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!"

A strange but still productive week

The weather here is still on and off--mixed snow, rain and general gloom.  Sore throats and general malaise have several of the Squirrels not up to doing much this week. 

However:  so far we have managed to:

make a quart of yogurt (this is a good home ec lesson for days when you don't want people sneezing all over the ingredients--just one person has to actually handle the milk and starter)
make a pot of pepperoni-lentil-beef broth-carrot soup, good for what ails you
start a jar of lentil sprouts
make a big pan of orange-coconut-almond granola (we're short on boxed cereal)
bake gingerbread
wash a bunch of laundry
fold a bunch of laundry
iron some grab-bag fabric for sewing
read half of Plutarch's Life of Solon (that was Mama Squirrel)
listen to a good chunk of the audio book of Number the Stars (that was Ponytails)
read several fairy tales from The Fairy Ring (that was Crayons)
turn more plastic spoons into little people (Crayons)
keep reading The Book of Three (Mama Squirrel and Ponytails)
finish Daddy-Long-Legs (Mama Squirrel and Crayons)

"But there is a different kind of virtue, the kind that children know about, the feeling of self-worth and happiness that comes from purely personal achievement.  The kitchen is just about the only place in the house where a whole family can re-learn this kind of virtue, where there is comfort, joy and enormous pleasure in doing something simple together, and then enjoying it together."--James Barber, The Urban Peasant

There are no guarantees...but it's still worth our time.

Do you ever feel like you're wasting your time reading all those books to your kids? 

What if you spend the summer reading oh, I don't know, something BIG to them...maybe the entire Chronicles of Narnia...and at the end they know the stories, but don't seem to have made any particular connections, at least that you can see, with the symbolism or character examples?  What does Lucy learn about the dangers of eavesdropping after looking into the magic book?  How does Aslan's ripping off an enchanted dragon's skin (in Voyage of the Dawn Treader) symbolize our need for submission to Christ's sometimes painful cleansing of our sins?  Why is it such a puzzle about who gets to go into the New Narnia at the end of the last book?  (Wasn't that a bit unfair on Susan? How about Emeth the Calormene?)  What if all this seems to go over their heads?  What if they never grasp the world's desperate need for more Puddleglums, those who will not be lulled by false logic and propaganda, even if it means sticking one's foot in the fire?

Charlotte Mason says that's a necessary risk that we take when we tell (or read) stories.  The mind feeds on ideas, not dry information; to use her food metaphor, we may not get exactly what we need from any particular meal, but it's certain that we won't get anything at all from a meal made of sawdust.  Even when we read the best books, we (or our hearers) won't receive or understand everything, all of the time; but that still gives us a better odds of getting (or giving) at least some nourishment, than in presenting what she calls "pre-digested" or sucked-dry material.

In Philosophy of Education, she writes of the child:

He is an eclectic; he may choose this or that;

our business is to supply him with due abundance and variety

and his to take what he needs.

Urgency on our part annoys him.

He resists forcible feeding and loathes predigested food.

What suits him best is pabulum presented in the indirect literary form

which Our Lord adopts in those wonderful parables

whose quality is that they cannot be forgotten though,

while every detail of the story is remembered,

its application may pass and leave no trace.

We, too, must take this risk.

Banana...and butterscotch...and strawberry--yes, it did work (What's in your hand?)

 What do you do with two frozen bananas,  some leftover strawberry crisp, and a handful of butterscotch chips?

Make muffins.

The recipe is our usual Canadian Living Banana-Yogurt Muffins, with a few butterscotch chips stirred in.  I thawed and mashed the bananas, added the rest of the batter ingredients, and then mashed the strawberry crisp with a fork and plopped a small spoonful on top of each muffin (before baking).  Jam would work instead.  I left a few untopped, for those who like them better plain.

Photos: Ponytails.

In which "Cuisinart rods"* become yesterday's homeschool

Boy, do I feel like a relic.

Today was our local homeschool conference.

