Pancakes

I love them and always have blueberry, chocolate chip, banana, plain, wheat, buckwheat, white flour, oat flour, sour dough, the list goes on. I love them with maple syrup, honey, butter, agave, peanut butter not so much, but strawberry syrup, elderberry, blueberry...You get the picture.

 

If you never tried buckwheat then your missing a treat. Since I do love them I like to try different ones and even though I do love them I don't eat them every single day....I know you thought that didn't you?

Buckwheat is a tasty grain that I have come to love, its not wheat like the name suggests and so it your gluten intolerant you can eat it. It makes a thick dough that makes fluffy pancakes I made then plain the first time but I'm thinking blueberrys or something next time.

 

Try some you will be glad you did.

 

BuckWheat Pancakes

 

• 1 cup buckwheat flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 Tbsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 cup milk
• 2 Tbsp melted butter or margarine

 

Mix dry ingredients together; add egg, milk and butter or margarine, beating well after each addition.Pour 1/4 cup batter for each pancake onto hot griddle. Cook 1 to 1½ minutes, turning when edges look cooked and bubbles begin to break on the surface. Continue to cook 1 to 1½ minutes or until golden brown. 

Sprouting for people and livestock

 

I sprout wheat for us to eat and now I am sprouting grains for our animals. We just started doing it and hope to transfer all our livestock from commercial feeds to organic sprouted grains. As we journey through this I will keep you posted on what we do and how its going.

Dare Mighty Things

 

I  love this quote I heard it today and I wanted to share it with you. My daughter has always had a hard time in life...learning has always come at a great struggle for her. Public school wanted to classify her but we knew there was so much more to her than a label. She looks at the world from the opposite direction as the rest of the world, being left handed she comes at a problem from a different direction, and she sees people...truly sees them and still KNOWS they are a child of God.

 

But that doesn't help with learning since schools like to put everyone in the same box when some learn from another box. She is mildly dyslexic, but is a voracious reader she loves Shakepeare, Jane Austen, and anything that is medival. She has a wedding dress picked out that is a Regency style dress like they wore in Pride and Prejudice. She loves the scriptures, is extremely shy, when she gets mad she cries, she doesn't raise her voice, loves animals especially her goats, is a romantic at heart and any boy who wants to capture her heart has  very high standards they must reach. She wants her first kiss to be the boy she will marry and she wants a boy who is her best friend.

 

But then things have always been so hard struggles with learning, fitting in with others, and being painfully shy. We have a saying in our home "What is Normal!" when she was little people would tell me she wasn't normal as they got older my son and daughter would get mad at that statement and decided that normal is boring and what is it anyway who sets that standard? What people didn't understand is that at 4 1/2 she witnessed her parents struggle with the death of her baby brother, us finding he had died in his crib early one morning and trying to perform CPR and seeing her parents fall apart as paramedics took him away. That is devastating to parents but to her who couldn't understand it was a major trauma.

 

This quote reminds me of her struggles and that her struggles will and have made her strong. She is an inspiration to me she doesn't judge people she loves them and how she will fall and stumble and them pick herself up dust herself off and try again and again till she succeeds.

 

  It is not the critic who counts; nor the one who points out how the strong person stumbled, or where the doer of a deed could have done better.
 The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who does actually strive to do deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends oneself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he or she fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
 Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt26^th President of the U.S. and
winner of 1906 Nobel Peace Prize

Pinto Beans

 

Why is it this time of year we crave thick hearty stews comfort foods? The foods we eat this time of year don't go well any other time of the year they just don't taste as good. Well I have been craving beans lately meatless stuff or at least small amounts of meat.

 

Hubby isn't the happiest with this but oh well I am doing to cooking and I make sure there is some meat.

 

I looked for something to do with pinto beans besides refried beans and I came across this recipe

 

And since I had soaked beans the night before with a little apple cider vinegar to help us digest all the goodness in them I decided this sounded good and easy. I through it all inthe crockpot and went to work.

Seasonings for the kids to add before I came home.

 

Cornbread I made before I left.

 

And it was yummy with a green salad very yummy indeed and warm on the tummy.

Header Collage....Pic Monkey

Ok, I am kinda cheap not on everything I will admit since hubby is probably reading this. But I live by "things come to those who wait" and if I can find it cheaper or free I would rather have that.

 

When I started this blog I ran across another blog that I can't remember now but they suggested

Pic Monkey for making a collage header. I wanted something not set in stone something I could move and change as I wanted. I also like to have a clean blog no thrills etc. I seem to lean towards a white background with pictures.

 

 

It is an easy site to maneuver around and the finished product is saved to your computer in a jpeg image. I just upload that image to where I want it. Easy and free that I love and my pictures aren't stored online somewhere I like that too.

 

I have also made a collage for a post and that worked wonderful.

In the Kitchen

Last week were in the kitchen whipping up some rich chocolate cupcakes and buttercream frosting.

 

They made monster cupcakes for a fall harvest we went to. It was yummy but way to sweet since I don't buy white sugar it was a treat for them to make.

 

Buttercream Frosting

From Wilton site

 

• 1/2 cup solid vegetable shortening
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter or margarine softened
• 1 teaspoon clear vanilla extract......we used regular vanilla
• 4 cups sifted confectioners' sugar (approximately 1 lb.)   
• 2 tablespoons milk

Step 1

In large bowl, cream shortening and butter with electric mixer. Add vanilla. Gradually add sugar, one cup at a time, beating well on medium speed. Scrape sides and bottom of bowl often. When all sugar has been mixed in, icing will appear dry. Add milk and beat at medium speed until light and fluffy. Keep bowl covered with a damp cloth until ready to use.

Step 2

For best results, keep icing bowl in refrigerator when not in use. Refrigerated in an airtight container, this icing can be stored 2 weeks. Rewhip before using.

Step 3

For thin (spreading) consistency icing, add 2 tablespoons light corn syrup, water or milk.

Step 4

For Pure White Icing (stiff consistency), omit butter; substitute an additional 1/2 cup shortening for butter and add 1/2 teaspoon No-Color Butter Flavor. Add up to 4 tablespoons light corn syrup, water or milk to thin for icing cakes.

Autumn Chores

Autumn seems to be the time of year to burn brush piles that need to be taken care of. I'ts cool and the crispness of the weather seems to smell so good add some woodsmoke and it is like digging in the garden in the spring...earthy, primal, instinctive.

So we've been burning some piles in the pasture where our barn is at since hubby cut some trees down and we let the does eat the leaves off of them. The trunks I want to cut up for logs but the branches are burning nice since they are dry.

 

We have one goat who loves the smoke, Silk's previous owners smoked and they said she loved cigarette smoke. Well I think she loves any kind of smoke.

Bunnies

Our son has had rabbits for a few years. He started out with dwarfs but we had an unfortunate event happen with a neighbor's dog and he lost his two females.

He bought two more that were bigger and then something happened and we ended with only one and then this one turned out to be male instead of the intended female.

Well last March we helped a friend by slaughtering her rabbits in exchange we kept one for payment of the service. And we kept a female they were young and young ones are hard to sex plus I am extremely allergic to rabbits making it a little harder so after some research I was confident that I chose a female. She was the only one out of the batch. Now fast forward 8 months and she is a female and has bunnies.

Friends

There's not much to say about this picture except it was Halloween and we were doing our bimonthly volunteering at our church's Bishop's Storehouse.

 

We try to do something fun for the holidays and wearing funny hats is one of those fun things.

 

Her and I met while volunteering here and we've gone on road trips together this summer we went to Nauvoo for a week such fun to do fun things with friends.