Make It/365! Two Weeks In

I've been keeping a record of all of my 2017 "making," and I thought I would share some of the entries with you so you can check out my progress.  As promised, I have used the word "make" to refer to actual creative enterprises, as well as more abstract endeavors .  Check it out:

In the first two weeks of the new year, I have:

• Made an effort to find a friend's lost dog by going door to door in my neighborhood.
• Made a big pot of spaghetti.

• Made a blog post. 
• Made it to church on the first day of the year.
• Made "cute animal" sketches in my sketchbook.

• Made school lunches again after the winter break.
• Made a master list of DIY cleaning products from a binder full of notes and clippings.
• Made an appointment to start getting allergy shots (and made it to my appointment).
• Made our house cleaner than it's been in awhile.
• Made Valentine doodles in my sketchbook.

• Made it through to the end of a book I was reading.
• Made an afternoon snack for six little girls having a play date.
• Made erasers out of eraser clay with my daughter.

• Made a yummy dinner of spiced mini-burgers and pita bread.
• Made excuses to myself about why I'm not making things in my craft room.
• Made a beautiful dinner of roasted chicken and vegetables in a cast iron skillet.
• Made a smoothie for lunch.
• Made gingerbread cookies with my kids.

• Made it through a major mishap--washing an entire box of tissue the girls let fall in their laundry basket.
• Made my exercise goal on my new watch (on just one day, lol!).
• Made chocolate chip banana bread.
• Made a lunch date.
• Made a Pin the Gumball on the Gumball machine with my daughter for her birthday party.

It's been fun to reflect on my day each evening through the lens of "making"..."what have I made today, anyway?" I hope to do more traditional making--working my way through the supplies in my craft room and the pins on my Pinterest boards--but until I get to it, I like seeing all the other ways "making" makes an appearance in my days.

Keep those ideas coming for my Make It/365 list! I got some great new ideas in the comments for my last post, and I will continue to add and update along the way.

'Tis the Season: Homemade Apple Sauce

My Facebook newsfeed has been filled with friends' posts about their apple-picking adventures since the middle of September.  We never made it to the orchard, but I managed to do what I consider the next-best-thing: 

I made my first batch of homemade apple sauce!

I bought a big bag at the grocery store of Gala apples that came from local growers.  I chose my recipe from the blog of Ree Drummond, better known as the Pioneer Woman.  It looked quick and used simple ingredients:  just apples, cinnamon, brown sugar, apple juice, and a squeeze of lemon juice.

Peeling the apples was the lengthiest part of the process, since I don't have a nifty apple peeling machine.  (I might have to track one of these down for next fall!) 

As I was doing it, I remembered something from elementary school:  You say the alphabet while you are peeling around and around the apple, and try to get one long continuous peel.  Wherever the peel cuts off early, that's the letter of the last name of the man you will marry!  Based on my luck, it's amazing my husband's last name doesn't start with a "B"!  You can see all the little chunks of peel in my photo...not too much of a continuous peel to be seen!

All of the ingredients spent 25 minutes cooking together in a big pot on the stove, getting softer and softer, smelling more and more fabulous.

I finished by pureeing it all in a blender, and was ready to serve the most delicious hot apple sauce I have ever tasted in my life.

My girls are used to unsweetened store-bought apple sauce, and found the homemade version a little too sweet for their taste.  (Crazy coming from kids, right?)  But I'm sticking with this recipe, because it tasted truly amazing! 

Many thanks to the Pioneer Woman for introducing this great new recipe into my repertoire!

Happy Apple Season, y'all!

Creating in the Kitchen: Homemade Elderberry Sryup

I have been singing the praises of elderberry syrup to anyone who will listen for almost two years now.  My children and I have been taking our spoonsful of syrup dutifully, and I have found that without a doubt, we are getting sick less often, and our symptoms have been milder and faster to disappear.  I'm not much for presenting the science behind it all--I will leave that up to you to web search if you are interested--but suffice it to say that elderberry syrup fights colds and flu, which makes it pretty timely for you to consider right now as fall approaches.

I have been dishing out somewhere around $24 a bottle for the Gaia Herbs brand at my local Martindale's Natural Market, and just a couple dollars less once in awhile for Nature's Way Sambucus.  (The Gaia brand is a thick syrup that has to be stored in the refrigerator, and the Nature's Way brand is a thin liquid that can be left in the cupboard.  My kids tend to like the Nature's Way brand better, and a bottle lasts us much longer, but I have this gut feeling that the Gaia brand might be more effective.) 

