Spring Tea and Ukrainian Egg Crafting

I did another Tea party with an Evite to a variety of people and offering needlefelting of styrofoam eggs and learning Ukrainian/Pysanky egg dye as crafts. I posted a lot of pics in another post.

For this tea I made scones again - this time the recipe from my cookbook that includes eggs, as do most scones (except the scone recipes I posted from my Valentine tea recipes). I still cut them out with a small round cookie cutter for smaller scones. I made the tangerine lemon curd again since that was such a success. I made some desserts this time: cookies, merengues spread with jam between two of them, and the winner was ... banana bread spread with Nutella and Granny Smith apple slices - made as a sandwich! I made the square pan bread again, and I made the egg salad and chicken curry sandwiches, since they were the most favored before. But I also made some baby quiches and a grilled ham and cheese sandwich (actually broiled), that were well received. I did veggies and dips again too.

I'll post recipes separate.

Candy Cane Legend & Happenings

Monte just called me from Norway. He's been there for a full week now and will be flying home tomorrow. All week I've been imagining 8hours ahead ... he's in geology meetings ... he's sleeping ... he's out eating supper. He typically calls me just before going to supper.

I've been planning our Christmas foods. With Heather not here, the sentimental one for tradition ... Our typical meal is Scandinavian. Monte said he's had ENOUGH Scandinavian Christmas foods, including several meals with lutkefish! So after remembering that Travis and Dawson don't even love some of our meal's foods, we're going to do Mexican! After writing my Las Posadas post on Dec 16, I got hungry for tamales.

So I'm currently cooking up field corn kernels with lime and water - for fresh masa. If you've ever had fresh made corn tortillas from fresh masa ... :-P !!!! And in my post I had mentioned churros, so I found a recipe. I've eaten them before, but not made them. Rather than typical doughnut shape, it's strips of dough dropped into some hot oil from a star shaped piping tip, then sprinkled with cinnamon-sugar.

Chanukah begins tomorrow and oil is an ingredient in their menu. Besides latkes, doughnuts are a more current food you can get in Israel today. So churros is good. We can remember the miracle of the oil as we make them and eat history!

Watch this for a well done presentation on the history of candy canes.

Family Time

Travis and Sarah just left. They live 1 1/2-2 hours away in Ft Collins. As a Worship Minister he gets Mondays off and Sarah asked to have Mondays off too. So we usually get together Sunday afternoons over to Monday. Dawson started school today, so we had supper together.

I got a new cookbook, a Webber Grill book. I tried a recipe out of it tonight that was fantastic and want to try everything in it! Monte wanted to try making 'Ices' - out of the Thompson seedless grapes hanging everywhere in our greenhouse, and the ripe red currants we have on bushes in my fenced in veggie/produce garden. In googling grape ice cream I found that most things are made with the purple concord grape. It's probably because the green isn't that appealing of a color.

Monte didn't use all the sweetening syrup I made for the ice cream, and it would have been better had he followed the recipe. So most of us mixed in store bought vanilla. It was good.

A good relaxing day together.

Palm Sunday - Hen and Chick Bread

Jesus' Palm Sunday Entry into Jerusalem

Our Supper Group friends just left - our brave friends. It's snowed a few inches, but the heaviest is supposed to start around midnight. I'm anxious to hear how their drive home went! It was raining in Denver when they left to come to our house. I'll let you know how much snow we get. It's not supposed to move on till tomorrow late afternoon. The meal turned out great, even though I was grilling the chickens in the snow! We had a great time and conversation.

I came home from church with lots of palm fronds (I do that every year) to decorate the kitchen table and set out my wool sheep and Jesus on a donkey. Everyone thought it so cool that I had to take a picture to post.

I found one tradition in all my readings for Palm Sunday that I've been doing several years now. My ancestors on my dad's side in the Netherlands carry on this tradition: baking bread chicks on a stick with colored streamers and parading them about homes and church. I bake a large bread shaped chicken with baby chicks sticking out around her. Where does this come from, and why Palm Sunday?

