Menus this week: fun in the kitchen

This week's menu started out by accident.  I printed out a sample menu page from the Hillbilly Housewife's free PDF Menu Planning 101, and left it in the kitchen.  The Squirrelings saw it and got all excited about the Quick Cinnamon Rolls, Garlic Breadsticks, and other things I haven't made for awhile; they were disappointed when I said it was just a sample I'd printed out.

Aww.

Well, we do have most of the ingredients called for, if we shifted some of the meals around, and I think most of us would like most of the meals.  But it's going to be kind of a crazy week, with different people in and out for different things.  How about everybody helps cook this week, when they are home, so that we get to try some new things/old favourites?

Okay.

To make it easier, Mama Squirrel printed out every single recipe from the menu and put them into a three-pronged folder.  Everybody responsible for a particular dish can easily find the instructions.  And if we want to do the same meals over again, it will be easy.

So here's this week's menu plan, with most recipes available on the Hillbilly Housewife website:

Sunday (Father's Day):  Breakfast:  Banana muffins, fruit, cereal.  Lunch:  Dad's choice.  Dinner:  At a relative's (that was easy).

Monday (a day when a couple of people have to leave early in the morning):  Breakfast:  Cereal and toast.  Lunch:  Macaroni salad.  Dinner:  A skillet rearrangement of Company Chicken Casserole, served with rice or maybe perogies.

Tuesday:  Breakfast:  Homemade granola or other cereal.  Lunch:  Vegetable Lo Mein, or it might turn into fried rice.  Dinner:  Impossible Cheeseburger Pie, vegetables.

Wednesday:  Breakfast:  Cheese Pancakes.  Lunch:  Pigs in a Blanket.  Dinner:  Green Spaghetti (my own addition--I have the ingredients for that, but not for the Stuffed Peppers originally on the menu), Garlic Bread Sticks, Bean salad, Peach Crisp.

Thursday (a day when people are eating at odd times):  Breakfast:  Hot or cold cereal.  Lunch:  quick sandwiches.  Dinner:  Italian Beans and Rice, Cheese Puffs.

Friday (we have a church event in the evening):  Breakfast:  Peanut Butter Bread for those who can eat it, other options for those who can't.  Lunch:  Banana Carrot Salad and leftovers.  Dinner:  5 Can Bean Soup (with bacon added), leftover bread sticks and cheese puffs, fruit.

Saturday (the adult Squirrels have to have a quick dinner because of another event):  Breakfast:  Cold cereal, and maybe the Quick Cinnamon Rolls.  Lunch (after grocery shopping):  Maybe hummus with vegetables, maybe sandwiches.  Dinner:  Either Slow Cooker Pulled Pork Sandwiches (from A Year of Slow Cooking rather than the Hillbilly recipe), or Sloppy Joes, and cookies.

What's for supper? Red, yellow, orange

The colour theme wasn't deliberate--we weren't having a paintbox party--but last night's dinner did turn out to be colourful.  In a good way.

Meat sauce (ground beef, mushrooms, green peppers, a bit of tomato sauce, basil)
Polenta slices, baked and topped with mozzarella cheese and parsley
Sweet potato oven fries
A bit of lettuce from the garden

Sliced watermelon
Apple-butter muffin cake with apple chopped into it (I had promised muffins, but it was too hot to turn on the big oven, so I made a pan of "cake" in the toaster oven instead)

What's for supper? Slow cooker ranch potatoes

Tonight's dinner menu:

Creamy Ranch Mashed Red Potatoes, from More Make it Fast, Cook It Slow
Mini sausages, peas
Lemon-poppyseed cake made from muffin batter and using up leftover lemon pudding

The potatoes tasted fine, especially with the homemade ranch dressing substitute given in the cookbook; but I didn't cut them small enough and they weren't cooked soft enough to really mash.  So we had Creamy Ranch Cut-up Red Potatoes instead.

Rosie Backstage: neglected Shakespeare gem?

Some things are just hard to figure out.

Kids Can Press is a very popular Canadian children's publisher.  Non-fiction books they've published have become standard resources in many classrooms.  Their craft books are particularly well done.

Tim Wynne-Jones and Amanda Lewis are decent writers.  Bill Slavin has illustrated over sixty children's books. (Although I think he could have made Rosie look a bit more appealing.)