I presented a workshop about making the most of a limited homeschool budget. As an example of homeschool resources that are inexpensive and versatile, I mentioned Cuisenaire rods. I didn't bother bringing any to demonstrate with.

Later in the day, a couple who had been in the workshop came up and asked me about the rods I had mentioned. I suggested looking for them at one of the larger booths--a very good, longtime vendor--that I knew carried Miquon Math.

Well, they still have rods in their catalogue, but they didn't even bring any with them today! I said, "I'm guessing maybe Cuisenaire rods aren't such a big seller as they used to be?" Yep.

And to top that off, the virtual online rods formerly at the Arcytech site have also disappeared, along with all the other good Java manipulatives they used to have. So you can't even "pretend play" with them.

Hoo boy. Maybe my next year's workshop should be "things we used to use way back when."

*Clarification:  the people at the conference did not call them Cuisinart rods.  I was just joking about that because I posted a long time ago about the crazy names and spellings I've seen for the rods.

Things we've been doing

1. Shovelling snow. A lot of snow. The most snow that fell in 24 hours in the past four years, and that includes a blizzard three years ago. Having this much snow on the ground, but still having daylight at 7 p.m. to shovel it by, is something my head can't quite put together.

2. Making crackers (a recipe from the first Tightwad Gazette book). The Squirrelings are starting a Homemaking unit about making things from scratch.

3. Getting ready for the local homeschool conference.

4. Getting to "Cornwallis surrenders" in Crayons' history book. (Seemed like the War of Independence would never end.)

5. Ponytails realized that she never did what she wanted to do with some of her yard-saled fabric, so she's been making plans for that. Plus, The Apprentice gave her a box of clothing pass-ons to refashion for spring!

Butterscotch-Chocolate-Chip-Chunk-Oreo Monstrosicookies

Some of you may be wondering what a girl is to do when she's finished school in the middle of a school year and job prospects are not the finest.

This is what I'm doing, anyway.



These frightening monoliths made themselves known to me at our last young adult event, and I decided to recreate them this afternoon. They're Oreo Stuffed Chocolate Chip cookies, which would be right up there with anything from This is Why You're Fat if only they were deep-fried.



Obviously they are catching on, despite the quadruple-bypass potential, because they're gaining on the Neiman Marcus in popularity. I came by the recipe, originally from Picky Palate, via my youth coordinator, via Amandaleine, via Bon Appetit (who refers to them as the turducken of cookies), via Becky Bakes. Viral cookies, anyone? Mine vary slightly in that I used half butterscotch chips, one quarter chocolate chips and one quarter chocolate chunks, as we were terribly short on chocolate chips. I also was stuck with store-brand chocovanilla sandwich cookies, because Oreo Double Stufs are awfully expensive to buy just to bake with. So get your Stairmaster warmed up...

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) softened butter
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
3 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 package Double Stuff Oreo cookies

I know the amounts sound crazy, but that is really how much dough you will need to successfully cover a whole bag of Oreos.

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Farenheit.

Cream butter and both sugars together until well combined. Beat in eggs and vanilla.

In a separate bowl mix the flour, salt and baking soda. Slowly add to wet ingredients along with chocolate chips until just combined.

Using a cookie scoop take one scoop of cookie dough and place on top of an Oreo Cookie. Take another scoop of dough and place on bottom of Oreo cookie. Seal edges together by pressing and cupping in hand until Oreo cookie is enclosed with dough.

I don't have a cookie scoop, it works just as well if you free-form it around the cookie with your hands and perhaps the aid of a teaspoon.

Place onto a parchment or silpat lined baking sheet and bake cookies 9-13 minutes (it took me even longer than that) or until golden brown. Let cool for 5 minutes before transferring to cooling rack.

Makes about 2 dozen colossal cookies!

Frugal substitute: Leftover Sweet Potato Cake

Southern cooks have done this for years--used pureed (cooked) sweet potato where Northerners might use pumpkin, such as in pie.

