ordered it from the library and then forgot about it.

Total side note: I don't know how it works for you but I swear there are a handful of people out there who read exactly the same books as me. They take out a bunch from the library and return them all at once. I, in turn, then get them all at once. I can go a week or two with no new books, then BAM! Ten books show up at the library in 24 hours. Crazy but true.

The new books to arrive for me were Bootstrapper, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, and The Soil Will Save Us. Now I had been waiting for The Soil Will Save Us and fully expected to start reading it once the kids went to bed. I was having a quiet evening and thought, well I should check out Bootstrapper in case I don't want it; I am going right by the library tomorrow.

On the Bookshelf - Feb 2016

One of my goals for this site this year is to share more books with everyone. One of my favorite things is learning what other people are reading. Each month, I am hoping to share what I am currently perusing. This month is mostly cookbooks. The next two months will probably be heavy on gardening books. I am always looking for recommendations so feel free to leave a comment about what you are reading.

Books I really love, I will do separate reviews on but for now, this is what I am currently checking out, in order of appearance above.

Maple-Glazed Carrots

I have a weakness for cookbooks. Inside, there are so many recipes and techniques. Here's the thing, by owning them I am able to aspire that some day, hopefully, I will be an amazing cook (who can host dinner parties with ease and have a perfect, Martha Stewart house). I realize this isn't true but to this day I remain hopeful. For the last year though, I have been purging my cookbooks. I have been reading them and guess what? Most of the ones I have owned don't contain recipes that are so amazing that they are worth the space on my shelf. I know, go ahead and pause as you think, no duh silly! It's okay I realize other people already know this. I take no offense. Cookbooks offer hope and don't we all need a little hope every now and then?

Sorry, I digress. Even as I have purged cookbooks, I have still had quite a few on my shelf that I haven't gotten around to reading. Recipes from America's Small Farms is one such book. So this evening when I was trying to come up with yet another way to prepare beets (our winter CSA is great but I picked up too many beets and carrots), I checked the index.

Notes From A Blue Bike

Some people have seen and commented on our cleared kitchen counters and asked why? Then asked what prompted it. It started with Notes from a Blue Bike. I honestly cannot remember why I requested it at the library, I know that I saw a post by the author about something and then noticed that she had published a few books. I checked the library: Organized Simplicity and Notes from a Blue Bike so I requested them both. Notes from a Blue Bike came in first. The subtitle, The Art of Living Intentionally in a Chaotic World, really peaked my interest prompted me to give it my attention before the other books that I signed out. It was mid-January and let's be honest, everyone wants to start the year out feeling like "this year I will accomplish more than last year" or something similar. Being pregnant, with the house in chaos most of the time, having more free time due to not working and wanting to make more time to spend with the kids doing things more intentionally this book was like a sign. I picked it up and didn't stop.

Chicken and Egg

Happy St. Patrick's Day to the many of you who celebrate. Unfortunately there will be no recipes for green eggs and ham today but there are a lot of egg recipes to be found in Chicken and Egg by Janice Cole.

For Christmas I got an amazing pasta book from my sister: Making Artisan Pasta. In fact, the book was so perfect for me that my in-laws got me the same book. Since I didn't need two copies, I returned one copy to Amazon and received a credit. Two of the books I ordered in exchange were Chicken and Egg and The Good Egg. I put off reading it for a while but once I decided to clean out my cookbooks, I decided that owning so many egg cookbooks was probably unnecessary. I already owned Eggs and The Fresh Egg Cookbook before the holidays and four books on cooking eggs seemed a bit much. Chicken and Egg is shorter than The Good Egg, I decided to start with Chicken and Egg.

What We Are Reading - Children's Books

We read a lot in our house. The boys love to read just about any time and are open to most genres. They love reading home improvement magazines with my husband, old travel magazines, fiction books, chapter books, you name it. Their appetite is endless. Whenever we are starting on a new project I spend a lot of time trying to find good books we can read with them to get them excited and involved. Since we are getting bees, here are top three bee children's books along with a few others we are loving.