And, especially in southern Ontario, you would think that a book designed to open up Shakespeare and the Stratford festival would be an instant classic, especially with classroom teachers and homeschoolers.  (Think field trips.)  Lois Burdett's "Shakespeare Can Be Fun" series is one example of something that has been very popular for the past decade. So why is it that Rosie Backstage came out in 1994 and immediately went out of print?  Wouldn't any resource that makes Shakespeare more accessible be enthusiastically snapped up?  It seems like the sort of book that teachers would have designed unit studies and stuff around.  Maybe they did, but online searches for the title+unit study and +lesson plan didn't uncover anything.

Rosie is set up much like the Barbara Greenwood Pioneer Story books (in the U.S., the first book is A Pioneer Sampler).  A story chapter, some facts, another story chapter, and so on.  The book is packed with information about all aspects of theater production:  a page on what a costumer does, a props person, a stage manager, a lighting person, and so on; there's also basic information about Shakespeare's life and the Globe Theater.  The Rosie story itself is okay--not thrilling, but it works as a vehicle for the rest.  Stuck backstage while her mother works on props for the Stratford Festival, Rosie meets a "mysterious man" who--wow, who'd have thought--turns out to be Shakespeare.  This particular Shakespeare seems to be at the theater in order to cause mischief (more like Puck or Ariel?), but in the end it all turns out okay.  (Some parents may not like the section about theater superstitions, particularly regarding The Scottish Play.)

So--a well-designed book with some useful information about the theater, in a format designed to attract kids' attention, seemingly lost in book oblivion.  Like the missing jewels on the duke's costume--it's a mystery.

What we bought at the flea market

Rhubarb Crisp, in a flash (and some use-it-up ideas)

Well, more or less of a flash.

Mr. Fixit had the afternoon off, and we picked up Grandpa Squirrel and went to a flea market.  So I had about half an hour when we got home to get supper on the table.

This was helped out by the fact that we had Reuben Chicken going in the slow cooker (chicken breasts, sauerkraut, and Thousand Island dressing), to which I quickly added a bit of cornstarch and water (you knew I was going to say that).  If I'd had some dinner rolls, we could have just eaten it as hot sandwiches, but we didn't have any, and we'd had a lot of on-a-bun meals lately anyway.

What else was in the fridge and freezer, on the day before grocery day?

A few frozen perogies, a bag of Asian-style frozen vegetables, a package of whole mushrooms.  I started the perogies going in a pot of hot water, and added the mushrooms plus about half the bag of vegetables.  (Mushrooms rinsed but not cut up.) I drained the whole thing before the veggies got mushy, added some margarine to the pot, and let it stay warm while I set the table, put out a bowlful of Triscuits, a jar of applesauce, and a few other things.

In the meantime, I was thinking about the fresh rhubarb that Ponytails had brought in the day before, and the cupful or so of homemade strawberry sauce that was sitting at the back of the fridge.  I didn't want to turn on the big oven, but the toaster oven would do fine to bake a dessert, if I could get it in quickly enough.

So in a small casserole I put a good layer of applesauce, the remains of the strawberries, and the quickly-chopped rhubarb (cut it fairly small if you want it to bake quickly).  I gave it all a good sprinkle (I mean a GOOD sprinkle) of cinnamon-sugar mixture.  I mixed a cupful of rolled oats, half a cup each of flour and wheat germ, a bit more cinnamon-sugar, and a bit of brown sugar (end of the bag), and added what should have been half a cup of oil but turned out to be a lot less since that was the very last of a jug, and I couldn't be bothered to go to the basement and get a new one.  I made it up by dabbing some margarine over the top before the dessert went in the oven.  It was done after about 40 minutes in the toaster oven (check and make sure the rhubarb is soft).  Good with yogurt or vanilla ice cream.

Punctuation Rant

I opened the weekly "shopper" paper yesterday, looking for yard sale ads.  Our "shopper" has gone to a mostly-articles format, since few people want to pay for print ads these days.  The headline that caught my attention said something like this:

"Prom and Grad, call for true elegance."

Did we learn this in school?

Were we ever told to write, "Pugsley and Wednesday, are playing with their octopus?"

Were we ever told that it was correct to say, "You and I, could make beautiful music together?"

Of course not.  So when did people start doing it?

The composer of such titles should write on the blackboard one hundred times:

I will not separate the subject of a sentence from its verb with a comma.  Even a plural subject (two nouns joined with "and").