But have you ever tried it in Pumpkin Cake? It works very well. Just make sure you puree the sweet potato very well--you can mix all the wet ingredients in the blender or food processor, just to be sure. I added a sprinkle of cinnamon-sugar on top before baking--sweet potato always tastes good with a bit of extra cinnamon.

Beats putting out a couple of dollars for a can of pumpkin.

(And of course you can do the same thing with any winter squash that you can get to puree smooth.)

Making coleslaw, the quick way (it's also lower-sodium)

What's that stuff? McCormick's No Salt Added Table Shake Seasoning. What does it taste like? Dried veggies, with a hint of lemon, and something like curry. And yes, there are corn syrup solids in it, so if you don't do corn syrup, this won't be for you.

What do we use it on? Mostly things like baked fish that go well with lemon and the curry-ish flavour. Sometimes veggie dip. More recently, Mama Squirrel has discovered that it makes a good substitute for seasoned salt in the Betty Crocker Coleslaw recipe (the type made with a mayonnaise dressing). In fact, right now that's the favourite coleslaw around here, beating out our usual oil-and-vinegar version. It's even easier if you use pre-cut coleslaw mix; this week it was 99 cents a bag at Food Basics.

Here's the recipe, from Betty Crocker's Cookbook.

1/2 cup dairy sour cream or plain yogurt
1/4 cup mayonnaise or white salad dressing (we use salad dressing)
1 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. dry mustard
1/2 tsp. seasoned salt or no-salt seasoning
1/8 tsp. pepper (I just throw a little in)
1/2 medium head cabbage, finely shredded or chopped (about 4 cups), plus 1 small onion, chopped (about 1/4 cup) OR half a bag coleslaw mix (we get the Colorful Coleslaw Mix: shredded green cabbage, red cabbage, and carrot)

Mix up everything but the cabbage and onion (or coleslaw mix). Mix in the veggies. If you make it with sour cream, sometimes it seems to need a bit more moisture--you might add just a little milk. Chill until ready to serve.

Linked from Grocery Cart Challenge Recipe Swap, March 2011

If you and your house were on a desert island

Yesterday I mentioned that I'd found a copy of Flanagan's Smart Home, by Barbara Flanagan.

The subtitle of the book is "The 98 Essentials for Starting Out, Starting Over, Scaling Back."

That concept is introduced at the beginning of the book, but seems to get lost a bit in discussion of whether the items described are durable, well-designed, and/or eco-friendly.  Flanagan doesn't explain exactly how or why she came up with 98 "essential" items for a home--she does say that she was aiming for 100 but that it came out at 98.  As someone said in a review of the book (I think on Amazon), her magic 98 didn't include a toilet plunger...someone else said they can't live without a roll of duct tape.  We could probably debate the "essentialness" of such things as a salt cellar, an electric blanket, a headband flashlight, and a floor lamp in the bedroom; and whether a microwave AND a toaster oven should be essential (yes, we have both, but I admit they do take up a lot of counter space). Also, "98" refers to the number of different items, not the sheer number of objects; for example, "fork" counts as one item, although most households would have more than one.  "Night table" assumes that you have just one.  "Bookcases" count as one item, but books don't figure into the count at all.  She also recommends vinyl records (Mr. Fixit would appreciate that), but the records themselves aren't counted with the 98.   Neither are personal items or clothing.

In contrast to today's "essentials" (based, perhaps, on what a single person living in a small condo would need), here are the useful items acquired by Joyce Radway in Grace Livingston Hill's Not Under the Law (1924/1925), on the first day that she starts housekeeping in a house about the size of a garden shed:

Wooden box, pile of newspapers, and a few peanut shells (came free with the house)
Thread, needles, thimble, pins
Enough cheese cloth for window curtains
Blue and white chintz
Half a yard of white organdie
Blue and white checked apron
"Canned alcohol and a little outfit for cooking with it"  (No, that doesn't mean an apron and chef's hat!)
Paper plates and cups
A sharp knife
A pair of good scissors
A hammer
A can opener
Some tacks
A few long nails
A broom, a scrubbing brush, soap, a galvanized pail, and a sponge
Several wooden boxes and two nice clean sugar barrels (she makes chairs out of those)
Candles
Two more aprons (she needs them for a temporary job)

But "one couldn't just exist if one was working, one had to have things tolerably comfortable for resting and eating or one couldn't do good work.  So she went back to her little house and sat down to think.  The conclusion of her meditation was that she decided to buy a saw."