Maple Nutty Nougat

I love cookbooks. I really love cookbooks with beautiful photos. I want to bake everything and have it look just like the delicious photos. As I have worked to clean out the kitchen, I have easily pulled cookbooks that I never use, have simple recipe or have very few photos. I have been having trouble letting go of a few of my other cookbooks, mainly ones with lovely photos that inspire me to be the kind of Suzy homemaker I wish I was.

Then there's another kind of cookbook: ones that were gifts. These are especially hard to part with. Why? Well, some one whom I love gave them to me and thought of me. So this week, as I perused my cookbooks trying to decide which one I would go through tonight, I found Mangiamo, the Sebastiani Family Cookbook. What is so special about this cookbook? It was given to me not by a special person but as a gift from a woman's conference back when I was working full-time in computers. So why the attachment? Really, it had more to do with what it represented that I no long am: a professional woman who travels for business. So I decided to bite the bullet and read it and see if it was really worth the space on the bookshelf as a cookbook or was it only a reminder of something I used to do.

The Complete Tightwad Gazette

I hate to start the day or week complaining but is snowed. Again. We already had eighteen inches and the extra six we got yesterday are making the trip to the chicken coop more and more difficult.

When the snow gets deep and the winds blow this hard, I tend to hibernate. I would be happy just spending the day in a chair in the backroom, a stack of books/magazines piled next to me. Unfortunately the kids like to eat and be read to, do crafts and get out of the house a little. In order to try and fill both our needs, we have been spending quite a bit of time at our library. L1 even got his own library card this year! I was so proud of him because although he isn't quite writing his name yet and he seems to have a strong dislike of writing at this point, when the librarian told him he needed to sign his name to get a card, he asked me to write it and he copied it to the best of his abilities, no complaints.

How to Feed a Family Cookbook Review

My sister loves cookbooks. In fact she reads cookbooks the way the rest of us read romance or other books. So for holidays I can almost always expect to get a fantastic cookbook that she has spent hours checking out. This past birthday was no exception, I received How to Feed a Family by the creators of The Sweet Potato Chronicles, Laura Keogh and Ceri Marsh. I don't know about the rest of you but I spent this past Saturday night with a small bar of dark chocolate, curled up by the wood stove reading it cover to cover. It was a lovely way to spend an evening.

 

The book has some great information regarding good foods and ways to be healthier. It also stresses the importance of food tasting good and spending time in the kitchen with kids. I absolutely loved the author's voices. I smiled pretty much the entire way through.
 

Gaining Ground by Forrest Pritchard

Last time I was at the library, I popped upstairs to the main counter. Typically I am downstairs to pick up books from the hold section or with the boys in the children's section. At the main counter, I inquired about donating my One Woman Farm book. (Yes it was fantastic and I may want to read it again, but this way, everyone can read it as my library doesn't currently have a copy.) Upon leaving the counter, I saw that they were displaying a number of farming books. The cover of Gaining Ground caught my eye so I grabbed it without even reading the back. When I got home, of course the baby was interested in nursing so I grabbed this paperback out of the stack (it was on the top after all) and plopped us down on the couch.

I had no expectations of this book. None. I was very happy to discover that I loved the author's voice. The writing style and tone sucked me in and I had trouble putting it down. It took me a couple of days ; for some reason the kids wanted to eat and I needed sleep otherwise I would have finished this in one sitting. It was that good.

Once Upon a Flock

I read a lot of great reviews for Once Upon a Flock by Lauren Scheuer and decided that I had to read it. I have been waiting for months on the list and last week it arrived. It took me over a week to get down to the library to pick it up. In fact, I had 24 books waiting for me, much to my husband's dismay. I believe his words were "you can't take just two books out like a normal person, can you?" In my defense, I only make a trip every other week and I am on the wait list for a number of new releases. Plus, it's spring and websites and blogs are reviewing books like crazy. With all the great reviews, I have to check the book out to, right? Right?? Ok, I admit, my name is Elizabeth and I am addicted to books. I digress.