That's it.  I'm done.

What's for supper? Beef-sausage tortilla filling

It was a busy day and Mr. Crockpot did the supper again. This "recipe" is proof that it's really okay to try out your own slow cooker ideas.

Improvised Beef-Sausage Tortilla Stuffing

1 lb. ground beef
Leftover sausages, chopped or sliced
The end of a jar of mild salsa (maybe half a cup?)
1 cup beef broth or water (use to rinse out the jar of salsa)
1 can no-salt-added kidney or other beans, rinsed and drained
Cornstarch--optional
Tortillas and toppings (cheese, sour cream, shredded lettuce)

Brown the ground beef. Add to the other ingredients in the crockpot. Start on High to get things going well, then cook on Low all afternoon (you are just heating things through, so Low is okay). I added just a bit of thickening at the end because I didn't want it to be too sloppy in the tortillas.

You could also serve this mixture over rice, or combine with cooked pasta. Or just leave it a bit liquid, eat it in bowls, and call it sort-of chili.

What's for supper? Back to our veggie roots

When we were first married, we had more vegetarian meals than meat ones; especially quick things we could make after work. Green Spaghetti and Chickpea Patties were two of our standbys. We found the Chickpea Patties recipe in a 1991 Vegetarian Times article; there's a recipe for Green Spaghetti in the same article, but we make ours differently--more cheese.

So that's what we had tonight:

Green Pasta (we used fusilli)
Chickpea Patties
Carrot sticks.

Green Pasta

I measured out the ingredients tonight as I went, so that I could write it down; but the amounts are really variable. I happened to have a whole block of cream cheese (bought on sale), but it's not necessary to use quite that much. We had enough leftovers to fill a casserole dish.

1 8-oz. block cream cheese
1/3 cup cottage cheese
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese
5 oz. mozzarella, cut up
1 tbsp. margarine (probably not necessary with all that cream cheese)
1/4 tsp. or more black pepper (or grind some on at the table)
bit of garlic powder
leftover cooked broccoli (entirely optional)
1 6-oz. package fresh spinach (but frozen would work too)
Approximately 1 lb. hot pasta

What you want to do is have hot drained pasta, hot just-cooked spinach, and the blended mixture of cheeses all ready to mix at the same time. You don't have to cook the finished mixture; the heat of the pasta and spinach warms up the sauce ingredients.

I started the pasta cooking, had the spinach rinsed, and then put everything else into the food processor and got it pretty much blended. When the pasta was done, I let it drain in a colander and cooked the spinach in the same pot for a few minutes, steaming in its own rinse water. When it was wilted, I ran it through the food processor with the rest of the sauce mixture. Then, in a BIG bowl (or you could use the pasta/spinach pot again), I mixed everything together. If you think you might have cooked too much pasta, mix it into the sauce mixture gradually until you have the proportions you want. Serve as soon as possible.

Linked from 4 Moms Share Vegetarian Recipes.

What's for supper? Vietnamese Baked Chicken Thighs

Last night's dinner menu:

Vietnamese Chicken Thighs, adapted from this recipe on A Year of Slow Cooking,which was adapted from a post on Sunday Nite Dinner
Baked potatoes, broccoli, carrot sticks, chow mein noodles
Watermelon slices, brownies, and pie (thanks, Grandpa Squirrel).

I was hesitant about making this chicken dish, because I've never cooked with fish sauce before.  I had a Vietnamese housemate during university who pretty much lived on the stuff (fish sauce, not chicken), but I wasn't sure how it would go over here.  Also, Mr. Fixit is not crazy about bone-in thighs, because they do tend to be greasy. But I bought some fish sauce, and we tried it (in the oven, not the slow cooker), and it was very good--the skin browned nicely (probably the sugar?), and the thighs stayed together enough after baking that they could be lifted out of the grease, so that was a plus. We'll probably make this again.

Steph's recipe calls for 4 to 6 thighs, and our package had 8, so I doubled all the sauce ingredients except the pepper and the garlic. 

Here's our version.