As Jesus overlooked Jerusalem, He wept. Jesus knows us and loves us, even with all our ordinariness. Jesus wished He could "gather them under My wings like a mother hen gathers her chicks under her wings". (Matthew 23:37, Luke 13:34)

Here's my recipe for hen and chicks bread-
1 cup hot water in a blender with- 1 small unpeeled, cut up and seeded orange (cut off some skin to use as chick beaks)
1/2 cup raisins
Let soak a bit and then blend well. Pour into a bread-making bowl and add-
1 pkg (2 tsp) yeast
1/8 cup oil or melted butter
1/8 cup honey or sugar
1-2 Tb molasses
2 tsp-1Tb cinnamon
1 cup flour

Mix these ingredients just until the dry ingredients are moistened, and with a cover on to keep warm, let sit to sponge for 10 minutes. Then add- 2 tsp salt & more flour till dough begins to clean the bowl and form a ball. Knead for about 10 minutes.

Shape the dough into loaves or the chickens (one large or 2 small). Let rise on a greased baking sheet, covered with a towel. Bake about 30 minutes at 350 degrees. (I haven't done this this year yet. If I do, I'll take a picture and add it here.)

I do a large ball for the hen body, then lots of small balls around her body for the chicks and one small ball on top of her body for her head. Take a toothpick to make indents and add currents or cut up raisins for eyes and slivers of orange peel for beaks.

I pulled out art work that I set on an easel for this week. I have Leonardo da Vinci's "Lord's Supper" as well as a modern painting of the scene. I have Rembrandt's "The Raising of the Cross" where he paints himself in the picture. And then Michelangelo's "Pieta". I saw these scenes frozen in Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of Christ" and it caught my breath - a work of art!
Passion Week is before us. One day the people cry "Hosannas" that soon changed to "Crucify Him"!

Spiritual Birthdays and Tacos

Yesterday was Dawson's Spiritual Birthday and next Wednesday is Travis's. When our kids were little there'd be God-talk-times, but there seems to be a definite time when children ask deeper questions and want to commit their life to God. Monte said he did it when he was eight, soon after realizing that his dad wasn't 'God' and in control of everything. He simply transferred that trust in his dad to trust in God.

I wrote these times on the calendar for each of our kids, calling them their 'spiritual birthday'. Then each year we'd celebrate that birthday with a special treasure hunt meal. The meal needs to have a lot of condiments that we can hide around the house. Since curry (which makes a great treasure hunt meal) isn't a favorite of my kids, we tended to do a taco meal. We'd make up riddles as clues to be left with each food item, guiding them to the next. Eventually everything is at the table and we can eat. There's a final note at their plate reminding them of their treasure in Heaven.

I quick fry corn tortillas so they're soft. Then there's bowls of cooked ground meat, grated cheese, chopped tomatoes, lettuce, green onions, and sour cream, and sometimes guacamole, chips and salsa, and maybe beans. It's one of my favorite childhood meals I grew up with, and my family loves it too. I prefer the soft cooked shells to the traditional crisp shells because the first bite tends to crack the shell down the middle and everything falls out! If you travel to Mexico soft corn tacos is traditional.

I still remember the first time we did this - and we usually retell the story. Heather was just learning to read. Monte was out of town and my sister Kelli was living with us (and that's another story!) so I wrote out very simple clues. Travis, not able to read yet, was practically hanging on to Heather's shirt tails waiting for her to sound out the clues so they could run and find the food. Like she'd be saying, "Look in the re-frig g g g ..." with a hard 'g' sound, as she was slowly walking upstairs. Finally I said, "The refrigerator is not upstairs!" And they'd take off running and laughing.