So she takes the train into the city and buys:

A Bible (used)
The saw ("the best of steel")
Gray denim for upholstery
Flowered cretonne to cover her box dressing table
"A lot of wire springs, some upholstery webbing, and twine, a long, double-pointed upholstery needle, and several pounds of curled hair and cheap cotton."
Some personal items like a hairbrush and nightgowns
Towels

"It really cost very little to live when one was careful.  As for heat and light, she did not need either at this time of year....Sheets and pillow-cases were not expensive when one bought remnants of coarse cloth and hemmed them; and washing was not hard to do with the outside faucet and drain so near."

One person's salt cellar is, I suppose, another person's saw.

The interest in Joyce's shopping list (fantastical and overly optimistic though it is--living in a garden shed does present some practical problems that GLH never goes near), and the value of the Smart Home book, is similar to the effect that Material World has on its readers.  (You know, the book where people around the world put all their worldly goods out in front of their houses.)  Each one makes you ask yourself--could you live with less?  If you have lived with little, or have been through a bad emergency situation, or have lived with inconveniences such as having to cook in the garage for a season, you might not find the idea of "essentials only" particularly romantic or desirable.  Most of us want enough stuff to be at least comfortable.

But how do you know where to stop?

Do you have a list of 98?  498?  998?

Does everybody need a salad spinner?

What's your take?

You thought your reading list was challenging?

"A discussion of Little Women included everything from a lesson on the Civil War to an explanation of the allegory in The Pilgrim's Progress, which the little women in Alcott's novel loved to act out.  When the children studied Aristotle, they learned the principles of logical thinking.  Plato's Republic led to de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which led to a discussion of different political systems, which brought in Orwell's Animal Farm, which touched off a discussion of Machiavelli, which led to a look at Chicago's City Council."--Marva Collins' Way (1982)

And how did Marva Collins get so smart?

"I read constantly in order to tie together fragments of information and interweave subjects.  As a business major in college I had not taken many courses in the arts and sciences.  My education was about the same as that of the average grammar school teacher, merely a sampling of some basic courses.  I had to teach myself more.  I read with an urgency so I could teach my students what they needed to know.  I believe a teacher has to keep polishing his or her skills.  You can't take the attitude 'I know how to teach,' and resist learning anything new."

"Theodore shouted, 'Hey, Mrs. Collins, that's cool.  Everything links into something else, doesn't it?'

"Marva beamed.  'Now you've got it.  Every scholar, every writer, every thinker learned from those who came before.  You are all becoming so erudite, we are going to have to dub you MGM--'Mentally Gifted Minors.'"

Why there weren't enough children's books...and why there aren't enough children's books

[Baker:] Where are you off to?
[Belle:] The bookshop. I just finished the most wonderful story about a beanstalk and an ogre and a -
[Baker:] That's nice. ...

Have you ever found your own particular suddenly meshing with a much larger general?  For instance, when you read those books about Boomers and GenXers and Beepers, and you suddenly realized that that 40ish guy you knew who worked a McJob and lived in his parents' basement with a reel-to-reel tape recorder wasn't that unique?

I started thinking awhile back about what kids' books used to be like, back when I was growing up--we'll say from the '60's through the '80's.  There were some things that puzzled me, or that I thought I had misremembered.  But I put a lot of that down to growing up in Ontario (rather than in the catalogue-happy U.S.) and in a small-town, working-class kind of place where you wouldn't expect to find a lot of bookstores.