Vietnamese-style Baked Chicken Thighs

8 bone-in chicken thighs (ours were still partly frozen)
3 tbsp. low-sodium soy sauce
3 tbsp. fish sauce (we used Taste of Thai brand)
1 tbsp. white sugar
1/2 tsp. black pepper
4 cloves chopped garlic
2 tbsp. canola oil

Place the thighs, skin side up, in a large casserole dish.  Mix the seasonings, garlic and oil together and pour over the chicken.  Cover and bake until done; the temperature and time can vary depending on the size of the chicken thighs, how frozen they are, and how much time you have.  I started it at 350 degrees and then turned it down to 325 degrees for awhile.  It was Sunday afternoon and we had lots of time.

Allow at least one thigh per adult eater and more likely two.

Church sale morning

It was too rainy for much yard saling today, but there were some rummage sales. Crayons brought home some additions to her horse collection (not in the photo). Mama Squirrel found science kits, books, a roll of knit fabric, a new pack of notecards, and a useful tin for putting things in.

"Explore the science of magic with Bob Friedhoffer, the mad scientist of magic!"

I'm impressed with that Magnetism kit--I didn't expect all the parts to be there, but it's pretty close to being intact. The only thing really missing is one large magnet that's used in a couple of the experiments.

Is anyone else out there familiar with picture books by Bettina Ehrlich? The covers usually just say "by Bettina." I've come across a couple of them lately, including The Goat Boy today; they remind me a bit of Edward Ardizzone's style.

Lentil soup isn't so bad

I don't have anything against lentils.  But some of the Squirrelings, in spite of my cajoling that Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup, have remained unconvinced, especially when it comes to soup. (Sprouts are okay.)

If you have reluctant lentil eaters, here are a couple of tips for improving your soup score:

Reduce the overall lentil content.  Aim for more of a vegetable soup than a straight lentils-with-liquid thing.  It helps if you cut the vegetables big enough so that they don't disappear into the lentils; the idea here is variety.

Work out a lentil-compatible flavour that your family already likes.  Might be Italian, pizza-flavoured; might be Middle Eastern; might be Tex-Mex.  Even a hot-dog, wieners-and-beaners kind of thing.

Here's a sample recipe that went over pretty well today.  The amounts are vague since I was just throwing things in the pot.

Lentil-Vegetable Soup with Salsa

3 cups chicken broth plus an equal amount water
Some green lentils--maybe half to two-thirds of a cup dry;
2 carrots, sliced
1/2 bunch celery, including some leaves, sliced
Salsa!

Rinse the lentils and check for pebbles. Bring the broth and water to a boil, and add the lentils and vegetables. Turn down the heat and simmer until the lentils are soft enough to eat and the vegetables are cooked. I poured in some mild salsa partway through--maybe half a cup, just enough to season it up and add a bit of onion and tomato.  Add more water if it needs it as it's cooking.

Serve with bologna sandwiches and Coffeemamma's Rhubarb Muffins.  Or whatever else you have.

What's for supper? Diner-style spaghetti sauce

Last night's dinner menu:

Diner-Style Spaghetti Sauce, with wholegrain spaghettini
Green salad with apples and sunflower seeds
Canned green beans

Peanut-butter-cereal squares

I know there are lots and lots and lots of recipes for spaghetti sauce, so who needs another one?. But this is something I adapted from the Hillbilly Housewife's Easy Seasoned Italian Sauce, and the way it came out reminded me of the way one of our favourite diner-style restaurants makes their spaghetti. More American-style than authentic Italian; but still good. It tastes like spaghetti and meatballs, only with broken-up meatballs, if that makes sense.

Mama Squirrel's Diner-Style Spaghetti Sauce
 1 lb. ground beef
About a cupful of sliced mushrooms (optional)
1 28-oz. can diced no-salt tomatoes, undrained (you can substitute two cups of homemade tomato puree)
1 small can tomato paste
1 tbsp. dried onion flakes
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1 tsp. dried basil
1/4 tsp. oregano
2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
One or two slices slightly dried (or toasted) bread, diced (optional--my kids didn't like this addition as much as I did, so I have been leaving it out)
Fresh parsley, chopped and added near the end (optional but pretty)
Hot pasta, Parmesan cheese, etc. for serving

Brown the ground beef, breaking up the meat as it cooks; add the mushrooms just before it's finished browning, and let them cook a few minutes. Drain the fat if necessary. Add all remaining ingredients except for the bread, and simmer until slightly thickened and it smells good. I added the diced bread near the end because I thought the sauce was still a bit liquid; it turned out to be a good addition (don't overdo it, though). Parsley too, if you have some (I just grabbed a bit from the garden).  Serve over hot spaghetti.