When Deuteronomy says several times, "teach the children diligently", "tell the children" - this is kinda like another commemoration as is the Lord's Supper and Passover. I'll tell you, our kids never grew up wondering if they were a Christian or not. And what great memories we have celebrating (partying) together around God's Truth and Presence in our lives!

Christmas Eve Food

For years we've done a Swedish meal that Monte grew up with every Christmas Eve. It was what was done in olden day Sweden and maybe still by some. Monte is 100% Swedish and I am part.

We make a soup in remembrance of poor families who had only broth and bread. It is called 'doppa i grytan' meaning 'dipping in the kettle', a communal thing, because the family would line up and dip bread in the pot. The soup is made to stretch what little meat they had. We make it with homemade beef stock from bones, adding very finely chopped meat and vegetables. So we eat soup with bread, and home-made potato sausage. And we don't do lutefish! I did try it one year as more of a pudding/casserole, but we don't need it. And considering all it's processing, I doubt is has any nutrients left.

For desert we do rice pudding and fruit soup. The tradition is to hide an almond in the pudding and the one finding it will marry next. Sometimes I'll have a little gift. One year my brother Rob got the almond. I guess when he proposed to Karla he had the almond in a ring box. Is that right Rob?

A couple years we made ostakaka from raw milk. We decided rice pudding is the poor man's version of this clabbered milk pudding that tastes kinda like cheesecake. If no raw milk is available, then it's made with cottage cheese.

When I was dating Monte I exclaimed, "Fruit Soup?!!!!?!!!" thinking it sounded awful. But it's my favorite thing now. We always have it and potato sausage leftover to enjoy for the whole Christmas season.

Supper Group

Last night we had our supper group at our house. Originally the five of us gals met together for what I posted earlier - 'Bible study or Divine Reading' - for several years. Then we thought of inviting our husbands for a supper. So it's an official church small group, that came about on it's own, and we've been doing it for more than two years now.

Monte says I need to post all the recipes. It WAS a wonderful Mexican meal. I'll just talk about the menu and if anyone wants specific recipes, I'll post them.

While finishing up the entrees we had appetizers and drinks ready to go for people to dive into. Typical chips and salsa, and my homemade guacamole, and Monte's fresh tomato salsa with lots of cilantro (the last of my garden's). But I have a tortilla press and mixed up masa and made some of our own chips, but we need to perfect getting them crispy. The hit was 'queso panela'. I'm always asked for this recipe. It's a round pound of cheese, queso fresca, in most stores' specialty cheese section, poked and marinated with olive oil, lots of garlic and lots of oregano. Then bake to soften.

Our dessert was ready too. I've read that if you have a great beginning and ending to a meal...So that's where I try and focus now, often veggies and dips up front or fruit. We made pureed mango and fresh squeezed lime juice with just a bit of sugar into an ice cream and served it with a few raspberries from what we picked Friday.

I grew up loving tamales and chimichangas and still do. I found authentically, chimis are really called chivichangas (they're fried burritos). So we made them. Monte usually browns the meat and crockpots it. This time he browned the beef on the grill with mesquite smoke and then crockpotted it till it could easily shred. Then sauted it with some tomatoes and onion (he'd have to tell me the rest). But that was the filling for the thin tortillas we get raw, and cook, from Costco. I made pork filled tamales with a 'verde' sauce (grilled tomatillos, jalepenos, onion and garlic, pureed, and cooked down with chicken broth, and add cilantro).

The side dishes were parboiled purple potatoes, then cooked in butter with lots of garlic slivers. Then because we had just got a bushel of mild green chilies roasted, we sauted some of these up, cut in slivers along with sliced onion and added cream. That was most of us's favorite. And then a salad with an avocado dressing I made.

We all really look forward to this getting together. We strive for once a month. In today's busy lives - from pastoring, to eldering, to church secretary, and counseling, and writing, and geology, and plant nursury seasons...It's great to have a time to unwind, to laugh, to share, to cry, to pray...with close friends.