I don't remember most kids I knew owning a lot of books.  My sister and I actually did better than most:  our mom got us the Parent's Magazine Press picture books by mail (Miss Suzy and the rest), plus we got several monthly magazines over the years, plus we were taken to flea markets and odd places where we found older treasures, plus my mom had been a teacher and had a few anthologies and such things around.  Also, we had a great public library, and a fairly good school library. But the standard at-home books of the time were the drugstore, supermarket and discount department store books:  Wonder Books, Little Golden Books, Dr. Seuss, anything printed by Whitman-Golden...and some series books that were easy to come by like Trixie Belden and the purple-bound Bobbsey Twins.  Most homes might have a few older hand-me-down classics around--Grandpa's copy of The Water Babies, or an older sister's cache of Scholastic books.

What there weren't a lot of...from the way things looked to me then...were places where grown-ups bought interesting books--or a lot of grownups who seemed to want to buy or read them.  Most living rooms had chairs, ash trays, televisions, but not bookshelves.  (One of my great-aunts was the exception--she had a little painting/sewing room with a wallful of books.)  And most children's picture books--again, other than the inexpensive ones like The Poky Little Puppy--and novels--other than the short list of real classics--were borrowed from the library.
 
So I thought about this--realizing that I was fortunate to have been gifted early on with old-but-cherished copies of Winnie the Pooh, Heidi, and Fifty Famous Fairy Stories...and wishing we had held on to that long-gone Mother Goose that I've never been able to identify...and wondering when all that changed...

And then recently I came across this, in Perry Nodelman's 1990's book The Pleasures of Children's Literature:

"In the mid-1980's, the sales of children's books in North America skyrocketed.  The most obvious reason was that the children of the so-called baby-boomers....were beginning to read.  Furthermore, the baby-boomers seemed more willing, or able, than their parents had been to buy children's books.  Because many of them had put off having children until much later in their lives than had been typical, many had already established careers.  Even those well off were often in two-career marriages.  There was more money to spend on relatively nonessential things like children's books."

Yes!--I thought--everybody during the '70's worried about money.   And yes, I think it's true that the later, younger '80's parents wanted more for their kids, wanted to buy them more stuff, wanted them to "read" more (in a qualified sense), had higher expectations (also in a qualified sense).  The inconsistent part, though, is that the parents of the kids I knew were usually as generous as they could afford to be when it came to Christmas and birthday toys...but we hardly ever asked for specific books.  First of all, the Sears catalogue didn't carry books, except for a few Dr. Seuss and baby titles. Besides, wasting your Christmas wishes on books seemed akin to the dentist suggesting you ask Santa for an electric toothbrush.

And though I loved books myself, I didn't have a strong desire to own more than a few.  The library had all my favourites, and surely they would be there forever.

"Meanwhile, the political climate meant that government at all levels had less money to spend on libraries.  According to Adam Hochschild [New York Times Book Review 1994], 'fifteen or twenty years ago, some 85% of all children's books were sold to school or public libraries.  This figure has plummeted'....The dramatic increase in the proportion of books purchased by parents and other relatives transformed the children's book business....Now, the people who buy the most books aren't experts, and they have no way of choosing books other than to try to figure out what the children they know might like.  This means, primarily, things they or their children are already familiar with."--Nodelman, 1996/1992

So there's the crunch, you see.  All of a sudden there was more money and more interest in buying children's books.  But according to Perry Nodelman, that did not mean that parents (and kids with money to spend) immediately went out and started buying the same sorts of books that discriminating librarians and teachers had once chosen for them.  Other than picture books, which did survive as something fairly easy to market, the rapidly changing publishing industry and bookselling industry started to concentrate only on

"1.  Reprintings and new editions of favorite books from the baby-boomers' youth: books by Dr. Seuss, book versions of classic Disney cartoons.

"2.  Other movie and TV tie-ins; books about characters the baby-boomers' children were already familiar with from other media.