We had quite a bit left over (I never know where to stop with spaghetti), so tonight we're having Spaghetti Pie.

And what's for dessert? Raisin squares, with one frugal addition

Tonight I made a pan of the Raisin Bars from the More-with-Less Cookbook.  These are not the same as the Hillbilly Housewife's Raisin Bars, which are also very good but which are more like flat muffins.  The MWL version is just date squares but made with raisins.  You make a filling on top of the stove by simmering raisins, water, cornstarch, a bit of sugar, and lemon juice until thickened and soft; then sandwich between two layers of oatmeal-based dough, as for date squares.  Bake for half an hour at 375 degrees, or until the top dough is the right shade of brown (the recipe says 400 degrees, but that's too hot in our oven).

The frugal twist?  I had a bit of cranberry jelly in the fridge, left from Easter, so I mixed that into the raisins at the end.  I also sprinkled the mixture with a spoonful of cinnamon-sugar before adding the top layer of dough.  It made the bars taste a bit like mince pie, but I kind of like it that way.

If you cut them and eat them while they're still warm, you'll probably have to use a fork.  If you let them sit longer, they'll cut better.

Hollering down from the treehouse...and what's for supper?

We have been busy up here--just haven't been blogging about it.  All the extra-curricular stuff has been winding up (with year-end recitals, festivals and such), plus we've been dealing with some on-again-off-again viruses (the germ kind, not the computer kind) that have thrown a wrench into schoolwork.

And today Mama Squirrel volunteered to be a styling head, to help The Apprentice finish up the few things she has left to do before she becomes a  licensed stylist.  That was fun.

So Mr. Crockpot is handling the bulk of the dinner preparations.  Mama Squirrel adapted a cookbook recipe and came up with this:

Beef and Pork Chili Mac

1 pound ground beef, browned in a skillet with a chopped onion and two cloves garlic
1 28-oz can diced tomatoes, drained
1 cup no-salt tomato sauce
1 tbsp. chili powder (the recipe called for two tbsp., but some of us here are wussy about hot stuff)
1/2 tsp. cumin
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 can baked beans, since we didn't have any cooked or canned plain kidney beans or chickpeas
1 cupful cut-up cooked pork from last Sunday's dinner
Hot cooked pasta
Cheese, optional

Combine hot ground beef plus onions and garlic with the other ingredients (not the pasta and cheese) in a slow cooker (we used a 3 1/2 quart size).  Cook on low for the afternoon while you sit reading recipes under the hair dryer.  Serve with hot cooked macaroni or other pasta.  Top with cheese if desired.

What's for supper? Easy smoked sausage recipe

Last weekend Mr. Fixit checked out a European butcher where we hadn't shopped before, and came home with a long skinny stick of smoked sausage.  We haven't had much smoked sausage here in a long time, mostly because of sodium limits.  This one turned out to be a bit different from the dark, thick-skinned, German style smoked sausage we are used to; it was lighter and hammier, more like kielbasa.  But that was fine, because what I did with it would have worked with either style.

Here's the recipe:

In the slow cooker, put some sauerkraut, as much as you want.  Add sliced smoked sausage (I didn't slice it too thinly).  Add cut-up carrots, or baby-cut ones if that's what you have.   I pre-cooked them for five minutes in the microwave, to give them a head start. Put the lid on and cook until everything is heated through; the smoked sausage is basically cooked already, like pre-baked ham.  I gave it about three and a half hours on high, with the carrots already started.

We served it with frozen perogies.

And what do you do with the leftovers?

Combine with a quart of chicken broth and some leftover smack-'n'-cheese, and you have Cheesy-Carrot-Cabbage Chowder for lunch the next day.

Children shouldn't read dead things. (Living Books)

The focus of this week's Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival, hosted at Fisher Academy, is Living Books, and it is based on this paper that she wrote, that was later incorporated into School Education, part of her six-volume series on education.

What is to be said about living books that hasn't already been said, said often, and said well? 

And yet our public libraries seem to sell off more good books than they buy; the mall bookstores, as always, have mostly glitz-for-girls and scary-for-boys; and the sold-to-schools book flier that we brought home from last weekend's homeschool meeting--well, we won't even discuss what abominations were in that one.  Homeschoolers, in a way, are lucky...the rest of the world knows about the big online booksellers, but we also know about smaller vendors who aren't embarrassed to combine Alfie and Plutarch in the same catalogue.