Though expensive, I have always thought it was worth the money not to be laid out with three-week long colds, as I often have been in the past.  And when I add up the money spent on Sudafed, throat lozenges (sometimes two or three bags full during a single cold!), and saline nasal spray, I realize that it's almost as expensive to get sick as it is to try to prevent it with elderberry syrup.

With my current campaign to reduce costs around the house, though, I wanted to try my hand at making my own homemade elderberry syrup.  I am pretty excited about the results, though I will have to check in with you after cold and flu season to let you know if the homemade version is truly as effective as store-bought.

Elderberries simmering with ginger, cinnamon, and cloves. 
That's not a plastic spoon, by the way; it's called Moboo--molded bamboo!

I found several web sites with recipes for homemade elderberry syrup, and I recommend to you the web site Wellness Mama, and her blog post from three years ago.

In order to follow the Wellness Mama recipe, I purchased a pound of dried elderberries from Rose Mountain Herbs, paying a very reasonable $13 for the product and a very unreasonable additional $10 for shipping.  Add to that the over $7 I paid for raw honey at the grocery store, and I was starting to have second thoughts about the cost- effectiveness of this project. 

After straining out the elderberries, I left the syrup in this bowl to cool
before adding the raw honey and filling my bottles.

However, making this first batch of syrup barely made a dent in my one pound bag of berries (only 2/3 of a cup worth), and I ended up with four bottles of syrup!  (I just reused bottles I had saved from the Gaia brand syrup.)

So, I will continue to sing the praises of elderberry syrup to you if you complain to me of colds or flu this fall and winter, and I just might add the suggestion that you tackle the DIY version.  It makes me feel a little like a pioneer woman when I can make something like this for myself rather than buying it off the shelves!

As an added benefit, the house smelled awesome while it simmered!

I highly recommend that you take a look at the recipe at Wellness Mama, and give elderberry a try as your preventative-medicine of choice this cold and flu season!

**************************************

You know I'm not a doctor, right?  I'm a wife, mom, and crafter, so if you have any medical questions about elderberry syrup, you are not going to want to take MY word for it. 

Talk to your doctor!

**************************************

 

Did you know that I also make my own deodorant and household cleaner?  I am taking this "detoxifying of body and home" very seriously; it's just been a slow road!

Now We're Cooking!

Coming together is a beginning;

keeping together is progress;

working together is success.

--Henry Ford

I feel creative when I cook.  Because I follow recipes very closely and seldom "wing it" along the way, people might not think that my cooking is a particularly creative pursuit.  But looking at the process as a whole, I feel very creative, from making the choices of what to cook, to selecting the food at the store, to putting together and serving the meal. 

It's a good thing I wore an apron to cook that morning!

On Saturday morning, a group of volunteers gathered in the kitchen at my church to cook over 50 meals for the Deacons to deliver to members who might be sick or grieving or home with a new baby--whatever might make it difficult for them to prepare their own hot, homecooked meal.

Chief Creative Cooking Genius, Theresa

The chief Creative Genius in this group was our leader, Theresa, who orchestrated the whole affair.  In three hours, she directed 12 people to turn $250 dollars worth of food into 9 different recipes separated into at least 50 different storage containers to be frozen for future delivery.  She runs an impressive operation!

Betty and Leigh on burrito duty

We made chowder and chili and chicken tetrazzini and burritos and pot pies and quiches and some things that I didn't even know about because I wasn't involved with those particular dishes.  We had choppers and bakers and stirrers and pork pullers and chicken saute-ers and dish washers and counter wipers and pie crust rollers and mixers and burrito folders. 

Dianne and Don, one of two husband-and-wife teams 

None of us created the recipes or grew the food or attended to fancy presentation.  And yet it was the most wonderful creative process to be part of that bustling kitchen with eleven other people who love to cook, or be part of church ministry, or hang out with friends, or whatever else might have been their personal motivation for being there. 

Can you believe Lexie just had a baby two months ago?  And she chose to hang out with us making Chicken Divan when she managed to have a baby-free day!

I was kind of wishing we could all take one of the dishes home with us; there wasn't a single meal that I wouldn't have been happy to share with my family!  

Chris is trying to hide her face from the camera as she works on pot pies, but I caught her smile!

I thought that spending three hours in the church kitchen would drain me of all desire to cook at home for awhile.  But on the contrary, I came right home and planned a few menus for my family this week, then headed to the store for a little grocery shopping.  It was a pleasure!

The fruits of our labor--a freezer loaded with meals to share with our community!