"3.  Books about new characters, but ones that came in series, so that once children became familiar with these characters they could read new books about them again and again."--Nodelman, 1996/1992

Now obviously there is more to the last twenty years of children's publishing than that; otherwise how could the Horn Book have survived?  Obviously there are still at least a few good books for older children still being written and still being published and still being sold.  But I think Perry Nodelman makes some good points...and his timeline of the change in the mid-1980's comes more than coincidentally close to that pre-1985 CPSIA ruling (outlawing pre-1985 children's books because of supposed lead hazards).  Why have we been fussing about that for the last few years?  Because those pre-1985 books, lots of them, are the good ones, the lasting ones.  Not the TV tie-ins, not the "classic Disney," but the real stuff.

And I learned something else from Nodelman's chapter about publishing.  This is about the U.S., so I'm not sure how it relates to Canada (other than the major publishers being in the U.S.), but it's interesting anyway:

"In the early 1980s, in order to encourage aggressive sales, the U.S. government raised the taxes charted on goods left in warehouses at the end of each year.  As applied to books, this meant that publishers could no longer afford to keep large numbers of titles on their backlists.  Books that had been in print for decades suddenly became unavailable.  Now, only those titles that still sell widely remain in print for very long."

I mentioned this to The Apprentice, and she pointed out that maybe this will change again with the advent of electronic book readers and publishing on demand. Maybe so.  Maybe in the near future there won't be any such thing as an out-of-print book.

But will there be anything left that we care to read?

When I realized myself that it was getting harder to find the kind of children's books that I used to like myself, and the books that were recommended by authors like Gladys Hunt and Dorothy Butler, I started bringing home any of the good ones that I could find at library sales and thrift shops, from other homeschoolers' for-sale lists, from yard sales, from anywhere.  I have a lot more children's books now than I did as a child.  That's all right, because I've had the excuse of having young Squirrelings for almost two decades now.  But am I going to sell them all off (the books, not the Squirrelings) when the last one leaves home?

Not on your life.

Image obviously copyright and owned by Walt Disney, although I found it on somebody else's blog

What's for Supper? Stir Fry

Tonight's dinner:

Beef Green Bean Stir Fry, except I'm making it with ground chicken instead of beef, and adding in sliced-thin leftover lasagna noodles (they look really interesting along with the green beans)
Rice
Almonds and chow mein noodles

Vanilla pudding, cookies

Banana cake, a little different

Ponytails asked me to post about this because she said it was amazing.

Ingredients:  1 batch standard muffin batter (I added a teaspoon of vanilla); two sliced bananas; one cup chocolate chips.

Directions:  Scrape half the muffin batter into a greased 8-inch pan.  Top with sliced bananas and chocolate chips.  Cover with remaining batter (it's okay if it doesn't quite cover).  Bake at 350 degrees for about half an hour or until it tests done.

If you eat a piece of the cake still warm from the oven, the chocolate chips will be gooey and the bananas will have that slightly strange, hot, cooked taste (like a baked banana) that some people like and some people really don't.

But if you chill it, the chocolate chips revert to a rich kind of cold chocolate chunkiness, turning the whole deal into a chocolate-banana-muffin-sandwich-cake.

You could probably get the same results with individual muffins.

So if you ever start making plain muffins and decide too late that you would rather have had banana bread, or just want a change, try it this way.

What's for supper? Beef and cabbage soup

Tonight's dinner:

Canadian Living's Beef and Cabbage Soup (without the rice, but with leftover sausage and sauerkraut added in)

Peasant Bread

Fruit yogurt, or last night's blueberry crisp, or an apple

What's for supper? Sausage and polenta

I like dinners that make people come in and say, "Something smells good in here."

Tonight's dinner:

Italian sausages, baked on sauerkraut (really, they taste fine together)
Baked sweet potatoes
Sliced polenta rounds, topped with a mixture of olive oil, Parmesan cheese and fresh parsley, and baked in a hot oven for about ten minutes

Blueberry-Applesauce Crisp  (frozen blueberries) and yogurt