"Now do but send to any publisher for his catalogue of school books and you will find that it is accepted as the nature of a school book that it be drained dry of living thought. It may bear the name of a thinker, but then it is the abridgment of an abridgment, and all that is left for the unhappy scholar is the dry bones of his subject denuded of soft flesh and living colour, of the stir of life and power of moving. Nothing is left but what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls the "mere brute fact.""--Charlotte Mason

Dry bones, no flesh, no colour...books fresh from the morgue?  Whatever these textbooks were, as Miss Mason says in her paper, they obviously weren't the books that got Swedish schoolgirls fighting a duel about their favourite kings.  Or the books that got Marva Collins' students working literary quotes into their everyday talk:

"Once when a student told a lie in class, someone said, 'Speak the speech trippingly on thy tongue,' and another chimed in, 'The false face does hide what the false heart does know.'  If a girl was acting too flirty, the other girls would accuse her of acting like the Wife of Bath....Another time when a rubberband shot across the room, I asked Michael whether he had done it.  He said no and blamed it on Phillip, who said, 'Et tu, Michael? This was the most unkindest cut of all.'"--Marva Collins' Way, by Marva Collins and Civia Tamarkin

The books are still there for the finding.  I expect that when I go to the Big Used Booksale at the end of this month, I'd be able to find multiple copies of Shakespeare plays, anthologies of poems, hundreds of paperback classics used for one class or another and then discarded.  They're getting a bit harder to find, but they're still out there....and they're "in here" too (online as e-texts).  If we're brave enough to trust our children's minds to the great thinkers, the great humorists, the great observers, then Pascal and Plutarch, Voltaire and Vermeer are easy enough to pull up, download, reserve through even a small library, or find on a used-classics shelf.

Charlotte Mason explains that yes, mathematics may help you develop your mind in a certain way; that learning Latin is certainly good for developing certain strengths, "intellectual muscle" and so on; but none of these alone are going to give you "fact clothed in living flesh, breathed into by quickening ideas."  This argument is not quite clear in the Parents' Review paper, as there appear to be a few words missing; it is clearer when you compare it with the same page from School Education:

"Mathematics, grammar, logic, etc., are not purely disciplinary, they do develop (if a bull may be allowed) intellectual muscle. We by no means reject the familiar staples of education in the school sense, but we prize them even more for the record of intellectual habits they leave in the brain tissue, than for their distinct value in developing certain 'faculties.'"--School Education, Chapter 16

But she also has a warning for those who would take even good books and grind, pre-digest, or otherwise manipulate either books or school subjects to make them work the way we think they should:

"The fault does not lie in any one of these or in any other of the disciplinary subjects, but in our indolent habit of using each of them as a sort of mechanical contrivance for turning up the soil and sowing the seed.  There is no reprieve for parents."

There's no getting out of it or around it; there are no short cuts, magic machines, or snake oil potions that can take the place of good books, well served at the right time.  And there is no magic clicker to tell you exactly what those are and when--even Charlotte Mason was chary about giving a list of the "hundred best books for the schoolroom."  She didn't want people just taking such a list and trying to plug it in, "make it work."  Now that is not the same as saying that any books are fine, including nose-picker histories and vampire romances; Miss Mason had definite opinions about good and bad books, and personally chose the best books she could find for her schools.  But it's not about the booklist, in the end; it's about awakening to the possibilities of books.

"Once she [Erika, a six-year-old student] began reading and saw what fun it was, there was no stopping her.  She became addicted to books.  If she wasn't reading one of the Judy Blume books or one from the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, then she was trying out the Fables of La Fontaine or the Song of Roland.  One day, as I went around the class asking each child what new bit of knowledge he or she had learned that day, [she] said, 'I'm like Socrates*.  The only thing I know is how much I don't know.  I'm learning something new every day.'"--Marva Collins' Way

*In this term's Plutarch study of Solon, we learned that Solon said the same thing. I don't know Socrates very well: did he also say he was learning something every day, or was Erika misquoted? It doesn't matter much, but I'm curious.