One Woman Farm by Jenna Woginrich

Spending so much time nursing a newborn can be wonderful and challenging. I have quite a bit of time to read. On the other hand, I have a lot less time to get things done such as laundry, dishes and of course, writing.

Another great holiday gift that I received was One-Woman Farm by Jenna Woginrich. I have really enjoyed her other books and this one did not disappoint. One-Woman Farm has more of a coffee table book due to the lovely illustrations and sketches through out the pages as well as the diary style entries. The book takes us through a year on her farm with a separate introduction of each season. Her introductions are filled with beautiful prose and are my favorite part of the book.

The Buttermilk Cookbook

Of all the lovely holiday gifts I received, I am really enjoying The Animal Farm Buttermilk Cookbook. This book is full of information about buttermilk, amazing recipes and beautiful photographs.

As you know, my dairy CSA share provides one quart of buttermilk a week and finding what to do with it has been a challenge. (There are only so many batches of buttermilk biscuits we can eat in a week, every week for months on end!) Needless to say, I was super excited to open this gift and have been reading the glossy pages as I nurse ever since.

December 2013 Update

I had planned to write an update in November however during my last month of pregnancy, I am not exactly sure where the time went.

My 100 Things Challenge went really well and I have been trying, especially with the holidays coming, to make sure that anything that comes into our house is something we really want, need or can't live without.

Money Secrets of the Amish

I am a reader. An avid reader. Recently, I have been really enjoying nonfiction books, primarily about homesteading but also about homemaking in general. I am not quite sure but some how I stumbled upon Money Secrets of the Amish by Lorilee Cracker. It must have been on a site where someone reviewed the book because I didn't read the beginning i.e. Introduction prior to requesting it from the library. The back cover was enough to intrigue me and thankfully I didn't have to wait too long.

The book is quite short and that alone was one of the reasons I chose to start with it over many of the other books that came in to the library for me that day. (For those of you who don't know, I use the library a lot. Some strange workings though typically make it so I need to pick up over twenty books one week and then nothing for the next three. Perhaps someone else borrows the same books as me?)

100 Things

As the holiday season draws near, here we are excited for a couple reasons: the end of gardening for the year, a possibility to curl up beside the warm wood stove and between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we are expecting another baby.

The joy I feel that gardening and canning is coming to an end might be because I am 28 weeks pregnant but I know myself. The reality is that by the end of September I am ready for a break from tomatoes and apples and beans and all the other little gardening chores that seemed great until I was overwhelmed by them. Although I haven't written our apples galore article, we have been inundated and at least two trees haven't even started to drop their green and red globes of deliciousness.

As the season slowly draws to a close, I start spending the evenings reading about all the things I might want to do next year. We spend more time at the library, pouring over books and guides and different non-fiction books.

Of the 27 books I currently have checked out, last night I picked up The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul

The Dirty Life

I came across The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball by accident when I was looking up books on Amazon. It was one of those recommended books and since I am a book addict I clicked. The first few pages grabbed my interest as they talked about cooking, organic farming and a dream. The Prologue did everything a good prologue should do: give some background information, sets the setting and hooks the reader.

One Seed, Two Seeds, Three Seeds... Weeds

I have read many articles, blog entries and books about people's love of gardening. The authors all seem to be happy working hard in the sun, planting and pulling weeds. Me, not so much. For one, it is hot in the summer sun and I burn. Second, aches, pains and blisters oh my. Thirdly, there is always something else I would prefer to do... cough, cough relaxing in the shade with a book.

Needless to say, I am always looking for something to minimize the amount of work my garden requires, while still producing the all the delicious bounty of the previous years. I know you are probably thinking, hey chick, it takes hard work. You are right but I would still love to work smarter instead of harder. So this winter as I was checking out too many gardening books and memoirs from the library, I stumbled across Lee Reich's book Weedless Gardening.