Related posts:

Notes from a Book Talk
A Month with Charlotte Mason, #24
Me not just dumb monster, me read Plutarch
Hearts and Minds
Thinking Like a History Teacher

Mama Squirrel settles into her personal productivity station

What's for supper (last night)? Sloppy Joes and frugal thoughts

We used to make Sloppy Joes with canned Manwich Sauce (bought on sale for 99 cents).  A few years ago we started making them from the Beany Malone recipe, and we liked them pretty much except that I had to remember to keep a jar of chili sauce around.  Later I modified the recipe (less chili sauce, no salt) to have a lower sodium content.

When I thought about making Sloppy Joes yesterday, I wasn't sure how long the half-eaten jar of chili sauce in the fridge had been there--that's how long it's been since we've made them.  Then I remembered the Sloppy Joe recipe at A Year of Slow Cooking, which is also in Stephanie's first cookbook.  It's a different style from Beany's--mostly spices and seasonings added to the browned meat, plus water and a can of tomato paste.  I made it on the stove instead of in the slow cooker, and added in a chopped pepper, because peppers, after several weeks, finally went on sale for under a dollar a pound. Mr. Fixit, who sometimes has problems eating tomato-ish, onion-ish dishes, said that this recipe didn't cause him any aftergrief.  I also noticed that it's very easy to control the sodium in this recipe--the amount of salt you add to the mix is up to you.  No MSG or anything else nasty either.

So unless I happen to have a fresh jar of chili sauce on hand, we will probably keep making Stephanie's recipe.

Oh, and the frugal thoughts?

Just that if you had to go out and buy all those seasonings at once, you might not consider Sloppy Joes to be a frugal dish.  But I already had everything called for, even onion flakes and celery seed, so for us the cost of the "mix" was very low.  I think about it the same way if I'm making granola:  the last batch I made (from the Common Room recipe here) had coconut, orange extract, wheat germ, almonds, and sunflower seeds in it; but those were ingredients I already had on the shelf and wanted to use up, not things I went out and bought specially.  

A teaspoonful of spice is different from a cupful of coconut, of course.  The trouble with buying spices, unless you scoop them in bulk, is that you have to buy a whole package or jarful in the beginning.  (I buy both frugal-brand-in-a-bag and bulk seasonings.)  But you do start to accumulate them after awhile, so putting a bit of paprika and cumin and cornstarch together to make Sloppy Joe mix barely registers in the cost of a meal.  It's like starting a new hobby, something like folk art painting or knitting where you have to start out buying not only tools but every single colour of paint or yarn that you need; eventually you can stop buying so much and just use what you have, replacing only as needed.

Of course it costs the same in the end, since eventually I have to replace the ingredients used up (or maybe I don't bother for awhile). But if they're there on the shelf, you might as well use them.

P.S.  Crayons wants to know if people make "Tidy Joes."

How homeschoolers do things: a letter-writing unit

In this case the point of interest is not so much how we're doing a language unit on letter writing, as the timing of it.

Actually that was accidental.

I had planned to have Crayons do some work on letter writing, starting this week.  Last week we finished reading Jean Webster's novel Daddy-Long-Legs, which is mostly written in letter form.

So there you go.  Crayons' interest in letters is still high; and Judy's letters in D-L-L cover everything from descriptions of her college life, to crotchety whinefests, to apologies afterward; from purely businesslike memos to one loveydovey epistle at the end.  (Sorry for the spoiler if you haven't read it.)  A very good example of how writing style needs to vary depending on the situation.

The book we're using is a hand-me-down from the Apprentice.  It's the Reader's Digest Kids Letter Writer Book, by Nancy Cobb, published in 1994.  The bonus for us is that it's Canadian.  All the address examples, cities, provinces, postal codes are Canadian ones.  I don't know if the book was also published in an American version--maybe someone will let me know.*  (The Apprentice originally got it as part of a kit with stationery, pens etc.)

We read the list of reasons you might want to write a letter ("Help you make a new friend," "Send hard-to-say-thoughts," "Be Serious (write to the prime minister)"), and then compared the first two sample letters in the book: one "friendly," one business-style.  As a mini-assignment, I had Crayons write a short business letter to her dad or someone else that she would normally send a more personal letter.  She wrote a very economically-worded request for a particular birthday present.  (Those double-digits are coming around soon.)

There are lots of other sample letters and tips in the book.  I'm not sure how many of them we'll use, but I know there's enough to keep a fourth-grader going for awhile.

*I did find this reference to a later version--maybe this one is American?  "LETTER WRITER STARTER SET : Have Fun, Keep in Touch, Be Heard, and Get Things Done --- By Letter!"